TWO Hunter business figures have taken out a full-page ad in today's Newcastle Herald to criticise the campaign that forced Whitehaven Coal chairman Mark Vaile to relinquish his appointment as University of Newcastle chancellor.
Surveyor Robert Monteath and retired Forsythes and Deloitte director Bruce Williams say the successful campaign to unseat Mr Vaile is based on emotion rather than facts.
They say advocates of an "ideological obsession" targeting coal are refusing to acknowledge the sheer scale of the energy storage task that is needed to counter the "inherent unreliability" of solar and wind generators.
Although it is not raised in the ad, both men say the big blocs driving the climate change debate and pushing for an end to coal use - Europe, the UK and the United States - are all reliant on nuclear power to bolster their own renewables grids.
They say renewables provide just 15 per cent of Australia's electricity and that the amount of battery and other storage needed to get a renewably powered country through the night is well beyond our present technical capability.
"Blackouts are coming," the advertisement says.
"It is a worthwhile cause to combat climate change but NSW must not attempt to save the world by destroying itself.
"We must have new power stations in NSW or the lights (and jobs) are going to go out."
The ad contrasts the original 100-megawatt rating with the typical 8000 megawatts an hour of power used in NSW overnight, or 90,000 megawatts all up, to illustrate the size of the storage task.
Mr Monteath said he and Mr Williams decided to "put our money where our mouths were" by paying to respond to a similar full page booked last Friday by the Australia Institute and signed by 16 people who described themselves as "significant donors" who could not support a university led by someone who was "determined to build new coal mines when most of the world is determined to reduce fossil fuel use".
Mr Williams said there was plenty of data on the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) website and other similar sources to show the huge reliance on fossil fuels despite the hype in favour of renewables.
He said he expected to be "treated as a pariah" for speaking out but he believed that many people, including most politicians, were either "unaware or unwilling to face" the inevitable impacts of shutting coal-fired power stations and hoping that inherently unreliable wind and solar sources would somehow bridge the gap.
The ad takes figures from AEMO for Monday morning this week as an example, saying that at "7.25am, wind and solar could only manage to provide 2 per cent of the electricity required to be generated".
"Fossil fuels did the heavy lifting providing 77 per cent of the power needed by the grid. At the same time Snowy Hydro was generating 21 per cent . . .
"Such a generation mix is not uncommon, particularly overnight in winter."
