War On Coal-Fired Power Delivers Crippling Power Prices & Record Profits For Generator/Retailers

The obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar has few winners and plenty of losers. The latter include the householders and businesses being crushed by power price increases of a magnitude that few of them can afford, and none of them expected (having been consistently lied to by the politicos and MSM about the true and inevitable cost of attempting to run on sunshine and breezes).

The victors include the power generators and retailers (sometimes one and the same – referred to as ‘gentailers’) whose profits are inversely proportional to the pain being suffered by their customers.

While STT has reported on the upcoming 25-30% hike in retail power prices – set to take effect from 1 July – that staggering impost comes on top of increases of between 10-20% in retail power prices that have taken effect throughout the financial year. Which means that many households and businesses will see a 50% jump in their power bills in less than 12 months. On top of double-digit percentage increases in their power bills every year since the Green-Labor Alliance ramped up the Federal government’s Renewable Energy Target back in 2010.

Of course, the greatest suffering is being felt in those places where wind and solar generation dominates – Australia’s wind and solar capital, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory, which purports to run with a 100% wind and solar renewable energy target (notwithstanding that it’s connected to the Eastern Grid and chews up mountains of coal-fired power, just like the rest of us).

Here it should be noted that in the piece below the figure recorded for SA of 36.1c/kWh is the base ‘off peak’ rate, whereas the ‘peak rate’ is currently 53c/kWh. Wind and solar ‘powered’ South Australians will see those rates jump by at least 23% next month.

South Australia blew up its last coal-fired power plant in May 2016 which resulted in an instantaneous doubling in wholesale power prices and retail power prices kept rocketing, thereafter. Wiping out energy-hungry businesses such as Stephen Scherer’s Plastic Granulating Services when his electricity bill of about $80,000 a month spiked to $180,000 a month back in June 2017 (see above).

The same metric was in effect when Liddell – a perfectly operable 2,000 MW coal-fired power plant in NSW was shut down in May this year. Predictably enough, wholesale power prices jumped 80%, almost overnight.

Here’s a report on life for the victors of Australia’s war on coal-fired power.

AGL forecasts a huge profit surge as households grapple with their own surge – in power costs
The Australian
Cameron England and Daniel Petrie
16 June 2023

AGL shares surged on Friday after the company forecast its profits would more than double in the coming financial year, during which time households will be grappling with their own surge – in electricity costs.

The energy company’s shares were up more than 14 per cent to $11.05 in early trade on the ASX after AGL said its underlying profit after tax would come in at between $255m and $285m – the top of the previously forecast range.

But the underlying profit after tax would then more than double to between $580m and $780m in the 2023-24 financial year, the company said.

AGL’s huge boost to its profit expectations came as fellow energy retailer EnergyAustralia unveiled price increases of more than 20 per cent for its electricity customers, with households on the default market offer to be slugged with an average increase in NSW of 20.5 per cent, 23.6 per cent in Victoria, 23 per cent in South Australia and 20.3 per cent in South East Queensland.

Its gas customers on the standing offer tariff will be hit with price increases from July 1 of 20.5 per cent in NSW, 15.8 per cent in SA, and 18.1 per cent in the ACT. Victorian customers will not experience a price change.

EnergyAustralia chief customer officer Mark Brownfield said the increases “reflect higher prices for wholesale electricity and gas due to energy market volatility in 2022’’, while the electricity price increases were also related to recent price determinations by the Australian Energy Regulator.

AGL said in a statement to the ASX its better performance in the current financial year, “reflect(s) an improved second half, in line with expectations, driven by increased generation due to improved plant availability and a reduction in forced outages, and higher customer margin due to disciplined margin management and an increase in customer services’’.

“This is partly offset by higher operating costs (excluding depreciation and amortisation) due to increased maintenance costs, seasonal net bad debt expense and the impact of inflation.’’

Data crunched by News Corp shows Australian electricity is among most expensive in the world, with more pain to come after the Australian Energy Regulator last month approved a hike of up to 25 per cent for people on default plans.

News Corp analysed electricity prices based on government figures for average household electricity usage and bill size.

The analysis shows that at 36.1c/kWh, South Australian electricity is the most expensive in the country, while NSW’s was the cheapest at about 26.5c/kWh.

All Australian states and territories were more expensive than the US, where electricity costs about 22.6c/kWh.

AVERAGE ANNUAL POWER BILL BREAKDOWN BY AREA

SEQ: $1,969 (up 21.5 per cent)
Regional Queensland: $1926 (up 28.7 per cent)
Sydney/NSW Central Coast/Hunter Valley: $1,827 (up 20.8 per cent)
Western Sydney, Blue Mountains, the Southern Highlands, Illawarra and NSW South Coast: $2228 (up 21.4 per cent)
Regional NSW: $2527 (up 20.8 per cent)
South Australia: $2279 (up 23.9 per cent)
Victoria: $1755 (up 25 per cent)

South Australia and the ACT, where electricity costs about 29.8c/kWh, were more expensive than the UK, where power costs about 30.8c/kWh.

While the amounts paid by consumers in their power bills also factor in costs such as distribution, AGL’s mega-profit forecast will be a bitter pill to swallow for households struggling to pay their power bills.

AGL chief executive Damien Nicks said the company’s improved performance in the current financial year owed a lot to better performance on the power generation side of the business.

“Looking ahead to FY24, without the challenging energy market conditions that we saw at the start of this financial year, namely widespread planned and unplanned outages coupled with unprecedented market volatility, we expect FY24 to be a stronger year as we see the sustained recovery of wholesale electricity prices roll through.”

AGL said it would benefit next financial year from “sustained periods of higher wholesale electricity pricing, reflected in pricing outcomes and reset through contract positions’’.

It also expected “improved plant availability and flexibility of the asset fleet, including the commencement of operations of the Torrens Island and Broken Hill batteries, and the non-recurrence of forced outages and market volatility impacts’’.

“This is expected to be partly offset by the closure of Liddell Power Station and higher operating costs, including: the impact of higher revenue from pricing outcomes increasing variable costs such as net bad debt expense and anticipated market activity; increased maintenance spend to improve asset fleet availability and reliability; and inflation.’’
The Australian

So far, so obvious and so very predictable: keep knocking out reliable coal-fired power plants and a power pricing and supply calamity, inevitably follows.

If the witless clowns who pretend to govern us were even vaguely concerned about Australia’s economic future, they would stop killing off coal-fired plants, as of now. And, rather, they would, as Michael Asten, explains start building High Efficiency/Low Emissions coal-fired power plants like this country’s wealth and prosperity depends upon it.

Ultra super critical plants fuel hope of clean, cheap coal power security
The Australian
Michael Asten
17 June 2023

We may or may not like Alan Finkel’s vision of “forests of wind farms, and endless arrays of solar panels”, as described in this newspaper last weekend, but there is some arithmetic we have to consider along the way.

Finkel endorses the goals for Australia to have a 43 per cent emissions reduction, and an 82 per cent renewables target by 2030. A sobering counterclaim by Paul Broad, former chief executive of Snowy Hydro, suggests the latter may take 80 years, not eight, to achieve.

Given that the Snowy 2.0 pumped storage project, including its connection to electricity grids, has seen a time blowout of six or more years and a cost blowout from $2bn to a likely $20bn, maybe Broad knows a fairytale when he reads it.

Australia currently produces 75 per cent of its electricity from coal-fired generating plants. Those plants are for the most part using obsolete technology and are progressively being shut down, hence receiving minimal maintenance. New technology where boilers run at higher temperatures and pressures (ultra super critical or USC, also often called high-efficiency low-emissions, or HELE, plants) are vastly more efficient and lower in CO2 emissions, but the tragedy is that our clever country has not adopted these.

Apart from the many countries in the Western world that have, we see that in Asia 10 countries from India and Bangladesh in the west, to Vietnam and China in the east, have USC technology installed, and have additional plants under construction.

What might such technology achieve in Australia? Large coal-fired power plants (think Loy Yang A in Victoria, or Eraring in NSW) have capacities of about 2 to 3GW (gigawatts of output electric power). A detailed study by engineering group GHD in 2017 found that a USC generating plant would cost $2.2bn per gigawatt, or in 2023 money about $5bn for each plant of 2GW capacity. International Energy Agency and Korean construction figures suggest an average construction time of four to six years for a USC power plant.

Australia has about 20GW of conventional coal-fired power plants spread over five states, accounting for 75 per cent of the nation’s electricity generating capacity. So as a cost estimate these now-obsolete plants could be replaced with USC plants for about $50bn, with no add-on costs for fuel supplies or transmission lines since the plants already have that infrastructure.

And the benefits? A huge reduction in CO2 emissions; USC plants are 30-40 per cent lower in emissions than the old technology, so we have the attractive prospect of being able to cut emissions due to power generation by more than a third, using available technology.

And this carries the bonus of supplying baseload energy, thus assuring power supplies to industry and domestic users without threats of blackouts on cloudy or low-wind days.

The $50bn required to achieve this conversion to efficient coal-fired power generation is challenging, but as a nation we are addressing bigger challenges. Our AUKUS nuclear submarine project is estimated to cost up to $368bn over three decades.

The federal budget last year took a step in the direction of funding new energy projects, with an allocation of $20bn over four years for the Rewiring the Nation project, which is designed to “upgrade, expand and modernise Australia’s electricity grid”.

How much more secure we would be, in an energy sense, if we put a similar amount of money into modernising our generators rather than our connectors.

The coal-fired plants envisaged in this discussion will not be the forever solution for our power needs. On the scale of two to three decades, aided by our AUKUS nuclear submarine development, it is likely small modular nuclear plants will become available. Such plants, like USC coal plants, can be sited at existing power stations.

Alan Finkel is confident that an availability of nuclear plants by 2040 will be too late due to the growth of renewable energy sources. However, the growth of nuclear power stations overseas (planned, new and recommissioned from mothballed plants) suggests his view is likely too pessimistic. But the crucial point is that over the next decade, USC coal-fired power is the efficient, secure and achievable option, and replacement with nuclear and/or renewable energy should follow as alternative sources become proven, stable and fit for purpose.
The Australian