More bad luck for the renewables industry. Despite providing free energy from the sun and wind, electricity prices keep rising relentlessly, shockingly fast. Even doubling in wholesale costs in South Australia and Victoria.
It was supposed to be cheap to collect low-level-energy across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Who knew that subsidized, unreliable energy would induce volatile pricing, allow the players to game the system, create obscene spikes, drive out the cheapest providers, require expensive battery storage, more frequency control, more maintenance, just as much back up supply, $400 million dollars worth of extra diesel generators (and the rest) and extra long transmission lines? Who knew? — Probably thousands of engineers.
Spot the pattern? Every other nation with lots of renewables has expensive electricity and our forward market says there’s more price rises coming.
Australian electricity prices rising six times faster than wages are growing
Sydney Morning Herald
Electricity prices have jumped by six times the rate of the average pay rise, new figures reveal, as family wallets are increasingly squeezed by essential services such as education, utilities and fuel.
The most significant price rises were electricity, up 12.4 per cent, fuel up 10.4 per cent, domestic holiday travel up 6.3 per cent and fruit up 9.3 per cent.
If you think our economy is flaming out now, wait til we reach the 23% RET target, and pay for the $1 billion interconnectors and the $4 billion extra hydro storage that we didn’t need when we had enough coal power. Then, after we reach the bottom, we’ll have to pay more to build new USC coal baseload, just to keep up with Indonesia, because we were too frightened to upgrade the old cheap plants; and it’s too frightening for any investors to do it for us.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
