The more renewables Australia added the more expensive electricity got
By Jo Nova
If Australia gets any more free cheap energy we’ll go broke
The Australian Energy Regulator has the data on electricity pricing and possibly a budget $20 million a year but hasn’t yet updated with the last quarter, so I thought I’d help them out. Because surely this is a graph that all Australians need to see?
This is every state in the National Energy Market, and even though some have more renewables than others, the long term trends are the same. Unreliable generators in one state can vandalize the whole market:
Quarterly volume weighted average spot prices - regions AEMO AER
(Click to expand).
Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel, but need thousands of kilometers of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated back up grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/07/the-more-renewables-australia-added-the-more-expensive-electricity-got/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-more-renewables-australia-added-the-more-expensive-electricity-got
