Sometimes there is only room enough in town for a single gunslinger. As Gary Cooper demonstrated, more  than once, when it comes to a showdown, one or more of them has to go.

Because Malcolm Turnbull’s proposal for a National Energy Guarantee is a policy directed at undoing the obvious and inevitable harm that the Federal government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target has done (and continues to do) to Australia’s once reliable and affordable power supplies, STT has likened it to a rabid dog chasing its tail, or placing more and more Band-Aids on top of bloody Band-Aids.

The stated objective of the LRET is to subsidise purportedly low emissions wind and solar to reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity generation sector. The NEG is accompanied with an Emissions Obligation which has the same objective.

If ever there was an unnecessary policy duplication, having the LRET still in place with the…

With reliable power in short supply this coming Summer (and beyond), PM, Malcolm Turnbull was bound to act. In yesterday’s post, we detailed how the National Energy Guarantee is meant to work, what it does and what it will not do.

At the heart of the NEG is a simple objective: keep everyone’s lights and air conditioners on, when temperatures rise along with the demand for power.

Australia will go down in history as the Nation with the most abundant energy reserves on the Planet and, paradoxically, the most expensive and unreliable delivery of electricity in the world.

The NEG might be said to be too little, too late.

STT sees the NEG as heavy-handed government intervention, the consequence of earlier heavy-handed government intervention, being the Federal government’s Large-Scale RET.

How the NEG operates in practice, and whether it achieves its objective, is down to the Energy Security Board…

Necessity the Mother of Invention: looming blackouts prompt a little action.

Politics is a cruel caper, at the best of times. And, in Australia, power politics is merciless. A decade and-a-half of government intervention in the power market has left Australia with the highest power prices in the world and a grid on the brink of collapse.

The disaster is largely down to distortions caused by the Large-Scale RET – through which $15 billion in subsidies has already been thrown to the wind and sun, with a further $45 billion to be squandered to the same ends – which has rendered cheap and reliable conventional generators unprofitable. The risk of the more populous States – Victoria, NSW and Queensland – following South Australia into Stone Age gloom every time the wind stops blowing has focused attention on the idiocy of attempting to rely upon the weather for power.

In the week…

The moral of the story of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ isn’t don’t lie, it’s don’t tell the same lie twice.

Renewables rent-seekers continue to stick with the same grab bag of lies, myths and furphies, despite mountains of evidence revealing their marketing pitch is just so much polished propaganda.

South Australia (Australia’s so-called ‘wind power capital’) is held up by wind worshippers as the example of how to transition to a 100% renewable energy future.

When the wind blows for a few hours at a stretch (see above) the wind cult claims victory, and seizes the high moral ground. However, woe betide anybody with the temerity to point out that SA’s obsession with wind power has left it with the highest power prices in the world, retail power prices rocketing, year-on-year, at 20% and a tripling of power costs to business in just on two years. Oh, and heaven…

Over the last year or so, the Australian wind industry, its parasites and spruikers have pointed to a number of proposals to spear mega-windmills offshore and out in the briny blue, including one monstrous boondoggle pitched for the waters off of the Victorian coast.

These pie-in-the-sky plans are accompanied with the usual guff about wind power being free, and getting cheaper all the time.

As yet, Australia doesn’t have any offshore turbines.

And that’s probably because the true cost of offshore wind power is magnitudes greater than the fantasists would have you believe.

From what Professor Gordon Hughes details, wind industry claims about offshore wind power being cheap have just been sunk.

Forget the Spin: Offshore Wind Costs are Not Falling
Global Warming Policy Foundation
Gordon Hughes, Capell Aris and John Constable
25 September 2017

Spin put on the government’s recently announced strike prices to three large offshore wind farms has…

Yet again, Judith Sloan tackles the greatest policy disaster of all time, and yet again she hits the bulls-eye.

Clean energy target a non-starter on road to affordable energy
The Australian
Judith Sloan
10 October 2017

You remember the bloke wanting to get to Dublin. He wasn’t in a good place to start his journey. This sums up energy policy in this country.

But here’s the thing: Dublin is affordable and reliable energy and we have to get there as soon as possible. And let’s be specific: we need electricity prices to halve from today’s levels to return to their historical average. This would mean we have electricity prices comparable with the US, for instance. It’s doable.

Luckily on the trip to Dublin, a little bird tells our bloke that the clean energy target is a non-starter as far as the government is concerned. It was always a completely dopey…

Gary Banks and Fred Hilmer: praying blackouts restore energy sanity.

If Australia’s energy policy debate was a theatre production, it would be labelled ‘high farce’.

Throwing $60 billion to the sun and the wind, destroying a grid which was renowned for not only its expanse, but its reliability and sending power prices from the very bottom of the league table, all the way to the very top, might sound like the work of deranged or scurrilous thespians. Except, this is the considered and deliberate work of successive Liberal/National and Labor/Green Federal governments.

The seriousness of what is, otherwise, a tragic comedy hasn’t been lost on Gary Banks and Fred Hilmer. Banks and Hilmer are elder statesmen of economic policy, and responsible for some of Australia’s most important and lasting economic reforms.

They are aghast at what has happened to energy policy in Australia and are astonished that Australia is the…