They are not renewables. Expand the hydro.

Let's be honest. They're not renewables. A wind turbine and a solar farm are a machine with a use-by date. Someone else digs the stuff up, someone else builds it, we cop it on a ridge or a paddock, and when it's stuffed it goes to landfill. That's not renewable. That's a sales pitch.

I don't support them. Bashan should be finished off, and the others like it. Profiteering in the name of clean and green is despicable. They wreck the look of the place. A blade takes the wedge tail off an eagle. At Bashan you're talking the wedge-tailed eagle, the white-bellied sea-eagle, the masked owl, the swift parrot and the white-throated needletail. A fire conveniently cleared the recovering trees on that site. You don't get the quiet back once the turbines are up.

And they don't stand on their own. Wind and solar have to be firmed. Someone has to hold the frequency and the voltage every time a cloud goes over or the wind drops. That someone is Hydro. Each of these installations has to buy frequency and voltage control off the network, and there is a real cost on the generation side to provide it. They run machines like Gordon at low load, holding the South Area Voltage Control system and the L6 frequency control, below the voltage and the load those machines are meant to sit at. That does real damage. You're flogging a hydro system Tasmanians built and paid for, so a wind farm can look like it works.

Now look at what you actually get. A solar farm in Tasmania is making power about a fifth of the time, and none of that is at night. Wind is better than that until the day it isn't, and then the hydro is expected to catch it. The sticker on the gate might say 350 megawatts. You do not have 350 megawatts when the kettle goes on. Hydro you can turn on. That's the difference. Ineffective next to a system that already runs on water.

So does the money add up? No. Two billion dollars waved through for Cellars Hill wind farm and the Weasel solar farm buys you nameplate, a battery to paper over the gaps, and a hydro system sitting underneath doing the real work while it wears itself out. The same money spent expanding the hydro buys power you can actually switch on. Echo and Tarraleah have already been upgraded to make more power with less water. That's the job. In 2016 they ran the storages down and shipped diesel generators in. The answer to that is more hydro, not another ridge of turbines and not another ship full of diesel.

Where's the report that says a Tasmanian house needs a wind farm? This push is the 200 percent by 2040 target and Battery of the Nation. A target. Not a cold house.

A panel on your own roof is a different thing. You're making power where you use it. A solar farm built so someone else can sell it is not that. Don't let them tell you it is.

Hydro first. Homes, farms, Tasmanian industry. Not a turbine sold as green, and not a solar farm that only works while our machines prop it up.