It’s wondrous what can pass as rational if you have no memory. Decontextualised information can be made to sound…sound…even though it is completely bonkers.
Take this from the poisonous Australian:
Special payments will be needed to keep ageing coal-fired and gas power stations in business to avoid future spikes in electricity prices, under a national plan to shore up the energy grid.
A new capacity mechanism recommended by the Energy Security Board will put incentives in place to stop the early closure of power plants and create long-term signals for investment in dispatchable generation.
The ESB’s post-2025 market design recommends four reforms of the electricity network to replace and secure baseload power, avoid price hikes and ensure long-term grid reliability.
Signalling the end of the nation’s coal-fired power fleet, the country’s energy ministers have also backed a revamp of the electricity market that transitions from traditional coal and gas assets to pumped-hydro, battery, wind and gas generation.
With half of the nation’s coal generation expected to exit the market around 2030, a shift to “fast and flexible” dispatchable power options will be accelerated under the proposed technology-neutral capacity mechanism.
The mechanism allows energy retailers to purchase certificates from generators to lock in supply and prevent the retirements of coal and gas plants, avoiding a repeat of blackouts and price spikes that occurred when the Northern and Hazelwood power stations shut.
The price spikes didn’t happen because the coal plants closed. That was a long-expected and welcome development. The problem was that gas-fired power couldn’t fill the baseload gap as planned, owing to the formation of a gas export cartel. The cartel shipped all of the cheap local gas to China as LNG and starved the National Electricity Market of “transitional fuel” just as the coal plants closed, triggering massive gas and power price spikes.
Coal-fired power is NOT dispatchable. It can’t turn on and off. Hence it is only viable as renewables baseload if paid to stay on by consistent demand or by subsidies. Gas-fired power is dispatchable. It can start and stop quickly but only if it has fuel.
All east coast energy consumers are still massively subsidising this China-sponsored gas-export cartel via high utility bills. Now they will have to pay higher taxes to subsidise the coal power plants as well. It is an incredible tale of policy butchery, corporate treason and media failure that means we will pay to pollute much longer than we needed to.
It should all have been fixed with the stroke of a pen. If the Morrison Government had installed domestic reservation for gas in 2017 we’d have cheap power, coal plants disappearing fast, and no stolen subsidies.
Myth has overtaken fact in the Australian power market to cover a Morrison Government enabled gas cartel rort on the scale of Enron.
