By Jo Nova
If Australia gets any more free cheap energy we’ll go broke
The Australian Energy Regulator has the data on electricity pricing and possibly a budget $20 million a year but hasn’t yet updated with the last quarter, so I thought I’d help them out. Because surely this is a graph that all Australians need to see?
This is every state in the National Energy Market, and even though some have more renewables than others, the long term trends are the same. Unreliable generators in one state can vandalize the whole market:
(Click to expand).
Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel, but need thousands of kilometers of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated back up grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
And we wondered why electricity got more expensive:
And again with labels.
The market never did recover from the closure of the Hazelwood coal plant. Costs rose by 85% and it took a pandemic to bring them down again, but only temporarily.
So Australia is close to 30% total wind and solar generation, and aiming with gossamer fairy wings for 82% in five years time.
Luckily, it appears there’s no chance we’ll get there. The solar daytime glut, negative prices and community hatred of high voltage lines is spoiling the market for developers. And not a day too soon….
REFERENCES
Latest quarterly results from the AEMO Quarterly report.
OWID: Australian solar and wind penetration.
And there for all who want to see…the reality of the lunacy of unreliables.
Had we begun a nuclear design program back when Howard brought in the ban on nuclear,instead of banning it, we would now have cheap, reliable energy and not one solar panel or wind turbine would have been required or needed.
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This is the depressing truth. We’ve basically wasted shed loads of money to make the system less effective and more expensive.
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I think it’s somewhat worse than “wasted” money, given how much of it was likely borrowed, and will need to be repaid by generations of taxpayers to come.
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And not just the wasted money, but the wasted time that our children and grandchildren will pay for for the rest of their lives.
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People have lied and cheated to get tax paid, government borrowed money or to get elected.
They are crooks.
It has nothing to do with saving the planet.
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Howard was right. Coal is a far better option, and he thought that was common sense and coal would continue forever. He used to talk a lot about clean coal technology. No one does anymore. So he did the nuclear thing for a green grift (I assume).
In hindsight, there would be no argument for wind and solar if we had the co2 at nil with nuclear. But that didn’t stop Europe from going mad with windmills. So I doubt we would be different.
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He introduced the need for renewable generation certificates (RGCs). Therefore giving unreliables an advantage in the National Rigged Energy Market!
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>Had we begun a nuclear…
Or just continued using nature’s gift, free and abundant 100% natural coal.
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It would be nice to show the renewable penetration for each of the states.
What is the average long term inflation rate? I’m thinking of the rule-of-72.
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) . . .
[ https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx ]
. . . has about 10.2% wind and small solar supply, with 78% Hydro. My supplier buys from the BPA. Once a year the rate changes by a small amount. Once set, the rate to me does not change regardless of the day or time-of-day. Spikes and plunges, as shown in the chart, do not happen. If the cost to my supplier changes, that does not come through to me. {I guess I should ask and learn more.}
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If there is an existing hydro system with sufficient generating capacity to meet demand but is perched water constrained then wind and solar become a tremendous asset because they conserve perched water. Finding places to build dams is often difficult and the cost of building them is often very expensive.
This is part of the story for Norway doing so well. They get paid to take power when Germany has excess then charge Germany heaps when they send power from hydro power into Germany. The other key aspect driving their wealth creation is that they use electricity for some transport and export surplus oil.
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RickWill
The power from/to Germany has to go through Denmark and from there to Norway & Sweden. Denmark ‘pioneered’ the scheme to balance their wind turbines.
You are right about Norway (descendants of Vikings) doing well out of that deal. About 2018 it was costing Denmark about a billion Euros a year.
The only problem for Norway is a ‘drought’ when rainfall is lower, but they just reduce the power they offer. That’s why they rejected a new connector to the UK last year.
Neither Norway nor Sweden uses pumped storage, the latter shut the only one down as uneconomic.
With the abandonment of nuclear Germany has increased brown coal usage (from 23% to sometimes 35%) and also faces an unwillingness by Poland and Czechia to take their supply output from wind. There is a strong suggestion that the reverse flow (coal Poland, nuclear Czechia) might be a bit more expensive. That may be why German is building a connector to Finland where their new nuclear plant is doing well.
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There’s no such thing as a free lunch or electricity supply! It’s all swings and no roundabouts for the vendors! You’ll be paying somewhere along the price line for every “watt watt watt” only 3 watts make for a very dim light!
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See my reference to the graph comparing Australia’s CPI rate against the rate of electricity costs.
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In 2007, Kevin O’Lemon was here from the government to help (himself). Then Juliar Gillard and now Albo and Bowen. During this magnificent team’s reign, electricity costs were the root cause of inflation, with zero indication of slowing down. Our economy is now firmly attached to WEF demands regardless of which party is in charge.
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Thanks again Jo and we really have suffered since that Rudd loony and the Greens kicked us in the guts.
BTW here’s the world’s total primary energy since 1965 and some selected countries.
But just look at the huge gap in the graph above China, USA, EU, India etc and the world and perhaps we might start to wake up.
This is total primary energy not just electricity. And this is before AI has only started to kick in and that will double in the next few years.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&facet=none&country=USA~GBR~CHN~OWID_WRL~IND~BRA~ZAF~AUS~OWID_EU27&hideControls=false&Total+or+Breakdown=Total&Energy+or+Electricity=Primary+energy&Metric=Annual+consumption
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Kevin Rudd? He may have been a bad joke, but it was John Howard who started us on this path.
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What specific action by JH do you attribute to starting the renewables disaster ?
There were Wind turbines and Solar farms established in Australia befor JH became PM !
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Howard hated inexpensive energy for Australians. He must have had an energy-deprived childhood and wanted others to suffer as well. He was and is a nasty little Uniparty man.
Apart from his renewables policy he also introduced world parity pricing for petrol, banned nuclear power by law and gave away much of our gas supply to the Chicomms at world’s cheapest prices on a bizarre thirty year contract with no provision for inflation or market price *.
* https://amp.smh.com.au/opinion/how-australia-blew-its-future-gas-supplies-20170928-gyqg0f.html
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Howard introduced the “Renewables Energy Theft” legislation.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r1085_first/toc_pdf/00093b01%5B1%5D.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf
It started out as:
The legislation was supercharged by Rudd. Its consequence for the Australian economy was far worse than anyone could have imagined. The unintended consequences and its economic reach are staggering.
I was involved in the development of the national grid primarily to get inefficient State Government beauracracies out of the electricity supply chain. I gave evidence to the productivity commission enquiry into the electricity industry as a large customer representative. The Renewable Energy Bill 2000 opened the door to Governments fiddling with the electricity generation again with clearly disastrous consequences. Howard opened the door.
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What Howard did was possibly the most economically destructive thing ever done to Australia.
And we’ve no end of incompetent PM’s do8ng destructive things to Australia.
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Clearly, the Howard era was not “the most economically destructive thing ever done to Australia”. Quite the opposite. Our economy was successful, Howard kept the federal government small, and as a consequence, produced almost a decade of surplus budgets that allowed his government to pay off the debt incurred in the latter years of the Hawke government, and all the debt created every year of the Keating government.
The Renewable Energy Bill did not adversely impact either the economy or individual Australians in the 8 years after it was introduced. Wholesale electricity prices remained absolutely stable at around $30/MW, as Jo’s graph shows. Why? Because inside that legislation was the Renewable Energy Target (RET), which Howard set to 2%, meaning that the bill was only intended to introduce a very small amount of renewable energy into Australia’s grid, sufficient to generate 2% of the NEM’s total energy supply.
It was during Rudd’s first government that Australia signed on to the Kyoto Protocol, which established CO2 emission reduction targets. And it was Rudd who decided to use the existing Renewable Energy Bill, changing the RET from 2% to 20%, that subsequently triggered all the cost increases in retail electricity charges on the NEM. This was identified back in 2017 by the ACCC:
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Retail%20Electricity%20Inquiry%20-%20Preliminary%20report%20-%2013%20November%202017.pdf
Figure 1.2 on page 14 shows the retail electricity price index remaining almost flat for all capital cities from 1991 until 2007, and then sharply increasing until 2013.
Figure 1.7 on page 23 makes it even clearer, and actually highlights the 2009 decision by the Rudd government to expand the RET from 2% to 20% as being the primary cause of retail electricity price increases.
It also shows the immediate effect of Abbott’s decision to remove the Gillard government’s Carbon tax – electricity prices reduced by 20% over the next three years. So you are right about some incompetent PMs doing destructive things to Australia’s economy. You are just point to the wrong ones!
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How many GW of coal fired capacity did JWH initiate?
It’s not what he did, so much as what he didn’t do. In sticking his federal nose into domestic energy production he did nothing to plan and implement new conventional power to satisfy the following 50 years of population and demand growth.
The States then sacked all their engineering expertise and left it to the Feds, who had no clue, and didn’t even realise they had no clue.
He started the decay.
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that should have been a State responsibility ?
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Howard was obviously the instigator for encouraging renewables, but who really initiated the adoption of the IPCC’s war on carbon/ CO2/Fossil Fuels , ?…..which has been the main driver of current energy policy .
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He can certainly be accused of opening the gate. But Rudd would have done it anyway from scratch or something way worse. A 2% level caused no problems. Could be argued it gives an option for people who do want to invest in solar for remote location power, or such things. It was a sensible policy for the pressure being applied at the time. Howard was always trying to brush these annoying issues aside and this is how he did it.
His main flaw was not seeing the writing on the wall and getting new coal power pants built there and then while you could.
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Again here’s Australia’s primary energy share by source and note wind= just 2.10% and solar just 2.96% and within 20 years that will have to be replaced.And again and again.
Again just look at the huge gap for real BASE-LOAD energy from Oil Coal and Gas.
So how do you fill in that huge gap using toxic, unreliable and super expensive W & S?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-consumption-by-source?country=~AUS
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Neville
“So how do you fill in that huge gap using toxic, unreliable and super expensive W & S?”
Easy.
You say we’re getting more clean green renewable cheap power, which will cut bills and create good – well-paying, union – jobs and save the planet.
Blame the last government, and Putin – and maybe the WuFlu or the political situation in Paraguay.
And enough will believe you.
That, copyright Biden, Starmer, Sholz, and doubtless others, too.
Auto
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Again here’s the World’s Primary energy share by source.
Note toxic solar = just 1.07%
Note toxic wind = just 1.52%.
How long before we wake up to their toxic W & S fantasy?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-consumption-by-source
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Hi Jo
Sometime ago I recall seeing a graph of Australian electricity consumer prices that you posted, showing the introduction of renewables into the grid coinciding with the rise on the graph. Do you still have that graph or can you find an updated graph? Unfortunately the wholesale price is not always relative to the retail price.
Thanks, Neil
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Yes. I have the graph but no reference to its initial source. However, Stephen Wilson recently included the graph in his recent IPA report, so it’s now available. It has appeared in two formats over the years, with one format more clearly linking 2009 as the starting date for renewables.
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Neil, I do have that graph and use it in my speeches, and am trying to update it because it ends in 2017.
https://joannenova.com.au/2018/02/electricity-prices-fell-for-forty-years-in-australia-then-renewables-came/
Done by Dr Michael Crawford. Sources listed.
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Many thanks Jo, that’s the one. Hope you can update it as the increases since 2017 should be be quite dramatic.
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The wholesale price increases are only a fraction of the story. The grid costs do not appear in the wholesale price. None of the FCAS cost appear in the wholesale price. The RET “Renewable Energy Theft” is not part of the wholesale price.
The best way to analyse what is happening with costs is to look at the electricity bill of a perpetual renter who does not have the capacity to benefit from rooftop.
I got my first electricity bill of $2.73 in 13 years this month. A combination of transferring electricity surplus to pay for gas to draw down the surplus early in the month; low sunlight and higher connection fees for electricity and gas. The off-grid battery was off-line for two days due to successive days of full cloud cover.
It is also noteworthy that rooftops are eroding the demand for grid scale WDGs and thereby causing the RE-Theft to increase. The subtle mechanism is the cost of LGCs increase so the WDGs can tolerate higher negative price before they voluntarily reduce output:
https://cer.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-03/qcmr-q2-2023-f2-4.png
As 2030 approaches, there will need to be guarantees on extending the RE-Theft to get private investment to plan more WDGs. The problem is the market is essentially saturated and there cannot be generation without demand unless there is lots of storage. Florence has tunnelled 850m in 2 years with 14,000 to go. At that rate of progress it willl finish by 2060. While past performance is no indicator of future performance, it is the best guide we have.
And guess what – the costs for Snowy 2 have to be recovered from electricity consumers, which is every Australian one way or another. And economists wonder why inflation in Australia is so persistent.
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The strange thing about all these “free” renewables is that the more we get, the more expensive electricity becomes.
There is no known exception to this rule. I am sure our resident Leftoids will advise if they know of one.
What I am really curious about is what the maximum price will be. We are already at the point of it costing about 50% of what it costs to generate your own via a petrol or diesel generator at current petrol/diesel prices. Of course, the Government will probably keep increasing taxes on liquid fuels as well.
What is the price it will max out at?
Could it stabilise at say, $1 per kW/h or is there no logical end point?
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I believe that there won’t be any end cost if Labor continues in government. They will simply adopt the “boiling frog” approach, gradually adding more renewables and increasing costs.
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As Rick has pointed out at #9, wholesale prices are only part of the cost increases – grid costs are also increasing as more and more transmission lines and control systems are added to cope with a widely distributed network of intermittent wind and solar generators.
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In Australia, year after year,
Electricity is getting so dear,
As renewable rates,
Ups the price in all states,
Per watt hour or volt ampere.
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Australia once had inexpensive energy as one of its main competitive advantages.
Thanks to pretend-conservative Howard and all those who came after him, that advantage was deliberately destroyed.
Hopefully, one day, all who were involved, politicians, senior public serpents, fake “engineers” and fake “scientists” will be held to account.
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David you are a dreamer. State actors that cause pain to the plebs never face the music. A mate and I both suffer from vaccine injuries to our biceps and my daughter has not had a menstrual period since her vaccine two years ago. No one will even admit the injury let alone find a culprit and likewise with energy. The politicians will blame the scientists, the scientists will blame the politicians. Both tell lies and both walk away with large chunks of our money. Both should be in jail.
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Say Australia ran entirely on solar and wind. What difference would it make to anything except massive electricity prices
and the need to continually build and install solar and wind. With a lifespan of 20 years, you cannot stop. You have to duplicate it all every 20 years.
So the costs never stop.
But, even if you believe everything, what is the benefit to Australia in terms of Climate? I would love to hear an explanation from our Climate Minister.
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Australia could well turn out to be the lucky country.
The rest of the world is giving up on solar power, batteries and EVs just as China takes over global manufacturing of solar panels, batteries and EVs. Australia has the most sunshine of any nation and is the perfect dumping ground for all stuff China cannot sell to someone else because Australia has the iron ore and coal to trade for it.
With solar panels at $500/kW and batteries at $200/kWh I would readily go off grid in the knowledge that I could make power cheaper than any grid alternative.
The Australian electricity grid back in its zenith around 2000 had evolved from local power companies before 1940; through municipalities and local councils in the 40s to 60s ; to State run enterprise in the 60s to 80s and finally to market driven private owners from the mid 1990s. That was before the free market principles were tossed out. The point is that the progressive innovation makes obsolescence a certainty. So a lifetime of 20 years is acceptable for many things. Cars that are well maintained and not driven continuously (like taxis) will give a service life of 20 years or more but by then technology has passed them by.
Long run, the world will likely have a mix of distributed generation from solar with battery storage and industrial generation from fusion. It is emerging that gas and fission are inevitable steeping stones to that future.
Animal life exists on Earth today only through the ability of biomass to cleave carbon and hydrogen from the atmosphere and ground water. Humans should never devalue the importance of biomass. So solar panels should be used in ways that do not impinge on the production of biomass.
When you think about it, trees are just solar batteries. Storing sunshine in a chemical form. But they have created the conditions amenable to animal life. Humans must always work in harmony with the biomass. I have little doubt that early industrial impact on Australia was detrimental. All the timber that was cleared for farming; used for heating; used for building and feeding smelters was a climatic disaster. Nurturing biomass should always be the top priority for human civilisation.
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But trees are no better than grasses. And we cannot eat trees or grasses but we can eat seeds and fruit. So you can have your biomass without your trees.
Yes, the cost of solar panels may drop much lower then manufacturing cost, which is great. But they have a limited lifespan. It’s not a plan for the future. And if there is no profit in making solar panels, they will stop being made. And then you have nothing.
Trees are still a major problem for farming. They are just one part of the biomass. I expect the majority is in the phytoplankton which cover 72% of the planet. They feed everyone. When we left the oceans, after the plants and grasses, ferns and then trees we had to find a way to live. We were carnivores. And then fruit eaters. Only in the last 10,000 years have we been growing our own food and trees get in the way.
If we lock up good agricultural land with trees, it’s no solution. And that’s the 35% tax on all large Australian businesses who do anything. It all goes into growing trees. So everything is more expensive and we get more trees. I am lost as to what problem that solves?
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The sort of biomass does not matter much. It is its ability to retain water on land that is important. Trees beget water; beget trees. But the trees can be replaced with any biomass.
My point is that it is anti-human to knock down trees to install solar panels.
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Understandably, people don’t want windmills near them. Especially Dr Bob Brown in NW Tasmania.
Windmills have to be on flat plains or preferably on ridges. Ridges are hard places to grow trees and in practice this ends up with clearing the lines of sight of protected National parks and replacing ridge trees with windmills.
Like all Green initiatives, it means disregarding all environmental protections just to install windmills. And then far more to get power lines through to the windmills.
In Australia, the entire footprint of coal power plants is about 400 acres and no more power lines have to be built. The devastation from windmills and their massive web of otherwise unnecessary power lines is against every principle of a protected forest environment and landscape.
Then both the windmill blade and solar panels are full of long life toxic poisons which would be banned under environmental rules where coal, oil and gas are by definition natural.
The massive environmental damage form wind farms smashes any concept of conservation. But every exception is made. So we have the appalling destruction of our remaining forests to save the humans? From what exactly?
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RickWill,
The only reason that solar (and wind) are so cheap is because most of the energy required to manufacture them is powered by coal and gas and oil . If renewables were to be manufactured by renewable energy they would be extremely expensive and totally unviable .
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But China can burn our coal, Russian oil and gas to make solar panels and batteries for Australia. All done at marginal cost as Australia becomes the only place willing to take them at that cost.
Basically the solar panels are congealed energy that can be returned over their operating life.
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I’m not sure where the battery cost of only $200/kWh comes from. CO2 advised some time ago that the WA large-scale battery installation cost $1000/kWh, and today the proposed Earring battery upgrade is estimated to cost around $500/kWh, and no doubt will further increase before it’s completed.
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I stated “if” #200/kWh. That is on the basis of China dumping them in Australia at marginal cost. Australia has no battery industry to protect. China have likely overshot on their battery manufacturing capacity like they did with solar panels.
It does not matter how hard China works to influence the UN, most of the world is running out of climate ambition. Australia is lagging in that regard.
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Interesting that the NON OECD share of primary energy consumption by source in 2023 from fossil fuels = 93.13%.
But the clueless OECD = 88.56% in 2023 after destroying forests and other environments for nothing.
And that’s all the countries of the world that belong to either the NON OECD or the OECD.
And after the OECD wasting trillions of $ since 1990 the OECD difference in 2023 is just 4.57%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-consumption-by-source?country=~Non-OECD+%28EI%29
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I believe that there is a better graph that clearly shows the changes of electricity cost against CPI changes, and how, after 2009 when renewables began to impact our grids, the electricity cost moved rapiodly upwards and away from the CPI cost increases.
Stephen Wilson included this graph is his recent IPA report, “The Ruinous Cost of Free Electricity”. Download the full report and look at Figure 1.
https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/research-papers/the-ruinous-cost-of-free-energy-why-an-electricity-system-built-on-renewable-is-the-most-expensive-of-all-options
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My Mac OS will not view .webp images so I had to open the pdf report. Figure 1 is indeed a better reflection of the cost increase than just looking at wholesale price.
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Sorry, the link should have been directly to the report.
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So yesterday driving around regional Victoria for work. Caught a couple of news bulletins on radio. Talking about 20% increase in wholesale electricity prices and how it will affect power bills etc. But the reasoning for these increases – apparently a lack of wind resources in one bulletin. Then another mentioned a wind drought, recently. So the spin doctors at AEMO are saying a lack of renewables is causing future price increases and that the low wind conditions that happened back in April: May are also to blame. Explain that to me again? That is complete BS.
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It will have to do until they can spin a better one.
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I’m guessing that this is because more gas has to be used in the southern states, and because they don’t use their own gas, their gas costs are very high. In WA, where the gas cost is about half that, our electricity prices have only increased by 2.5%, around one cent/kWh, and we still use gas as the majority energy source, with coal a close second. My average daily cost in winter is only $5/day, and it’s been a cold winter.
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What I see Chris Bowen doing now is sneaking gas and deisel fired power generation into Labour’s energy mix to keep the power on in order to buy more time to roll out his boondoggle of 28,000km transmission lines to service his renewable superpower dream. This is not only sneaky but dangerous for Australians because it is an attempt to side-line the vital nuclear power option proposed by the Liberal/National opposition. Meanwhile Bowen hopes Australians will fall for his ruse that renewables are solely responsible for keeping the lights on and industry functioning.
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Great info as always Jo.
I’m curious as to how much AEMO has swayed the regulations to favour the “Intermittent” Electricity sources? (I’m not using the Rene###les tag) Wasn’t the market system changed from .5 hour blocks to 5min blocks to suit the variable output of the intermittent producers? Also, why was the market situation created in the first place? I believe this was bought in after various state owned systems where privatised? Wasn’t it originally the responsibility of each state Government to provide reliable power at the cheapest cost to the customers?
The biggest issue now seems to be that all Government and Bureaucrat heads are infected with the Climate Catastrophe cult and have total bought into the “CO2 is bad” lie where there is no longer rational thought on the subject of Australia’s minuscule contributions to GHG percentage or China’s free reign on output etc.
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The Labor government in Victoria of Cain Kirner as now the Andrews Allen through ideology and mismanagement sent Victoria broke and Labor in fact started the sell off of the successful SEC. Kennet rightly wanted to smash the militant unions and so completed the task. Andrews, enough said ,and here we are. Communist Victoria
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Earlier I said the NON OECD share of primary energy consumption by source in 2023 from fossil fuels = 93.13%.
But the clueless OECD = 88.56% in 2023 after destroying forests and animals and their environments for nothing.
And that’s all the countries of the world that belong to either the NON OECD or the OECD.
And after the OECD wasting trillions of $ down the drain since 1990 the OECD difference in 2023 is just 4.57%.
I still say that unreliable, super expensive, toxic W & S is the greatest BS and fraud and waste of money in Human history.
Here’s the OECD link that’s very easy to understand.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-consumption-by-source?country=~OECD+%28EI%29
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Another iteration of
“The hurrier they go the behinder we get”
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Well even Black Rock’s Larry Fink knows that toxic W & S are just more BS and fraud and the USA and the World will need much more energy to service the Cloud and AI.
Here’s Physicist and energy expert Mark Mills informing the US Senate about the massive new energy demands.
This is from June 2024 and just 5 minutes and see video down page at the link.
https://www.climatedepot.com/2024/06/21/ai-energy-detransition-energy-analyst-mark-p-mills-testifies-to-congress-on-how-massive-electricity-demand-for-ai-means-policymakers-can-no-longer-entertain-the-idea-of-an-energy-transition/
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I saw this posted on Farcebook.
This is the problem when you have a simpleton like Chrissy Bowen in charge of Australia’s energy supply.
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Give the man a break. He’s unemployable. And not understanding any science he considers an asset in making decisions. If you took all such people out of positions of power, there would be mass unemployment.
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Let’s not forget the lying ideological public servants who feed him all the bullsh#t that he sprukes. The man is not capable of understanding facts .
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The science is settled.
https://files.catbox.moe/qh3bfx.jpg
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Canada’s version of our ‘Stolen Generation’ narrative.
The cost of a hoax
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Listen to ABC News correspondent Pierre Thomas make the Freudian slip of the CENTURY…
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177 page UN report on population replacement in Western nations.
Replacement Migration
Population Division
Department of Economic and Social Affairs
United Nations Secretariat
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd-egm_200010_un_2001_replacementmigration.pdf
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This is the situation in the state of Maine, where I live.
Our state legislature passed laws giving huge subsidies to developers (85% of which are from out of state) to develop solar “farms”, and at the same time, requiring current electric companies (CMP and Versant) to increase their billing in order to “recoup” the subsidies.
Result is that prices have gone sky-high, and all of the citizens are blaming the power companies, while the politicians are all laughing behind closed doors.
My wife and I pay approx. $200-$300/mo for a 1400sqft home, no electric heat, all bulbs LED, and no electric hot water.
Meanwhile, Maine’s average residential electricity rate is 23 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is 29% higher than the national average of 17 cents per kWh.
Also, just about every square foot of space now hosts a field of solar panels.
In MAINE. For those that aren’t aware, we’re a NORTHERN STATE, cold winters, SNOW, short days…
Total idiocy. More solar, more wind, higher prices.
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Jo,
Here is another view of what happened to domestic electricity prices, to complement yours. IIRC, you have used this format youirself before now.
These numbers are from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is usually regarded as a neutral observer, to show Consumer Price Index movements. The basket of goods that is shown is commonly used as an estimate of how your monthly household bill changes, while the line for electricity is a guide to the movement in your power bills. At some past date, for comparison, they are set equal to show if one increases or decreases with respect to the other. They are not dollar values like wholesale or retail prices, but they are comparable indices.
Geoff S
https://www.geoffstuff.com/cpigraph.jpg
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“community hatred of high voltage lines is spoiling the market for developers. ”
Time to dig out all the research about the dangers of living near high-tension lines. There might be some interesting figures about cancer rates for those living nearby.
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Double the needed capacity means more than double the price.
But you can top that, at first install the needed capacity with solar modules.
This can’t work because there is the night, so to fill the gaps needed during the night with wind turbines
And for the days without wind and the nights use coal-fired power generators.
And so you got more than triple the price.
It’s not magic, it’s politics.
10