Victorian Vortex: Wind & Solar Obsession Guarantees Mass Summer Blackouts & Power Prices Soar (Again)

 

Following South Australia’s lead on wind and solar was never going to end well. The State that set and met its very own 50% RET is renowned for mass load shedding and Australia’s only statewide blackout. SA also suffers the world’s highest power prices.

So, it should come as no surprise to Victorians that when Premier, Daniel Andrews and his witless sidekick, Lily D’Ambrosio decided to follow suit in earnest, that their power prices should rocket too.

South Australia’s RE obsessed Labor government danced with glee when it blew up its last reliable coal-fired power plants a couple of years back; Victoria’s Labor government is itching to do the same to its remaining coal-fired plants in the Latrobe Valley.

Federal Liberal MP, Craig Kelly is one of a handful politicians with his head screwed on. Craig has been dishing up hard and unpalatable facts about chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar for years now. Here he is doing just that in an interview with Peta Credlin on SkyNews.

‘Huge spike’ in Vic power bills due to state govt policy
SkyNews
Peta Credlin and Craig Kelly
6 September 2019

Victorian power bills are on the up, thanks to the “highest wholesale prices in the nation” and is showing no signs of slowing down, MP Craig Kelly told Sky News host Peta Credlin.

“There’s been a huge spike in wholesale electricity,” Mr Kelly said. “If you look at when the state Labor government first came into office, the wholesale electricity price was around about $30 per megawatt hour. “Since then, due to the policies they’ve introduced, we’ve seen the price not double but actually triple. “To think you could triple wholesale electricity prices in a few short years, like Victoria has done, is absolutely amazing,” he said.

 

Transcript

Peta Credlin:  Well you wouldn’t know it with the cold weather in Canberra tonight, but the summer months, they’re creeping up. And no matter how many facts we can throw at the state Labor government in Victoria, it seems that we are talking about seeing rolling blackouts and job losses right across the state.

With a target of net zero emissions by 2050 and talks of an interim target, likely to be a reduction of around 45% by 2030, the energy market operator and many in the sector are calling for Daniel Andrews to explain exactly how he expects the grid to keep up with demand.

These targets could see the Yallourn power station closed well before its 2031 end of life date. Not forgetting of course this plant supplies Victoria 22% of its electricity.

Tonight I’m joined by our resident energy guru and federal member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, to go through exactly how Daniel Andrews’ energy plan will affect household in the great state, or the once great state I have to say, of Victoria. Craig, thanks for your time tonight.

Craig Kelly: Yeah, good to be with you Peta.

Peta Credlin: I want to start… Thank you, mate. I want to start with wholesale electricity prices. We’ve got a good graph I want to put up just to start the conversation going so everyone can follow it easily enough at home.

You’ll see there’s been a huge spike in the price of wholesale electricity in Victoria from 2015 to 2018. It’s extraordinary. Tell us what’s the real driver?

Craig Kelly:  Well, it’s quite amazing, Peta. If you look at when the Labor party, the state Labor government first came to office there, the wholesale electricity price was round about $30 a megawatt hour. Since then, now the policies they’ve introduced, we’ve seen the price not double, but actually triple. To think that you could actually triple wholesale electricity prices in a few short years, is what Victoria have managed to have done, is just absolutely amazing.

But why they’ve done this Peta, they’ve simply been forcing more and more of these so-called cheap renewables into the grid that just causes chaos. That’s why we saw them chase the Hazelwood power station out of town. They tripled the royalties down there and prices have gone through the roof. And they’ve continued to go through the roof.

Believe it or not, Victoria this year has actually taken over South Australia as having the highest wholesale prices in the nation. And we saw the report today, things are only getting worse. While we’re getting some relief in the other states, Victoria is now the only state of Australia where electricity prices are continuing to head north.

Peta Credlin: We know that there was brownouts last summer and widespread blackouts for consumers as well. We also know there’s scheduled outages on its way for industry. Now, how on earth does someone running a business in Victoria cope with intermittent power supply? Cope with getting a letter from their provider, indeed a phone call saying as of next week we’ve got to shut you down between these hours? How do you run a business?

Craig Kelly:  Well Peta, you simply look at how you can move out of the state, and this is tragically what we are seeing happening. But it’s also what we are not seeing or is not visible, that’s investments that would have otherwise been made. People otherwise coming to invest and set up businesses in Victoria that need energy are simply not doing so because the price of electricity is just so high, and yet they look down the track, the policies that the Labor government want to bring in are not going to fix the problem, but with their ideological… this mad ideological drive that they have will actually make the problem continue to get worse and worse and worse.

Peta Credlin: We don’t often see energy CEOs enter the fray in terms of speaking up. We know they drink the Kool-Aid on renewables. We saw that with AGL before Andy Vesey left the country, but rarely do we see them speak some truth on these issues. We saw, however, Catherine Tanna of Energy Australia really bell the cat on this issue with the retirement of the the Yallourn power station.

Now we know it’s 22% of Victoria’s grid. Not so long ago they lost Hazelwood, 25% of Victoria’s grid. As she’s concerned, her company is concerned that A, there’s not much of a plan B, but all of the uncertainty and the push on renewables could see them close this plant or could see this plant close earlier than it’s scheduled end date of 2031. What’s the answer?

Craig Kelly:  Well Peta, the answer is they have to stop with their crazy 50% renewable energy target in Victoria. Remember this was the same target that the Labor party took, that the federal Labor party took to the election, the last election, which they were widely defeated on. That was one of the reasons why Bill Shorten was defeated at the election campaign. Australian’s knew that it drives prices up.

And the real concern in Victoria, they are currently running very close to the line on the amount of dispatchable power they have. So when there’s days when there’s little wind, and at times in Victoria we’ve seen over the last couple of months, there can be times for hours on end, whether it can be the wind turbines in Victoria, can actually be generating zero electricity. From all the wind turbines across Victoria-

Peta Credlin:  Let’s just stop there. Let’s just stop there because I want to highlight that point you’re making with some graphs. Take down the graph please producers that you’ve got on the screen there, put up the one that gives us wind energy and solar energy, and the example date is the 27th of July this year.

Now that was wind production, so you could see in the very early hours of that Saturday morning, we had basically no wind power in the state of Victoria, 27th of July this year. Also, obviously, three, four five, six, 7:00 in the morning, we didn’t have much solar either.

There’s the solar graph. You can see there’s basically no solar activity until about 9:00 AM.

Now, if you had the Daniel Andrews plan in action then, you’ve got no power for most of the early night hours on a Saturday night going into Sunday morning, you’ve got virtually no solar power. Virtually no wind power. You’d have virtually no power under Andrew’s plan. What happens to your traffic lights? What happens to your hospitals? What happens to your households? What happens here, Craig?

Craig Kelly: Oh Peta, it’s surprising. Actually, in Victoria on that date for example that you gave, between midnight and 6:00 AM in the morning, they still needed between 4,000 and 5,000 megawatts of electricity. Now that was basically being all driven from the coal fire power plants.

Now the question is if those coal fire power plants aren’t there, where is the electricity going to come from? You can build as many wind turbines as you like across Victoria, but if the wind is not blowing, you get no electricity, and we saw on that date not enough from the wind turbines and the solar panels to boil a cup of tea. Now more wind turbines-

Peta Credlin: Yeah, and we’ll just put that graph up.

Oh, just want to put the coal graph up so people can see that you are absolutely telling your truth. These are all freely available statistics, and you can see where we had no wind and no solar in Victoria. Dear old coal, the much maligned coal had to step in and basically, you know, keep the lights on.

Craig Kelly: So the concern is if they close down their other coal fire power stations in Victoria, which is highly likely they’ll have an early close down because when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, these coal fire power stations have to turn off. So it increases their maintenance costs. They can’t sell their electricity to the grid, they get to a stage where they will close down.

And then you’ve got the nightmare situation when the wind’s not blowing, there’s simply not enough power. Now, you might hear some people in Victoria, “Oh we can solve this problem with big batteries.” Now, I’ve done just a rough calculation. That six hour period from midnight to 6:00 AM, if you tried to cover that with large batteries, what they have in South Australia was the largest battery in the world. You would need 225 of the largest battery in the world they had in South Australia to run Victoria’s electricity grid for six hours in the middle of the night.

225 of the world’s largest battery, for six hours in the middle of the night. And then what happens after that? You still need the electricity after that. So the idea that you can somehow cover this gap with large batteries is just absolutely foolhardy, and it’s putting the whole security and the economic base of the state of Victoria in jeopardy, plus the knock-on effects that will have into New South Wales and the Queensland.

Peta Credlin:  Yeah, I’ll tell you what, it’s not good news going into the weekend, but we’ve got to keep talking about this so that Victorians wake up and see this sort of travesty that’s headed their way by a government who didn’t really campaign on any of these issues, but are springing it on them on the other side of an election. Craig Kelly, as always, thanks for the common sense and thanks for being here on a Friday night.

Craig Kelly:  Thanks, Peta.
Sky News