Opinion
Half a million Victorians enjoyed a candlelit dinner on Valentine’s Day — whether they wanted it or not.
And they’d better get used to it.
At least 530,000 homes in Victoria were blacked out yesterday, and hundreds of thousands are likely to remain without power for “days, if not weeks”, while heavy industries have been ordered to shut down.
Welcome to “Net Zero”, Victoria.
AGL Energy’s Loy Yang A coal plant went offline shortly after 2pm (AEDT), with the state government attributing the outage to the physical collapse of six transmission towers due to storm damage.
An earlier unrelated partial outage at Victoria’s second largest generator, EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn, further exacerbated the shortfall, leaving Alinta’s Loy Yang B as the only remaining coal power station in a state where coal still provides more power than any other energy source.
So, why didn’t Victoria just turn on its wonderful “renewables”?
Because — and who could ever have foreseen this? — a day of hot, gusty winds, followed by thunderstorms, meant that wind farms were shut down and solar panels weren’t generating much, either. I mean, who ever heard of such weather patterns in late summer in Victoria? A time when demand for power, to run air-conditioners, traditionally spikes.
And still the Victorian government has the cheek to call the weather events “unprecedented”.
The outages forced the Australian Energy Market Operator to order electricity wholesalers to switch off power to 90,000 households, in a practice known as load shedding – a deliberate reduction of supply to selected areas during extreme events to protect the electricity network from long-term damage and widespread blackouts. The remaining 400,000 odd homes and businesses were disconnected due to other storm damage.
Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio met AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman amid the crisis, which she attributed it to the “unprecedented impact of extreme weather on Victoria’s power grid”.
Is anyone actually buying this excuse?
Energy industry experts, business groups and the state opposition pointed the finger at the government, with Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Paul Guerra, warning that support for the government’s target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 would “start to weaken” if reliability, security and affordability of energy supply could not be guaranteed.
Well, guess what? If you’re demented enough to rely on wind and solar, reliability, security and affordability of energy supply can’t be guaranteed.
Don’t rely on the wet, weak Victorian opposition to actually have the balls to come out and say it, though. These pathetic wannabe-Greens in expensive suits are dumb enough to argue that what Victoria needs is more wind and solar.
Opposition energy spokesman David Davis said the outage highlighted Victoria’s vulnerability, following “Labor’s failure after nine years in power to plan the renewable transition properly”.
And we wondered why Victorians just shrugged and voted Labor back in.
The outage caused financial pain. Wholesale prices hit a cap of $16,600/MWh, which will take a toll on retailers immediately before flowing through to households when the next price tariffs are implemented on July 1.
Prolonged high wholesale prices will cause higher bills, which authorities are desperate to avoid after two years of price increases of more than 20 per cent.
The Australian
Maybe, though, when they get their next, even bigger, power bill, after weeks of not actually having any power at all, even the voters of Australia’s Wokest State will finally start to clue in that “Net Zero” is a disaster.