Terry McCrann: Walking away from Paris Accord only way to cut power bills

DON’T hold your breath waiting for the measly savings on your power bill promised by the laughingly named Australian Energy Regulator, far less the sums supposedly on offer from the ACCC, says Terry McCrann.

DON’T hold your breath waiting for the $30-40 a year saving — yes, that’s right, over a whole year, so around 60c to 80c a week — on your power bill promised by the laughingly named Australian Energy Regulator; far less the ten times bigger sums of $300-400 supposedly on offer from the competition regulator the ACCC.

If I was being cynically unfair, I’d add, just look at how much the ACCC is saving you on your petrol bill. The biggest thing it’s done with petrol is to stop you getting 10c a litre off from Coles and Woolies, limiting their — true, usually, phony — discounts to 4c.

Going back to electricity, both those “promises” and around $4 — make that closer to $5 in the trendy Green inner suburbs — will buy you a cappuccino or, I’m terribly sorry, chai latte. Whether per week or per year; makes no difference.

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The reason is simple: both in the broad are trying to patch over the “symptoms” — the very painful symptoms — of the real problem, which is a completely and irreparably dysfunctional power (especially electricity but also gas) system as a consequence of its privatisation and the subsequent overlay of global warming madness.

To be both fair and realistic — especially to the ACCC and its boss Rod Sims, because what the ACCC proposes would deliver some functional rationality if not necessarily cheaper prices — is that they have to deal with the reality, unless and until the fog of global warming insanity which has engulfed (most of) our political and business elites is lifted.

South Australia’s wind farms show the future of energy generation for the whole country.

The surface insanity is the Federal Government’s yet to be delivered so-called National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which will guarantee neither energy nor a reasonable price for any energy.

The underlying, the fundamental problem, is of course the commitments under the Paris Climate Accord farce to slash our emissions of carbon dioxide by 26-28 per cent in aggregate terms by 2030.

Given our equally insane mass immigration policy, that is actually closer to 45-50 per cent in per capita terms — greater, far greater, than promised by any other country in the entire world.

That plays out in the forced use of ever more useless wind generation (when the wind chooses to blow of course).

Yes, you can rabbit on about distributors “gold-plating” the poles and wires, and so needing to generate higher profits on their much greater investments.

Which of course ignores the basic desirability of so-called “gold-plating” which in former, saner times, would have been known as building a robust network so lights stayed on when the wind did blow too hard and we didn’t want rickety poles and wires to start bushfires.

In any event, the extra costs to the consumer generated by the supposed gold plating is minute — that $30-40, maybe up to $100 a year — set against the hundreds of dollars of extra costs from the direct and even more insidious indirect subsidies to useless wind and solar.

You’ve got to ask yourself, incidentally, if an entity like the AER is so utterly incompetent as to issue a report so inanely trumpeting that $30-40, why it isn’t immediately cited for abolition.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims. Picture: AAP

Just look at South Australia — indeed, take a good look because you can see the future for the whole country in SA’s present, as we all follow in committing to more and more wind. Especially, when you “see the future, and it’s windless”.

Last Saturday the wind was blowing lustily across SA. Those windmills were spinning merrily, providing almost all the power the state needed. At times it really was almost “free” — for the whole day the price averaged just $44.89 a MWh. Across the eastern states, only Victoria had cheaper power — $42.50 a MWh — because, yup, the wind was also blowing lustily there as well.

Come Monday, it stopped blowing. What happened to the price in SA? It averaged $701.60 a MWh for the entire day, as SA had to call on its long extension cord into Victoria’s coal-fired power stations in the Latrobe Valley. This also helped push up the Victorian price to $78.18 a MWh.

So, in the space of two days, we got a swing of around $660 a MWh, and this idiot AER regulator trumpets a theoretical saving some time in the future of 60c-80c a week.

At least the ACCC made a half-rational attempt to deal with the reality of what the combination of the Paris commitments and the proposed NEG is setting us up for.

It wants the government to guarantee the demand from new — by default, coal or gas — power stations, and so the supply to industrial and commercial users (but not retail consumers: why not?).

This is an attempt to address the “problem” — sheer, blinding insanity — that forced use of ever more and more wind has turned base-load coal fired stations into becoming totally unsuitable (and ludicrously expensive) variable suppliers.

To bring some half-sanity to an insane mandated system, it is variable wind that should be the variable supplier. Energy minister Josh Frydenberg’s NEG has got it the wrong way round.

Rather than guarantee how much has to come from wind (and other renewables) the NEG should guarantee how much comes from reliable power generation — that is to say, coal.

I’ve been reluctant to spruik this too loudly because it could actually give the incurable stupidity of the NEG within the insane emission-cutting policy some functionality.

By all means, don’t have government or regulatory intervention in the power market. But that “nonintervention” starts with ditching any mandated use of wind (and solar) and walking away, right away, from Paris.

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