When you pump your credentials as the world’s renewable energy superpower, it’s pretty hard to avoid the fact that your constituents pay the highest retail power prices in the world. Wind and sun worshippers can’t have it both ways: either South Australia is Australia’s wind power capital and that fact explains why its consumers are being belted, or some other alien force needs to be identified as the culprit.

The latest wheeze amongst the wind cult is to blame coal-fired power plants. Which doesn’t seem to gel with the fact that when Victoria’s 1,600 MW Hazelwood plant closed earlier this year, Victorian wholesale power prices jumped by 25%, overnight.

As they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, hey Giles?

Sure enough the owners of conventional generation plant are regularly engaged in power price gouging, whenever wind power output collapses, a point picked…