cougar and eneabba, page-8

Article in Herald Sun today

Your power bill will triple

YOUR electricity bills are going to at least double in the next 10 years and relentlessly rising power prices could easily triple them.

If, that is, and when, you actually get the electricity. Because just as certainly we are headed for a downunder world of power brownouts and blackouts, when the lights - and everything else: fridges, air conditioners, ovens - are quite literally turned off.

This will be the case in every state, with the single possible exception of Tasmania, thanks to the hydro power that the Greens hate almost as much as the mainland's coal-fired generators.

There is one reason and one person to blame: the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He is condemning all Australians to this literally dim and very expensive future, whether or not Penny Wong's ETS Dead Parrot is brought to life.

The CEO of Origin Energy, Grant King, explicitly predicted the price rises in an important speech to CEDA - the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia - in Sydney on Tuesday.

And I quote: "We think it is quite possible that, by 2020, the price of energy to consumers will be two to three times what it is today."

He was slightly less explicit in blaming Rudd. He said the price rises would be driven "largely by the current policy environment, large amounts of renewables being forced into the system, uncosted charges for those renewables given current policy settings, and substantial increases in transmission and distribution costs".

Who's responsible for the "current policy environment"? Who's forcing "large amounts of renewables into the system"? And who's responsible for all the consequent cost increases for transmission and the like?

Two words: our Kevin.

King also noted that our "traditional fuels" for electricity generation, otherwise known as coal, would get more expensive as they were "repriced to much more internationally consistent pricing".

Let me put that into English. The price of coal is going up. Why? Because more and more people want to put it into power stations and steels mills.

That's, into power stations and mills outside Australia.

You could not ask for a more exquisite condemnation of the utter stupidity from the prime minister down.

Other people, obviously mainly the Chinese, desperately want the coal we are demonising; and in the process render utterly irrelevant any efforts on our part to reduce its use in domestic power generation.

Grant's speech was mostly a powerful statement of rationality. That the supposedly pitiful 5 per cent target for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by 2020 was both actually punitive and impossible.

As I've previously outlined, thanks to our soaring population, it means we have to reduce per capita emissions by something close to one-third. And do so in just 10 years.

In a word: impossible. Unless we literally just turn off the power. In practice, if we persist, that's exactly what will happen. But not necessarily by choice.

This is prime ministerial stupidity of truly Herculean proportions. Embracing the fundamentally conflicting policies of reducing energy use and growing our population faster than any other developed country.

Where King went off the rationality path though was in his rather casual assumption that we would nevertheless have enough electricity by 2020.

After he had explicitly said, it was now too late to put in place sufficient new generation. Unless, the implication, we sharply and immediately forced up the price of carbon and so the price of coal-fired power.

Why? Because then companies like Origin would happily build new gas-fired power stations, the only sort that can actually get done in that time-frame.

They'd build them because their power price would then be "competitive" with coal-fired power. That's to say, equally more expensive.

At least King blew the whistle well and truly on wind power. Although he didn't quite put it in those terms - he's got too big an investment in the rort. And heck, if governments are stupid enough to demand he 'produces' power that way, he'll do it and we'll foot the bill.

"In order to supply 7000 megawatts of growing demand between now and 2020, if the renewable target is met by wind, we will need to build about 13,000 megawatts," he said.

"Because we will also need to build around 6000 megawatts of open-cycle gas turbine to balance out that (wind) intermittency."

Just absorb the stupidity of that and the utter waste and uselessness of wind. We have to build a second power station for every wind one. A second expensive gas one along with every even more expensive wind one!

There is an alternative, sane, future that King didn't explore. One that limited price rises to perhaps 50 per cent over the 10 years.

We build half-a-dozen new brown and black coal-fired power stations. With no additional charge on the carbon.

It would give us cheap power, plentiful power, reliable power. Just like in China and India. And what we 'used to have' in Australia, looking back from 2020 and beyond.


This is probably the reason why Len is choosing to take the power generation path rather than GTL.