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Electricity markets are a prime example of ideology winning over logic. In Australia, the eastern states have a privatised electricity market while Western Aust

Electricity markets are a prime example of ideology winning over logic. In Australia, the eastern states have a privatised electricity market while Western Australia has a very limited market with agreements to hold a certain amount of gas fuel at a certain price. Currently the price of electricity is significantly higher in the eastern market than the "less free" western one.

Nursie 3y ago
Yep, god bless our communist energy policy, while the eastern states were screaming about rocketing energy prices a year back, ours were stable because the electricity company is state owned and contributes profit to the public purse, and as you say a certain portion of gas has to be reserved for the local market. Coming from the UK I don’t want competition in basic utilities like there is there. I don’t want to have to shop around for the best energy price every year, or to be at the mercy of the free market on pricing for the most basic of necessities like power and water.
Grimburger 3y ago
There's absolutely no evidence of privatisation driving up costs in Australia. It's the hysterical marching cry of young naive people railing against the ever-increasingly vague boogeyman of neoliberalism but the actual evidence doesn't back it up. You talk about ideology over logic while demonstrating that exact same thing. > The AER report contains no consistent correlation between higher bills and privatisation. > The ABS index of electricity prices across Australia, showing movement of electricity prices over time, also doesn't demonstrate a link between privatisation and price rises. > Whether comparing electricity bills, prices or the relative price index of electricity in each state, there is no consistent link between privatisation and what consumers pay for their electricity. > Experts say the biggest influences on what people pay for electricity are costs of transmission and distribution. They say these costs have risen in recent years irrespective of whether the owners of the transmission and distribution networks are privatised. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-privatisation-increase-electricity-prices3f/6329316 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-priva...
- lastdong 3y ago
  A natural resource lieing solely in the hands of profit-driven private companies. Take a moment to reflect on the potential risks this poses for the average consumer, the consequences of placing profit above all. Will you entrust your well-being to CEOs and boards whose sole priority is relentless growth and maximizing profits, regardless of the consequences? Laws can only do so much to prevent vital resources from becoming unaffordable for the very people who deserve them. These companies, with no regard for your, the citizen's, vote or input, prioritize profits above all else. To them, it's just another business move, leaving the consequences behind as they move on to the next venture. You can argue and consider other ideas, but the higher risk in the private side is always there.
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    > These companies, with no regard for your, the citizen's, vote or input, prioritize profits above all else. And they are easily reigned in by the Australian Electricity Regulator, while governments owned businesses are not. We recently had a price cap put on coal and gas prices, private companies had to eat a massive loss, government owned generators huffed and puffed until they got billion dollar bailouts from the rest of the nation for their coal guzzling power plants that should have been shut down years ago had they not been taxpayer liabilities. There's simply no evidence of these things driving up prices. We have a huge government owned pumped hydro power storage project underway that has blown out from $2b to $10b in the spacce of a few years, if this was privately owned it would have gone bankrupt, instead more and more cash from electricity users will eventually have to be paid to fund it. It's costing 5x more than simply putting grid scale batteries in the cities and the government has sunk cost fallacy that it can't walk away from. This is the problem with government ownership of electricity assets in Australia, politics gets completely in the way of good decision making and projects that should have failed long ago. As I said before, where's the evidence, because all I see is ideology. This is what happens when governments run electricity projects: > He assured the electorate it would cost $2 billion and be up and running by 2021. > By April 2019, a contract for part of the project was signed for $5.1 billion — and that doesn't include transmission costs, which will cost billions more. > Who will actually pay for transmission is still being decided. > "Someone's going to pay for it," Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad told 7.30. > "The taxpayers will pay for it through your taxes, or you pay for it through your bills. The current cost is $10b and the project has blown out to the end of the decade. No one is admitting how far they've dug or the status of meeting targets. The transmission bill is still up in the air but will likely be an additional $5b added onto household bills. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/snowy-hydro-2.0-expensive-and-wont-deliver-energy-expert/11594768 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/snowy-hydro-2.0-expen...
lastdong 3y ago
In the UK, water (Thames Water), the country natural and fundamental resource is owned by a Chinese wealth fund and Canadian Pension funds. How could anyone think this was a good idea?
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  > How could anyone think this was a good idea? The profit motive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation
Panzer04 3y ago
The western Australian example just demonstrates why petrostates are wealthy - if you have big energy resources you can make stuff cheaper, surprise! And realistically all that's really happening there is west Australia is effectively imposing a tax on gas profits to subsidize the grid. There's no magic success here - just a redistribution of gas profits to electricity consumers. I don't actually think the Australian grid is a good example of privatisation failure. There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything aside from the marching cry of the left.
- bongobingo1 3y ago
  > There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything Did we gain anything? I ask in earnest, I don't know. I can guess that the cost of running, maintenance, etc are now "not a cost of the state", but the cost doesn't just disappear, it was always on the consumer via tax or bills (or tax and bills, hopefully in a way that sums to the same cost!).
  - Panzer04 3y ago
    In theory, you remove government overhead. Government bureacracies are infamous for expanding without the requirement to make a profit as a constraint. As it pertains to power, People tend to promote government as a means to make it cheaper - but this is sort of a fallacy - the only way the government can do it cheaper is if it's operationally more efficient to a significant degree. I don't see how a government achieves this. Private energy generators are usually not very profitable - the people making money were commodity producers, recently, not electricity generators.
- Nursie 3y ago
  WA owns its electricity generation and supply companies, so no it’s not just a tax, it’s nationalised infrastructure and it works great for us. It’s not just cheaper, it takes the privatised profits off the table and instead feeds them back. It’s not magic, it’s pretty good sense though, and it serves the people of the state well.

Nursie 3y ago

Yep, god bless our communist energy policy, while the eastern states were screaming about rocketing energy prices a year back, ours were stable because the electricity company is state owned and contributes profit to the public purse, and as you say a certain portion of gas has to be reserved for the local market. Coming from the UK I don’t want competition in basic utilities like there is there. I don’t want to have to shop around for the best energy price every year, or to be at the mercy of the free market on pricing for the most basic of necessities like power and water.

Grimburger 3y ago

There's absolutely no evidence of privatisation driving up costs in Australia. It's the hysterical marching cry of young naive people railing against the ever-increasingly vague boogeyman of neoliberalism but the actual evidence doesn't back it up. You talk about ideology over logic while demonstrating that exact same thing. > The AER report contains no consistent correlation between higher bills and privatisation. > The ABS index of electricity prices across Australia, showing movement of electricity prices over time, also doesn't demonstrate a link between privatisation and price rises. > Whether comparing electricity bills, prices or the relative price index of electricity in each state, there is no consistent link between privatisation and what consumers pay for their electricity. > Experts say the biggest influences on what people pay for electricity are costs of transmission and distribution. They say these costs have risen in recent years irrespective of whether the owners of the transmission and distribution networks are privatised. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-privatisation-increase-electricity-prices3f/6329316 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-priva...

lastdong 3y ago
A natural resource lieing solely in the hands of profit-driven private companies. Take a moment to reflect on the potential risks this poses for the average consumer, the consequences of placing profit above all. Will you entrust your well-being to CEOs and boards whose sole priority is relentless growth and maximizing profits, regardless of the consequences? Laws can only do so much to prevent vital resources from becoming unaffordable for the very people who deserve them. These companies, with no regard for your, the citizen's, vote or input, prioritize profits above all else. To them, it's just another business move, leaving the consequences behind as they move on to the next venture. You can argue and consider other ideas, but the higher risk in the private side is always there.
- Grimburger 3y ago
  > These companies, with no regard for your, the citizen's, vote or input, prioritize profits above all else. And they are easily reigned in by the Australian Electricity Regulator, while governments owned businesses are not. We recently had a price cap put on coal and gas prices, private companies had to eat a massive loss, government owned generators huffed and puffed until they got billion dollar bailouts from the rest of the nation for their coal guzzling power plants that should have been shut down years ago had they not been taxpayer liabilities. There's simply no evidence of these things driving up prices. We have a huge government owned pumped hydro power storage project underway that has blown out from $2b to $10b in the spacce of a few years, if this was privately owned it would have gone bankrupt, instead more and more cash from electricity users will eventually have to be paid to fund it. It's costing 5x more than simply putting grid scale batteries in the cities and the government has sunk cost fallacy that it can't walk away from. This is the problem with government ownership of electricity assets in Australia, politics gets completely in the way of good decision making and projects that should have failed long ago. As I said before, where's the evidence, because all I see is ideology. This is what happens when governments run electricity projects: > He assured the electorate it would cost $2 billion and be up and running by 2021. > By April 2019, a contract for part of the project was signed for $5.1 billion — and that doesn't include transmission costs, which will cost billions more. > Who will actually pay for transmission is still being decided. > "Someone's going to pay for it," Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad told 7.30. > "The taxpayers will pay for it through your taxes, or you pay for it through your bills. The current cost is $10b and the project has blown out to the end of the decade. No one is admitting how far they've dug or the status of meeting targets. The transmission bill is still up in the air but will likely be an additional $5b added onto household bills. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/snowy-hydro-2.0-expensive-and-wont-deliver-energy-expert/11594768 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/snowy-hydro-2.0-expen...

lastdong 3y ago

In the UK, water (Thames Water), the country natural and fundamental resource is owned by a Chinese wealth fund and Canadian Pension funds. How could anyone think this was a good idea?

111111IIIIIII 3y ago
> How could anyone think this was a good idea? The profit motive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation

Panzer04 3y ago

The western Australian example just demonstrates why petrostates are wealthy - if you have big energy resources you can make stuff cheaper, surprise! And realistically all that's really happening there is west Australia is effectively imposing a tax on gas profits to subsidize the grid. There's no magic success here - just a redistribution of gas profits to electricity consumers. I don't actually think the Australian grid is a good example of privatisation failure. There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything aside from the marching cry of the left.

bongobingo1 3y ago
> There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything Did we gain anything? I ask in earnest, I don't know. I can guess that the cost of running, maintenance, etc are now "not a cost of the state", but the cost doesn't just disappear, it was always on the consumer via tax or bills (or tax and bills, hopefully in a way that sums to the same cost!).
- Panzer04 3y ago
  In theory, you remove government overhead. Government bureacracies are infamous for expanding without the requirement to make a profit as a constraint. As it pertains to power, People tend to promote government as a means to make it cheaper - but this is sort of a fallacy - the only way the government can do it cheaper is if it's operationally more efficient to a significant degree. I don't see how a government achieves this. Private energy generators are usually not very profitable - the people making money were commodity producers, recently, not electricity generators.
Nursie 3y ago
WA owns its electricity generation and supply companies, so no it’s not just a tax, it’s nationalised infrastructure and it works great for us. It’s not just cheaper, it takes the privatised profits off the table and instead feeds them back. It’s not magic, it’s pretty good sense though, and it serves the people of the state well.