Smart meters a dumb answer to energy crisis

AS bills soar and supply dwindles, politicians need to come up with better ideas than so-called smart meters. Keeping coal-fired plants open would be a start, writes Miranda Devine.

JUST great.
Instead of fixing the self-imposed energy crisis in this energy rich country, our political masters want to impose another greenie scheme to make us use less electricity and pay more for the pleasure.

Smart meters would be rolled out to every household, on the recommendation this week of the federal parliament’s Committee on the Environment and Energy this week so that dynamic billing can be used to hike prices at peak times, and (yeah sure) lower prices in off-peak.

As if anyone wants to do their laundry at 3am, or turn off the air conditioning on a 40 degree day. There’s a reason electricity use is high at peak times. It’s because people need power when they need it.

It’s this sort of pointless central planning intrusion into the minutiae of our lives is what sends voters spare.

The geniuses who concoct these schemes ought to be forced to have their meetings in a corrugated iron shed in Broken Hill with no airconditioning.

Smart meters and dynamic pricing are just fancy names for further increasing our bills, while avoiding facing the fact that we need more cheap, reliable coal-fired energy.

Of course, Victoria, our most socialist state, has already been there done that. And an auditor general’s report in 2015 found it was a disaster for consumers, who paid for the rollout but saw the (small) benefit go to the energy companies who saved money by sacking the people who come and read your meter.

Committee chair ­Nationals MP Andrew Broad is concerned about what he calls the “trilemma” of having to 1) cut emissions to suit the Paris climate treaty, 2) making sure the lights stay on and 3) keeping power bills under control.

It’s less trilemma than mission impossible. We’re defacto choosing two out of three at the moment and the only leg of that three legged stool that is fixed in stone, for asinine reasons, is the Paris climate treaty.

Broad reportedly admitted this week that smart meters don’t work to reduce demand:

“Does it alter behaviour? … generally speaking, no, people don’t look at them, but it will become part of ­demand management particularly as people understand how to use it.”

Huh?

There once was a day when Nationals MP would fight for the coal industry.

We’re importing 200,000 new people into this country each year, and yet we are doing nothing to provide the extra baseload power they will be using as our existing coal fired power plants come to the end of their use-by date. We’re all just supposed to do more with less, work in depressingly dimly lit offices, stop using the labour-saving devices that once were a sign of progress and now are a sign of moral turpitude.

Since the closure of Hazelwood power station in Victoria last year, wholesale power prices there have more than doubled and blackouts have become more frequent. Premier “Red Dan” Andrews, has made the situation infinitely worse by instituting a state-mandated Renewable Energy Target, which requires 40 per cent of Victoria’s energy be provided by renewables by 2025.

SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s bandaid solution to the inevitable energy shortage this summer was to ship in diesel generators which burn through 80,000 litres of diesel fuel per hour. Very environmentally sound.

SA Premier Jay Weatherill might be working with Elon Musk on solar energy, but the Tesla battery hasn’t addressed the state’s power supply issue. (Pic: Supplied)

Oh, and that silly Tesla battery Weatherill was sold by Elon Musk? It provided just one per cent of South Australia’s energy. Almost half the power South Australians used over summer came from Victoria’s remaining coal-fired plants.

Here’s an idea. States which refuse to provide their own affordable baseload energy don’t get to buy it from states which do.

At one point in January, South Australia’s energy prices shot to a staggering $14,200 a megawatt hour, while NSW was paying $89 a MWh Queensland $85 MWh.

The two states enjoying lowest prices this summer, NSW and Queensland, are the states with the most coal fired generation. QED.

But virtue-signalling AGL is determined to close the Liddell power station in 2022, refusing an entreaty by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to extend the life of the plant or sell it.

So NSW is set to follow the path of its southern neighbours.

But there may be a glimmer of hope on the horizon. When I interviewed Premier Gladys Berejyklian on our Miranda Live internet radio show last week, she left open the possibility of the state government intervening to prevent the closure of Liddell in order to guarantee cheap and ­reliable electricity.

Asked whether she would step in to buy the plant or somehow help the company keep it open, the Premier said: “We could potentially, there’s a whole range of options we’re looking at … I don’t want to say too much.”

Bravo Premier. Keeping Liddell open is a good start.