Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Australia’s “climate genius” Seth Griffith explains how households could all be powered by government financed solar with an EV in the garage by 2024.
Clean energy cash splash would cut household bills $4200 by 2035
By Nick O’Malley and Mike Foley
October 5, 2021 — 5.00amAustralian households would save $4200 on their energy bills by 2035 if governments helped them add solar power and batteries, replace gas cooking and heating appliances and purchase electric vehicles.
The subsidies would cost around $12 billion in the earlier years of such a scheme, but save $300 billion in household energy costs and help reduce the nation’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions by about a third, according to analysis by the energy non-profit group, Rewiring Australia.
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Treasurer Josh Frydenberg last month labelled economic risk as the primary motivation for climate action and put it front and centre of the next federal election, due by May next year.
“Australia has a lot at stake. We cannot run the risk that markets falsely assume we are not transitioning in line with the rest of the world,” Mr Frydenberg said.
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If governments subsidised early uptake, the savings would soon outweigh the costs, the analysis shows.
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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/clean-energy-cash-splash-would-cut-household-bills-4200-by-2035-20211004-p58x2w.html
Given there are around 8.3 million households in Australia, the $12 billion subsidy quoted by SMH only stretches to $1445 / household. Not nearly enough to subsidise a full solar conversion and EV purchase. And a lot of those households are high-rise apartments, so not a lot of space for the solar panels.
Even if you have the roof space, the energy budget is wafer thin.
I have a friend who lives in a very sunny part of Queensland, whose very large house and garage roof area is covered with solar panels. He has a big battery and an EV. Not because he believes we are experiencing a climate crisis, all this is because he doesn’t trust the government’s ability to run the country or competently provide basic services. He also collects rainwater and grows his own food.
He can *just* about run everything off the solar, except 2-3 times per year when he has to switch on the grid supply. No home heating or cooling, other than a few fans, and this only works when he limits driving to 5-10 miles per day in his EV.
Total cost of all this (including a cheap low range EV) was around AUD $65,000. Scaling this out to every house in Australia, $65k x 8.3 million households = $539 billion.
Of course this setup wouldn’t work for most people. There is nothing average about my friend’s house or his solar setup.
The bit Seth left out, is that even if you have a decent roof space, staying within the energy budget of the solar energy you can collect from an average roof would for most people require some drastic lifestyle changes. Especially if they do not live in a sunny part of a sunny state like Queensland, which experiences mild winters and good sunlight pretty much all year round.
If a person runs an energy intensive home business side hustle, say doing some automobile repairs and arc welding, they would be well and truly stuffed. Same for people who live in Australia’s densely populated cold climate states, which barely see the sun in winter.
There is an additional problem. My friend’s solar panels need a regular wash, to keep them operating at peak efficiency. Above all else Australia is a dusty place, a land of vast deserts and sweeping plains. A lot of dust from our arid interior gets carried and deposited on more populated regions, when the wind blows across our drylands. Australia has enough water for most people to live comfortable lives – but not if every household starts using hundreds of litres per week of additional water, to keep their solar panels clean.
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If Australia wanted a 100% carbon free grid, all they would need is just 3 Palo Verde scale nuclear plants ($12 billion/plant) for 12 million households (AU$50 billion) and an additional 6 nuclear plants for all their commercial and industrial electrical needs for a total cost of US$108 billion (AU$150 billion) or 10 times cheaper than going solar..
There are about 123 million US households, so using your friend’s cost of AU$ 65K/household (US$47,000) that would be US$5,8 trillion just for household use,so adding industrial and commercial use would be at least 3 times that or $17.4 trillion…
For comparison, if the US built just 72 Palo-Verde scale nuclear plants and kept all existing our hydro plants, the US could have a 100% carbon free electrical grid for household, commercial and industrial electrical needs for “just” $864 billion ($12 billion/nuke plant).
Leftists suck at math, logic and critical thinking.
At the core of all this green drivel is the claim that battery cars will get cheaper with increased volumes. Given the constraints on lithium, cobalt and copper, batteries will only ever get more expensive.
You also get the lie that wind power is getting cheaper when of course it isn’t.
You can save a lot with slave labor too.
About that washing problem? Easy solution! Use solar power from users, to desalinate all that water surrounding Australia – problem solved!
See, I could EASILY be a high-level bureaucrat in Government…
The very first paragraph in the above article’s quoted excerpts from the smh.com.au article written by Nick O’Malley and Mike Foley is incomplete: here is the paragraph with corrections underlined:
“Australian households would save $4200 on their energy bills by 2035 if governments helped them add solar power and batteries, replace gas cooking and heating appliances and purchase electric vehicles, at a governmental expense of $8400“.
Bookkeeping matters.
It’s sad when your own government lies to you and pretends it’s for your own good, it’ll save the environment and the economy – when it’s obvious that it’ll suck the life out of everything.
I have done the math every few years on the true life cost of converting your home to Solar and selling the extra to the utility at the price I pay for electricity. To do this you must include the typical maintenance cost. You also need to consider the fact that after about ten years the technology advancements will make your equipment obsolete and replacement parts unavailable requiring total replacement in come cases.
The math is simple. Determine the amount you will need to borrow for your installation – the price quoted by the ex-used car salesman pushing this mistake on you. Look at what your present retirement investment is earning over an average of the last five years. Take that amount and plug it into any of the future value investment calculators on the internet with that rate of return. Now take the loan amount and determine the Total cost of that loan. Subtract what you will pay for the loan and any down payment from what you would have earned. Subtract the total cost from that amount – this is necessary to cover the Maintenance costs over 10 to 15 years. (If you are going to buy all repair parts and make all repairs yourself you can use half that amount.) Don’t forget the added cost of repairing your roof and having the system un-installed and then reinstalled every 20 years. You also need to add the quoted cost of the system to the Tax Assessment value of your house and then a similar increase in Homeowners Insurance value and the increased Insurance payment.
Every time I have done this calculation, using current costs/prices, I ended up losing twice as much from lost income from investing that money I borrowed to have NO payments to the utility – i.e. Fee electricity, as I would had if I had not bought this massive milestone around my neck.
Worse the local Utility is pushing this very hard for the last few months. The have a calculator on their website calculating what you will “Save.” To have their recommended size installation based upon my electrical usage, which thy insert for me based upon my account number, I pay $ 180 a month more per month. I believe this is because I have a heat pump, but am not sure. The HP is the highest rated, most efficient HP sold today.
P.S. I work for the local utility. The chief electrical maintenance technician Installed a Wind Turbine and Lead-Acid Battery storage system at his home, 20 years ago, which is on a bluff overlooking the river. Ten years ago he took it down. He was not saving any money and the cost of maintenance, which he did himself, was most of the problem. The replacement parts alone, which he got at wholesale, made it cost more than metered electricity.
2+2 equaling 4 is so yesterday for today’s green crazies. About the only thing good I can see coming out of all this stuff is that governments are going to run out of the money that these nutters think it has because there simply won’t be enough people left with jobs and actually earning a living to pay the taxes for handouts for the green stuff let alone handouts for all the unemployed that will inevitably result.
When we build our house close to 40 years ago now we put insulation in the walls because that was what we could afford the time. We didn’t have enough money for insulation in the roof but we were able to save that up and it was very easy to put in later. We live in a colder part of Australia ie Canberra and that insulation has certainly kept our gas and electricity bills down and keeps the house cooler in summer as well. It didn’t cost us a huge amount of money. But we were certainly very frustrated when the Rudd government decided to hand out insulation to everybody, killing a few young men along the way working as installers, and taking our taxes to help pay for it. Most of the people, particularly in the very well off town that we live in, could well afford to put insulation in themselves. If the issue was about support for poorer people, insulating government housing would have been a much better option.
We are now in the process of putting on solar panels and battery, not because we are committed to solar which doesn’t make sense economically for anybody including us. However it will give us a degree of protection off grid as coal stations progressively shut down and peak demand is unlikely to provide sufficient energy at times when it is needed just for homes. Let us not even think about industry. We will get no common sense from the Greens until their iPhones can’t be charged. I imagine it will then be all the government’s fault despite the lack of basic common sense and knowledge now.
Build nuclear, now!
You know, some guys got together about a decade ago and claimed that Obamacare was going to save me a lot of money. Since I buy health insurance for 14 to 15 people, I thought this was a neat idea. Since then, my health insurance costs have more than doubled and our coverage and deductibles suck compared to then.
So, pardon my skepticism that these same people are going to drop the cost of energy in the USA and save me lots of money. And of course this article is about crazy Australians but we have the same crazies trying to run the USA into the ground here too.