The energy debate in Australia remains paralytically stupid. Readers will recall the following:
- Gas exports via QLD skyrocketed local gas prices from 2014. Indeed local prices were pushed much higher than those in the export destinations of gas-poor north Asia.
- The price hikes from $2Gj to $20Gj cascaded through utility bills directly for gas and secondarily via electricity because gas-fired power is the marginal price setter in the National Electricity Market.
- Successive corrupt Coalition governments instead blamed the price hikes on renewables when all they needed to do was reserve enough gas for local use. Like WA does.
- China took most of the QLD gas even as it turned into a national enemy. It was literally using this gas to build a military with which to threaten Australian freedom even as high local gas prices hollowed out our own industrial capcacity to fight it.
- This crowning glory of suicidal policymaking culminated in Morrison’s “gas-led recovery” post-COVID which was no more than a fig leaf for Santos to pollute the Great Artesian Basin by fracking all of NW NSW even though the lack of domestic reservation still guaranteed astronomical prices.
- At various times I have noted that this policy corruption dwarfs anything ever seen in any emerging market. Indeed it makes Enron look like child’s play. Simply put, it is the greatest single resource curse in the history of extractive industries. No worries.
But it did have one upside! The process of creating immensely expensive power, driven by exorbitant gas prices, was, in effect, a corrupt carbon tax because it priced gas out as a source of power. The only difference with the Labor carbon price was that it was not paid for by polluters, but by consumers to polluters via their astronomical utility bills.
Six years later we see the results:
The exponential rise of renewable energy led to it providing more than 30% of Australia’s electricity in 2021, while gas-fired power fell to its lowest level in 16 years.
Data collected by OpenNEM, an open source platform, shows renewable energy provided 31.4% of electricity within the national market covering the eastern states and South Australia last year.
The national figure has quickly surged beyond the national renewable energy target, which required electricity retailers to sell about 23% of generation from solar, wind and hydro plants by 2020.
This is pure economics in action. Gas is no longer viable (unless subsidised by an idiot, such as the Morrison Government in Kurri Kurri):
With more ahead:
So, congratulations Australia. Rather than take a free carbon price that was paid entirely by polluters, you voted for one that you pay to polluters via huge utility bill hikes, industrial hollowing out, national strategic vulnerability, unparalleled environmental destruction and rampant federal corruption.
I sincerely wish that I was making this up.
