Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Subsidies for everyone – the Aussie Federal Government is pushing to make electricity retailers responsible for continuity of supply, which will likely force them to pay for fossil fuel generators to maintain reserve capacity to cover gaps in the renewable energy supply.
States push back against subsidies for coal and gas-fired power plants
By political reporter Melissa Clarke
Posted Thu 26 Aug 2021 at 6:27pmKey points:
- The government wants to introduce a scheme that would require energy retailers to pay for spare energy capacity in case it is needed
- Energy Minister Angus Taylor wants it to include coal and gas generators
- Renewables companies are lobbying against the plan
The Federal Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, is battling to get support from the states and territories for his plan to get electricity retailers to pay coal and gas-fired power generators to keep operating.
The federal government wants to introduce a Physical Retailer Reliability Obligation (PRRO) to ensure there is enough energy available in the National Electricity Market (NEM) at all times to fill gaps when wind and solar power cannot meet demand.
The PRRO would require energy retailers to pay for spare energy capacity in case it is needed.
That spare capacity could come from renewable resources like batteries, pumped hydro, and demand management, but the federal government wants it to also include unused capacity in coal and gas-fired power plants.
That could see energy retailers giving money to coal-fired plants and prolonging their use through the system, if their existing spare capacity is cheaper than developing new storage options.
While the Commonwealth is aggressively promoting it, the states and territories are yet to be convinced, given the scheme could undermine investment in the renewable alternatives.
…
What can I say – as an Aussie, there is a reason I have a big generator downstairs.
Aussie electricity providers in my opinion long since gave up on the idea that it is their job to maintain grid stability, so there has been a rush to the exit door, with operators of unfashionable coal and gas generators embracing the new renewable energy age.
The Federal government has belatedly realised that, unless they do something, the only people who will be held responsible for the inevitable blackouts and grid instability are the politicians who created this mess.
I doubt this last minute outbreak of almost sanity will save the situation. Coal and gas plant operators still have no motivation to invest in proper maintenance, or build new plants, so Australia’s end of life fossil fuel generators are likely rapidly becoming almost as decrepit and unreliable as the renewable energy systems which are supposed to replace them.
And somewhere squeezed in the middle of this circus will be the energy retailers, who will now be forced to buy expensive unreliable electricity from renewable plant operators when it is available, yet at the same time they will be forced to pay the owners of decrepit coal and gas plants to stand by, allegedly ready to jump in when the renewables fail. Under the new reliability obligation, energy retailers will also likely be expected to pay large fines to the Australian Federal Government, when everything inevitably falls in a heap.
No doubt energy retailers will soon start demanding subsidies of their own, to continue operating in such a hostile regulatory environment.
Because you can’t have backup windmills or PV. But you can have back oil and coal.
And definitely from people with brains who get their back up.
According to griff, the solution is to have lots of residential solar to take over when the centralized solar isn’t working.
Let’s not forget that “Demand Management” is newspeak for “rolling blackouts. They’re essentially saying that a Zimbabwe level of electricity reliability is acceptable.
All the brainwashed monkeys applaud the idea of a “smart meter”, not realizing that a meter is just metering and can’t be smart. The smart part is something else. It’s punishing people who consume at the wrong time.
Of course that will lead to electric fire when people try to hack the wiring around the “smart” “meter”.
What happens when they don’t?
Fined and drummed out of the energy sector, made bankrupt?
Or flogged mercilessly with a wet lettuce leaf?
Or does that answer depend on which political party is in the ascendancy in Canberra?
I do not know Australia, so may have completely misreas this, but on the face of it this sounds like an excellent idea and one worthy of the robust ironic element in both Australian and English culture. Its sounds positively pythonesque
Someone has to bear the costs of the current mania. The essence of this mania is pretending that intermittent and unreliable electricity supply is the same product, and interchangeable with a reliable and constant electricity supply.
So this sounds like taking that at face value, and telling someone in the supply chain to make it so. To only sell to consumers an energy product that meets the well established standards for such a product. That is, it shall be available 24 x 7 within certain parameters.
Of course, contrary to the spin of the wind and solar lobbies, you cannot do this with wind or solar, and this is a critical defect. What is being supplied by either, though they and their advocates will not admit it, is a quite different product.
This measure sounds like telling the supply chain, if renewable is so great as part of the mix, generate power however you want, what you have to supply is the conventional end product.
The measure happens to have chosen the retailer. But the retailer then has to secure product which meets the standard, and that means that the whole chain is going to have to restructure.
Surely the logical result of this is that retailers will shortly decide that it costs far more to deliver this with a mix of renewable and conventional than it would to deliver it with conventional?
At that point its game over. The whole scam is exposed. It consists in the fact that once you have backed up renewable sufficiently to generate a reliable supply, you no longer need the renewable, its more cost effective to just use the backup. This measure sounds like it will make that blindingly obvious. In which case, its to be applauded.
This could be a total misunderstanding. I don’t know Australia.
You have not misunderstood, and not because you don’t know Australia. This of course would have happened long ago, EXCEPT governments world wide have forced energy providers to purchase UR energy, whether it makes economic sense or not. Because they would never have made this insanely unreliable and uneconomic decision on their own. Logical results mean nothing when you are being run by government fiat.
It is a simple matter to mandate both a quantity and time length for every power purchase.
For example, 24 hours. You only get paid for the minimum power delivered in that time frame, not the average.
Australia is lost. We have ex-lawyers making medical decisions for 8+ million people.
renewables mob can rot in hell
remove ALL their subsidies if they keep bitchin re decent supplies like coal n gas, that actually provide mining jobs for aussies unlike os made pv and turbines
Turn electricity into a luxury! Only when the wind is clear and the clouds are weak, electricity can be used!
Not how it’s going to be done. Instead, and we are quite a ways down that road, electricity will only be used by the rich elites, who can afford the sky high rates, and the little people will just have to do without. Already I read that @10 % of Germans are having to choose between paying for electricity, or FOOD. Only going to get worse….
Some years ago, the South African ANC government decided to set up “Regional Electricity Distributors” covering larger regions than the existing city-level suppliers. The centralised Eskom generation and country-wide distribution system would be unchanged. This was simply a POLITICAL decision, since the Socialist ANC didn’t like any sort of independence, even of its major cities. Now I can’t speak for other cities, but the Johannesburg electrical department makes a profit on resale, and its infrastructure was about to be GIVEN AWAY to some un-elected political organisation. So, of course, maintenance fell apart – why keep fixing something that’s going to be taken away? And THAT was the start of the despised ‘load shedding’! Eventually, everything returned to the status quo, but there had been 18 months of limited maintenance – and it shows!
Maybe Australia will learn from others’ mistakes – but then they ARE politicians, so I hae me doots.