Essay by Eric Worrall
“… the up-front costs involved in transitioning the network to renewables will be large …”
Why could power bills rise by 35 per cent next year? It’s part of a bigger problem
By business reporter Gareth Hutchens
Earlier this week, the boss of Alinta Energy said retail electricity prices could jump by more than 35 per cent next year.
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Why? Because, as experts have explained, Australians living in eastern and south-eastern Australia have to rebuild their electricity system within a decade or so, given the pace with which old, coal-fired power stations are abruptly exiting the system.
They say renewable energy will provide cheaper electricity bills in the long-run, but the up-front costs involved in transitioning the network to renewables will be large, and since things have been left so late, the disorderly nature of the transition will likely make it more expensive than it would have been if the transition had been planned.
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An example of the disorderly transition
Want an idea of how quickly things are moving?
Last month, AGL shocked the market when it announced plans to close its Loy Yang A coal-fired power station in Victoria by 2035, 10 years earlier than expected.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-14/why-could-power-bills-rise-by-35-per-cent-next-year/101522542
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a wholly government owned national broadcaster.
The ABC blames a lack of planning and the “disorderly” early closing of coal plants for the allegedly temporary spike in energy costs. So its still coal’s fault, even though they are helping the green transition by withdrawing from the market.
Of course this begs an obvious question – if the closure of a coal plant is causing such disorder, why can’t the government simply build a new coal plant, to ease the pain of the green transition?
Surely a temporary coal plant costing a few billion dollars would be better than slamming ordinary householders with the extreme costs of a “disorderly transition”.
The ABC blames a lack of planning and the “disorderly” early closing of coal plants for the allegedly temporary spike in energy costs.
Not blaming the airheaded gummint poohbahs who think FIRST you end your reliable power supply, THEN you magically turn on the switch for the ‘renewable’ sources which aren’t even built yet? Good governance this is not.
abc is THE goldstandard for green wokery
Your state-owned Leftist propaganda mill reflects the ideology of your politicians and Deep State bureaucrats. With the totalitarian examples of the last century, you’d think that the peoples of Australia and the UK never would have let the State control the levers of information control.
35% increase for what? Certainly not any effect on climate. When you go to the Doctor and say “Doc, it hurts when I do this” the Doctor says “stop doing that”.
Doctors used to say that. Now they have their admin examine your insurance to find out what it covers and for how much.
Unfortunately Australia is committed to making the same mistakes in energy policy that are being exposed in Britain, Germany & the EU.
Not even changing the government will make any difference.
Buckle up … things are about to get a whole lot harder.
“Buckle up … things are about to get a whole lot harder.“.
I so wish that you were wrong on this, but the swamp seems to be in total control everywhere with no sign of them ever easing up on anything. In the UK they have set about destroying Liz Truss, which they look like achieving in an absurdly short time, but everywhere else is in the same grip. [re Liz Truss – under the UK Tory party rules, the swamp picked the two candidates for the party members to vote on. Just like Hong Kong, except there the CCP swamp picked only one candidate. Given a full choice, the party members would have picked Kemi Badenoch. The swamp said she was too inexperienced. Could she even remotely possibly have done worse than Liz Truss? No way.].
We need leaders with the guts to say that modern economies run on energy, and the way to optimise that is for governments to keep out all ideologies and to level the playing field. I see no evidence of any guts getting to the top anywhere.
Yep – you can only insulate yourself as best you can. You are relying on less informed individuals experiencing enough pain ahead of you that they become a loud voice.
When I asked Nigel Farage in person at CPAC Australia whether Liz Truss had any chance of sorting out Britain’s energy market, he said no. I think we’re seeing his prediction play out.
Far too many entrenched interests, in all parties, are making a fortune tithing the peasants through green energy rackets, for them to let go without a struggle.
Cory Bernardi, former Senator and now Sky News programme presenter, said that from his experience MPs follow the party line or get sidelined with no chance of promotion to a portfolio position.
As I wrote elsewhere today, the fundamental, underlying problem are policies adopted as a result of acceptance of the evidence-light, pseudoscience of the “Catastrophic/dangerous, CO2-driven anthropogenic global warming/climate change” CONJECTURE.
Only when (and if) that junk “science” goes away, will the problem be solved.
My sister who live near Ft. Meyers, Florida says another house that survived the hurricane just burned down today because the EV in its garage spontaneously combusted.
I could not help but laugh. But I do feel regret now that I laughed. I hope the house and car owner was adequately insured.
I have always had the opinion that insurance premiums will kill the current BEV behemoths.
I learnt last week that the replacement cost for a BEV Lexus battery was AUD42k. That knowledge will kill the second hand market for them.
Especially because the prospective purchaser will have no way to tell if the battery has been abused by deep discharging, ultra-fast charging, etc., which a first owner would have no incentive not to do if he was planning to unload the car in three years.
Scissor, please ask your sister to post you a link, then submit a story. This EV risk needs to be broadcast far and wide.
They are setting fire to containerships too and in this case discarded batteries going for recycling caught fire , luckily before it got to the ship
https://gcaptain.com/container-lithium-battery-fire
Not sure if this is the same fire as Scissor is referring to, but I saw this:
https://www.myfloridacfo.com/news/pressreleases/details/2022/10/11/psa-cfo-patronis-to-electric-vehicle-makers-we-need-solutions-to-combat-ev-fires
And they are blaming Ian, with its storm surge. Its their get-out-of-jail-free card, with the added advantage of being able to blame climate change.
I did a quick search on the internet and found this:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2022/10/13/florida-homes-burning-down-from-immobilized-evs-after-hurricane-ian-n2614429
I posted about this in tips some days ago Eric
Just waiting for that to happen to a few EVs here in New Zealand! I’m glad I’m not in the insurance business!
I’m glad I’m not in the insurance business!
You should be. Just think of the premiums you can charge!
You actually are in the insurance business, unfortunately on the cost side if you buy insurance for any property. You will pay for these fires through premium increases.
If one thinks it through, wind and solar will always be more expensive, as they require total conventional backup, which also has to be paid for.
Batteries would be even more expensive. El Hiero, even with favorable siting, was a failure at being all-renewable.
Bring up ‘King Island,Tasmania,hydro”.
It clearly shows that even in a good location, ” The roaring 40 tees” wind on average manages about 40 % of the Islands needs.
Solar is very small, so the Diesal generator carries the load.
I am sick of being told that renewables will be cheaper,” Because the fuel is free.”.
As all the shallow seas around Australia are all a giant Carbon Sink, then our tiny 1 per cent of CO2 is easily absorbed.
Michael VK5ELL
Dr Gifford of CSIRO published in 1992 “Implications of the globally increasing atmospheric CO 2 concentration and temperature for the Australian terrestrial carbon budget – integration using a simple model.”
Australian Journal of Botany 40, 527-543.
http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/BT9920527.htm
Saying about the Australian landmass – “The present modelled rate of net sequestration is of a similar magnitude to CO2 emissions from continental fossil fuel burning and land clearing combined.”
So – the Australian landmass absorbs our carbon emissions.
I have been running part of my household load off-grid for 11 years now. I have large format LiFePO4 batteries that are still performing well.
I live at 37S and during the first year I just kept adding solar panels until the battery did not cut out. The worst month has consistently been May due to persistent cloud cover. The panels are not optimised for May sunshine so my capacity factor is somewhat lower than it could be if I did not follow the 26 degree roof line with the panel mount.
My average capacity factor is 3.8%. I may be able to get to 6% if I was to optimise tilt for May. Even higher, about 10%, with a tracking array. Higher again if I had a small diesel generator to operate if needed in May.
I also have an on-grid system that has achieved 14% CF in best year, It has reduced to 13% since a neighbour installed a large system and that drives the street voltage up and both systems are limited by voltage regulation.
The average cost of power for my off-grid system is substantially lower than it would cost to produce power from a diesel generator now but about 10 times the cost of coal generation before it was knobbled by all the intermittent generators. System replacement cost would be a little lower now than a decade or so ago.
No academic doing the sums for “renewables” bases their calculations on achievable numbers. The calculations rely on fantastic assumptions like the existence of a diversity fairy and “demand management” otherwise known as rolling blackouts..
Rick, just wait until more are added on your street! You will be replacing the whole system. And paying for it.
And transmission lines to main grid and now in Australia a specialised transmission line second grid for wind and solar.
But add removal and replacement costs every on average twenty years compared to, say, coal fired power stations for accounting purposes fifty years operation but well maintained capable of eighty of more years.
The insanity of the ‘green transition’ continues unabated by rational thought. The Swamp is in control.
Demonstrably false.
That is an understatement but I agree with the underlying proposition that the quicker and sooner the ‘transitioning’ is attempted the better for consumers and voters, rather a short sharp shock than slow death by a thousand cuts.
The problem is that a lot of the costs get baked in. Those synchronous condensers in South Australia are now part of the cost. All the new transmission lines and grid strengthening are now part of the cost that need to be recovered over the next few decades as well as all the additional maintenance. AEMO’s accelerating costs to manage all the additional complexity is baked in. All the computers being run by every generator to maximise their profits by smart pricing of bid blocks is baked in.
The only way you can control electricity costs is to make your own. And that is a reasonable option for many Australian households. Better to buy a stationary battery and solar panels to power your house than buying an EV for example. Get off grid.
One factor in Australia that favours getting off-grid is that the electricity assets are in private hands. I cannot envisage circumstances where households will have to pay for an unused service that is available in a street.
Electricity generation assets (FF) in Queensland are public assets. The state government fleeces all down the line to pay for its horrendous inability to manage anything … and I mean ANYTHING … huge blow outs in government public service operating budgets and every single infrastructure project is substantially over budget and out of time.
In NSW the power stations and transmission lines were controlled and managed by the Electricity Commission but after decades of poor work practises and related high operating costs a Coalition State Government closed the EC and transferred the assets into some government owned private companies, so accounting done off state budgets.
The power stations were independently valued at A$12-15 billion, but sold for under $6 billion. When the debts on those private company books were repaid with interest only A$800K was left. The debt was used to pay the 16 years of Labor State Government extra dividends to improve budget bottom lines.
At the time the EC was closed the NSW Railway Workshops in Sydney were also closed and the work put out to tender with the private sector, poor work practises there as reported to a local area business group included absenteeism of sixty per cent, six out of every ten employees absent every working day.
How do I know? The manufacturing company I managed was a member of the business group, our manufacturing manager was shocked when he heard about the workshops.
That is done for water supply available but not connected in Australia.
yup talk of supplying town water instead of low quality bore to the town. then they stated even passing the block was going to be 20k per household
odd that no ones interested anymore?
About ten years ago I lived in a Queensland provincial city that had it’s own water supply paid for by ratepayers and owned by the council for ratepayers. The Labor Queensland Government took control of the town water system and had water meters installed, our rates previously included water supply.
And ratepayers had to pay for the water meters.
[I cannot envisage circumstances where households will have to pay for an unused service that is available in a street.]
in qld and elsewhere probably if you go OFFgrid in a place the grid passes…they want to STILL charge you supply etc fees anyway
only way is if youre rural and powers not handy
handy however could be stretched to somewhere requiring 3 or more poles and lines YOU pay a huge sum for to get connected to think 50k or so 16 yrs ago a power at frontage block I looked at would have cost me 18K to get hooked in as they stated a transformer would be required as it was the last home block in the rd.powerline HAD a post and transformer there but “older”
yeah wtf?
needless to say I didnt buy there
Bit late to the piece but I know what you mean about rorts. The sign on our small acreage 4 years ago said it came with town water and that power was available all just a couple of kilometres from town. The poles and wires ran down our street, water meter at the front of the property, done deal.
The transformer and pole that we had to have, just to be connected to the grid cost us nearly 30,000 dollars. The required setback from the street meant that we needed a heavier grade of copper cables to have any hope of feeding out 5kw ‘limited’ of 6.6kw solar panels to the grid. So there’s another 11,000 dollars. The water turned out to be illegally supplied by the developer and was cut off by the council, after a battle that is. One person in the street had to sell her horses.
We have an 87MW commercial solar project 3 kilometres from us and in the past 3 and a half years we’ve had around 15 blackouts, numerous brownouts and power spikes. We’ve lost several electrical items due to this two of them were expensive to replace, one was a water pump.
And then Matt Kean turned our region into a Renewable Energy Zone! We’re up to 2,007MW of existing, approved and planned wind and solar so far. Plus 180 kilometres of new transmission lines, part of which will go through our beautiful valley. It’s bloody devastating.
Happy days….
“They say renewable energy will provide cheaper electricity bills in the long-run, but the up-front costs involved in transitioning the network to renewables will be large..”
————
How will renewables yield cheaper electricity bills in the long term when solar and wind farms need to be replaced every 15-20 years or so? Do wind farms even last for 20 years? How long does the typical newly constructed fossil fuels or nuclear power plant last these days?
Inquiring minds want to know.
BTW, nothing motivates action on climate change like throwing a can of tomato soup on a priceless work of art like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a London art museum.
Just Stop Oil protesters throw soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflower painting – YouTube
Someone needs to go to jail over that.
Instead of jail, I believe they should be sentenced to Community service on the Shetlands planting 3 foot high Palm tree saplings all over all the islands. They can be released from ‘service’ when these trees, (wonderful for the climate!!) grow to a height of 4 foot.
If the world is warming these saplings will surely prosper and grow and these people won’t need to spend much time on the Shetlands waiting for growth.
(Am I being too mean? Should I reduce growth to 3 foot and 1 inch?)
Singapore has caning. Works for them.
Why can’t an individual coal fired power station can’t be transitioned to a potential H2 burner, even as a blend of input fuel. There’s a massive amount of civil works already paid for.
Oops, second can’t is a typo.
whole post was a typo mate!
hydrogen takes more to make than you get back
leave the coal plants alone and build MORE of them
before Xidan really kills Vic
That has been proposed in Victoria, but greens are put off by the idea of building a new coal to hydrogen plant and retrofitting the carbon capture when the technology is developed
Please check out the operational part. What is the energy density of H2/volume ? It’s pretty less. Hence the boiler size has to be different.
Morrison has done a lot of harm by adopting Net-Zero. It was foolish to follow the lemmings. There was no longer a clear point of difference that was based on reality. Hopium is supreme in Australian politics. Supported by incompetent academics who have no idea what is involved in the TRANSITION. It all depends on China’s ability to produce all the stuff needed. AND no one has asked China if it is doable.
China is already burning 4,000,000,000 tonne of coal to achieve the current piddling rate of of TRANSITION. Imagine how much coal and nuclear power they will need to produce the required torrent of stuff in a couple of years. IMPOSSIBLE is a gross understatement.
It is fun to watch as long as you know you are not going to lose heaps when the power socket is simply a hole in the wall. As long as you are not the most exposed to the cost increases, others will feel the pain before you and that should raise a few questions. Maybe some of those ABC journalists are looking at their aged parents predicament.
I can guarantee that no academic study underpinning the TRANSITION of any network has a line item – “synchronous condensers”. Even vast batteries will not ride a decent system bump in the millisecond time domain. They are fast but not fast enough for big bumps.
I asked my federal government ALP MP what the total cost will be to switch to net zero. The answer of course was just a rambling preforma piece of nonsense without a $ sign in it. I pointed out that they have a defined project now that net zero is the specific objective. They can estimate demand so they know how much renewable power will be required, they have good statistics and estimates on wind and solar availability (and associated wind droughts) so they can make reasonable estimates of how much back up power and how much electrical energy storage they will need and they can estimate the extra transmission and grid costs required to hook all this up. They also know the approximate life of windmills and solar panels. Therefore they can work up an estimate and schedule of the total cost and calculate some sort of NPV for say 50 years. They can do the same for coal and nuclear (not hydrogen) and calculate NPVs and then compare them all to each other. They may have done this but the chances of this being made public in Oz are zero because a hard headed engineering analysis is not what they want the public to know. The net zero stuff, including the need to ever do it, is ALL done on feelings and unqualified assumptions.
The whole net-zero argument has been presented and accepted without any real engineering based scrutiny. Warm and fuzzy coffee shop meetings where, “we have to do something” have taken the argument in an “accept first- work out the details later” direction. Any attempts to put an argument to the contrary, are met with your opponent, “shoving their head in the sand”. Though I firmly believe that a >35% price increase, for what will be an inferior product, will jolt some of the deluded, back to reality. The real shame, is the money that has been spent on this transition already, and the real benefit, that that money could have provided to recognised problems of this world, has been entirely wasted, on the latest “Holy Grail Quest”.
Pollies and the media love this sort of stuff, because it’s easy to be, “seen to be doing something”, still, the time to produce “the benefits of the transition”, is fast approaching and it will be exposed for the scam, that it is. Such a waste of time and effort. All eyes will be on the European winter and the death and destruction that it will wreak. Sadly, people will die in large numbers, before humanity says, “ENOUGH”.
The estimates are being done by academics who have never built anything.
All the estimates really on China making the stuff at ever reducing prices. No one has asked China what they can produce over any time frame.
All the current projects are under huge inflationary pressure. China simply cannot make the stuff needed fast enough.
This is what the CSIRO produce:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/EF/Files/GenCost2020-21_FinalReport.pdf PDF (2 MB)
All based on LCOE of generation, which even a fool knows is a glossy way to describe a turd.
The whole fiasco relies on ever increasing subsidies to make the TRANSITION viable. The incompetents advising the government do not make the connection that subsidies (more accurately, legalised theft) inevitably increases the cost to consumers.
The current largest wind farm project in Australia is the Macintyre Project in Southeast Queensland. Nordex is the turbine supplier. They are German based and you know how well Germany is doing at the present time. I expect there will be serious financial issues with this project.
The largest wind farm in Australia is in Victoria. It fell behind schedule by almost two years from planned commercial operation. Some of that related to grid indigestion that may have been resolved by the battery in Victoria.
One day the politicians pushing this nightmare will realise the guaranteed output of all wind farms combined is ZERO.
In several publications this year Wind Europe has acknowledged that all five of Europe’s wind turbine manufacturers are operating at a loss.
Siemens Gamesa, for example, in a press release on 26th Sept said “Wind Turbine manufacturers are operating at massive losses and cannot invest to satisfy growing demand for wind energy”
Nordex must presumably be in a similar position.
Notice that the “transition” will go on forever. they will tell you that we just need more of it, to get over the hump, then it will sustain itself, like a perpetual motion machine.
And a perpetual money machine for those receiving the green energy subsidies.
tgasloli
Reply to John Bell
October 14, 2022 5:39 pm
And a perpetual money machine for those receiving the green energy subsidies
Indeed.
This point is very much worth highlighting.
The subsidies, and costs, will continue.
With the manifold drawbacks of intermittently and utter unreliability.
Auto.
friends mums just got 250k for 10yrs lease of land in SA to run PV setup
bloody cells would be lucky to produce that money even at SA exorbitant 34c or so KWH charges
In Australia, this climate madness kicked off in 2008/2009, not long after that infamous fictional movie started being shown around government agencies. Wind and solar have had a good decade plus to prove themselves. So the current issues with any transition can not be considered rushed or abrupt.
It must be also highlighted that in the same time frame the UAE has successfully commissioned a nuclear power plant based on proven Korean technology.
Of course this begs an obvious question – if the closure of a coal plant is causing such disorder, why can’t the government simply NOT CLOSE IT , to ease the pain of the green transition?
I would have used the crossing out symbol for “build a new coal plant” but that function seems to have disappeared for now.
Most of Australia’s coal plants are well past their use by date, almost as unreliable and broken down as greens claim. I’m guessing the early shutdown is because a major repair is required and AGL doesn’t want to foot the bill, if they’re going to be forced to shut down soon anyway.
I was not aware that the plants are in such bad shape. Its funny that there’s no money in updating and/or building new coal, gas, and nuclear but there’s plenty to fund unreliables.
I think its time to recycle politicians.
It supports Waza’s comment that both government and the energy companies knew about the planning requirements as early as 2008/09 and that maintenance of FF generators stopped at that time as the asset owners would not be able to recoup the sunk costs in planned maintenance.
The lack of planning is entirely one of political policy … and in Queensland I read that our state government is bringing forward the decommissioning of its FF generators to 2032.
FFS these politicians’ collective IQ doesn’t exceed room temperature.
It would be interesting to know how much debt the QLD private companies, government owned, hold in debt and interest liabilities not reported in state budgets.
Streetcred: “FFS these politicians’ collective IQ doesn’t exceed room temperature.”
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And that IQ number is in °C not °F.
It makes business sense that the owners avoided putting any additional money into something that the politicians were planning on eliminating. Same thing can be said for the drilling and mining industries.
We’re in for hard times.
Gee, who would have thought that the government telling an industry that it will be out of business in 13 years or so would have adversely affected O&M and replacement budgets. Bad government policy has bad consequences. Sadly, those bad consequences are not fully felt until years in the future. Since the politicians run the media, you will never hear that the government’s bad policies caused your distress. They’ll blame it on those greedy FF companies, as they are doing now for wildly inflated energy costs.
No recent graduate wants to work in a coal fired power station. It is viewed as a dead-end career.
The University of Newcastle up till recently offered combustion engineering courses. Now they offer a degree in “renewable energy”.
If you are not training people to work in productive industry but rather training them to be hangers-on then it is inevitable that the economy will decline – influencer is the new big money spinner in developed countries.
New graduates will go for the highest pay. Hopefully the plant owners will try to compensate for the supposedly dead end job.
I can see the reluctance of recent graduates to work in a FF plant but there will be a need for someone experienced in the work when the scam implodes.
I certainly hope that there are engineers willing to become knowledgable in both systems.
At Jo Nova a former electrical engineer who worked for the NSW Electricity Commission reported a few years ago that before they were sold there were completed future plans to upgrade and add generator units.
Hopefully they didn’t toss out the plans. I believe they will need them soon.
The absolute fundamental issue is that all the “green transition” inputs including costs are arrived at by — yep you guessed it — models…Now where have we heard this before??
So let us simulate the unsimulatable (sic) the climate, the most complex natural phenomenon on the planet — and let’s create something we’ll describe as a doomsday scenario we’ll call that CAGW or more easily “climate change” and let’s fix the non-existent problem by simulating and predicting everything we need to utterly and completely change the most complex interconnected engineering creation ever – the current reliable energy production and delivery system across every continent, but we’ll need to do it by an arbitrary year because we are running out of time — Makes perfect sense…
We have been through all this before, here is some history of the last great power crisis of the 1980s
https://wongm.com/2020/06/1982-new-south-wales-power-crisis-backup-gas-turbines/
How anyone can claim renewable energy is driving down the cost of electricity to consumers and get away with that lie is beyond me. The proof is in the pudding and all the people have to do is look at their electricity bills. Are we that stupid or what?
You’ve missed the point, Markl.
“They say renewable energy will provide cheaper electricity bills in the long-run.”
The success or failure of renewable energy, in the long run, will depend upon technological development, as well as the competence of politicians and their advisors.
A crisis of soaring energy prices should stimulate the research and development into more efficient renewables, particularly with regard to ‘Building Integrated Photo Voltaics’ (BIPV) and Sodium-Ion batteries which are safer than Lithium-Ion batteries and do not require the use of scarce materials.
If such research and development fails to produce the technologies, in the future, that can compete economically with fossil fuels, then I expect that the use of fossil fuels will be increased.
Whilst many politicians and their advisors would appear to be scientifically illiterate, I don’t believe they are completely stupid. Survival is one of the strongest forces.
Politicians are stupid in every aspect except one, Vincent.
Politician’s IQs are off the charts when it comes to getting money to find its way into their pockets.
Vincent, you seem to be assuming that R&D into ruinables will be fruitful on any meaningful timeframe. We would be betting our entire society, economy and energy systems on the come. That’s how we got into this ruinables mess in the first place, the belief that government can dictate future developments. I am aware of no past precedents that augur a favorable outcome from that; quite the contrary.
What else would you expect with capital exorbitant dilute energy?
Just keep repeating the mantra. Unreliables are cheap…unreliables are cheap..
Tesla Powerwall Price In Australia Shifts Into Ludicrous Mode (solarquotes.com.au)
Shell Recharge hikes its public charging network prices by over 30% (msn.com)
Who else thinks there will be “public charging infrastructure deserts?” Will those on-street charging points survive in rough neighborhoods? What will the maintenance costs look like in high-crime areas? What will the social justice warriors say?
Anyhoo, what are the costs for upgrading the electric distribution infrastructure, tearing up roadways and installing all the underground lines? Generation and Transmission system improvements? Destruction of all kinds of buildings including homes and apartment buildings from exploding EVs?
Question.
If renewables are capable of producing cheap electricity, why are prices constantly increasing as renewable capacity occupies more and more of the grid?
Second question, if the massive increase in Green energy efficiency particularly solar arrays we are constantly being told about is real, why are blackouts and anxiety about winter electricity availability such a concern?
Third question, If renewable energy is so desirable and low cost, why is the need to limit usage and to monitor closely your consumption, such a high priority?
No more Dams, No more Fracking, No more Coal, No new Mines for anything (let alone lithium) & No Nuclear.
In the words of ‘Jake Jolliet Blues’
“Well then … I guess you’re really up shit creek”
Do you mean “Joliet” Jake Blues as played by John Belushi in the 1980’s “The Blues Brothers” classic movie? From Wikiquote:
“Jake and Elwood are meeting with Sister Mary Stigmata, whom they refer to as “The Penguin”]
Jake: Five grand? No problem, we’ll have it for you in the morning. Let’s go, Elwood.
Penguin: No, no! I will not take your filthy stolen money!
Jake: Well, then, I guess you’re really up Shit Creek.
[The Penguin smacks Jake with her ruler.]”
It’s not only the up-front costs which will push up power bills. It is also the operating costs and ongoing maintenance costs, which will sock consumers very hard for ever – or until the country comes to its senses and fosters nuclear- and fossil-fuelled power generation, finally consigning solar and windmills to the rubbish bin of history!
when they started the smartmeter push Vic attorney general said ZERO benefit to consumers but cashcow for suppliers
correct
supply charges rose 300% since
let alone the ripoff in actual usage being paid to subsidise the solar/wind scams
Eric, your “… if the closure of a coal plant is causing such disorder, why can’t the government simply build a new coal plant …” is a bit off the mark. The question to your government should be: Why the hell are you closing perfectly good coal plants and paying for unnecessary, duplicative and uneconomical ruinables replacement power generation?
So why is free energy so expensive? Maybe because physics trumps politics and wishful thinking. Perhaps we need leaders who actually think through their decisions and base them on critical analysis and real understanding of the physical world.
Or at least hire someone who does.
The government clearly stating that they intend to end fossils and fossil fuels believing them is not disorderly transitioning. It is fossil fuel tiring of being used as a crutch and cutting their losses. That it doesn’t work out the way the government promised is no surprise. Dumbasses.
So “free” is actually “free in the long run”?
Or “free sometimes somewhere”?