Electricity prices declined for forty years. Obviously, that had to stop.
Here’s is the last 65 years of Australian electricity prices — indexed and adjusted for inflation.
During the coal boom, Australian electricity prices declined decade after decade.
As renewables and national energy bureaucracies grew, so did the price of electricity. Must be a coincidence…
Today all the hard-won masterful efficiency gains of the fifties, sixties, and seventies have effectively been reversed in full.
For most of the 20th century, the Australian grid was a hotchpotch of separate state grids and mini-grids. (South Australia was only connected in 1990).
In 1998, the NEM (National Energy Market) began—a feat that finally made bad management possible on a large scale.
Though after decades of efficiency gains, Australians would have to wait years to see new higher “world-leading” prices.
For the first years of the NEM, prices stayed around $30/MWh.
But sooner or later a national system is a sitting duck for one small mind to come along and truly muck things up.
Please spread this graph far and wide. Thanks to a Dr. Michael Crawford who did the original, excellent graph.
Read more at JoNova
The facts that enviromental doom sayer Paul Ehrlich(The Population Bomb)opposes cheap abundant energy just like Greenpeace and the rest of the Eco-Wackos crowd dose
In late 2017 (very recently) the Alberta government held a wind power auction. Companies could bid on the right to sell new wind power to the Alberta grid, and whoever bid the lowest price, got the right to provide electricity to the grid. Dozens of companies bid. With no taxpayer subsidies, the winning bid came in at 3.7 cents per kw hour to provide 600 MW of power. This price is LOWER than the cost of producing electricity by burning fossil fuels! This price is about 1/10 of the retail price of electricity in Europe and Australia! Lesson for everywhere: Ditch the subsidies. Let the market set the price. IF that price is viable, go for it. (Likely explanation for the low price: Southern Alberta has very strong winds that are continuous. Alberta was a producer of wind energy even in the distant past)
Were subsidies used to build those turbines?
Customers had no choice but to buy that electricity when those turbines came on line.
Ontario has put taxpayers on the hook to pay for some really bad contracts signed with Samsung.
True, Alberta, like Texas, are better suited to wind power.
I have lived in Alberta all my life. I have never heard of subsidies for wind turbines, or high feed-in electricity pricing or any of those green schemes that make the news elsewhere. I might be wrong, but I believe that wind power competes on its own economics in the Alberta electricity mix. Australians and Ontarians may be annoyed to know that Edmonton’s retail electricity price bobs around, and averages about 4 cents per kw hour. (3.78 cents for December, 3.33 cents for November, 2017)
Dispite all their Greener then Thou attitudes the same bunch of Eco-Wackos still use Fossil fuel in their everyday lives its just their unaware of it