The ABC has had to correct two statements made by Alan Jones on Q&A last week, including one that put the cost of wind power 10 times higher than it actually is.



“Eighty per cent of Australian energy comes from coal, coal-fired power, and it’s about $79 a kilowatt hour,” Jones said on Q&A on 20 July. “Wind power is about $1,502 a kilowatt hour. That is unaffordable. If you take that power and feed it into the grid, then every person watching this program has electricity bills going through the roof.”

Jones also made an incorrect claim connecting the former leader of the National Party John Anderson with mining companies.

Both statements made by Jones were sourced from newspaper articles – in the Australian in 2011 and the Sydney Morning Herald this year – which have since been corrected online.

The statement by Jones that wind power was unaffordable at $1,502 a kilowatt hour has been the subject of a fact-checking article in the Conversation and a Media Watch report on ABC TV.

On Thursday the ABC posted a correction which said Jones had apologised for the error. The ABC’s correction said Jones had pointed to the Conversation analysis, which found the real cost was $150 per megawatt hour. Jones had also erred in using kilowatts instead of megawatts.

The Conversation had decided to check the claim after it was broadcast last week and had contacted Jones, who acknowledged the mistake in an email to the website.

“As he has readily acknowledged, Alan Jones’s statements on Q&A on the cost of wind and coal-powered energy are not correct,” the Conversation said.

“His claim that renewable energy is having a large impact on residential electricity bills also runs counter to modelling commissioned by the government.”

The ABC also corrected an accusation Jones made on the same program in linking Anderson with mining companies.

Jones had said: “John Anderson, the former leader [of the National party], who went to Eastern Star Gas on a success fee if he could sell Eastern Star Gas to Santos. I won’t tell you what the success fee was.”

But there was no success fee. The ABC said: “Former deputy prime minister John Anderson contacted Q&A to say he received no success fee.”

“The claim was first made in the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 May 2015 but is untrue and was subsequently withdrawn and corrected by the Sydney Morning Herald.”

Last week Media Watch reported that the Jones wind cost error came originally from the Australian’s Cut and Paste column in 2011, when the paper misquoted a Productivity Commission report from the previous month.

“And, thanks to a stray decimal point, multiplied the cost of wind power tenfold ... knocking it up from $150 per megawatt hour to $1502 … and doing the same to rooftop solar which it blew up from $400 to $4004,” Media Watch said.

The Australian’s editor, Clive Mathieson, told Media Watch the error would be corrected online. “We have no way of determining who exactly was editing C&P for the June 15, 2011 edition but I suspect it was someone who has since left the newspaper. As such, we do not know where the information came from. It does look like the information is inaccurate.”