Via The Australian today:
Craig Kelly has doubled down on his comments suggesting renewable energy will cause deaths this winter, saying dozens more people could die if power prices aren’t brought down.
Mr Kelly, whose claims were described as “ridiculous” by some of his backbench colleagues, said the cost of electricity is the “number one issue” facing Australians.
“If we look at the numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, on an average day in June or July, you have 500 people, Australians, die,” he told 2GB Radio.
…Mr Kelly, chair of the Coalition’s backbench energy and environment committee, said unrealistic and high renewable energy targets were forcing up prices. South Australia, he said, now has the world’s highest household electricity prices in the world.
“How in this nation we have such abundant coal, such abundant gas, such abundant uranium, a nation that is an energy superpower, how do you go about getting the world’s most expensive energy?” he said.
“The answer is simple, you go down the South Australian track and say ‘let’s have a 50 per cent renewable energy target’. You’d think we would be learning from South Australia, but instead, we’ve got Bill Shorten wanting to copy that for the entire nation.”
It is actually pretty simple. Gas will kill this winter, people and businesses:
Gas, not renewables, sets the marginal cost of electricity in the NEM owing to where it sits in the wholesale electricity market bid stack. See Australian Energy Market Operator description below:
It has been a rough consensus for fifteen years that Australia would undertake decarbonisation via the transitional fuel of gas as a bridge to renewables. It may be that SA outperformed other states in attracting renewable investment but that is largely because it has the best assets for it in consistent wind and sun. What disrupted the plan was not SA over-investment, nor coal power closing, it was the price of gas which has launched 600% owing to Curtis Island exports and cartel discriminatory pricing.
The only way to reduce power bills short term is to force the price of gas lower using draconian anti-monopoly regulation. Sadly the government cocked that up by failing to install a gas reservation mechanism wide enough, deep enough and quickly enough to make any short term difference. The gas price is a national crisis, even the government declared it so, yet it has been treated in policy terms like a Sunday stroll.
Alas, we now appear destined to take the worse case scenario. Demand destruction will be the key to adjustment ahead. Any deaths can be sheeted home to this.
I just hope that we get some kind of effective cartel busting mechanism operational in the medium term. Otherwise as local gas consumption falls, the cartel will raise prices even further to offset volume losses.
