Turnbull finds way to cut bills, emissions

The thread header is a bit misleading...Turnbull can't do anything about power pricing as he does not own the generators. He cannot reduce the bills because his pig headed attitude and love of everything green is pushing the prices up and up!

Recall the below article written by Piers Ackerman back in June when Turnbull was still hugging Alan Finkel and regarded him as a hero for putting together a report that said everything Turnbull wanted to say.

Quite obviously the Cabinet has told dopey Turnbull to pull his fat head in...he will destroy the LNP unless someone reads him the riot act!
I hope they finally have...

THE Finkel report is a blueprint for destruction — of the Australian economy and destruction of the Liberal Party.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull would do himself a huge favour if he dumped the irrevocably flawed Finkel report immediately. Moreover, he would save the nation and his party from obliteration.

Chief Scientist Alan Finkel presented a document which only highlights how ridiculous Australia’s political and media classes have been with their kneejerk responses to the global Green-Labor inspired hysteria over the intensely disputed claims of global warming.

His report fails at every level. The claims that are made in his name just don’t stand up, the modelling he relied on is as shoddy as the modelling used by such notoriously inaccurate forecasters as Tim Flannery, whose disgraceful legacy is a raft of energy-consuming desalination plants costing taxpayers hundreds of millions.

The Finkel report foundered within a week of its launch when energy companies announced immediate power price increases in the order of 15-20 per cent. According to Dr Finkel’s report, his modelling showed that the cost of power would increase this year by about 3 per cent. It was hopelessly wrong and that’s just the first of a multitude of disastrous errors.

The second is one of omission. The report doesn’t address the enormous cost of energy storage, batteries, etc., essential to the safe usage of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. This would run into the hundreds of millions.

Dr Finkel also misses another basic cost — the cost of building and connecting the theoretical 4000-5000 wind turbines and solar cells that his report calls for. The expense of these additional sources of energy would run into the billions. Again, there is no mention of cost in the report.

There is a fourth point that must similarly be made — and again, it’s not mentioned in the Finkel report — is the horrendous cost of guaranteeing constant frequency, that is, a stable frequency of the electricity running across the power grid.

Anyone who has had any experience with using electricity generators would know how much the frequency can rise and fall as the load is increased or decreased and that, when the frequency is erratic, equipment can and does fail. We’re not talking about highly sensitive equipment either. Most modern white goods require a stable frequency delivery which solar and wind generation just cannot provide.

The Greens, Labor and sandal-wearing self-composting inner urban activists won’t tell you but the grid is currently (no pun intended) kept stable because huge spinning turbines powered by coal, gas and hydro are constantly at work providing the critical base load power necessary to prevent your light bulbs from exploding, your fridge from thawing and your washing machine from coming to a shuddering halt whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun sets.

Those turbines help synchronise the input of the irregular solar and wind energy — and as solar and wind provide more energy, so the cost of adjusting their contribution to provide the constant frequency necessary to operate the grid and stop it from blowing up increases.
Those turbines are like giant flywheels.

They provide the inertia necessary to keep the power frequency pulsating within the fine tolerances demanded by electrical equipment.

The whole debate about renewable energy targets (RET) is rotten. It is based on the provision of a tradeable certificate for every megawatt/hour of wind or solar power. Without too much brain stress, if the average wind generator produces three megawatts per hour for which an average of $80 is paid and the tower is in operation an average of eight hours a day, the sum is 3x8x365x$80 which is $700,800 per year.

That’s right, each wind tower — before it earns a dollar from the sale of electricity — is taking money from electricity users and it’s because of this not-so-hidden subsidy that wind can compete with coal. A nice little earner. Where does the money go? Most goes offshore, much of it to China.

That’s right, the country that buys our cheap coal for its inexpensive coal burning power plants and manufactures wind generators and solar cells that will provide expensive energy to us — energy so costly that what remains of our industrial base will migrate to nations with cheap baseload, increasing unemployment, welfare and social misery.

Remember how the South Australian Labor government cheered when it blew up the power plant at Port Augusta — and recall how SA lost its power because the grid couldn’t cope with its renewable energy?

The Victorian Labor government is as dumb, forcing the premature closure of the Hazelwood coal-fired power plant earlier this year.
As the number of major power consumers decline, the cost to average households must increase merely to pay for the network upkeep.

Federal Liberal MP Craig Kelly, whose electorate of Hughes in Sydney’s southwest, houses middle and low-income voters, is a leader of the growing number of Liberals concerned at the extraordinary lack of rigour apparent in the Finkel report.

He has already noticed that increasing numbers of his constituents have turned to wood fires this winter as the soaring cost of electricity makes conventional heaters prohibitively expensive.

In parts of Kelly’s electorate, pollution levels from wood burning already exceed World Health Organisation levels and there are warnings about the carcinogenic nature of the soot being pumped out.

This is Third World stuff, except that countries we used to think were Third World, like India and China, are using Aussie coal to keep themselves warm and power their industries.

How did we get so stupid?

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...s/news-story/42284b4c97a6133cb5ebd4e07047352f