By Jo Nova

We’ve never had another third quarter this expensive

Despite setting price records — averaging $200/MWh across the whole quarter for the whole five-state National Energy Market, there’s like a cone of silence around the price of brown coal. The ABC is happy to evangelize about 30 minute “renewable energy records”, but they don’t mention that the three-month total system costs went off like a bomb.

Somehow Australia has all that free cheap green power and yet the wholesale costs exploded. The system broke:

No other Q3 has ever been this expensive.

But one unmentionable fuel type was still cheap

The average wholesale price for all generators last quarter was 20 cents a kilowatt hour (or $200 per megawatt hour), but brown coal generators were still able to supply during that same incendiary quarter for just at 4c a KWh. That was the average “winning bid”. So last quarter brown coal was one fifth the price of black coal, and one sixth the price of gas or hydro, and no one is talking about it.

The cheapest prices were from brown coal. (Far right)

Imagine if Australia had a free market in electricity? […]