Australia is having a hard time of it. From the Australian Financial Review:
South Australia intervenes in electricity market as prices hit $14,000MWh
Turmoil in South Australia's heavily wind-reliant electricity market has forced the state government to plead with the owner of a mothballed gas-fired power station to turn it back on.
The emergency measures are needed to ease punishing costs for South Australian industry as National Electricity Market (NEM) prices in the state have frequently surged above $1000 a megawatt hour this month and at one point on Tuesday hit the $14,000MWh maximum price.
Complaints from business about the extreme prices – in normal times they are below $100 – prompted the state government to ask energy company ENGIE to switch its mothballed Pelican Point gas power station back on.
The extraordinary intervention – first foreshadowed in December when the government of premier Jay Weatherill hosted an energy crisis meeting – comes as electricity prices soar to near record levels across the nation.
Suck it up hippies - wind and solar are not baseload capacity; never will be - they are the little foam of icing on the coal-black energy cake. The virtue-signaling of green. Want green? Go nuke!
Turns out it is not just bad energy planning - this folly is having some serious economic repercussions - from Eric Worrall:
The fallout from this disaster may extend much further than a month of insane electricity bills.
Australia is currently struggling with an ongoing trend for heavy industry to translocate business operations to other countries in Asia, countries which provide stable regulatory environments and costs, lower taxes, cheaper wages, and less red tape. The ongoing renewables madness, which afflicts every state in Australia to some extent, may convince even more large employers that it simply isn’t worth waiting for Australian politicians to stop messing around with fashionable non-solutions to the nation’s energy needs.
You simply can not run a viable business with energy rates this high - this will drive manufacturing out of Australia and increase the unemployment. All for stupid politics and shoddy science.
Leave a comment