Without wind, solar and battery storage, Australian households and businesses would have faced wholesale electricity prices up to between $30/MWh and $80/MWh higher than they were last year, and paid an estimated $155 – $417 more for household electricity bills.
Dutton blames renewables for rising power prices, but bills would be much higher without them
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There are regularly posts online which attempt to manipulate readers by showing a graph of places with expensive electricity, and the amounts of renewables they have. The right wing manipulation is to insinuate that renewables drove those expensive prices, however, these folks purposely ignore reality.
All of those places they show, like Australia, long have had expensive electricity – and that is partially why they chose to go renewables. For instance, Australia has some of the world’s largest volumes of natural gas – relative to the US on a per capita basis – and it COULD be cheap as fuck there. However, Australian energy companies have 100% put their company’s gas industry on the global market – which is 5 times the price of the US domestic market, which is what Australia could have…but doesn’t.
Same as the UK.
So really, this post is to show, that renewables do in fact offer cheaper pricing.
Which is funny, because at the same time that right wing monkeys says renewables make it more expensive – they also complain that renewables don’t work because they drive the cost of electricity to zero during the daytime solar peaks…lots of BS.
Now I personally love the idea of solar and wind turbine , I especially love the idea of a battery for every home . But this report is a bit suspicious as it’s a report done by an investing group , looking for more investors . Not saying it’s a bad thing it’s just pointing out it’s kind of like Phillip morris publishing a report on the health benefits of smoking . ( they actually did that back in the day ) .
As I tried to read the report and the findings it was a bit complicated, as they sited the cost of repairing older infrastructure, this to me is a misnomer as the money for improving such infrastructures would be equivalent across the board either by implementing it thru renewables which , maintaining such is as costly as mainting gas or coal burning .
To my knowledge nothing beats price per megawatts to that as nuclear . But the report also states that by having alternative means of electricity generation would drive down prices due to increased competition. Which makes since .
But what’s confusing to me is the supposed tax on carbon emissions that seems to be the driving factor for the report . But at this point my brain is fried trying to make sense of the whole thing . For which makes it harder for me to believe the report . This seems to be deliberately designed as such , hence my skepticism. But i still would love to more alternative means of electricity generation . As diversity is always a good thing .