Vikki Campion: Math doesn’t add up on mystery tour of green grift

Power is not bought or sold like anything in any other marketplace in Australia, but try doing the math on the opaque mystery tour of the green grift, writes Vikki Campion.

NSW transport minister Jo Haylen quit over a $750 van ride while federal climate change Minister Chris Bowen could have bought half the Hunter Valley’s vineyards with the millions lost to the clean energy hoax.

In this horror week, taxpayer-subsidised wind turbines in Victoria literally fell apart in the paddock, the Transgrid transmission line budget blew out by $4.1bn, and the granddaddy of them all, the spot energy price, which used to sit around $50 per megawatt-hour (MWh), soared to $16,000 per MWh on Thursday. And from the responsible minister? Crickets.

Adding up Ms Haylen’s silly winery mistake is easy, but try doing the math on the opaque mystery tour of the green grift. Power is not bought or sold like anything in any other marketplace in Australia.

Behind your bill is a complex, computer-run bidding war where power is bought and sold in five-minute time intervals – where the most expensive megawatt sets the price, with an entire secondary “green certificate” market running in the background, forcing retail prices up.

Imagine a bid per kilometre to take your kids to school (or half the Minns Cabinet to a winery) instead of one bus that drove the whole way.

A wind turbine collapsed at the Berrybank wind farm in Victoria’s southwest. Picture: Supplied

The first kilometre might be easy with wind and solar power, on a bright and breezy day, so their bid is so cheap it’s nearly free, while the next kilometre can be done with what’s left of our cheap coal. But this distance is far and no one wants their five-year-olds aimlessly wandering unfamiliar neighbourhoods because the power runs out, so on comes gas bidding a bit higher, but it’s still not enough to get them to the school gate, which is where others such as batteries and diesel come on at the other end of the journey.

These “bid-stacks” are sold in five-minute blocks, where an energy market program looks at bids made by hundreds of generators and determines how much power is required to get the kids to school.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

Here’s the kicker: The last megawatt is the price setter. So the price you pay for the last 500m to school becomes the price paid to every driver on every part of the journey. It doesn’t matter if intermittent renewables offer a negative price; the driver bidding for the last 500m sets the price.

For all of Bowen’s rhetoric of “cheap renewable energy”, generators got paid big on Thursday when the spot price reached $16,000 per MWh.

That’s why it’s a furphy to say intermittents are cheap because the person at the other end of the power point pays price set in the stack that reaches Australian Energy Market Operator’s projected demand.

And it doesn’t stop there. The entire scam is riddled with hidden subsidies. Another unseen market adds billions more to households paying to keep the fridge on. The Clean Energy Regulator issues solar and wind factories special “generation certificates”.

Along with the Large Scale Generation Certificates, there is another smaller market, called Small Scale Generation Certificates, which can be bundled up and sold again.

Underneath this is a third market, completely invisible to the public: The Capacity Investment Scheme, which is blank in the budget, citing “commercial in confidence”.

As politicians across the spectrum dribbled on about the cost of living this week, none wanted to touch the actual cause of why it is so expensive. Picture: NewsWire/Aaron Francis

In the desperate land of getting the kids to school, this is the cost of building the vehicle that gets them there and they get a return even if the vehicle cannot get out of the garage. As politicians across the spectrum dribbled on about the cost of living this week, none wanted to touch the actual cause of why it is so expensive.

If you cared about the cost of living, you would reward suppliers that offered reliability instead of those who can only get you halfway up the road.

You would end the Capacity Investment Scheme, erase generating certificates, end the subsidies, end the $22.7 billion more for in the otiose and fraudulently-named Future Made in Australia Fund, and drain all public money suckled into the green hydrogen hoax, including the new green hydrogen subsidies passed through the Senate this week in the deceptively-titled “Tax Credit for Manufacturing Bill”.

If a $750 wine trip is an embarrassment worth resigning for, what do you call Mr Bowen’s legacy, billions thrown away for an energy network that can’t get the kids where we need them to go?

MODERATE LIBS SACRIFICING PARTY AND LETTING TEALS SEAL THE DEAL

The self-immolation moderate Liberals are willing to undergo to hurt their joint party rooms and virtually hand Climate 200 candidates their seats is amazing.

Port Macquarie, the conservative stronghold that chucked out Nationals-turned-independent Rob Oakeshott after he backed a Gillard Government, is being forced into the ballot box again, this time by defected-National-turned-Liberal-moderate Leslie Williams, who mysteriously waited until the most damaging time possible to resign from her state seat last Friday.

Port Macquarie MP Leslie Williams has resigned, triggering a by-election at the most damaging time possible. Picture: Supplied

The March 15 distraction can only benefit Climate 200 while confusing voters and sneaking resources away from a Peter Dutton prime ministerial bid.

Already, the Nats have two campaign teams on the ground for the federal electorates of Cowper and Lyne, defending, on the one hand, a seat with a retiring member and, on the other, a cashed up Climate 200 challenger with prime ad space on highway billboards featuring their typical motherhood slogans: “I’m independent that means I’m on your side”.

How will it benefit any to have Liberal corflutes in a seat nearly taken by the teals last federal election?

To pull a campaign team together to run a three-cornered contest, the NSW Libs HQ, which appears to have no resources deployed, will have to draw bodies and money out of teal Sydney federal seats to send to the coast, to try to win a seat their junior partner comfortably held until the sitting member changed teams.

Not only do the federal Coalition need to win some 20 seats with Moore MP Ian Goodenough moving to the crossbench on Tuesday, but they also need to ensure every seat the Liberals and the Nationals already hold are retained.

Voting is optional preferential in NSW, not compulsory preferential like the federal system, which means the Libs running against the Rats could ultimately see another teal as a result.

LIFTER

Bowman MP Henry Pike for taking on an obfuscating Macquarie University over its lack of disciplinary action of academic Randa Abdel-Fattah for her anti-Semitic statements.

LEANER

Chris Bowen, his office and his entire climate change department for ignoring Alexandra Meggitt who walked 149km from Binda to Parliament House, sleeping in a swag with her kelpie, Cliff, in what proved to be a false hope to gain attention of senior politicians to demand a stop to wind factories.