Today heralds a new day in Labor’s energy meltdown. Albo will travel to the Hunter:
Anthony Albanese will launch a six-week Made-in-Australia pre-budget campaign in the coalmining Hunter region of NSW, where he will announce a $1bn investment in the Solar Sunshot program to claim a bigger stake in global solar manufacturing supply chains.
The Australian can reveal the Prime Minister is preparing to put significant money on the table in support of Labor’s net-zero transition plan ahead of the May 14 budget and next year’s federal election.
As Jim Chalmers and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen finalise new clean energy incentives in the budget, Mr Albanese on Friday will travel to the former Liddell coal-fired power station and unveil $1bn in production subsidies and grants to ensure more solar panels are built in Australia and the Hunter.
Marvellous stuff. I don’t know whether it will succeed, and it will surely rely upon Chinese investment, given they have all the best IP, bought years ago from UNSW as John Howard slept. So, I’m not sure how made in Australia it will be.
But we’ll let that slide.
Also, in The Hunter, today is a second political process that says more about Albo than a few panels reflecting his arsehole. It is this:
New South Wales may end up paying $150m a year to subsidise the extension of Australia’s biggest coal-fired power plant, money better spent accelerating the take-up of rooftop solar with storage, Tim Buckley, an energy analyst said.
It comes as the Labor government will on Thursday announce $1bn for solar panel manufacturing in Australia, with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, travelling to the Hunter region to spruik the government’s new Net Zero Economy Authority.
Origin Energy and the NSW Minns Labor government are still negotiating whether to keep open all or part of the 2.88 gigawatt Eraring plant. In 2022, Origin said it would close the facility – which supplies as much as a quarter of NSW’s electricity – by August 2025.
Amusingly, the more Albo’s “sunshine out my arse” for solar panels work, the more need there will be for NSW, VIC and QLD to subsidise their failing coal power plants.
This is because more household solar means ever-lower daytime power prices. That sounds good, but coal plants can’t turn off, so they keep pumping loss-making power right on through.
Hence, they are closing. That was the plan!
Except for a tiny wrinkle: the battery and power storage systems to replace coal have not been built. The original plan was for gas-fired power to replace coal for twenty years while batteries caught up.
But all the gas has been sucked up by the East Coast Gas Cartel and shipped to China.
And get this. Hilariously, the Gas Cartel includes Origin Energy, the owner of Eraring. Origin has masterminded a rentier position so extreme that it:
- sells cheap Aussie gas to China to keep the local market short and the price high;
- rendering gas power very expensive in Australia and driving up wholesale power prices for all its assets;
- then demands subsidies to run its dying coal plant to support the energy transition to less…coal.
Origin also sponsors the energy think tank Grattan Institute, whose former executive, Tony Wood, recommended much of the above to the government.
And on top of all of that, the same gaggle of Labor morons off the Hunter today have instituted retail energy bill subsidies to prevent the mess from inflating bills from skyrocketing the CPI even further.
The failure was too apparent there, and Labor was paying a political price via rising interest rates. So, Labor is shifting the payments to the energy cartels instead into higher taxes, where its incredible energy debacle can be hidden in perpetuity.
