- JoNova - https://joannenova.com.au -

Quick! Tell the PM: Pumped Hydro is not a “generator”. It’s a $2 – $4b energy chewing “renewables” bandaid.

No more excuses for sloppy, inaccurate language. How can you run a country with falsehoods?

Hydropower is a generator. Pumped Hydro is giant appliance that sucks electricity and gives you back some later. In a system with reliable baseload generators it is superfluous, redundant, and entirely unnecessary. It is an expense we don’t have to have, didn’t need, and don’t want to pay for. It can only make things more expensive than the system we used to have. Not only do we have to pay for the giant infrastructure, every day it operates we also throw away 20 – 30% of the electrons (so to speak) that go through it.

Scott Morrison says it’s only $1.4 b from the taxpayer, but the total cost may be $4 billion, and as Judith Sloan says, someone’s got to pay — if not through taxes, it will be added to electricity prices. The Snowy Corp may “self fund” it (a deceptively nice way to put it), but they won’t be donating the money.

And the Snowy Corp couldn’t “self-fund” it from electricity bills if they weren’t already so ridiculously high.  If we had enough coal power to keep electricity as inexpensive as it was a few years ago no one would buy this non-competitive supply.

Let’s be clear about the economics of this project: it rests on very high and variable wholesale electricity prices. Water can be pumped up the hill when prices are low and released when prices are high. That might be a good deal for the corporation, but it’s not a good deal for consumers.    — Judith Sloan

Let’s be absolutely clear, this is entirely a Renewables Expense

The cost of any storage should be henceforth added to the cost of Wind and Solar Power. No one should say Wind power is cheaper than coal — unless they’ve added in the cost to make it reliable (like coal power is) — add on the costs of the batteries, the interconnectors, the pumped hydro.  Let’s compare apples to apples.

Lets remind ourselves why we are spending up to $4,000 million dollars — we’re trying to stop bad weather

This is pure superstition money — we think that buying expensive electricity will stop droughts and floods and if we only pay enough penance to the Climate Gods the weather will get nicer. Follow the money trail, there is a chain of profit-makers living off our pagan fear. If our conservative major party sells out the voters out to the likes of Vestas, GE, Siemens, the EU and the UN and a bunch of B-grade bullies and grant troughing scientists, no wonder their polls are so dismal.

Let a real conservative party take their place or hope the Liberals can be reborn.

h/t Ian

9.9 out of 10 based on 101 ratings