3 ms·
Australia is in the unique position of having abundant reserves of gas, coal and uranium but through what is probably blatant corruption the most expensive powe
by boyter 8y ago
Australia is in the unique position of having abundant reserves of gas, coal and uranium but through what is probably blatant corruption the most expensive power prices in the world.
The gas is exported at a fixed cost to Japan and other countries where it can be resold to Australians at a profit.
Other issues are that no power company in Australia is willing to build a new coal power plant because the current coal subsidies are likely to go away with a change in government. The current government is very much pro coal. To illustrate how bad this is the current government Treasurer brought a lump of coal into sitting parliament and was waving it around showing how non dangerous it is. The coal lobbies are very strong and are running out of export options.
Australia is in this position due to a lack of bipartisan support towards any energy policy. Its also a problem because the power networks have been privatized and the incentives were set to guarantee returns on building infrastructure. The network as such is gold plated but the power it carries is very expensive.
While gas should be the answer to the network shortfalls there was a massive profit incentive to not do so initially wait for the spot prices to surge and then jump in and collect massive paychecks.
The result is that people installed solar. Which caused the electricity companies to raise prices which lead to more solar installs. The companies here are in a death spiral. They are insanely profitable right now, but the writing is on the wall.
However companies such as Tesla installed a massive battery to counter some of the issues and that project after 6 months is almost about to pay for itself.
Its a horrible situation to be honest, and I cannot wait for the power companies to fail due to their own hubris.
BTW if you think this is bad, do a quick check into the status of the National Broadband Network NBN in Australia. That's corruption on a whole other level and you should laugh at us Australians. No matter how bad your internet is I promise ours is worse, more expensive and despite billions of dollars not about to get better.
- stephen_g 8y agoAustralia does not need any more coal stations. Wanting to build new ones has weirdly become a strange infatuation by the conservatives, but there is absolutly no need in Australia for more baseline capacity. It's all in the peaks, which is all gas (which mostly of sets the benchmark price given where it sits in the AEMO stack). So most of our price problems are just the price of gas, and the introduced reservation program has helped with that a little but does not go far enough. That, and the gold plating of the infrastructure (which alone is like 40% or something IIRC of the price rises over the last decade). Most of the 'reliability problems' than the politician are on about are really just 'fears of possible future reliability problems', stirred up by the blackouts in SA that were mostly due to transmission lines being blown over in a massive storm while one of the interconnectors with Victoria was down for maintenance, and some wind turbines tripping out because of dangerously high wind speeds. There isn't really that much reliability risk apart from the fact that our coal stations are all pretty unreliable (the Australia Institute has taken to tweeting every time a generator trips out, it's pretty crazy how unreliable our coal stations are). Perhaps we will need some more gas peaking stations but new pumped hydro and big batteries will probably take over some of that.
- stephen_g 8y agoSorry, should be 'baseload capacity' in the first bit.