Rising electricity prices expose the high cost of wind and solar

Australia’s rising electricity prices have exposed ‘free’ wind and solar as a costly illusion.

Phew. Thank goodness for all that ‘free’ wind and solar electricity flowing into the grid – keeping price rises down to just 20-25 per cent for this coming year.

Who knows what price rises would have been if we’d stuck with all that black and brown coal? Try, minus – to stress, that’s minus – around 75 per cent.

For the last few years, the madness in the deliberate destruction of our electricity system has been like the boiling frog exercise.

Prices have gone up relentlessly every year as we shut down and blew up the stations that delivered plentiful, reliable and cheap electricity; and we’ve sort of absorbed and adjusted to the ‘rising temperature’.

But in the last year – and now, also, prospectively for the year to come – prices are ratcheting up dramatically. Suddenly the ‘hot water’ has become decidedly noticeable and even more ‘uncomfortable’ for 26m ‘frogs’. Do you think; do you really thunk, that there might be some – I dunno – vague connection?

That all this supposedly ‘free’ electricity not only ain’t free at all, but is indeed pretty damn expensive?

With anyone with a functioning brain – there’s a very, very long list of those, headed by our national twerp-in-chief Chris Bowen, that clearly don’t – it is not and quite simply can’t be ‘free’.

It costs money to turn wind into electricity.

At the most basic, the wind doesn’t turn into power behind that switch in your home; the sun doesn’t shine directly into your appliances.

You have to spend money, you have to build things, to turn the wind and sun into electricity, just like any other form of electricity apart from lightning.

But it gets worse, albeit in a way that’s difficult to comprehend to Bowen et al.

If you want to use a lot – even more, all - wind and solar - you actually have to build two generation but also to some extent distribution systems.

That’s all the so-called turbines - actually, just lazily rotating bird-killing blades – and solar panels, which do a passing good job of frying assorted wildlife.

Then in addition, you still have to build the real electricity generation system to provide the power when - have I written this before? – the wind don’t blow and the sun don‘t shine.

This second mass of infrastructure could have been, should have been, used to be, the actual, first and only, power generation systems.

The ‘second build’, of all those wind and solar so-called generators, is a complete waste of money.

But also, money that has to be recouped in prices – when it’s not being recouped in billions of dollars of direct taxpayer subsidies; along with the basic reality that the free electricity is not only not free but the most expensive you could invent.

The proof of this is laid out in stark and undeniable terms in the AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) statistical record.

Back in the early 2010s, electricity was coming out from almost entirely real power stations, at a wholesale cost of around $30 to $40 a MWh, from SA to Queensland.

In 2022 it was between $80 and $160; in 2023 so far $105 to $150; and who knows what in 2024.

Originally published as Rising electricity prices expose the high cost of wind and solar