Supposedly free renewables are paradoxically wildly expensive

Can Australia survive the Albanese Labor government’s minister for destroying our electricity system Chris Bowen?

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

Can Australia survive the Albanese Labor Government’s minister for destroying our electricity system Chris Bowen?

This is not just a legitimate question. It is both an urgent question and a truly existential question.

They are questions posed directly by the latest data from AEMO – the operator of our national electricity market, which includes all the states except Western Australia.

They are questions posed by the data, but not – to its disgrace, and its continuing betrayal of those 26m Australians – by AEMO itself.

Like most regulators these days, AEMO’s an institutional coward. It’s not going to call out its political masters, and the one in particular, for prancing, like the proverbial emperor, clothes-less.

In its cowardice, it’s also signed up to the “mad, bad and – seriously – dangerous” rush to wind and solar, enough batteries hopefully included, so peerlessly executed by Bowen.

The latest AEMO numbers suggest the $75 per household quarterly rebate over the 2024-25 financial year is going to prove an even sicker joke than it already looked on budget night.

Then it was supposed to deliver some reduction from the punitive 30 per cent-plus higher levels of power prices that Australians had already suffered since the election of the Albanese government.

Now it looks more likely to merely take away some of the pain from yet further increases, to even higher levels, in 2024-25.

It all comes back to one reality.

The more supposedly – in the brainless eyes of Bowen - “free” wind and solar forced into our national grid; the more and more expensive electricity becomes.

Back in 2012, when we still had plenty of brown and black coal generation, the wholesale price of electricity – according to the AEMO data - averaged around $30 per MWh over the entire year and in every state in the NEM.

Very importantly, in those days AEMO and the national grid worked to force the cheap prices from coal-fired plants across all the eastern states.

Fast forward to 2024 and after the billions of dollars spent on forcing all that “free” electricity into the system, AEMO tells us that prices in the June quarter ranged from $101 per MWh in Queensland to $173 in NSW.

Across the NEM the average was $133 per MWh in the quarter.

That’s some 340 per cent higher than the electricity price across Australia over the entire 2011-12 year.

That’s also, me telling you that, not the thoroughly compromised AEMO.

So far in July the price has run from $105 per MWh in Queensland up to $180 in Tasmania.

In South Australia which has the most ‘free’ electricity in the nation, the wholesale price has averaged $167 per MWh.

The most damning – of both Bowen and AEMO itself - was the proud boast that in July 2023, for 30 minutes one day, the entire grid got 65 per cent of its electricity from renewables.

Yet in the same month, on another day, it got just 19 per cent. Bowen is of course utterly incapable of understanding how disastrous that is, and will get catastrophic.

AEMO should understand. But it’s a disgrace.

Originally published as Supposedly free renewables are paradoxically wildly expensive