Malcolm Turnbull has, it seems, decided that the ‘energy crisis’ is all the fault of the Labor Premiers in South Australia and Victoria.
The blackouts in South Australia were due to Weatherill’s fixation with renewables and the closure of Hazelwood in Victoria was due to Andrews’ lack of planning.
That is, of course, total crap.
In early September last year, a few weeks before the huge storm that caused the infamous blackout in South Australia, Jay Weatherill warned that current rules allowed private electricity companies to drive “prices higher by withholding supply”.
This is exactly what happened during SA’s blackouts – the gas-fired power station Pelican Point chose not to supply more electricity.
Tony Wood, energy program director of the Grattan Institute, said after the February blackout, when Engie only had one unit running at Pelican Point and chose not to fire up the second, “If the price for power stays high — at say $10,000 per megawatt hour — and stays there for several hours, (Engie) can make a lot of money,” Mr Wood said.
“But if they start their second plant (sending more power into the system) and the price crashes to $300 per megawatt hour, they don’t make as much money.”
In an attempt to address this problem, the South Australian Government launched a tender to buy 75 per cent of its long-term electricity needs in an effort to increase competition.
A few days after that announcement was made, and still weeks before the blackout, United States-based Solar Reserve chief executive officer Kevin Smith said his company was interested in bidding for the tender by building a solar thermal project at Port Augusta.
The notion that this is a remedy thought up by Nick Xenephon and Malcolm Turnbull is just wrong.
We are also supposed to believe that Xenephon’s demand that pensioners get a paltry one-off payment is some sort of win for energy affordability.
Why doesn’t he just vote against the government’s budget savings measure which cuts the clean energy supplement – $4.40 a week for single unemployed, $7.05 a week for a single person on the aged or disability pension to help them with rising energy prices. The government argues that, with no carbon tax, these payments are not necessary but they kept the compensation that working people got with the increased tax free threshold.
Not content with blaming Jay Weatherill, Turnbull then turned on Daniel Andrews saying the closure of Hazelwood was “a consequence of the Labor Party’s complete failure to lead on energy.”
“Daniel Andrews has allowed that enormous baseline power station to close.”
In fact it was the French owners of Hazelwood, Engie, who also own Pelican Point, that made the decision to close Hazelwood as it was rated as the least carbon efficient power station in the OECD and was beyond its use by date. Five of Hazelwood’s eight boilers were desperately in need of major repairs which would have cost over $400 million to make them safety compliant.
As Turnbull and Xenephon prance around announcing more feasibility studies, ignoring that the chief scientist was already conducting a nationwide review, one thing is abundantly clear – the show ponies’ only concern is political posturing.
