With abundant supplies of coal, gas and uranium Australia ought to be renowned as an energy superpower. It isn’t. In less than 20 years it deliberately destroyed the most reliable and affordable power generation and delivery system, on earth.
It started with subsidies; massive subsidies to wind and solar – both domestic and large-scale – delivered via our rocketing retail power bills under the Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Target; that’s costing power consumers more than $4 billion a year.
Those subsidies were designed to force the grid manager to take wind and solar (on those occasions when it is actually available) over and above reliable, dispatchable coal and gas-fired power.
No single policy has ever done more damage to Australia’s economic competitiveness; no single policy has ever allowed a handful of rent-seekers to profit so handsomely at the expense of Australia’s productive industries, business and jobs.
Now, however, the chickens are coming home to roost. The owners and operators of coal-fired power plants – which were never designed to run and dispatch electricity intermittently – are threatening to exit the market. Surprise, surprise.
It’s the price paid for having ideologues and rent-seekers running the show, instead of engineers and free-market economists.
Australia’s Eastern Grid is doomed to collapse this summer whenever demand peaks and sunset and calm weather coincides. The exit of even one more coal-fired power plant guarantees a complete ‘system black’; a question of when, not if.
So, faced with a complete blackout calamity of the kind suffered in South Australia (Australia’s RE capital), California and Texas, the latest Band-Aid solution is to subsidise the generation of coal-fired power to, you guessed it, offset the effect of the guaranteed subsidies paid to intermittent and unreliable wind and solar.
The team from Jo Nova report on the latest twist of insanity in Australia’s suicidal energy policy.
Australian government needs coal subsidies to save grid from renewables subsidies
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
17 August 2021
In Australia, the subsidy bandaids are piling up.
We subsidized weather-controlling generators in the hope that our electrical infrastructure could not only provide electricity but would also stop storms, floods and The Taliban. However the weather-controlling-generators were also weather-dependent, and it was costing quite a lot to add storage, stability, transmission lines and synchronous condensors. Who knew changing global weather would cost so much?
Once upon a time Australia had a full complete electricity grid that was cheap and efficient. Then we added inefficient things to it until we had two whole grids, one that changed the weather (in theory) and a spare one that filled in for all the other grids failures. For some reason it was not cheaper to run two whole grids rather than just one.
The subsidies were needed to drive out the cheapest player (coal power), but having succeeded, we then needed different subsidies to keep the coal power in.
What a tangled web we weave when first we lie to ourselves.
Grid and bear it: subsidised coal part of energy overhaul
The Australian
Geoff Chambers
26 August 2021
Special payments will be needed to keep ageing coal-fired and gas power stations in business to avoid future spikes in electricity prices, under a national plan to shore up the energy grid.
A new capacity mechanism recommended by the Energy Security Board will put incentives in place to stop the early closure of power plants and create long-term signals for investment in dispatchable generation.
NSW is nearly running out of electricity every 4 days.
The Australian understands the Australian Energy Market Operator has issued a record number of warnings about a lack of supply in NSW this year, at a rate of almost one every four days. The notices are issued when AEMO considers there is not enough capacity available in the system.
Once upon a time Australians got “capacity” for free, now we have to pay for it.
We didn’t need an Energy Security Board either.
Jo Nova Blog
STOP THESE THINGS 
What has/will happened after years of lies?
Wind Turbines
No need for backup wind always blowing somewhere
Roof Top Solar
Make your own energy and sell the remainder at tiny price to Big Energy companies to supplement their output (selling to their customers at a much increased price)
OOPS
Not enough wind so backup needed
Big Battery
Need BIG expensive block of batteries to store energy from turbines when needed – not for when not enough is being produced but to help smooth the haphazard production from turbines which end up causing blackouts as the system cannot cope with the fluctuations from turbines. Commence installing these batteries with all new Wind Turbine installations and where possible at existing sites.
Energy Companies
pay for excess energy from their customers who are making more than they need during the day, and then sell it onto others at a vastly increased price than they purchased it for.
Companies believe this is not fare – to them.
Solution install hectares and hectares of their own solar panels, at the same time telling everyone those pesky roof solar producers are causing problems with the Grid – households producing and selling to them so much their own solar arrays cannot connect to the Grid – not enough room.
So must blacken household solar input and get Governments to agree to have them shut off adhoc when there’s too much and they cannot cope with the competition.
Private Providers
Push to get them to install batteries so they can look after their own needs when the sun goes to bed and/or cloud causes problems – but still turn off their input to the grid IF there is more coming in from industrial solar arrays and or wind.
Industry
still Installing Wind Turbines and solar arrays and batteries even though the Grid cannot cope but continue blaming household rooftop solar people for the problems of BIG industrial providers.
When will Governments accept they have been lied to by Industrial energy providers over and over again, from the beginning of this nightmare and accept these methods of energy production are OK on a small scale, but not suitable for large scale energy requirements of a first world country.
We are going to have an enormous problem in the not too distant future trying to find ways to get rid of all the turbine, solar panel, and battery environmentally damaging waste. At the same time as trying to turn the clock back to a time when energy was accessible to everyone, when and where they needed it at a cost that did not cause prices of everyday items to explode to a point where they have become unobtainable by the majority of the population.
At the same time as beginning to build what they should be building now – Nuclear energy plants.
Of course with the cost of energy at this time going to be ‘out of this world’ as well as energy being in short supply due to the worlds weather environment having been turned chaotic due to Wind Turbines having grown in such numbers and enormous sizes that they have altered the manner in which the winds that move around the world behave.
Thus making it difficult and costly to try to turn things around and eventually rid of turbines.
The worlds weather is altering now what will it be like in say 20-25 years? How many years will it take for the way the winds move around the world to revert back to what they were before Wind Turbines?
Are we leaving our children a world in such a mess it could take a many generations to bring things back into alignment? What will that world look like with all the creatures and environments we have come to love have disappeared?
Reblogged this on whatyareckon.
Who in their right mind wants to rely on breezes and sunshine for a continuous uninterruptible supply of electricity? Intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine, has not, and will not, run the economies of the world, as electricity alone is unable to support the prolific growth rates of the medical industry, military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures to meet the demands of the exploding world population.
Only healthy and wealthy countries like the USA, Germany, Australia, and the UK can subsidize electricity from breezes and sunshine, and intermittent electricity at best. The 80 percent of the 8 billion on earth living on less than 10 dollars a day cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag. Those poorer countries must rely on affordable and abundant coal for reliable electricity, while residents in the healthy and wealthier countries pay dearly for those subsidies with some of the highest cost for electricity in the world.
Sorry Ronald but continually calling quarry AU a “healthy and wealthy country”, is like appealing to ‘common sense’, it does not exist; otherwise it would be in use. With the USA, Germany and the UK, being more reliant on RE, are getting sicker by the flicker.
Prez Joe Biden says climate change is a fact – what did he look out the window? Like he said mission accomplished in Afghanistan – sure it is the Taliban did in a few days what they couldn’t do in the previous 20 years – & replaced all their old weapons with new ones – thanks Joe!
Malthusian philosophy was predated by ancient Greek’s upper classes using slavery, giving them time to think. Today it is self policing wage-slavery. The modern world is built on it; slavery that is, ask a 3rd worlder
Q: How many spin doctors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One to hold the bulb & as many as it takes to turn public opinion!
“Tell him he’s dreaming”; film The Castle. It seems that with the RE increase there is an exponential decrease of across the board FOI being released.
The ‘commercial in confidence’ excuse was even used by QLD after getting a national football grand final played here. As if other states that put in bids don’t know what the winning bid was; that sort of info within business is usually an open secret – as in the you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours variety.
But then, some believe preferential voting, where the race runners pick the winners, is somehow democratic – like RE!
Start using real speak; the poor in first world countries, the homeless, ill, unemployed, mentally disturbed, uneducated, are no different to the suppressed in third world countries – ‘developed countries’ is Orwellian speak. Were governments really doing their duty, charities would not exist. But political parties classed as charities would also disappear – in their common bond of ripping off the wage enslaved taxpayer.
So it all goes around in circles like the sun & wind until, in ever decreasing circles, it disappears up its own rectum. That wallah, produces more hand-out self-interested politicians!
Only lower animals and plants depend on weather to survive，Wind power and photovoltaics are cancers that depend on the reliability of coal or hydropower power grids! Parasites! Vampires! Fools subsidize this garbage power.
Credit to the photovoltaic crooks at the University of New South Wales! This is just the beginning.