Remember a few posts back I said the people behind Sun Cable have Motives? I’m happy that I connected the dots to my satisfaction, and that might be completely wrong and Sun Cable are just going to sell to Singapore exclusively. But I love it when more pieces drop.
Like this. It’s great (since I actually live here) that Victoria is a key part of a grid that’s slowly joining Australia from South Australia to Queensland. But it shows another truth - the larger the grid gets, the more resilient it becomes overall.
I realise that PM Albanese’s retention of the climate goals was seen as an ambitious stretch (especially - let me have a bitch please I’ve had to put up with those mongrels for nine effing years - especially in light of the major bastardry the previous government committed to try and weasel out of it and keep their fossil fuel lobby mates in business, and - look, this could be a long parenthesis, I’d better stop it here and pick it up in a separate article one when my anger’s banked down a bit eh?) where was I oh yeah retaining the climate change goals might have been seen as stressful tot he economy, but when you look at all these other factors, it’s actually quite doable.
Australia led with the Tesla battery in South Australia, and power companies have since put in baseload support batteries all over the place, and that was one reason my lights stayed on here when those self same power companies tried to gouge us for more money and just let their grid fall apart a month back.
Wait. Back Up - “Let” It Happen?
Well, I’m not 100%. But how else can you explain this? The electric suppliers play the same whiny tune several times a year: “Due to unprecedented demand . . . there may be . . . blah blah blah . . . unless the price per unit is raised blah blah blah percent . . .”
WHO ARE THEY KIDDING?
Whether the energy suppliers believe in climate change or not, there’s one thing they can take to the bank every year, and that’s that people buy HVAC. Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning demands go up every year because more and more people demand it, and there just are more and more people every year.
So you’d think it was child’s play, right? You raised prices last year, you must have made some profits or your shareholders would have abandoned you like fleas off a dog in water, so what did you do with all that money? Oh - your CEO and CFO both have McMansions and Mercedes’ suited to their station in life now? How nice.
Marty the Engine Driver hasn’t had a pay rise in four years, you’ve invested none of the ‘service fees’ in actually improving your service (or even, apparently, on servicing the generating plant which is falling apart faster than a chocolate canoe in a hot spring) and so this year we get to pay even more for your systemic failures last year? Because ‘demand’?
We’re about to pay another rate hike because “Russia and Ukraine. Honest.”
Now please remember that AGL were thinking of splitting into two entities so that the customer-facing AGL could claim green cred, while the other one, the one they were going to never speak of again, was almost literally at the coal face making the mess. Also they were very likely doing it so that they wouldn’t have to shut down those unreliable engines that they allowed to conk out in the manufactured ‘crisis.’
And while AGL does produce almost 10% of all of Australia’s warming-inducing pollution, they’re just the biggest of a group that I don’t think anyone has done a full pollution audit on as a whole sector and including the cost of obtaining the fuel they burn. And of course, making billions a year doing it. Which they pay no tax on, and which somehow miraculously never makes it to the Engine and Generator Service Department or the Let’s Build Renewable Power Plants Task Force . . .
Had they spent some of the money doing these things instead of pissing it up walls, they’d be sitting pretty and would have had baseload assistance batteries up the wazoo, wind and solar to fill those batteries, and they could save the last fiver they’re currently spending on a hose clamp for the engine at one of the powerhouses.
Okay - Solution, Sherlock?
I’d have thought it was easy. Share the hell out of this post and my other energy posts also my other posts on other blogs about these things. (Don’t worry, I’ll put links in the footer.)
And if you’re reading this because someone shared it to you, or you’re the person sharing it, get angry, get activist, get writing. Write to politicians, write to papers, write your own posts on websites and blogs. Get together with others and organise huge signs or buy an ad in your paper.
Write to the energy companies themselves. Let them know that you’ll switch if they don’t knuckle down and start doing what we want.
And what do we want? Energy companies should be required to put in place as much wind and solar generating capacity as the fossil fuelled plant they operate right now, and must do so within two years or less, at which time they should shut down half their fossil fuel generators or more.
They should also put in place during the same time period enough energy storage to store a day’s output from their sustainable plant.
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