Australia Closes Coal-Fired Power Plants: Hospitals Forced to Cut Power Use & Power Prices Rocket

Australia’s ‘inevitable transition’ to nature’s ‘wonder fuels’, the wind and sun are looking more like a transition to the Third World.

Rocketing power prices have seen tens of thousands of Australian families cut from the grid, no longer able to afford power at all.

And power ‘rationing’ of the kind one might expect in North Korea, Cuba or the USSR of old has beset a country which once enjoyed the cheapest power on earth; thanks to the winning combination of abundant reserves of coal and gas and politicians with their feet on the ground rather than their heads in the clouds.

Although they don’t call it rationing, it’s called ‘demand management’.

As we detail below, the victims of these Stalinist ‘power purges’ include Victorian hospitals (forced to turn off lights and air conditioners) and dozens of energy-hungry businesses paid by taxpayers to shut down completely, in order to prevent the grid from collapsing, during a perfectly normal Australian Summer hot spell.

Australia’s suicidal renewable energy policy – the Federal government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target – is a household punishing and business destroying $60 billion tax on Australian power consumers, redirected as Renewable Energy Certificates to wind and solar power outfits.

Precisely as intended, the LRET has gutted conventional generators, rendering reliable and affordable coal-fired power plants unprofitable.

The massive subsidies enjoyed by wind power generators allows them to undercut everybody (when the wind is blowing or not blowing too hard), knocking coal-fired plant to the back of the queue, preventing them from dispatching power and earning revenue.

Now the consequence of that insidious market perversion is starting to bite: the places which have shuttered and even blown up a coal-fired plant, South Australia and Victoria are watching their wholesale power prices rocket (retail power prices will inevitably head north, too).

Both States have power grids dominated (weather permitting, of course) by wind power capacity: 1,698 MW in SA and 1,516 MW in Victoria.

For as long as STT has been in the business, the wind industry, its parasites, and spruikers have been telling us that the only surefire way to suppress prices is to add wind power. But that narrative comes unstuck when the evidence is applied.

After the closure of Victoria’s Hazelwood plant last year, the only way for Victorian power prices is up.

Hazelwood closure drives jump in household electricity prices
The Australian
Matt Chambers
20 January 2018

The government-owned Snowy Hydro has lifted this year’s household electricity bills by more than 10 per cent as part of a sector-wide surge in prices driven by the closure of the Hazelwood brown-coal power station and renewable energy schemes.

The Victorian hikes at Snowy’s fully owned Red Energy and Lumo Energy retail businesses, revealed in a search of Victorian government registers, follows price rise announcements from the big three retailers — AGL Energy, Origin Energy and EnergyAustralia.

These have been matched by nearly all other Victorian retailers in the nation’s most competitive retail market.

Only Alinta, which has bought the Loy Yang B brown coal power station in Victoria, has lowered its prices, which it says is due to being able to access cheaper power.

Grattan Institute energy director Tony Wood said: “What you are seeing now in Victoria is the flowthrough of the Hazelwood closure, which has been the biggest contributor of higher wholesale prices, which are up from about $50 per megawatt hour to $80 in the past year.”

Snowy is jointly owned by the NSW, Victorian and federal governments. Talks are ongoing between the three for Canberra to buy out the states to pursue Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme.

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