Renewables powering up costs

South Australians will be hoping the wild weather that brought down power lines and triggered blackouts in the area around the state’s new Tesla battery on the day it was switched on is not a taste of the summer to come. The $50 million battery, centrepiece of the Weatherill government’s $550m energy plan, is supposedly a stopgap for the state’s energy supply. It is designed to power up to 30,000 homes for more than an hour in the event of a major blackout. But not yesterday. A government spokesman said the battery could not power homes because storm damage to transmission lines had to be repaired to reconnect homes to the grid.

Leaving aside the unfortunate coincidence, Mr Weatherill faces his moment of truth after flicking the switch to turn on the world’s largest lithium-ion battery near the Hornsdale Wind Farm in the state’s mid north. “This means that, for the first time, clean and affordable wind energy can be dispatched to the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whether the wind is blowing or not, improving system reliability,” he boasted yesterday.

At what cost, SA taxpayers are entitled to ask. As Samantha Hutchinson wrote on yesterday’s front page, an investigation for the Menzies Research Centre led by businessman Tony Shepherd has found subsidies for renewable energy are the cause of most power price increases, adding almost $300 to the average bill. State Labor governments, which have inflicted unrealistically high renewable energy targets of 40 or 50 per cent to be met in the coming decade or two, should take more notice of the impact of soaring prices on consumers and small business owners, who regard power costs as their main problem. As Mr Shepherd says, the public is entitled to feel angry after being kept in the dark about the extent to which the costs of subsidising the introduction of renewable energy would be added to power bills.

The summer heatwave and storm season, already under way, will maximise demand for power and test the ability of the national grid to cope. The market should be left to pass on the benefits of Australia’s abundant sources of energy.