The politics of energy suddenly got real. The fantasy of attempting to run economies on sunshine and breezes has been revealed for just that.

Germany’s headlong rush into renewables is in tatters, to keep the lights on and business ticking along, it’s been forced to build new coal-fired power plants and reinstate previously mothballed plant. A bitter winter that saw wind and solar output collapse, forcing Germans to rely on ‘dirty’ coal has spelt the death-knell for its so-called Energiewende.

The debacle playing out in South Australia, now renowned as the place with the most expensive and the least reliable electricity supply in the world has left politicians of every hue rattled. But in the wind cult’s eyes it is still ‘Australia’s wind power capital’, which must count for something, surely?

Where barely a few months ago it would have been a brave politician who had the…