The WA Council of Minerals and Energy has exposed the fact that irresponsible net-zero energy policy has doubled the electricity costs of WA businesses, from $46/ MWh in 2021 to $96/MWh in 2024.

This is the reality of the insane net-zero policies from the major parties, who are willing to virtue-signal Western Australia into ruin by embarking on the transformation of the energy grid to accommodate unreliable, expensive and intermittent wind and solar power.

Modern society and industry need something that is called "baseload" power, that means that at any given time, a certain amount of electricity must be available or the grid will collapse. Wind and solar cannot provide baseload power, because as we all know the sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. That means that these intermittent sources need to be backed up either by storage or peaking generation such as gas.

Furthermore, our entire grid was built to accommodate large scale centralised baseload electricity generation, with large baseload coal plants in Collie generating the electricity, transmitted via large transmission lines to substations where it is fed into the local distribution network. Nobody knows the real cost of the "renewable transformation" of the grid, but estimates suggest it will be in the tens of billions.

One Nation WA rejects the need to panic and spend huge amounts of public money, causing inflation, to build a grid that will be more expensive to run and is unsuited to servicing industry.

We note that Germany, a country that invested billions in its renewable energy transformation, is currently experiencing rapid de-industrialisation, largely due to unaffordable energy costs. Businesses such as BASF, Siemens and VW are announcing massive job losses and are closing factories.

There is a simple solution for WA - just keep using coal. WA's emissions from coal fired electricity generation are completely irrelevant on a global scale, and the only thing we will achieve by this virtue signalling is to create hardship for Western Australian businesses and families.