The appointment of Angus Taylor as Australia’s new Energy Minister has guaranteed that the end to subsidised wind and solar will be brutal and swift.
Malcolm Turnbull’s downfall resulted from stratospheric power prices, sent into orbit by unreliable and intermittent wind and solar.
His fate was sealed when he started spinning the line that his National Energy Guarantee (which would have effectively doubled wind and solar capacity) would result in power being delivered at 1970s prices. The same line is currently being spun by wind and solar outfits and their propaganda wings, in an effort to forestall the end of the world as they know it.
The problem for that line of argument is that everyone, almost everywhere, has heard of South Australia.
SA is the place renowned for setting and then meeting its own ludicrous 50% Renewable Energy Target – blowing up a perfectly good coal-fired power plant along the way- and, funnily enough, equally renowned for routine load shedding, statewide blackouts and the world’s highest power prices.
Large swathes of Adelaide (the city that never sleeps) were powerless last week, when the State was hit with some inclement spring weather, giving its long-suffering residents a literally chilling reminder of September 2016 and ‘Black Wednesday’; the day that saw a whole state freezing in the dark, in part without power for more than a week.
The nonsense being spouted about adding more chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar to bring down power prices is a reflection of the desperation that’s spread amongst renewable energy rent seekers and the zealots, charged with marketing the purported merits of nature’s wonder fuels.
Panic is not a strategy, but what follows when it’s revealed that what was thought to be a strategy, turns out to be a one-way ticket to oblivion. And oblivion is where Australia’s wind and solar industries are headed.
The appointment of Angus Taylor as Energy Minister has guaranteed that the end to subsidised wind and solar will be brutal and swift.
Taylor’s, soon-to-be-launched, full-frontal attack on subsidised wind and solar is – as STT has pointed out once or twice before – just the inevitable consequence of the fact that the Federal government’s renewable energy policy is inherently unsustainable.
Throwing more than $3 billion a year in subsidies to wind and solar at power consumer’s expense – while they suffer the highest power prices in the world or, in the case of 200,000 families, do without power altogether because they can’t afford it – was never sustainable on any level, but particularly the political.
Much the same story is being played out around the globe, wherever governments have allowed renewable energy rent seekers to hijack energy policy.
First, there’s the Blitzkrieg-like attack on conventional generators, with market distorting policies that favour unreliable wind and solar; next comes destruction of electricity markets and grid reliability; rocketing power prices follow, as night follows day; furious power consumers turn on the government responsible; and, the rest as they say, is history.
Any politician that misunderstands that sequence of events hasn’t been paying attention. Malcolm Turnbull didn’t, nor did Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne. Both are now rattling at the bottom of the dustbin of history.
The only thing ‘inevitable’ about subsidised wind and solar, is rocketing power prices. And what inevitably follows is an end to the policies that inevitably infuriate power consumers.
The good news is that in Australia, the US and Ontario the wind and solar industries now face their Armageddon. The bad news is that it took almost 20 years.
The better news is that – once the subsidies, mandates, penalties and targets that built and sustain wind and solar are removed, slashed or scrapped – no politician in their right mind will ever attempt to re-introduce any such scheme, policy or plan, ever again.
Here’s The Australian’s Judith Sloan detailing the End of Days for wind and solar.
Beginning of the end for subsidised renewables
The Australian
Judith Sloan
1 September 2018
One of the most astute investors in the world is Warren Buffett. Since 2004 his company, Berkshire Hathaway, has invested more than $US17 billion in renewable energy, predominantly wind farms. In case you think Buffett is some bleeding-heart global warming believer, here is his explanation for the investment: “I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate … We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”