Renewable Power Australia – Paying A Saudi Billionaire To Wreck On Electricity

By Andrew Bolt ~

Let me demonstrate how our politicians are spending billions to give you more expensive and unreliable electricity just to pretend to stop global warming that they pretend is catastrophic.

We are paying a Saudi billionaire $300 million to pretend to make a difference to the climate by ruining our electricity supply:

Moree Solar Plant

Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.

AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030, as the government vows to ease the pressure on prices.

Former Nationals MP Ron Boswell says end these mad subsidies:

In recent years, the renewable energy target has delivered subsidies of about $9 billion to renewable projects. And over the next 13 years, renewable projects will receive another $36bn…

More than any other policy action before or since, the RET [renewable energy target] is responsible for today’s energy mess. Force-feeding high-cost, unreliable energy into the National Electricity Market killed off any investment in baseload energy and made the grid more expensive and more unstable…

The simple fact is that a new clean energy target would simply be renaming and extending the RET… At a CET certificate price of $60 a megawatt hour, wind and solar will receive consumer subsidies of $60/MWh, while a new, ultra-supercritical coal plant would receive just $3.75/MWh.

The problem is that a CET values emissions intensity but not security of supply. As a result a CET is heavily weighted towards unreliable renewable energy and fails to recognise the necessity of baseload energy. The Finkel review effectively conceded this, arguing that under a CET renewable energy would more than double to almost 42 per cent…

If a wind farm gets guaranteed market share and an $60/MWh subsidy it is going to drive out lower-cost competitors such as gas and coal.

A good example of the staggering scale of renewable subsidies is the Moree Solar Farm in NSW. This project has received a $102m taxpayer grant and a $60m taxpayer-funded concessional loan, and will receive $141m in production subsidies (by 2030) … In the next 13 years, the project will receive more than $300m in subsidies but deliver about 1/68th (or 1.45 per cent) of the output of the Hazelwood power station that closed in Victoria earlier this year.

Nick Cater on the Renewable Energy Target:

The hypocrisy of the compassionate class takes your breath away. On one page The Sydney Morning Herald wails about the plight of the vulnerable, on the next page it’s slamming them with demands to increase the RET.

If there were a prize for most heartless headline of the year, Peter Martin’s column in the Herald last Saturday would have to be in the running. “Get real,” it read. “Electricity isn’t that expensive.”

No word — obviously — in Martin’s column about the jobs being lost because of high power prices. Perhaps it is because energy-stressed sectors employ a disproportionate number of blue-collar workers. Few graduates take up careers in steel fabrication.

Freezing the RET at the present level of 23.5 per cent will do little to ease the short-term burden, but it will at least send a signal that renewable energy must stand — or crumble — on its own two feet. The renewable sector must be made to carry the cost of its own instability instead of passing it on to mugs like us.

Andrew Bolt writes for the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, and The Advertiser and runs Australia’s most-read political blog. On week nights he hosts The Bolt Report on Sky News at 7pm and his Macquarie Radio show at 8pm with Steve Price.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog . http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Australian Solar Power Plants, Moree Solar Power Plant, Renewable Energy Target Australia, Renewable Power Subsidies, RET (Renewable Energy Target Australia), Solar Photovoltaic Power, Solar Power Generation

Posted in: Australia, Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Change, Electrical Power Generation, Fraud/Waste, Leftists (In the USA aka as Liberals-Progressives), Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Renewable Energy, Solar Power