Wind Industry Demands Even More Subsidies for Pointless Transmission Lines
June 10, 202Wind power will never truly compete with reliable generators, hence the endless subsidies. Now, the wind industry wants even more subsidies to pay for the transmission lines that would allow it to send its chaotic wares halfway across Australia.
The claim is that another so-called ‘interconnector’ will help South Australian wind power outfits to deliver electricity across the border to NSW, at 1970s prices.
The reality is that taxpayers will fork out hundreds of $millions of dollars every year on added transmission costs, just to allow South Australian wind farms to occasionally dump some electricity on NSW consumers, and further undermine the stability of its grid.
One point raised in the pitch for the interconnector was that, with wind turbines spread far and wide, connecting them would ‘smooth out’ the weather-driven variability in output, across states. STT has smashed that myth in numerous posts, over the years.
The combined total capacity of all of the wind turbines hooked up to the Eastern Grid is 8,132 MW. And yet, notwithstanding being spread across an enormous geographical expanse, Australia’s whirling wonders often struggle to collectively produce more than 200-300 MW, representing less than 2-3 percent of all that monumentally expensive generating capacity – see above and this post: Total Joke: Australian Wind Farms Regularly Deliver Tiny Fraction of Their Total Capacity
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