By Dr Matthew Fagan
Windmills are not in the State budget. They are not in the Federal budget. No foreign superpower is paying for them, no cartel of foreign benign investors graciously fixing our previously adequate system. No.
We are paying for these windmills, without our knowledge or agreement or legally. Billions a year. Even if they make no sense at all and no one cares. As for economic sense, they cost nothing to the ‘investors’ and then to make matters worse, these uneconomic monsters are being subsidized to operate.
Look at the accounts of Hepburn Wind. Massively profitable and totally paid by us but owned by a Green group who are paid the world’s highest rates for electricity no one needs or wants. Still a single free windmill cannot be run at a profit and the owners are then then given another $800,000 cash a year just to exist.
The mechanism is the issuance by law and compulsory purchase of LGCs. Laughable Gobsmacking Great Carbon Tax credits just for generating power even if it is not sold. Most of $1 million cash per windmill per year just to exist, on top of what they are paid for the electricity if sold.
The same with lunchtime solar panels. In the end the owners pay nothing and still get cash coming in for electricity no one wants or needs – dormitory suburbs where the people with solar panels are being paid cash by the people who do not have them, for electricity which is not wanted, needed or used. The electricity distribution system from high voltage to low voltage does not work backwards any more than the water distribution system pushes water back up hill from rain gutters. High voltage industrial areas are not being fed by low voltage domestic supplies. When no one is home in a suburb, the payment for ‘free’ lunchtime power is insane.
But wait. There’s more. Soon we will have to pay for their batteries. The argument for doubling down on our wasted cash is that these systems are utterly useless and we should have known that.
So while we rail against the sheer stupidity of covering our landscapes and oceans with giant windmills, just remember who is paying for all this insanity.
Not the ‘government’. You are.
I think you should also look at how they connect to the grid. I think we pay for that too through the AEMO, no mater where the windmill farm is sighted. Please investigate this assertion.
Yes and all the infrastructure to a host of wind farms, not just a few coal power plants. Then you get power transmission blowing over in South Australia, for no apparent reason. If a new transmission tower cannot stand winds of 110km/hr, there is something very wrong, but South Australia was taken off for a week. Act of God? No, the aptly named Weatherill.
IMHO, the only weakness in the LRET legislation (other than the question of whether it is Constitutional to give ‘subsidies’ to one private party paid for by compulsory ‘payments’ or ‘penalties’ imposed on another private party) is that the LGCs only have value because they are traded on the artificial ‘market’ for LGCs created by the RET legislation, where certificates must be purchased by retailers, or they pay a ‘penalty’ of $65.00/MW. If retailers could be persuaded to pay the ‘penalty’ instead of buying certificates from the renewables generators, there would be no (or at least less) incentive for new renewables generators to enter the market, and the 100+% subsidy to existing renewables generators would fall. I heard of only one company (ERM Power in Queensland – see here:http://greenmarkets.com.au/news-events/major-retailer-erm-chooses-penalty-price-over-contracting-new-wind-and-sola) ever doing this. It might be worth talking to ERM for more details about this.
Have you considered that no government has the right to legislate payment from one individual to another. This was the basis of Magna Carta. You are not supposed to enrich third parties. It has been a principle of English law for 800 years. Any taxes go into general revenue. The government has the right to raise taxes, fine, operate services and charge for them. It does NOT have the right to force you to pay someone else for nothing. Take Hepburn Wind. They have no debts, are privately owned and still get a gift of $840,000 a year. For what? From whom? You. That is government legislated theft by your electricity retailer for which you get absolutely nothing. They supply nothing. The Mafia would love the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000, legislated under John Howard.
Dr Fagan, your article was spot on, except for one minor point – I understand (from their latest Annual Report – see here: https://www.hepburnwind.com.au/journal/annual-report-2017/) that the Hepburn Wind Farm has two wind turbines, not one. Good work.
Agreed. My mistake. As you know, it hardly matters but it was far from clear in the early reports.
Basically we are all paying for all forms of “renewable” energy generation installations including grid connections, battery storage where applicable and for the power output whether used usefully or not. The huge amount of subsidisation can only come from taxpayer or consumers – nowhere else – so we pay for the installations, their operation, and for the unreliable output they produce. That’s one of the key reasons why the costs of grid power are soaring.
The key reason is the $6Billion a year collected for nothing at all. You pay for others to buy and own and operate windmills. You then have the right to buy your wind power from them at record high rates.
Where do you win out of this?
The only way they can force the coal power stations to close, which is the stated aim, is to make them uneconomic. The only way to do that is to force prices up to pay for wind and solar competitors while refusing to allow them to share in the bonanza, so they are a supplier of last choice and have to close.
In what other market is the biggest, cheapest, most reliable, eternal supplier forced to close? The so called RET act forces all the coal people out of business. Intentionally. While enriching foreigners who not only own our power system, they charge us for our own ‘free’ wind.