Alan Moran has just taken on the role of RET “Terminator”.
For Alan the driving question is not: “are you John Connor?” – it’s more like “are you Jonathan Upson?” – or any other wind weasel stealing from Australian power punters, for that matter.
But this Terminator hasn’t been sent to protect wind weasels or their parasites, he’s out to terminate their leech like grip on the public and power punter purse.
On that score, it seems like things are just going from bad to worse for Australia’s wind scammers.
Barely a day goes by now without someone in the mainstream press tipping a bucket on this obscene subsidy-driven-rort.
Here’s Alan “The Terminator” Moran setting out just what the great wind power fraud will cost us, if we don’t kill the RET right now.
Terminate the renewable schemes now
The Australian
Alan Moran
14 November 2013
THE sun is setting on the carbon tax. At its present rate, $24 a tonne of CO2, the tax increases the wholesale electricity price by 55 per cent, yet a Treasury-endorsed OECD paper estimates Australia needs a tax of $78 a tonne to meet its emission restraint goals.
Other countries are not following Australia’s lead in imposing a cripplingly high carbon tax, they are not even taxing emissions at the EU’s $6 a tonne. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent grudging acknowledgment that its forecasts of soaring global temperatures have failed to materialise during the past 17 years can only reinforce governments’ resistance to penalise their economies.
But the carbon tax is not the only such burden carried by Australia’s producers and consumers. Other measures include the $2 billion subsidy for the Clean Energy Finance Corp. With its discontinuation, the cost of renewable energy requirements are becoming more prominent.
Labor’s budgetary expenditure on emission restraints was about $4bn a year. The Coalition’s average annual spending, including $800 million on direct action, looks to be below $2bn.
Renewable energy requirements for electricity supply have been around since 2001. Through the years the mandatory share has been expanded and is scheduled to ramp up to a notional 20 per cent of supply by 2020. Aside from about 15,000GWh of commercial hydro, the 2020 target is defined as 45,000GWh of subsidised electricity comprising 4000GWh for rooftop solar facilities and 41,000GWh for larger facilities, mainly wind farms.
Overall, renewable requirements add about 40 per cent to the wholesale electricity cost.
Wind generation costs are at least $100 a megawatt hour, compared with less than $40 a megawatt hour for coal, the predominant source of electricity. There are also higher network and back-up costs.
Rooftop solar facilities are cheaper and receive less favourable regulatory treatment. Nonetheless, their electricity-generating costs and grid connections, subsidised by commercial electricity generators, makes rooftop solar at least five times more expensive than coal.
Progression to the annual target of 45,000GWh would involve a consumer subsidy to renewables rising year by year to $5bn a year by 2020. By then the renewable program would have imposed a total cost of $23bn.
And, because the subsidy is for the 15-year life of each facility (solar rooftop installations receive this subsidy upfront), the annual cost will continue to increase after 2020 before gradually tapering.
Changes to the program ostensibly follow advice from the Climate Change Authority, which was appointed by the Rudd government and is chaired by Bernie Fraser. The authority’s legislation was intended to lock in the program, preventing a future Coalition government from dismantling it, but this built-in restraint could be overcome.
Options for modifying the scheme include:
The Origin Energy proposal, which reduces the renewables total to a genuine 20 per cent by 2020 as initially intended. This would imply a maximum of 33,000GWh of subsidised renewables, reducing the 2020 annual cost to $3.7bn.
A variation of this would allow only the existing and committed projects to proceed as subsidised. This would mean about 15,000GWh and an annual cost rising to $1.7bn by 2020.
The full costs could be saved if the program were to be totally abandoned, forcing renewables to immediately compete without subsidy, as their adherents always claimed they would eventually be able to do.
Beneficiaries would argue that terminating the renewable subsidies would constitute sovereign risk and adversely affect investment generally. But we are already seeing previously guaranteed income streams from overseas renewable schemes facing early termination. No investor can reasonably expect a subsidy to prevail for 15 years and there would be few precedents for a government committing its successors to 20 years of worthless expenditure.
The case for an immediate termination is strengthened by the fact the original rationalisations for the subsidy program have been undermined. No longer is it seriously maintained that renewables, with modest initial support, will become competitive with conventional supplies in a few years. It also has become clear that the world will not undertake carbon dioxide abatement measures comparable to those of Australia, hence any domestic measures have a trivial effect.
The Australian
The wind industry should consider itself “Terminated” – the RET is simply economically unsustainable, as to which, we note Alan’s point that:
No investor can reasonably expect a subsidy to prevail for 15 years and there would be few precedents for a government committing its successors to 20 years of worthless expenditure.
The wind industry exists for one reason only – the fat pile of subsidies that are diverted from Australian power consumers by way of the mandatory Renewable Energy Target and the accompanying Renewable Energy Certificates, which have been sprayed around like confetti at a big fat Greek wedding for over a decade now.
For an insight on precisely how the scam works check out our post – The RET & the REC: the anatomy of a National fraud.
Some day this entire scam is going to end. When it does, it’ll be thanks to Terminators like Alan Moran.
STOP THESE THINGS 
So according to Acciona the revision or removal of the RET, which is now known to be being used as a scam will bring about a ‘Sovereign Risk’ situation to the Government of Australia – So I assume what they’re saying is that if a Government looks after its people and their money by preventing them from being cheated/swindled by scammers they will cause the country to be seen as a financial liability.
Couldn’t that be seen as some type of ‘stand-over’ threat? Are we to hand our country and our money over to scammers and say and do nothing to ensure the financial viability of companies who have shown so little respect for the people of this country?
There may have been bipartisan agreement in 2002, but the years since have shown the folly.
Once the wind energy companies were able to source huge amounts of our money and to continue to receive it for many years, not having to justify and prove claims of energy production and reduction in emissions, and having no need to worry about what it would cost to the public and businesses over and above what they received in REC’s – then the scammers began to take control of our valuable asset – energy production.
Energy is something that we have come to rely on above anything else. It’s used in every aspect of our lives; it is more than a source for cooking, lighting, heating and cooling. We use it in transport, manufacture, communication and so many other ancillary things such as spinning a centrifuge for research and medical purposes, operating humidicribs for sick babies – there are so many things we use it for.
Why wasn’t there any consideration of what handing over to an unproven private enterprise without constraint or controls production of this resource would mean to the country?
Why wasn’t there any research undertaken into the wider effects before sanctioning it? Why wasn’t there any thorough research carried out BEFORE the signing of Kyoto – fixing us to a target which is proving to be impossible to reach without causing vast medical, environmental and financial distress?
What were they thinking?
It seems the new pence are starting to drop in UK as ordinary punters realise they’ve been dudded. London bankers riding high on the carbon trading gravy train are finding their days are numbered – and never has a demise been so justly deserved than in the case of these parasites. From JoNova comes this report:
Jo finishes her article with this well chosen parting shot: