Morrison gas cartel delivers new energy shock with added treason

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This is such a bad analysis that I don’t know where to look:

Outages at coal fired power stations have pushed up gas prices on the east coast of Australia spiked, sending wholesale electricity prices surging across the National Electricity Market.

Spot gas prices hit $19.31 a gigajoule in Brisbane on April 9, according to the latest report from gas industry analyst EnergyQuest, helping send wholesale electricity prices up to an average $232 a megawatt hour in Queensland and $211 a megawatt hour in NSW.

…“Overall, domestic gas prices have been on an upward trend for months due to high international prices and any disruption to domestic production, such as electricity generation outages, pushes domestic prices even higher,” the EnergyQuest report said.

But, with demand for liquefied natural gas falling in Asia as high prices forced buyers to consider alternatives and lockdowns in China taking a toll, EnergyQuest chief executive Graeme Bethune said the sharp spike in domestic prices was not the result of additional exports of gas from the east coast.

“The spike in domestic gas prices does not appear to be due to any increase in LNG export volumes. In February Gladstone shipped an average of one LNG cargo per day but slightly less at 0.9 cargoes per day in March and in the first half of April,” Mr Bethune said.

“Nor do increases in electricity prices appear to be closely correlated to coal prices. Newcastle thermal coal prices reached a record $US430/tonne in March but were $US276/tonne by mid-April.”

Instead, outages at key coal-fired power plants in Victoria and NSW appear to have caused the spike in both power and domestic gas prices, along with a seasonal fall in solar generation as autumn rains set in across the NEM.

That is rubbish. Both coal and LNG prices have gone through the roof globally thanks to Ukraine. Because the local gas export cartel has attached local prices to those, they have risen here as well. It is no more complex than that.

Gas, not coal, sets the price of electricity in the NEM. It is the marginal price fuel that can turn on and off as required. Not coal. 

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Ipso facto the Morrison Government sponsored gas cartel – which refuses to use domestic reservation to keep local prices attached to local production costs – is directly responsible for the new power price shock shaking east coast power markets.

Let’s recall that the Turnbull Government tried to fix this in 2017 but its form of gas reservation was too weak and only held prices down for a few years.

When prices rose again in 2019, the last patriot in the Aussie parliament, Rex Patrick, demanded from the Morrison Government a stronger gas reservation regime in return for the very high-income household tax cuts that are now considered by many to be stupid.

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In short, the Morrison Government took the tax cuts but bald-faced lied to the Australian senate on the written contract to deliver gas reservation. This is corruption on a scale of scores of billions of dollars.

The final kicker is this. Three-quarters of the gas is going to China. In part, it uses it to build the very weapons that will threaten Australian freedoms, while the power shock here ravages our ability to build anything at all with which to defend ourselves. Including such basics as explosives. Even as the Morrison Government claims to be strong on China and national security.

This is what happens when your country loses all of its bearings in an election of pure propaganda that itself belongs in China.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.