As we all know, there’s nothing a corporate green loves so much as the green of taxpayer’s money. They’re not so keen, however, on paying their “fair share” of tax themselves.
The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) will release its final decision this Thursday on new rules for integrating batteries, pumped hydro and other forms of storage.
The AEMC’s draft decision, released in July, angered many firms because it proposed charging storage providers for drawing power, ignoring a recommendation by the Australian Electricity Market Operator (AEMO) that they be exempt.
Why should they be exempt from a tax all other energy providers pay? Because they want the government to distort the market in their favour.
Battery maker Tesla, which has supplied some of the largest storage to the National Electricity Market, said in a submission that the charges would “kill the commercial viability of all grid storage projects, causing inefficient investment in alternative network”, with consumers paying higher costs.
Which is as much to say that these “renewable” scams are unfeasibly costly without massive subsidies. Even with such subsidies, renewable reliant states like South Australia are paying the highest electricity prices in the world.
Ah, the troughers object: a large part of those high prices are “poles and wires”. Indeed — because, not only are they expensive to produce, but renewables place enormous stresses on grids, which have to be massively upgraded to cope. All that costs money — and the green scammers want someone else to foot the bill.
Australia’s electricity grid faces economic and engineering challenges as it adjusts to the arrival of lower cost and also lower carbon alternatives to fossil fuels.
While rule changes are necessary to account for operators that can both draw from and supply power, how they are implemented can have long-lasting effects on the technologies that get encouraged or repelled, independent experts say […]
The prospect that storage operators will have to pay transmission charges could “drastically” affect their profitability since their business models rely on the difference between the price their pay for power and how much they can sell it for.
If a business model is so heavily predicated on subsidies, its’ a clear sign that it’s an uneconomic boondoggle.
Separately, the latest edition of the Clean Energy Council Confidence Index shows leadership by state governments is helping to shore up investor appetite for investing in renewable energy even with higher 2030 emissions reduction goals from the federal government.
The Guardian
Well, there’s a surprise: corporate grifters have a fine nose for free money.
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