By Jo Nova
Don’t mention brown coal?
Last quarter I reported that the Australian Energy Market Operators (AEMO) had strangely “forgotten” to list the brown coal prices in its quarterly report, despite it being the second largest energy source in our national electricity market.
Other quarters, often they would include a graph comparing the average winning bids of all the major fuel types — a graph that surely is essential in these inflationary times where our electricity prices are setting record highs, rising by 25% this month, and we have a national debate on our energy crisis.
In the next quarterly report the AEMO did list the average “winning bids” of brown coal but didn’t do the comparison graph, so I’ve done it for them. If only they had room in their 68 page report and $450 million dollar budget so Australians can see, at a glance, which fuel source provides the cheapest wholesale generation by far, every quarter, all the time?
Despite all the inflation, the war, and the pandemic, brown coal generators are still making electricity for 3c a KWh. Shouldn’t Australians know that?
Click to enlarge (Or download the larger JPG file)
Compare that to current retail electricity prices in our renewables superstar state South Australia — where the cost varies from 33c to 47c per kilowatt hour.
Brown coal doesn’t “set” the winning bid as often as it used to when it was a larger proportion of our generation mix. Obviously, if it did, we’d have cheaper electricity.
The prices for solar and wind power were the nonsensical minus $24 and minus $41/ MWh. They’re not included because they are not despatchable, and most of the costs of the unreliables are hidden in subsidies. When we spend $20 billion on pumped hydro and transmission lines, those costs, like the batteries and demand schemes should be added to the wind and solar charges. When the rest of the reliable grid has to charge more to cover their costs of sitting around on “standby” — those higher costs should be added to the renewables bill too.
Brown coal is a national asset because it is impervious to international dramas and conflicts. It can’t be shipped far because it has a habit of catching fire on the boat, so there is no international market, instead we have hundreds of years of supply all to ourselves. The more we use, the more black coal and gas we can make billions of dollars with. Instead of being a renewable energy superpower, we could be a cheap energy superpower.
Australia made $124 billion dollars in export revenues from black coal last year
Imagine a world where Australian electricity prices were cheap again and industries moved here from all over the world. With the extra funds Australian families could afford laptops, music lessons, books and adventure camps for every child, or trips to the Whitsundays, Ningaloo, whatever turned them on. Parents might not have to work two jobs. What a life of riches we gave up so easily, with so little thought, because we were badgered and bullied into a futile quest to change the weather?
As it is, here in the Renewable Land, the Australian Labor Party has decided not to even talk about coal in its party platform, despite it being our second largest export industry. President Xi, Larry Fink, the WEF and the UN will be happy.
REFERENCE
The AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics (QED) reports
This is what people fail to understand. The coal produced power that is being foregone to make way for “renewables” is marginal cost product.
420
The gas industry has moved mountains to get rid of coal fire power stations. They financed the activism. Why? Coal is the lowest bid. The low bid controls any auction price. I note from the histogram we can expect a minimum price rise of 267% when brown coal shuts. This increase will smash the east coast economy.
Is there ANY way out of this fiasco?
No. It is already too late. We are just running down the clock.
Danistan is going to repeat the bankruptcy of death-by-debt as in the late 1980s. This time its the late 2020s. The debt is far bigger, the ability to reset spent on vote buying.
Can anyone save our children from stupid?
220
A hint of realism here in NSW?
From today’s SMH, paywalled, sorry.
” Delta Energy, which owns the 1320-megawatt Vales Point plant on the shores of Lake Macquarie, said it had notified the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) that it had reassessed the ‘‘ technical life’’ of the generator , determining it could keep running beyond its original closure date of 2029. ”
Cheers
Dave B
140
Delta have no intention whatsoever of closing Vales Point. The mine is next door and they will clean up as the idiots at Macquarie St follow the WEF rather than actual science.
30
“The low bid controls any auction price.”
Doesn’t the highest bidder get the goods.
10
The low bid sets the floor price in any auction.
The NEM has a floor price set by brown coal.
Why not just get most of our power from lignite? We do have 33 BILLION tons easily accessible. About 300 years worth for the NEM.
Lets set the power price at A$35/MWhr + cpi for 100 years.
80
Have to say that Australia is very odd. We make $billions from coal but wont use it here. Would be very easy to call hypocrites about now. Why we didn’t go for clean coal technology in the past two decade is very strange. It is like we must ignore our own abundant supply but make Chine richer and more powerful by buying solar and wind objects from them. Extremely strange indeed.
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Dave. I do not care (at all) for “clean coal” since we’ve all been doing very well without it, haven’t we?
Australia’s become ever wealthier: life spans have become ever longer, and whenever there’s a list of the world’s “most livable” cities, Oz gets about 5 in the Top 10.
So what is the problem? What is with the hysterics and charlatans griping that because they have a mental problem…imagining / hallucinating there’s something wrong about burning coal….the rest of us have to play along with their psychosis?
When the next door neighbour’s kid tells me he’s Superman and is planning to fly off the Sydney Harbour Bridge and take a swing over the Opera House, I do NOT humour nor encourage him to believe his nonsense. Likewise I do not entertain the fantasists with their “clean coal” palaver!…
As my old mate Louis The Fly always says “When you’re on a good thing. Stick to it!”, FFS.
290
You could say the same about Uranium. At least with gas we have it sorted out and just price gouge ourselves instead of simply exporting it all at lower prices.
I was reading a report the other day which placed Australia in the top 10 most complex places to do business in. I don’t know if their was a weighting for stupidity.
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“Have to say that Australia is very odd. We make $billions from coal but won’t use it here.”
Same applies to uranium and nuclear power.
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“Clean” depends on your definition. The first Oxford dictionary definition is “free from dirt , unsoiled, without foreign matter” Coking coal is CLEAN. It is washed, and it is hard. It leaves no stain when handled or smeared on paper. Brown coal in its raw state (with 50-60% moisture) is basically dirt. One can growth plants in it. However in the dried pressed state (as briquettes) it is clean.
CO2 is a clean gas that is necessary for plant growth ie it is beneficial. It does not and can not heat the earth surface. (is not responsible for the surface temperature on Venus which is due to the atmospheric pressure and proximity to the sun)
Talking about “clean” when burning a fuel is nonsense. However, “cleaning” the emitted gas stream of particles which are not burnt is an important process. There are laws on the emission of particles. In advanced countries such as Australia most processes not only comply with laws but are advanced with no visible emission of particles.
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The wholesale price for electricity from coal power stations has been 3c per kWh for a very long time which means in real terms the price has actually gone down.
And I believe that translates to a domestic consumer price of 10c per kWh which is what Australian domestic consumers were paying before the Howard regime allowed non-dispatchable parasitic loads to pollute the electricity grid. Of course, industry was paying even less than that.
Even about 15 years ago I was involved in organising a supply contract for Victorian private schools and the price was an unbelievable three point something cents per kWh.
500
And our cheap, reliable brown and black coal have helped to green the planet as NASA and CSIRO have been telling us since Matt Ridley spilled the beans about this miracle about 10 years ago.
I wouldn’t be surprised that only one Aussie in 100 would fully understand how cheap and RELIABLE our coal energy could be if we ditched the UNRELIABLE , TOXIC W & S lunacy ASAP and only built BASE-LOAD COAL energy starting today.
SA is a super expensive UNRELIABLE, TOXIC basket case and would fall over today if it couldn’t import reliable coal energy from Vic. But that can’t last if brown coal is shut down.
Yet the Labor and Greens loonies now want to build a TOXIC 9 TRILLION $ offshore Wind disaster along our east coast and wreck our environment and kill migrating Whales etc into the bargain.
Never forget that Dr Finkel told us we could STOP all Aussie co2 emissions ( 1.1% – THINK) today and it would have ZERO impact. Just look up the global co2 emissions data since 1988 and then THINK and WAKE UP.
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AGAIN check out global co2 emissions since 1988 and WAKE UP.
Nearly all of the increase in global co2 emissions since 1988 have come from the developing NON OECD countries, like China, India, other parts of Asia etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?facet=none&country=Non-OECD+%28GCP%29~OECD+%28GCP%29
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Don’t forget the country that the Elites/Regressives/Left absolutely adore and are lovingly infatuated with, China, has absolutely no CO2 emissions limits whatsoever and are allowed to be the world’s largest CO2 emitter (what the Left call “carbon”). And it is not a Third World country by any means (you’d think someone would have noticed that by now).
1) China CO2 emissions 10.4 billion tonnes per year.
2) USA emissions 5.0 billion tonnes
3) India 2.5 billion tonnes.
4) Russia 1.6 billion
5) Japan 1.2 billion
Notice how China and India have no CO2 limits and together produce over 2.5 times the CO2 compared to the largest country with CO2 limits, the USA.
Ref: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/
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Don’t forget the country that the Elites/Regressives/Left absolutely adore and are lovingly infatuated with and loyal to, China, has absolutely no CO2 emissions limits whatsoever and are allowed to be the world’s largest CO2 emitter (what the Left/Regressives call “carbon”). And it is not a Third World country by any means (you’d think someone would have noticed that by now).
1) China CO2 emissions 10.4 billion tonnes per year.
2) USA emissions 5.0 billion tonnes
3) India 2.5 billion tonnes.
4) Russia 1.6 billion
5) Japan 1.2 billion
Notice how China and India have no CO2 limits and together produce over 2.5 times the CO2 compared to the largest country with CO2 limits, the USA.
Ref: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/
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Thanks David and just look at the near straight line at the bottom of the OWI Data graph.
That’s Aussie emissions and yet I’ve had hostile lefties swear at me and yell “that we have to do SOMETHING”?
Fair dinkum, why are we so dumb today?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?facet=none&country=Non-OECD+%28GCP%29~OECD+%28GCP%29~AUS
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Australia barely rates a mention at:
14) 415 million tonnes.
And we are expected to destroy our economy for the benefit of China while their emissions are 25 times as much?
And I don’t even think Australia’s CO2 emissions figures are honest. Doesn’t the government/Elites count (by some measures) the emissions from exported coal which is actually burned in other countries, including China?
251
David even our CSIRO tell us that the entire SH is a co2 NET SINK and the NH is a co2 NET SOURCE.
Here’s their quote from their Tassie Cape Grim site. See in brackets at the end. So in their twisted logic we Aussies must be saving the world.
“Seasonal variation”
“Carbon dioxide concentrations show seasonal variations (annual cycles) that vary according to global location and altitude. Several processes contribute to carbon dioxide annual cycles: for example, uptake and release of carbon dioxide by terrestrial plants and the oceans, and the transport of carbon dioxide around the globe from source regions (the Northern Hemisphere is a net source of carbon dioxide, the Southern Hemisphere a net sink)”.
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Cannon-Brookes is as much a danger to this country as Bowen, who always reminds me of a quokka without the cuteness or intelligence.
M C-B is one of those celebrities who think because they have done well in one area through luck (in his case) or being able to convincingly read others words, they must be listened to. He, and others, like Cate Blanchett, should heed the words of Anthony Hopkins: “People ask me questions about present situations in life,” Hopkins said. “I say, ‘I don’t know, I’m just an actor. I don’t have any opinions. Actors are pretty stupid. My opinion is not worth anything. There’s no controversy for me, so don’t engage me in it, because I’m not going to participate.'”
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Best lines ever uttered by an actor.
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David – Under the UNFCCC/IPCC accounting rules CO2 emissions are counted at their source. So those emanating from the burning of Australian coal in Japan, China, India etc are attributed to those countries where the fuel is actually consumed. Likewise CO2 arising from the consumption of imported Saudi Arabian oil in Australia is added to Australia’s annual budget, not the Saudis.
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“At only 25m people, we generate + export over 5% of the world’s emissions today.”
Do Toyota get pinged for the emissions their exported vehicles emit, no, I didn’t think so.
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Thanks David and just look at the near straight line at the bottom of the OWI Data graph.
That’s Aussie emissions and yet I’ve had hostile lefties swear at me and yell “that we have to do SOMETHING”?
Fair dinkum, why are we so dumb today?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?facet=none&country=Non-OECD+%28GCP%29~OECD+%28GCP%29~AUS
00
As could be expected, the organized and LEGISLATED destruction of the mining industry (and all the support industry) is of NO consequence to these muppets.
They care nothing for the consequent unemployment nor even the monumental loss of “taxes and excise” torn from the enterprise and work of others. They are on a “Holy Mission”; just ask them.
The ONLY beneficiaries well be the recipients of the “spillage” that is invariably linked to such activity.
The question that MUST NOT be asked is:
“Who benefits from the destruction of a functional society?”
“Management by Crisis”? “Solutions in search of problems”? You Betcha!
In the words of that great observer of human nature, Groucho Marx:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies”. ~
250
Groucho Marx was indeed a wonderful observer of human nature but that quote is actually from Ernest Benn, although frequently misattributed to Marx.
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You learn something every day on this here excellent blog.
Ta.
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By 2030, Blackout Bowen will be in the Shadow Ministry as the Opposition Minister for “counting paper clips for the Australian Public Circus” and Australia will have Nuclear Power and minimal solar panels and wind towers. And then I woke up. Dreaming again. Oh dear.
Wake up Australia. Let’s get back to cheap affordable energy.
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I was shocked reading that Johnny, until I got to the point where you said it was only a dream.
And even Dutton supports unreliables so it doesn’t really matter which faction of the Uniparty is in power.
We have to 1) boycott woke businesses (as thinking Americans did with Bud Light, the brand is dead now), 2) elect some conservatives and other rational thinkers into various Australian Parliaments.
250
Think Dave Might be having one of
Johnny’s dreams
110
I was hoping BoBo would be selling pencils outside the racecourse.
80
We had been living in “The good old days” . Reliable power , personal transportation and abundance will be nostalgic soon . The people who would try to save us are will be called racist , sexist, homophobic and cultural nazis . The people who benefit from the destruction of our society are hiding themselves because if we knew who they were and exactly what they were doing we could stop them . We see their puppets but they remain hidden .
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And let’s not put any blame upon on the rest of the world for their emissions.
They are only doing what we here in Aus should be doing ie burning fossil fuels.
It is singularly the fault of the Green Leftist loonies here in our own country !!
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(Meant to be a responses to ianl at #10 below)
This is a phenomenal resource, we are fools if we do not use it . .
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The lignite (brown coal) deposits in the LaTrobe Valley are very thick – 20 to 30m – with the coal/overlying strata horizon very close to the surface. This extremely low strip ratio allows very cheap extraction mining, from which the 3c/KWh is derived.
Which is fortuitous, as lignite tends to be quite wet (perhaps 40% moisture) and high in ash (non-burnable material). The generating stations are built directly adjacent to the mine, with the short coal transport belts being directly fed into the dynamic stockpile.
Managing both feedstock qualities and spontaneous combustion propensity is a sharp, never-ending requirement. In particular, if the feedstock ash increases in Na mineral content beyond design spec, the boiler needs to be put off-line and scaled out. When this happens unexpectedly, Melbourne’s power supply can rest on a knife-edge.
The actual generators are specifically designed for the qualities of the individual deposit locations. This means that each generator and deposit “pair” are completely symbiotic.
The thickness and strike of these LaTrobe lignite deposits is extraordinarily extensive. On current consumption, a further 500 years is easily available.
[For the greenies who like to red thumb comments like this, I suggest you compare lignite ash components with those from actual forest wood ash. And CO2 is not a pollutant – almost the entire biosphere comprises combinations of CO2 and H2O with very minor trace elements]
400
Would pressuring the coal to remove moisture improve the efficiency?
Would it reduce the CO2 emissions per MWh?
Would using the latest German design for lignite (as they call brown coal) which gives 800 emissions v 1120 or more in Latrobe plants?
An idle thought. Dan Andrews doesn’t want them (and he would like to ban brown coal but knows he would be gone in a day later).
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Graeme 3, You are correct. Melb. & Monash Unis have long been doing research to reduce the moisture of the coal with many ways such as steam heating but nothing so far is viable. In the crusher plants before the boiler exhaust gases are used to dried the coal so it can ignite in the boiler but the steam in the combustion does reduce flame temperature and addition heat is required for the drying and requires more combustion space and larger exhaust systems than black coal. However, the brown coal is cheap to mine (needing little capital or manpower) and there is little waste from the process. The brown coal boiler system is about one third less in capacity of a similar black coal system thus higher in capital.
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Why dont they use electricity from solar power plants to dry the coal over the day?
Nobody says solar power is useless, if it contributes to clear base power it should be fine. Just saying
30
Those newer German Lignite plants are the brown coal version of USC, much more efficient than older ones, like ours, which are two and three levels (Hazelwood) of technology lower than the German plants.
They have also introduced pre heating of the (powdered) coal before it is injected into the furnace to remove the moisture content, and they have similar efficiency levels to the black coal USC plants.
Many years ago, the (original) operators of the now destroyed Hazelwood were actively in the process of adding that coal pre heating to remove the moisture from the coal. The plan was shredded as you can guess.
This link shows Neurath F and G, both Lignite USC Units, which came on line way back in 2012, and each Unit drives an 1100MW generator. If you scroll to the bottom of the article and look upwards a few Paras, you’ll see just that in the paragraph beginning ….. WTA technology. The article is dated May of 2008, 15 years ago.
I find it really puzzling that ‘new tech’ is something craved for in every aspect of society, except in modern power generation.
We here in Oz most definitely have people running things that are just plain scared to do things like this.
Tony.
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The general timidity is a concern. It is further alarming that our leaders seem keen to undermine progress.
30
Ianl, I think your are a geologist and I normally appreciate your comments. However, with regard to coal you are somewhat misinformed. Lignite is different to the Victorian brown coal. Lignite as used in Germany has much lower moisture in the range 25-40% and can have high ash. The coal in Collie WA is close to lignite. It has about 25% bed moisture and the ash content can get up to 8% on an AD basis. The brown coal in the Latrobe Valley has over 50% moisture. The coal used at the Loy Lang Power stations has 66% moisture. The ash content is very low at less than 1%. Even in Briquettes (from Morwell) the ash content is less than 3%. Yes it is easy to recover the coal, with automatically controlled surface excavators feeding directly onto conveyor belts. No manpower required if the unions would allow.
The Leigh Creek coal in SA is slighter better than the Collie coal in moisture but has higher ash. The Angelsea Vic brown coal with around 50% moisture was getting closer to lignite. Peat (as in Ireland &Scotland) has a bed moisture of 80-90% is a younger version of coal. Normal black coal has a bed moisture of 0.5 to 3%. The bed moisture and air dried moisture are a step in classifying coal.
100
Can anyone in the AU government say how much lower** temperature is now that all that money and effort has been expended?
**meaning not risen as much as it otherwise would have.
First CO2, then change in temperature
July 2006 382.46ppm
July 2023 420.99ppm
Temperature rise during these years from Roy Spencer’s site is 0.38 Celsius degrees (Global Lower Atmosphere)
Note: the temp dropped by 0.4 in the first half of 2008. In 1998 temp was up by about 0.62.
A reasonable person might suspect a lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature.
The AU government is wasting the citizens’ money.
270
John, Dr Finkel told us 6 years ago that we could reduce all Aussie co2 emissions and it would have ZERO impact on temperature.
And he was our Chief Scientist and could not lie before the Senate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJY8xKknpms
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The fact that the use of coal is still increasing at a rapid rate across the developing world is a good indication of the energy realities. RE is expensive, unreliable, needs backup and its energy density is far too low to power the high population dense countries that make up the vast majority of the world. Even it it might be possible in a sparsely populated continent downunder (which it isn’t), that emits the equivalent of a fleas fart, what is this achieving from a global energy perspective ?. The reality is that until we develop controlled fusion, we need to stick with what we have and the development of cold fusion might have already been achieved if all those wasted trillions had been invested there instead.
180
Why can’t anyone, present company excepted, work out that, even though solar and wind is supposedly the cheapest of all generation methods, the more we get, the more we pay for electricity? It’s a simple empirical observation.
I guess that’s why they had to stop teaching critical thinking skills in schools decades ago.
It’s all part of The Plan.
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Dr. John Clauser, the co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Physics prize has come out and said the whole nonsense of Climate Change caused exclusively by CO2 is an absolute HOAX. Anyone who has ever studied physics cannot possibly conclude otherwise. There is absolutely NOTHING that can ever be reduced to a single cause and effect in anything. It is always a complex dynamic
Physics tells the truth and exposes “the plan”.😎
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Jo,
love your work but please refrain from using crappy warmista tactics.
Asking us to compare wholesale generation prices with retail?? That doesn’t tell us anything about what is the thrust of your argument as distribution costs are the largest component.
You are better than that.
Adding in BIG numbers which are unrelated to the ones you are comparing against is the realm of scoundrels and one of the reasons why so many people are so confused about energy policies.
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Dean, I’m not buying. No tactics here, just straight info. Why not compare wholesale costs to retail? The audience here is discussing the exact percentage of ash content, they know what wholesale and retail mean though they may not know the exact retail costs of our highest renewable state (since it’s changing so fast).
And speaking of distribution costs — was it always the largest component when we paid 10c/KWh retail (in 1995), or is that just another new mark of renewable inefficiency?
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Dean is absolutely right – distribution costs have always been “recovered” as a proportion of the measured (accumulated) energy readings in the retail market.
It has traditionally been the easiest way to apportion network costs to retail customers and assumed network demand was directly related to energy use over a period of time (90 days accumulation).
And while the distribution cost component has gone up and down depending on investment cycles of historic network providers, it has always been a sizable component of retail “energy” billing.
Maybe between 30-50% of accumulation energy billing since 1995 when total billing cost might have been about 10c/kWh (that’s about 20c/kWh in today’s money).
So it is not “straight info” to just compare retail and wholesale prices in any timeframe and this is THE major confusion point in the modern electricity market.
I’d venture to suggest that many in your audience still do not ‘know what wholesale and retail mean’ because they are wondering why feed-in tariffs have gone so low.
Regressive governments finally realised that solar consumers (richer folks) were getting a free-ride on network costs and non-solar consumers (poorer folks) were being dudded.
Bad form for victim-mentality regressives who were pushing more and more of total network costs onto the battlers.
41
Russell, this is a specialist blog, not a newspaper. I write whole blog posts on exotic things like FCAS and moist adiabatic lapse rates. As far as I know, no one here in 900,000 comments or emails has ever asked me to explain retail or wholesale, or appeared surprised that retail prices include poles and wires, nor wondered why retail feed in tariffs have gone so low.
I threw in one line as an extra on the retail price, just for perspective. My point was that if we used more brown coal those retail prices would shrink – which is absolutely true. I didn’t bother to explain more on it, because I don’t want to bore the audience…
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If we are going to hold people feet to the fire for making misleading statements then what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Sorry, your comparison is not logical. It is noticeable because you have an audience here who are used to high standard information which you nearly always provide.
If you are going to compare retail to wholesale to get some point across, then why not rubbish satellite measured temperatures because they don’t show the same warming as limited distribution airport and city contaminated surface measurements.
You have no need to do it, the arguments are strong enough on their own. You are a science communicator, how does comparing apples to oranges help?
11
To Dean and Russell: Reviewing the comment string, do you see someone who was misled about this fully-disclosed comparison? Any comment? I note your concerns, and wonder where you can get apples to apples info on the “wholesale” cost of renewables? I mean credible info, which renewable proponents don’t care to bring.
40
Australia missed a huge opportunity probably starting at least 30 years ago. We should have ignored the climate alarmism simply based on the fact that our emissions matter SFA. We could have been an oasis in the Southern Hemisphere providing cheap reliable power to manufacturers etc fleeing the US and Europe. Gee whiz, even Toyota wanted to keep manufacturing in this country, even after Ford and GM decided to pull stumps. Probably a lot of those industries or companies may not have even needed tax shelters or subsidies. We could have just sold them on cheap power, great climate, stable government ( well until the last one at least ) and a relatively reliable workforce. It could have built slowly and then by now been quite substantial. The fact that Victoria probably has at least 500 years supply of easily attainable brown coal with all the infrastructure built, and we now have a government wanting to off shore wind turbines on the Gippsland coast is really bizarre. A common theme when I listen to podcasts from around the world – “we are being governed by people who have lost their minds”.
240
You’re right, we have stable government, but many unstable politicians.
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“we are being governed by people who have lost their minds”. We are being governed by the Left. Same meaning.
50
Quarterly reports, raw statistics, government departments are famous for this. But the hope is that the average Joe and Mary won’t make these statisics into an easily interpreted visual representation like a graph. It’s amazing what jumps put of hidden in plain sight raw statistics when they’re turned into the truth.
110
Three cents per kWh. Someone’s making a bundle but it ain’t being passed on to the public as reasonable energy costs.
100
Unlike EV’s…😆😆
You can’t be allowed to have cheap reliable energy because that goes against the depopulation plans.
If you have to choose between heating and food then you won’t be having those bank account draining kids now will you.
Kamala says the quiet bit out loud:
https://twitter.com/ABridgen/status/1679965387696340997
I saved it. 😁
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This is what happens when free market principles are not followed. People will vote with their wallets if allowed to. This is also what happens without a free press. The narrative is just a big lie.
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How can any rational authority report a NEGATIVE cost for wind and solar power generation. .
They are fooling themselves and some politicians but not the intelegent observers.
Infact, by declaring a negative cost they reveal the false cost basis of the renewable systems and the huge subsidies etc being plowed into them.
100
What does a negative price actually really mean, anyway?
I know in economic terms it means the owner pays someone to take away the resource, but in terms of the unreliables scam, where does the money come from to do this? The suffering consumer, I assume….
90
G’day David,
I’ve tried to work out how they are incorporated into the retail price, with only one bit of certainty i.e that such negative bids get into our bills for us to pay somehow.
Now for my guesses:
The negative price quote ensures despatch, because of the priority given to “renewables”;
but the price received is the AEMO normalised price, ( always positive ), for which I’ve not seen any calculation;
and the costs of those Large Generation Certificates (properly “CO2 tax”) are included in the wholesale price of the coal fired generators, making them look like the most expensive producers. But paid for by us.
Cheers
Dave B
70
Interesting how expensive gas is. Thats what caused the first rise in electricity prices, when gas was regarded as better than coal for co2 reasons and the transition began.
That was all it took for me to see that “new electricity” was going to be more expensive and started questioning the narrative.
80
I remember listening to Phillip Adams on Radio National, interviewing a green academic, back in the early 2000s. The statement was at that time, the truth, which was, the problem with fossil fuels is they are too cheap and we just can’t compete with that.
Then they just started lying and deceiving by stating renewables are cheaper. They worked out that honesty was a losers game.
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Imagine a country which went from nomadic subsistence to having one of the worlds richest cities a hundred years later in the 1890’s to the richest country on earth just under a century later in 1980, using it’s mineral wealth to fast track the health and wealth of its inhabitants while fostering innovations which have improved the lives, safety and standard of living for billions world world. human
They indeed would be the lucky country, with the obvious use of their own resources, natural, man made and human to continue with improvements for all their citizens!
That is, if they weren’t controlled by elite idealists who hate the society which gave them every advantage they exploit and believe the vast majority on that continent must be taught a lesson in how Marxist despair improves character. Mind you, those elites are not the ones who will be living the subsistence lifestyle the Marxist elites espouse as the only road to atonement.
They will be enjoying the lifestyle they believe their virtue should be rewarded with, as they patronisingly pat the heads of the minorities they used to beat the majority into submission with!
Ah the lucky country, so promising, so apathetic in its societal teenage years, prepared to throw away the chance to make actual long-term advances to define what an Australian really is, for an international Ponzi scheme!
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Governments are happy to benefit from revenues from fossil fuel exports but refuse to use them to benefit their economy. I looked at Norway which has had a decade of subsidies and schemes to transition to electric vehicles. At 80% of new sales it seems to be working .But the crazy thing is they are also the third biggest exporter of oil and gas in the world which allows the revenue to fascilitate the transition. But seriously what do governments think happens to emissions they export. If they genuinely believed that what they were doing was saving the planet they would ban the export of fossil fuels. It is after all called global warming not local warming. They are all such obvious hypocrites it still annoys me that people still vote for these idiots. Hopefully as the connection of renewables to higher prices and blackouts becomes better known some sanity will return to our democratic system and the right parties come to power.
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It is simple economics…
Everybody realises that if we do not sell our coal to China, then that simply means we leave a bigger market open for exploitation by other coal producers (there are many that could step in)
I think the common expression is “cutting off your nose , to spite your face “
No sane government is going to shut down its primary source of export earning potential..
..(i hope !)
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Aloha! Take a look at this link. What it shows is that 7bil Earthlings will keep coal burning until their economies can afford a better source of power. Note the coal plants that are “planned” and the ones that are “under construction”. Half the coal map lights up with purples. Coal is very much a viable choice for half of the world. John Kerry needs to resign his as climate disciple of the WEF. Let free markets and the consumers choose not corrupt billionaires and their paid for marxist politicians!
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-coal-power-plants-in-one-map/
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