Australia’s most “progressive” state, which last year re-elected its socialist premier, will be very lucky not to reap what it has sown, this summer.
The Victorian government is vying with South Australia to be the most idiotically dedicated to the ideological fanaticism of pursuing “renewables” at any cost. South Australia is furthest down the primrose path: its electricity prices are the highest in Australia. In 2016, the entire state was blacked out.
But lucky Victorians are fast catching up. Victorian electricity bills have soared to second-most-expensive in the nation. Last summer, the state experienced rolling blackouts on the hottest days of the year. Now that Victoria has recklessly closed yet another reliable coal-fired station, the state will be in an even more precarious situation when this summer’s heatwaves hit.
Victoria’s gas ban and high renewable energy targets have placed its power grid in a precarious position this summer, potentially leading to “contagion” with other states, Energy Minister Angus Taylor has warned. After Federal Labor’s resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon urged the Andrews Labor government to immediately lift its moratorium on conventional gas exploration saying the policy makes “neither economic nor environmental sense”, Mr Taylor also urged the southern state to reconsider its policy stance.
“We’ve got a situation where a major baseload generator has been taken out of the market in Hazelwood. We’ve got a ban on gas and we’ve got a very aggressive renewable energy target,” Mr Taylor said. “So that’s a precarious grid that faces serious risks, both this summer and incoming summers.”
However, the Victorian government hit back, saying…“We know that privately owned ageing coal fired power stations are unreliable and continue to fail and that’s why our investment in renewables is so important,” a Victorian government spokesperson said.
They continue to fail because government meddling has distorted the market beyond all sense, and made it unfeasible for energy companies to invest in the upkeep of conventional power stations.
Tasmania experienced just the sort of dire situation that climate-hysterical energy policies lead to, in 2016. The perverse incentive of the Gillard carbon tax encouraged the Hydro authority to virtually empty the state’s dams in order to chase a windfall gain by selling the energy to the Mainland. When the usual rains failed that winter, the state was left with the very real risk of environmental disaster. When the BassLink undersea cable broke, Tasmania was left without any means of securing electricity supplies if the Hydro ran dry.
Victoria is dancing a similar dangerous line, this summer, with two major conventional generators offline.
Outages at AGL Energy’s Loy Yang A coal plant and Origin Energy’s Mortlake gas generator have led to concerns Victoria faces a significant risk of power outages this summer.
…Adding to tensions are longer-term concerns the state’s 50 per cent renewable target by 2030 may force out major coal generators like Yallourn in the Latrobe Valley which supplies 22 per cent of Victoria’s electricity and 8 per cent of the national market.
theaustralian.com.au
If Victoria and South Australia both go dark in the summer heat, the contagion will spread to the rest of the Mainland states. But it is the “progressive” ninnies in those states who will suffer the most, as they reap the whirlwind of their hysterical virtue-signalling.
It should be most entertaining to watch.