Guess you missed the news that 2 inter-connectors connecting SA Qld and Victoria blew up at the weekend cutting power to 40,000 homes in Sydney and shutting down the Aluminium smelters at Tomago and Portland.
Three states affected, didn’t happen when we had out own power supplies.
The only reason we have interconnectors is the unreliable nature of wind and solar.
It’s not that long ago that the BassLink inter-connector was out of action twice, on one occasion for almost 6 months.
With the proposed increases in renewables the situation will only get worse.
It won’t, though.
Coal will hang around for a couple of decades, in an ever-diminishing capacity, tops, after which Australia will be on totally renewable energy.
Not because it’s PC, but because it works better and it’s cheaper.
And you’ll be dead and I’ll be on a pension (if there is still one) and people will look back and laugh at all this crap if they bother to think about it at all.
Everything else is just getting in the way.
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Change is bad. Bad things happen when you change stuff. Don’t change stuff.
#bythelightandwarmthofthetirefire
Because before renewables we never had blackouts
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And prices never went up
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And Ignorant idiots didn’t keep shouting their Idiocy in the face of irrefutable reality.
Free Efficient Electricity from the Sun & Wind?
NO! Expensive Inefficient Electricity from polluting Coal thanks!!
wut?
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I disagree that the only reason we have have interconnectors is because of renewables. Interconnectors would have the same valid reasons for being built if we stuck with coal and gas (or whatever.) That is, they allow for a larger number of suppliers to compete in the wholesale energy market. That should make the overall system cheaper and more reliable.
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And the battery in SA saved them from black-outs, even with all those pesky renewables… (https://reneweconomy.com.au/on-first-day-as-pm-morrison-learns-difference-between-big-battery-and-big-banana-84075/)
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They don’t have to worry.
They will always keep getting Federal topup dollars courtesy of [mostly Vic] taxpayers.
See here is the biggest lie of all…
ITS NOT FREE!
Well it is free, in that the energy source to generate electricity is indeed free for solar and wind.
It costs to mine coal and deliver to a coal-powered generator.
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when unless im mistaken solar panels solar farms wind turbines dont just appear for free…
so if coal isnt free then there is no chance that solar and wind are free!
.
May post this in the politics thread.
Alex Turnbull: Coal miners exerting ‘undue influence’ on Liberal Party, says son of former PM Malcolm Turnbull
By chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici
Updated about 8 hours ago
RELATED STORY: Turnbull to resign from Parliament on Friday
RELATED STORY: Coal politics an open-cut minefield on all sides in Queensland
RELATED STORY: Renewables the solution to rising power prices: Energy Australia
Malcolm Turnbull’s son has lashed out at vested interests in the Queensland coal mining industry, who he says are exerting undue influence over the Liberal Party’s energy policy.
Key points:
- Alex Turnbull slammed the “panic and mania” in energy policy
- He said coal miners were “unduly” influencing Government policy
- He said renewables would bring prices down while also cutting emissions
Alex Turnbull, who describes himself as a keen environmentalist, studied economics at Harvard and runs a private hedge fund in Singapore.
Before leaving Australia he spent five years at Goldman Sachs, where he was responsible for buying and selling the debt and assets of energy companies.
It was during that time that he began to appreciate the consequences of what he calls 10 years of energy policy “panic and mania”.
Speculating on the value of the debt at companies like Alinta or AGL made Goldman Sachs hundreds of millions of dollars.
Listen to the interview with Alex Turnbull on PM.
It was during the Rudd-Gillard governments, when the prospect of a carbon price depressed the long-term prospects of those energy generators.
Mr Turnbull, 36, bought the debt cheap. But when Labor decided to provide generous compensation to those high emitters, the debt price spiked and the investment bank made loads of money selling it.
Explaining why he had decided to speak up, the younger Turnbull said: “I’m a free agent now and I can express my opinions as and how I please”.
“I’ve been quietly very frustrated at how unproductive policymaking has been in this area and how partisan, because generating tonnes of volatility is great for hedge funds but it’s not particularly good for consumers,” he said.
A big part of his job was to forensically analyse the cost and viability of coal-fired power stations.
Speaking to ABC Radio’s PM program, he said it made no economic sense for the Coalition Government to be entertaining the idea of underwriting new coal-fired power plants.
Mr Turnbull referred PM to a February 2017 analyst report by new energy finance analysts at Bloomberg.
It stated that if new coal stations were to be built in Australia, electricity prices would be “substantially higher” than with a combination of wind, solar and gas (provided gas markets operated efficiently).
The report warned that investing in new coal would be “very risky” for four main reasons:
- Future carbon (price, regulation and policy) risks
- Significant risks of reputational damage for the lender/investor
- Exposure to the highly-variable wholesale electricity price market as coal plants struggle to secure long-term supply contracts
- A history of delays and cost overruns with the construction of recent projects
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates the time gap between commissioning a new coal-fired power station and it coming online and generating electricity would be eight years.
Depending on the capacity, Mr Turnbull calculates that such a new plant would cost between $2 billion and $4 billion to build, but he is sceptical that such a project could survive three electoral cycles.
The decision to build the Datteln 4 coal power station in Germany was announced in 2004, started construction in 2007 and after delays on account of legal challenges and engineering hiccups, it is not expected to come online until at least 2020.
Bloomberg concludes that equity sponsors committing to coal-fired power stations demand higher returns for their capital, and debt providers will limit their exposure or avoid such projects altogether — as has happened with the case of some Australian banks saying they will not finance the controversial Adani coal mine in Queensland.
Asked whether debate about the economics of coal-fired power was being muddied by the lobbying of coal miners, Mr Turnbull said people who “own a lot of coal in the Galilee Basin (Queensland)” were exercising “undue influence on Liberal Party policy”.
Described as “small miners” he said “they have assets they probably regret purchasing that don’t make a lot of sense anymore and they’re trying to engineer an outcome which makes those projects economic.”
Australia’s mining industry represents about 8 per cent of GDP and employs 200,000 people, but the younger Turnbull said it was not the Government’s job to choose which jobs it was going to protect and which ones it would not.
Days before his father suffered the ignominy of losing the prime ministership in a chaotic coup, the Liberal Party had taken the decision to abandon its signature National Energy Guarantee and a pledge to legislate a 26 per cent emissions cut in the electricity sector.
Notwithstanding that, Mr Turnbull said he was very proud of his father’s achievements as Prime Minister.
“He’s been a voice of moderation and reasonableness and sanity and getting things done despite overwhelming odds and I’m proud of what he’s done in numerous areas,” he said.
“Climate has been ferociously difficult and has claimed however many prime ministers one can count over the last decade and it remains a serious challenge and one of profound public interest.”
A week before Scott Morrison appointed him as new energy minister, Angus Taylor told a commercial radio station that “the obsession with emissions at the expense of reliability and affordability has been a massive mistake.”
The younger Turnbull rejects that entirely.
“It’s a mistaken idea that there is a conflict between decarbonisation and reducing power prices,” Mr Turnbull said.
*After initial outlay Free.
Coal?? Not so much.
Nice one young Turdball. 
No, seriously, . Good stuff!! Need more voices coming out against these FRC’s.
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Bad things like increased health and life expectancy? wealth beyond the wildest dreams of your ancestors, let’s go back to cutting down forests to make steel, that will work a treat with 7 billion people on the planet.
Q: How do you build a wind turbine without coal?
After the initial outlay do they stop paying capitalist landowners the $14,000 per year to have these monstrosities on their land?
Not forgetting the billions of dollars in subsidies, $225 million to AGL alone, or have you forgotten that, every left-winger in the country was whinging about it including quite a few on this website and calls for nationalisation.
Coal?? Not so much.
Queensland only:
Rate Average price per tonne for period
- Up to and including $100 - 7% of value
- Over $100 and up to and including $150
-
- First $100 - 7% of value
- Balance - 12.5% of value
- More than $150
-
- First $100 - 7% of value
- Next $50 - 12.5% of value
- Balance - 15% of value
How much extra tax would you be paying.
The above does not include Company tax, personal tax paid by employees or the other states and federal government.
As an aside I see another government funded expedition is stuck in the Arctic. ice that climate scientists assured us would disappear by 2013.
How many rescues is that, The ship of fools led by Chris Turney in the Antarctic - the ice breaker he was on got stuck, so did the one that tried to rescue him and the one that tried to free the rescuing ice breaker,
The Catlin expedition, 2 expeditions of lunatics in kayaks that tried to cross the Arctic. The list goes on.
ok how about this… the assets required to produce the energy both cost money, however the energy source for wind and solar is free.
better?
I suppose that the horse and cart probably had something to do with Henry Ford when he built his first car. Probably had deliveries of raw materials etc by this then common means of transport.
But then by pure luck I guess car and trucks made deliveries replacing the horse and cart as this industry progressed. Same for the future with power generation.
Of course sorfed, even a fool like you knows this, but you just have an issue with progress. By the way, how is your health going ? Guess you would have been dead if medical progress had not been made.
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