Below are the statistics on the cost of power generation in 2011 from the Australian Government’s own Productivity Commission:

• Coal fired power station $79 per Mw/h (megawatt/hour)
• Gas fired power station $97 per Mw/h – or 1.2 times the cost of coal power
• Wind power $150-214 per Mw/h – or nearly 3 times the cost of coal power
• Solar power $400-473 per Mw/h – or nearly 6 times the cost of coal power

You don’t need to be Einstein to work out that the high cost of Wind and Solar is the reason the public are being screwed with high electricity prices. The Carbon Tax just adds further pain

Via the Australian

THOUSANDS of jobs across Australia are at risk as Labor’s rising renewable energy target undermines economic growth and saps exports, fuelling ­Coalition backbench discontent with a policy Environment Minister Greg Hunt is widely seen to favour.

The RET, which has prompted electricity retailers to source a rising share of energy from high-cost wind farms, is forecast to lead to the loss of 4900 full-time jobs by 2020, and more than 6000 by 2030 as higher power prices ripple through the economy, undermining competitiveness and household budgets.

Only weeks before the government’s review of the RET is due to report on the policy’s ­efficiency and effectiveness, new modelling by Deloitte Access Economics, commissioned by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Business Council of Australia, shows keeping the RET entails a $34 billion hit to Australia’s economy, including a near $3bn cut in exports by 2020.

“The current scheme is likely to impose a considerable cost to the Australian economy going forward,” the report concludes, noting the RET is abating carbon at an effective cost to the economy of $125 a tonne — or about five times more than the current carbon tax, which the Coalition plans to repeal from July.

“While the RET is in place, ­investment is directed to less ­efficient and higher cost renewable technologies — at the ­expense of more efficient and lower cost generators,” it adds.

 

“Renewables” are a complete con:

• The solar industry has grown to become one of the leading emitters of hexafluoroethane (C2F6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). These three potent greenhouse gases, used by solar cell fabricators, make carbon dioxide (CO2) seem harmless.
• The stark reality is that Solar is surprisingly inefficient when it’s dark and cloudy. Even these new Solar Thermal plants can only supply enough heat stored in the form of steam to allow power generation after dark for only an hour. Sure we use less energy at night then we do during the day, but when the Sun goes down do you really want the alternative to be infrequent wind energy to power the TV, refrigerator and the heater?
• Each and every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2,500 Kg of it in each of the behemoths. The mining and refining ofneodymium is so dirty and toxic – involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product – that only one country does it – China.  This year it flexed its trade muscles and briefly stopped exporting neodymium from its inner Mongolian mines. Forget Middle East oil, how’s that for dangerous reliance on a volatile foreign supply.
• Wind Turbines kill a massive amount of birds and bats. They also cause ill health effects on humans.
• Wind Turbines blight the landscape.
• Even the Productivity Commission spells out that mandated solar and wind won’t knock out coal-fired power generation. All it does is displace cleaner but more expensive gas-fired generation, undercutting the fuel switch that has the most potential to cut Australia’s emissions and needlessly raising electricity bills.
• Wind power is intermittent and inefficient. Back in 1919 a smart German physicist named Albert Betz figured out that the most you can possibly get out of Wind Turbine is around 59% of the power in the wind. This is an unassailable bit of physics. Stop whining about it. I’m not going to prove it here but it is not hard to at least understand why we can never convert 100% of the wind’s power. In other words, a perfect best-possible Wind Turbine would be able to convert almost 59% of the power in the wind into mechanical rotating power. But we can’t achieve perfection. A given Wind Turbine has a “design point” that generally defines its peak efficiency at the wind speed for which the system is designed. At wind speeds above and below the design speed the efficiency is the same or less – maybe much less. If a turbine’s best efficiency is 40% at a wind velocity of 10 meters per second it will be 40% only at that wind speed. At all other wind speeds it will be something worse. That wind turbine will generally operate at lower than its best efficiency, because wind speeds are never constant or average. When there is no wind, a turbine’s efficiency is zero.