The cost of accommodating the chaos delivered by wind power is utterly staggering. And provides half the explanation as to why South Australia, Australia’s ‘wind power capital’ and the world’s ‘renewables leader’, pays the highest retail power prices in the world. The massive subsidies included in the cost paid by retailers for wind power, provides the other half.

In our recent posts, we’ve focused on the desperate scramble to find electricity when wind’s promised megawatts go missing; and how Victoria’s hospitals and dozens of energy hungry businesses have been forced to power down to prevent a complete grid collapse.

In this post we hand over to Jo Nova to focus on the cost to power consumers of finding electricity from meaningful, but very costly, sources which are meant to operate at the margins, rather than as centre-stage performers.

The owners of diesel generators and Open Cycle Gas Turbines charge like…