Jo Nova
A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology.
If Australia gets any more free/cheap energy, we’ll go broke.
The Australian Energy Regulator has the data on electricity pricing and possibly a budget of $20 million a year but hasn’t yet updated with the last quarter, so I thought I’d help them out. Because surely this is a graph that all Australians need to see?
This is every state in the National Energy Market, and even though some have more renewables than others, the long-term trends are the same. Unreliable generators in one state can vandalize the whole market:
Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel but need thousands of kilometers of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated backup grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
And we wondered why electricity got more expensive:
And again, with labels.
The market never did recover from the closure of the Hazelwood coal plant. Costs rose by 85 per cent, and it took a pandemic to bring them down again, but only temporarily.
So Australia is close to 30 per cent total wind and solar generation, and aiming with gossamer fairy wings for 82 per cent in five years time.
Luckily, it appears there’s no chance we’ll get there. The solar daytime glut, negative prices, and community hatred of high-voltage lines is spoiling the market for developers. And not a day too soon…
This article originally appeared at JoNova and was republished by CFACT.
