ENERGY Regulator Report : Hazelwood Coal Plant Shutdown Drives Record Power Price Surge

WELCOME to the Australia! The lucky country with the world’s cheapest energy sources that now boasts the world’s highest electricity prices!

ENERGY rationing has always been a key feature of the Left’s misanthropic agenda of depopulationdeindustrialisation, enforced through punitive emissions controls, protected by the indisputable cloak of ‘climate change’ … the emotionally powered eco-cause engineered by the environmental movement of the 1970’s who realised that doing something about supposed catastrophic man-made global warming would play to quite a number of the Left’s social agendas.

STANFORD University and Royal Society’s resident global warming alarmist and population freak Paul R. Ehrlich spelled out the deindustrialisation objective with this attack on energy in 1976:

Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun
.”

– Prof Paul EhrlichStanford University/Royal Society

EHRLICH also wanted to poison black African’s in order to fight climate change. But, we’ll leave that conversation for another day. Ahem.

Paul Ehrlich.jpg

Paul R. Ehrlich | Center for Conservation Biology | Stanford

FORMER Australian PM Julia Gillard, who implemented Australia’s ill-fated 2011 carbon tax, was open in expressing its core function to drive substantial changes in patterns of energy production and energy use.’

GILLARD’S ideology synonymous with another well known eco-doomsayer and the creator, fabricator and proponent of global warming – UNEP’s founding father Maurice Strong:

Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” – Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN’s Earth Summit, 1992.

*

IN 2016, Victoria’s premier Dan Andrews took his State one step closer to Ehrlich and U.N. Strong’s energy-free utopia, with the closure of Hazelwood coal-fired power station, culling 22% of Victoria’s cheap, reliable energy supply and flipping the state from a power exporter to an importer.

COAL-fired power plant closures have been the order of the day for Australia’s virtue-signalling and global warming theory-obsessed political class who think that destroying the country’s industrial heartland, and imposing crippling energy-poverty on its citizens is a worthwhile price to pay for “saving the planet”.

THE result:

“Victorian wholesale prices were the highest on record and were up 85 per cent in 2017. New South Wales prices rose 63 per cent, Queensland was up 53 per cent and South Australia up 32 per cent.”

*

Matt Chambers writes in The Australian on the report from the Australian Energy Regulator on the record surge in power prices:

Screen Shot 2018-03-29 at 5.23.19 pm

The abrupt closure of the Hazelwood brown coal-fired power station in Victoria last year caused record wholesale power prices and flipped the state from a power exporter to an importer, the Australian Energy Regulator says.

But, in a report to the COAG Energy Council, the energy watchdog found no evidence of opportunistic or anti-competitive behaviour from remaining generators, despite the reduced competition.

“The impact of the Hazelwood closure has been, and continues to be, significant right across the National Electricity Market,” AER chair Paula Conboy said.

“High wholesale prices in the NEM are not unprecedented and indeed have been higher in the past, but the 2017 increases were sustained over the year and occurred simultaneously across the NEM.”

Victorian wholesale prices were the highest on record and were up 85 per cent in 2017. New South Wales prices rose 63 per cent, Queensland was up 53 per cent and South Australia up 32 per cent.

“The replacement of Hazelwood’s low-cost brown coal generation by higher-cost black coal, gas and hydro generation — coinciding with rising black coal and gas fuel prices during the period — was found to be the underlying driver of the wholesale price increases,” Ms Conboy said.

From the middle of the year, Victoria became a net importer of electricity for the first time in nearly 10 years, with increased imports of gas generation from South Australia, and black coal generation from NSW and Queensland.

“Our analysis did not identify instances where bidding behaviour normally associated with the exercise of market power significantly affected average prices,”Ms Conboy said.

The report found price offers from remaining Victorian generators were largely unchanged, with some gas-fired generators moving capacity to lower price bands.

But the AER said it would need to monitor longer-term issues.

“Ownership in the South Australian and Victorian markets is concentrated, with a few, largely vertically integrated participants controlling a significant proportion of capacity in both regions,” the report said.

The AER said it was too early to tell if prices will stay high.

The report was commissioned by Scott Morrison and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg to monitor the behaviour of generators in the wake of the rapid closure of Hazelwood, by France’s Engie, in March 2017, just four months after notice was given.

The Australian Energy Council, a lobby group representing major electricity and gas businesses, said the AER report supported the industry’s explanation for higher power prices.

“The AER did not find any abuse of market power, withholding of capacity or shift to offering higher prices for the same capacity,” AEC chief Matthew Warren said.

“Ultimately, higher-priced generation had to fill the supply gap and set the price more often, which is unsurprising when a large, cheap generator leaves the market.”

Hazelwood shutdown drove power price surge, says Australian Energy Regulator | The Australian 

(Climatism bolds)

 

NO mention of RET and REC subsidised and mandated wind and large scale solar farms on the forced economic closure of Hazelwood and no mention of the cost, chaos and instability caused by intermittent weather dependent unreliables. Though, cost, chaos and instability are par for the course when all you have left is windmills and solar panels to ‘power’ your grid.

MEANWHILE, the rest of the sane world continues its rapid expansion of clean coal-fired power plants to guarantee cheap, reliable energy supply for industry and households and to maintain economic growth, international competitiveness and boost living standards. This group ironically includes green-energy obsessed Germany, whose disastrous €Trillion Energiewende experiment has decimated its industrial heartland, leaving more than a million German households axed from the grid, unable to afford electricity, with an added 328,000 left powerless in just 12 months…

*

AUSTRALIA’S political elite and the climate-obsessed mainstream media should take a closer look at that enduring quote on insanity:

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Unknown

•••

See also :

Energy Poverty related :

Ref.: https://climatism.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/energy-regulator-report-hazelwood-coal-plant-shutdown-drives-record-power-price-surge/

Support

Newscats – on Patreon or Payoneer ID: 55968469

Cherry May Timbol – Independent Reporter
Contact Cherry at: cherrymtimbol@newscats.org or timbolcherrymay@gmail.com
Support Cherry May directly at: https://www.patreon.com/cherrymtimbol

Ad

Why do CO2 lag behind temperature?

71% of the earth is covered by ocean, water is a 1000 times denser than air and the mass of the oceans are 360 times that of the atmosphere, small temperature changes in the oceans doesn’t only modulate air temperature, but it also affect the CO2 level according to Henry’s Law.

The reason it is called “Law” is because it has been “proven”!

“.. scientific laws describe phenomena that the scientific community has found to be provably true ..”

That means, the graph proves CO2 do not control temperature, that again proves (Man Made) Global Warming, now called “Climate Change” due to lack of … Warming is – again – debunked!