Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova – According to the charity KOGO, green energy champion Victora, Australia is experiencing unprecedented demand for charity provided warm woolies to help poor people who can no longer afford to heat their homes.
Volunteer knitters in high demand as soaring power prices leave people cold
ABC Radio Melbourne By Nicole Mills
Updated 22 Aug 2018, 8:42amA national army of knitters is in desperate need of more volunteers to help them meet the growing demand for winter woollies.
Knit One Give One (KOGO) founder Ros Rogers said the organisation has already donated more than 55,000 items this year.
“The need has gone up, definitely,” she said.
“This year we’re having trouble keeping up with the demand for two reasons; we’re becoming better known so people are asking for us, but the other thing is that there’s just more demand.
…
Knitters can not keep up with demand
Yet despite the huge number of donations, they still can not satisfy the demand.
“Some people say it has been a colder winter — I actually don’t think so,” Ms Rogers said.
“I think it’s been milder than what we’ve had, it’s just the need that’s so much greater unfortunately.
…
Victoria’s deep green left wing government is determined to end the age of dispatchable power whatever the cost.
While fossil fuels are disparaged in Oz, at least the country is still blessed by the third highest sheep to human ratio in the world:
https://theverybesttop10.com/countries-where-sheep-outnumber-people/
So good on ya, mates, for all that wool for the poor and energy-starved.
I once had a business which included carpet as one of the products in our lineup and asked the person in charge of that line why we did not sell wool carpet. He said that there were not enough sheep. Guess he should have checked ‘down under’.
I stand to be corrected if someone knows better, but I’m pretty sure that Australian sheep are mostly of the ‘Merino’ variety, and accordingly their wool is extremely fine and soft. Excellent for clothing, OK for blankets, but not much use for carpets – which need a tougher sort of wool.
J,
I don’t know the percentage, which in any case might vary from year to year, but, yes, Merino is the main breed in the wonderful land of Oz.
But breeds with coarser wool (width up to 41 microns on Lincoln v. 24 or less for Merino) are also found there, to include British Long Wool Breeds (like Lincoln). British Short Wool Breeds, Australasian breeds and recently introduced wool breeds (such as Danish/Finnish).
we have other breeds as well
the dags and rough wool are used for carpets i believe
the superfine is sold to china or italy, and we buy it back later
because OUR woolen mills shut down some yrs ago, and couldnt afford the power to run now if they had’nt already closed!
we’ve also lost almost all our other cloth making and buying fabric now is limited to pretty much one store , and the odd dept in larger retailers, and Id bet 99%= is imported from china or indian mills.
A man comes home with a sheep under his arm and says “honey I would like you to meet the pig that I sleep with when you say you have a head ache.”
His wife looks up and says “You stupid moron can’t you tell the difference between a pig and a sheep. ”
He says “I wasn’t talking to you”
Years ago in Colorado they told a lot of Wyoming sheep jokes. On a trip to Australia I found them a bit unappreciated.
In Australia we tell sheep jokes about New Zealanders.
Beware “carpet salesmen”, as crooked as car salesmen and politicians.
Oh come off it, nobody is that crooked, surely? 😉 Have you seen the movie “The Hunt for Red October”? When the Irsh-American actor playing the politician tell Alec Baldwin’s naval character that, “I’m a politician. That means I kiss babies at election time, the rest of the time I lie & cheat & steal!”
Sure he wasn’t talking about Alec Baldwin himself?
I expect the next move will be to reduce the volume of sheep downunder so that less wool is available for knitting, then those poor oldies might just die-off as part of the grand plan to reduce the population. Old people are such a burden, aren’t they, after all, what on Earth could they possibly contribute to society anywhere? Sarc off!
the droughts sure taken a harsh toll on our sheep as well as cattle
theyre selling for as little as 14 to 18 in poor condition lambs
last yr and prior theyd have been round the 80 to 100 mark
The problem with old people is they have an unnerving habit of remembering how poorly Socialism worked the last place it was tried.
~¿~
John
I assume the “third highest sheep to human ratio” was referring to sheep as farm animals, as opposed to humans as willing fools.
Ok, maybe not.
Don’t be cruel
To a willing fool…
Buncha Knit Wits if you ask me … they need to make their energy sources more affordable
Here in Oz, woolen garments prices are way above the reach of the pensioner/low income strata. It’s all artificial crap fibers in the stores.
We send off the high-quality stuff as exports where they get top prices – much the same as our meat. Crap for the locals and top prices for the exporters.
One winter I was trying to buy a Canadian wool sweater in Victoria. Several Asians were shopping in the same store and we were all disgusted that there was not a single Canadian made garment. The tourists commented they could buy the same garments back home for much less (and could find better quality too). Canada’s formula for economic success- sell real estate to foreign owners to inflate local real estate prices, transfer all manufacturing overseas, give the rights to natural resource extraction to foreign controlled companies. Oh yes, and to top it all off, allow special interest groups to make it impossible to get your resources to world markets so that the U.S. is your only possible market- then botch free trade negotiations with the U.S.
That’s quite an ambitious plan!
If the Falkland Islands be a colony rather than a country, then only New Zealand is more sheepish than Oz.
For the last several years New Zealand farmers have been more cowed than sheepish.
I think Mongolia can give Australia a run for its money. They have about 40m herd animals and a population of about, some say less than, 3m. Given that over a third of the population lives in Ulaanbaatar, you can guess that the number of sheep, goats, yaks, camels, horses, cattle and a couple of pigs stands at about 25 per person excluding townies.
Australia has about 12m in town and another 12 out, and 125m sheep which is about 5 per person or 10 per person excluding townies. Add the two cows per person and we get 12. For goats they only get a leg each.
Interestingly, Mongolia has just over 5 sheep per person making it a very close contest if they are not actually tops. Uncertainty exceeds the difference. Asking around the office, one had 400 goats, another 200 horses. The number of animals is breathtaking.
Crispin,
My link was just for sheep. You raise the important point of horses and ruminant species other than sheep.
But we’re talking wool here. Not that there aren’t goats raised for hair.
Mongolia is indeed livestock heavy and human light.
The armies of the Khan churned mares’ milk into butter in their saddle bags. Hard men.
The Khan told them not to bathe, so that their smell from a distance would intimidate their foes.
Marco Polo on the mongols:
“It is true that they have plenty of firewood, too. But the population is so enormous and there are so many bath-houses and baths constantly being heated, that it would be impossible to supply enough firewood, since there is no one who does not visit a bath-house at least 3 times a week and take a bath – in winter every day, if he can manage it. Every man of rank or means has his own bathroom in his house…”http://hist383f12.umwblogs.org/2012/11/21/marco-polo-and-the-mongols/
I see there are things on the internet about Mongols not bathing but I couldn’t find any documentation of real evidence for that belief. One suspects that if contemporary people did make such claims about the Mongol’s bathing habits it may have been in the spirit of the age old practice of making your enemy seem inhuman. Weapons of mass destruction and all that.
They also tenderized their meat by putting it under their saddles.
I guess vegans and the PETA crowd don’t get much traction in Mongolia..
Breathtaking, yes. Especially if you are standing down wind.
But just think how much the government will save in healthcare costs after the old farts freeze to death.
Carbon-reduction = population-reduction (mainly ‘useless eaters’)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cold-weather-uk-winter-deaths-europe-polar-vortex-a8224276.html
Somebody once said somewhere that a society is judged upon how well it looks after the sick & elderly! The Greenalists have a lot to answer for!
Mark, even more money will be “saved” because of all the “young farts” ie children. dying from cold. The main reason you can’t get life insurance for infants is their death rates are so high anyway, compared with those who make it past early childhood, so this will push them up further.
A great win for Zero Population Growth indeed.
But at least it will cut down on their production of the evil CO2 – 40,000 parts per million per exhalation and since kids are so active, they will produce much more than the old (and not so old) farts which shows their perfidious effect on the globe.
Not that I’m criticising children at all, it’s just their nature, they can’t help it.
Next time a self-righteous child starts telling you about how evil oil etc is, give them this information and then ask them “just what are YOU going to do about what YOU’RE doing to the planet?”
Perhaps they’ll shut up for a while.
The goat that stinks on yonder hill…
feeds all the day on Chlorophyll.
Poor old people dying of the cold? It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Down is better. Forget knitting—start stuffing down long handles and hats.
Meanwhile in China, everybody is snug as a bug and electricity is dirt cheap. CO2 emissions climbing 4% per year.
China needs its old people, because its idiotic Communist regime was anti-human for too many decades. Which in effect was anti-woman, yielding its present population with an estimated 55 million excess males.
Its population pyramid is more of a pagoda.
China should consider Plural Marriage with multiple husbands for one wife
Doesn’t work. But they are the leaders in the sex-bot business, and working on artificial wombs.
So engineering will solve the problem in another ten years or so.
Mark,
Unless the Drang nach Sueden provides Vietnamese, Philippine, Malaysian, Indonesian and Australian “brides”, not to mention East Timoran and Bruneian female captives.
Communist China’s ethnic minority subjugation and oppression policies in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, SE China and Uyghuristan are worrisome possible precursors of the drive to dominate the South China Sea and beyond.
Artificial wombs in ten years? I bet they will be Fusion powered.
~¿~
Not sure about the 10 year timeline, unless the Sex Bots are powered by Cold Fusion.
That and the fact that Sex Bots can’t have babies so the Family Trees will die out. Gotta be Plural Marriage.
OK as long as the husbands are doing the housework rather than just creating it!
Excess makes due to a cultural preference. The one child policy meant that baby girls were abandoned and left to die or given up for adoption. creating the surplus males.
No, no Allen. China pulled out thousands of coal fired domestic boilers for space heating and was unable to find enough gas to run their ‘low pollution’ replacements. It was all over the news. No heating. The direct cause is the EPA infection killing coal spread to the far East, largely through sponsored student training of key people in the Chinese EPA.
In the midst of a coal boom there is a war on coal. The particulate matter hasn’t settled on this quite yet.
They came up with a solution, convert coal to gas in the boonies where pollution is less of an issue, then pipe clean burning gas to the cities. At < 50% efficiency I suspect their CO2 emissions are trending up if this process becomes fashionable.
Theoretically sensible; it eliminates pollution in cities, which is killing people in China, and creates lots of CO2 to feed plants and hence people.
Where it has gone wrong is the common government blunder of thinking things can be done instantly; so coal has been cut off before the gas manufacture and distribution is ready.
Woollies. Mankinds best dispatchable insulation.
I think each country will have to wrestle with its own green dragons and suffer before there is an uprising and revolt and green energy will be cast aside, it is all a phase, a passing phase, the watermelons must be put down, no matter what.
Too bad the dumbed down masses will not connect the dots until it gets far worse.
people get the government they vote for and some say deserve. vote in virtue signalling idiots then don’t be surprised if you can’t afford rising energy costs.look on the bright side, you have a lovely big desalination plant and you can sell more coal to china while your poor people die of the cold.
Well, that’s one way to get rid of any pension funding problems they may have.
Let the poor and old freeze in the dark.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Less work for the death panels.
The welfare time bomb is but one of the financial time bombs ticking steadily away in Australia.
I am sure you are familiar with the annual ATO tax statements in Australia which shows a breakdown of where the tax goes. Top of the list is welfare and, IIRC, for tax year before last, haven’t done last tax year yet, was just below AU$15,000 followed by smaller numbers for other cost areas such as health, policing etc. That’s every year!
…“Some people say it has been a colder winter — I actually don’t think so,” Ms Rogers said…
Well they do keep track of temperatures in Victoria…and “it has been a colder winter.”
The end of August is supposed to be the end of winter, yet on the 22nd they were still trying to keep up with demand?
It certainly has been colder
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/this-is-pretty-unusual-melbourne-shivers-through-coldest-late-season-morning-in-60-years-20180829-p500dy.html
But the ABC downplay the record cold to try to fool the public. .. https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/here-is-the-abc-weather-report-forget-this-cold-warming-is-real/news-story/1195efea46a1f87efc4abdb60979f3e7
wimmera has been 1.3 below the avg ..and gets NO mention
however it also rained a few days last week and the BoM has our rainfall at? ZERO fromlast tues to mon evening
so i wonder where the huge puddles and rivulet at my front door requiring gumboots to get over came from?
It wasn’t raining, you were mistaken.
Redistributive change, public smoothing functions, or private smoothing functions?
2,000 to 3,500% markup on coal-fired electricity in Victoria (AU).
Yes that’s . . . two-thousand to three-thousand five hundred percent markup.
Victoria holds the record for the highest markup on electricity in the World!
An opportunistic oligarchy of middle-men is gouging the end-user in an obscene money grab. The prime offenders are transmission network operators, State Gov, Federal Gov, brokers and retailers.
Australia’s ACCC is aware of the massive mark-up on the base cost; however, it refuses to discuss it or investigate it.
Numb-scull population of Victoria will continue to pay big while the industry enriches itself at their expense.
Forget about suing Big Oil. How about rejecting Big Government, profiting from the CACA scam?
Enron showed how. Oz made it legal.
Ferd,
I literally laughed out loud.
Sad, but true.
And the new Federal energy minister Angus Taylor will drive down energy prices.
There’s a few Liberal Party donors that’ll skilfully turn that promise against consumers in the fullness of time.
This and many more messages brought to you by . . .
The country with more (per capita) coal, gas and uranium than any other.
The country with the highest (ex tax) electricity prices in the World.
Australia – Powering Forward –
when they asked for the review on smart meters it said: the ONLY benefit will be to the retailers…not the consumers
and theyre right
supply service charges are up from 24 to 125 in just 4/5? yrs
as well as obscene per kwh rises too.
majority rural people have NO mains gas option either
LPG is 130 or so 100kg cylinder +rent of about 30 or more per cylinder also
Government creates a problem, and the trusty myrmidons blame private industry and demand more government.
I always knew intelligence was not additive. We’ve finally spread it so thin catastrophe is imminent. We reached “peak intelligence” and it’s all downhill from here.
It’s more than we have a system that has elevated the stupid to positions of power, and stupid is as stupid does.
But, historically, that’s what happens in economic good times. Then the stupidity leads to economic bad times, intelligent–or at least competent–people gain power, and the cycle repeats.
Sheri
Are you suggesting that you’re more likely to win the school high jump meet with on six foot jumper than with 6 one foot jumpers?
Human history is by and large a long chain of Big Kids making Big Messes and the longsuffering adults stepping in to clean up after the dust settles.
Meanwhile the Arctic icecap is gaining 1000 km^3 of ice per year as of this date for the last 2 years.
http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickness-and-volume/
http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/sea/CICE_combine_thick_SM_EN.png
“Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.”
– Stephen Vizinczey
The entire Canadian federal Cabinet seems to have this terrible affliction – they are either incredibly evil or incredibly stupid – and I just don’t think they are all that evil.
Same goes for the Australian Cabinet until this week – we’ll soon see if they get smarter.
The British Cabinet seems to be even more obtuse, and they have had a much longer time to learn just how idiotic their green energy schemes truly are!
As I recall, Britain’s foolish green energy schemes started with Tony Blair about 20 years go, and have continued until now, when there appears to be a slight perturbation in The Farce, with the permission to frack-on.
There may be method in their madness – the UK’s per-capita Excess Winter Mortality Rate this past year was about 2.5 times the average for the USA – with about 48,000 Excess Winter Deaths in the UK vs an average of about 100,000 per year in the USA, which has five times the population of the UK.
Excess Winter Mortality rates are high across the planet, even including warm countries like Thailand, Brazil and Australia.
Earth is colder-than-optimum for humanity at this time – world Excess Winter Deaths total about 2 million souls per year.
Reference:
COLD WEATHER KILLS 20 TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE AS HOT WEATHER
By Joseph D’Aleo and Allan MacRae, September 4, 2015
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cold-weather-kills-macrae-daleo-4sept2015-final.pdf
Green energy systems are an effective method of killing off the elderly and the poor. Given the tenacity of governments around the world to hold on to these proven costly, intermittent and ineffective green energy schemes, in spite of these obvious grave defects, maybe the killing off of the elderly and the poor is the government’s objective – I mean really, can anyone truly be this stupid?
To be fair, most of the US is at a lower latitude than the UK. A couple of states rarely see snow, although some years all 50 states get some.
Warmer countries like Spain, Portugal etc have a higher Excess Winter Mortality Rate per capital than the UK.
Correction:
KK:
Warmer countries like Italy have a higher Excess Winter Mortality Rate per capita than the UK. Australia is higher than Canada, as are many other warm countries.
Check out the Lancet article and others referred to in our paper.
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cold-weather-kills-macrae-daleo-4sept2015-final.pdf
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/abstract
Lower winter death rates seem to correlate with better adaptation to winter – better home insulation and heating systems and lower fuel costs.
KK,
True, yet Britain’s Western Maritime Climate means milder conditions than for much of the North American Atlantic Seaboard at lower latitudes.
Deaths from cold have more to do with the difference between the highest and lowest temperatures than they do with absolute low temperature.
Places that see really cold low temps have infrastructure built up to deal with it.
Possibly Mark – it is normal cool weather, not extreme cold, that is by far the greatest killer of the elderly and the poor – read the Lancet article referenced above.
The great killer is “Heat or Eat” – fuel poverty, poorly insulated housing and lack of proper heating systems.
Imagine if the idiot Euro politicians (including the Brits) had focused on cheap, reliable energy, and home insulation and central heating programs – Granny Nan and Great Uncle Bill would be down the pub, enjoying a pint, instead of pushing up daisies.
The Greens are the great killers of our age.
Best, Allan
Not cold? Although Australia has only about 710 weaher stations, so there is some smearing, here is the minimum temp anomaly.
http://www.bom.gov.au/web03/ncc/www/awap/temperature/minanom/3month/colour/latest.hres.gif
Lee – How does an anomaly map provide information about actual temperatures? 🙂
The reported minimum temperature in July (winter) in Melbourne is +6C. Sydney is +7C. You’ve got it good there mate.
It was colder than that today (in summer) in Calgary. People were wearing shorts here – well, not all of them. It was cool and rainy – not enough global warming…
Circa 2005 I visited my son, who was at grad school in Adelaide – what a great country – nice people, (but lousy government) – hope your latest change works for you.
Tonight the forecast low in Calgary is +2C – and it’s still summer – gotta love that global warming – if we get any more of that stuff we’re going to freeze to death.
The latest change was at the federal level not state. SA had their state election in March. We have 3 levels of Govn’t in Australia, local, state and federal.
Same in Canada – 3 levels of incompetence – typically far-left imbeciles.
It doesn’t but it shows cooler or warmer than the baseline. Down here at home in WA we had some mornings at ~ -2C at 0730. Analogue of course.
Arctic sea ice summer minimum this year will be yet another embarrassment to the CACA consensus community, yet again covered up by the downstream media.
The inconvenient truth is that Arctic sea ice extent has been growing since 2012.
Some interesting weather is on the way for the NH next weekend. As blocking on the Arctic circle over both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, will set up ice age patterning that will drive cooling down across North America and to a lesser extent NW Russia. What’s also interesting is that this patterning is linked to storm activity in the western Pacific.
I hope that includes here along the US east coast. 🙂 been hotter’n h*ll here recently.
lt will be mostly Canada as a more zonal jet stream further to the south will stop the cold from pushing too far into the USA.
So befitting of the Victorian Deutsche Demokratische Republik . The Government Tass news agency calls on all good socialists to knit to keep people warm they have made deathly cold in the first place.
If you get a chance, watch a great movie called “Goodbye Lenin.” This is straight out of that movie.
This isn’t about dispatchable power.
It’s about callously ‘dispatching’ portions of the population, kids and old folks first.
This is murderous ‘green’ socialism at it’s finest!
J Mac
They get the kids with malaria – about a million per year – two million counting everyone.
They get the elderly and the poor with the cold weather and high energy costs – about another 2 million Excess Winter Deaths per year.
The (red) greens are the great killers of our time.
Still, the Greens are not a murderous as their 20th Century leftists heroes Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who killed about 200 million souls, mostly their own people.
Or are they?
Well actually, 2 million per year here, another maybe 2 million per year there, times 100 years… Hey! Wait a second!
Since PG&E has been systematically raising my gas and electric rates with the complicity of the State PUC (who is supposed to be looking out for Consumers) … Imhave been burning wood in my fireplace. The Bay Area Air Quality District can go to hell. I’ll burn whenever I want … “no burn day” or not. The air quality would be much better if the State wasn’t forcing PG&E to RAISE my energy rates in pursuit of costly, inefficient, energy generation. Idiot policies have consequences … idiot eco-leftists.
Kenji.
But should you ever dare to visit SoCal and burn driftwood on the beach there, the full weight and might of the law will descend on you like the legion of doom.
Thousands are dying in the UK every year due to fuel poverty caused by green taxes.
Another great example of wooly thinking from green campaigners.
So much for global warming.
Lets try the ‘People Angle’…..
Maybe, just maybe, those folks ‘demanding’ these items of knitting are not actually asking for the knitted item. ?????
Maybe they are ‘asking’ for The Person, Some Person, Any Person, Anyone at Anytime to come and personally deliver it. They want someone to talk to, someone who, even for just a few minutes, will talk to and listen to them. Them.
Not a screeching TV set. Not a money grubbing, faux and oxymoronic Social Media Network
An Actual Real Person to show Real Actual Interest.
Or, someone to talk to when they go collect it from anywhere.
IOW, the customers for this stuff are lonely and want/need human company
Before they venture into the world of Comfort Food and inflict permanent, life threatening and Serious Harm upon themselves.
Maybe they are there already and instinct tells them how wrong *that* notion is.
Nothing in this world is ever simple or easy, apart from Confirmation Bias, Cherry Picking and Messenger Shooting.
Always think twice before going there…..
Good point and probably partly true too as they may feel dejected by society, lonely, isolated even. It’s like when old people, typically money poor but possibly asset rich (House), are found dead and have been for sometime.
you can get blankets jumpers n socks at opshops without much outlay, i just check labels for real wool re jumpers . quilts avg 10 to 15 $ you should be able to get top to toe outfit for 20$ or less. I havent bought anything new for over 20 yrs
cant afford to but also cant justify the insane prices charged nowdays for thin badly made crap.
I would suggest that the people who need this help would most likely still need it even if electricity prices were lower.
This is a larger societal problem. Our welfare system, while flawed, and under resourced, is still sufficient enough that if you are freezing and you can’t do anything about it, it’s due to more than not being given enough money.
Some of that is the fault of the people who are struggling, and some of it is just bad luck and unfortunate circumstances, but electricity prices are not what really needs to change to solve these problems.
That’s what I think anyway.
Green energy is affordable if your name ends in Gore, Windsor (Charles “I just spent AU$107,000 on an electric Jag” Windsor), Turnbull, Shorten, Merkel, May, Cameron etc etc.
I thought that Tasmania was supposed to save Victoria because of excess hydro power?
I’ve said this before, but I think it’s worth restating it here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/08/08/aussie-agriculture-minister-on-climate-change-i-dont-give-a-rats-if-its-man-made-or-not-you-shouldnt-feel-afraid-to-turn-a-heater-or-a-light-on-at-night/#comment-2425142
“So, exactly where does the money from the larger power bills go?
26% of the increase over the last decade comes from increased retail margins (yay for privatization). 46% comes from the “gold plating” of the distribution network (a combination of greatly overestimating future demand, and government imposed reliability standards to reduce blackouts, introduced in the mid 2000’s)
Around 17% of the increase is from increased wholesale power prices. Around 16% of the increase is from spending on “green schemes”, accounting for around 6% of a power bill.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-04/energy-policy-solar-electricity-bills-air-conditioning-costs/9298346
So, 72% of the increase in power costs has nothing to do with the cost of generation, or money spent on green schemes. But I don’t hear much round here from those who are so worried about the high cost of electricity, talking about the things that are responsible for most of the increase in cost.”
“46% . . . gold-plating” primarily relates to customers in NSW, Qld and Tas.
It adds between $100 and $200 to a customer’s annual electricity cost (in those States).
This thread is about Victoria largely unaffected by so called gold-plating.
I’m not so sure about that.
“Gold-plating the power grid
This story investigates claims of how Citipower and SP Ausnet used the electricity rules and bureaucracy to turn what should have been a $107 million public investment on an enhancement to the Melbourne CBD electricity network into a $271 million spend.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/gold-plating-the-power-grid-20120705-21iv5.html
Philip that incident is a drop in the ocean.
In Victoria it’s all about the cost of changing to smart meters.
The gift that keeps on giving to the industry (not the consumer).
Smart meters were ‘sold’ to Victorians as part of the green revolution.
The whole exerciser is a massive fraud on consumers and it’s on-going.
A one-off cost criminally ‘amortised’ in perpetuity under the protective cover of green initiatives.
The green revolution has allowed the industry to mislead and gouge consumers in an orgy never before seen in Victorian utility commerce.
Green imposts are fraudulently reported by the industry so as not to alarm the gullible public. The industry uses ‘transfer pricing’ and other dishonest accounting methods to hide the real cost of green business.
On the Federal front, Malcolm & Co told the ACCC to look at everything but the base cost of coal-fired electricity. Moreover M & Co insisted the ACCC ‘find’ solutions for industrial customers (not retail customers).
Part of what got Malcolm fired but the new mob will do little better.
The industry is now so powerful it cares not.
Nothing (of consequence) will change . . .
“Philip that incident is a drop in the ocean.”
That wasn’t an isolated rare incident.
And, what is fraudulent about smart meters?
Philip the ACCC accept gold-plating is not a major factor in Victoria.
Do your research before spouting off.
Smart meters aren’t fraudulent they’re a good device.
Everything surrounding them is fraudulent in the extreme.
Don’t make it so obvious that you’re a left-wing apologist selective with the facts.
I do my best to argue in good faith. If I’m wrong about something, I want to know.
“Don’t make it so obvious that you’re a left-wing apologist selective with the facts.”
This doesn’t help anything.
But, but, but, woollies come from sheep, and sheep emit the deadly, planet-murdering gas, methane. Ban the woollies! Ban the sheep! Slaughter the sheep! So what if a few old, sick, poor people die from cold, if it means “saving the planet”. Think of the children!
See page 37 for example. http://Www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/publications/studies/Stromerzeugung_2017_e.pdf
Seems to show wind and solar array cheapest energy.
Page 34 35 show increasing wind and solar give lower prices for Germany.
Don’t bother clicking – damaged file. Of course,wind and solar can never result in lower prices, unless heavily subsidised and fossil fuels punished
Works fine as typed. In edge and chrome. Not sure what Problem is. Copy link and paste into acrobat reader also works.
I would be interested in seeing your proof of your costings of wind / solar Vs thermal generation
The wicked banality of the CO2 obsessed climate extremist on full display.
They are doing the equivalent of handing out galoshes on the Titani. Non-rational extremism brings out the dumbest in people.
Climate extremists are extremely non-rational.
This is just more proof that humans are responsible for the earth’s climate. /s
Remember – these progressives are the ones who care about the poor. They’re always telling us so.
“keeping up with demand” — what an immaculate way of saying, “providing for people freezing in increasing numbers”
Sugar coat it for a good cause, since these do gooders can’t stand the true sight of human discomfort … and can’t stand the insight about WHY people might be freezing in increasing numbers.