Today, after Pauline Hanson pointed out that power prices have risen 300% in two decades, the government tried to blame it all on Russia and Ukraine.
That doesn’t explain why power prices have gone up in the 20 years prior to Russia-Ukraine, but the large increases in wind and solar power does.
Transcript
The Ukraine conflict does not affect coal fired electricity prices in this country, because our domestic coal fired power stations have long-term price contracts. They are not subject to spot international prices. Fuel prices in coal fired generation are a tiny proportion. Secondly, no country transitioning to unreliable solar and wind has reduced electricity prices. Countries that increased solar and wind increased electricity prices every time. The relationship is approximately linear: more solar, more wind, higher prices.
Thirdly, CSIRO projections rely on applying favourable and unreasonable hurdle rates for investing in unreliable and expensive solar and wind costs. CSIRO cost assessments of solar and wind do not include construction costs of the roads, the bridges et cetera coming in, disposable costs every 10 to 15 years—which is three times for the equivalent life of a coal fired power station. New offshore turbines are so big that they have to build ships dedicated to moving them. The cost of the ships is not included. Batteries essential for continuity of supply in wind and solar are not needed for coal.
There is an extra $100 billion on solar and wind that is not included in the costings. Grid stability management due to wind and solar being unstable and asynchronous are not included in the costings. And transmission lines, because the distance from the generation sources to the cities where the customers are is so big that the transmission lines are estimated to be an extra $50 billion expense, are not needed for coal fired power. Why are solar and wind still subsidised? Who pays for these subsidies? It is the electricity users.
That’s what’s driving up, in part, our electricity generation costs.
Absolutely correct as exposed by Professor Ian Plimer several years ago! This government has continued to push the Russia/ Ukraine conflict in this regard exposing their continued ignorance of the history of the Betrayals of the Minsk Agreements by Europe, UK and the USA!
Utterly DISGRACEFUL!!!
Can I suggest that everyone share these with young people you know? So many people my age have access but their teenagers are in schools and they’ve lost them. Yet there is such hope. Before the Federal election, I was rung by a couple of groups of 18 year olds who wanted to vote freedom but were worried about climate change etc. I wrote one short email containing a few facts they never get told at school: that’s all it took.
Another factor completely overlooked but actually very obvious, is the intermittent nature of renewables. They only generate around 25% of the time. And so for 75% of the time we need the power coming from storage or backup
The astronomical cost of storage is waved away by the green deluded but the cost is beyond belief. Pauline had mentioned almost $1 trillion to provide several days backup in case of prolonged bad weather. (which happens)
Or we could look to have backup generators, which are inevitably gas powered, although diesel generators do a lot of heavy lifting in SA. Just remember that the capacity here has to almost equal todays grid! And it is unpredictable how and when it will be needed, so the gas plants are not the efficient combined cycle of 60% efficiency , but cheaper but far less efficient plants which only have efficiencies in the 30% range. Somebody has to own and maintain this back up grid – and be paid for it. Inevitably from the user …
Again our alarmist friends just cannot do the numbers here and prefer to spout slogans and insist renewables are cheap. This is completely false and will cause a complete disaster. This behaviour is just like how they cannot actually look at the past temperature record or the actual data on temperatures, favouring distorted models of the “garbage in garbage out” variety which have been wrong for decades to divine that there is a climate catastrophy
The only catastrophy is what will befall Australia if we continue our present course…