Below is an extract of an interview with Sharri Markson (Sky News) and Warren Hogan (Judo Bank) discussing Victoria’s widespread power outage, which left some 500,000 homes without power on Tuesday evening after a fierce storm rolled through Victoria.
I argue that East Coast Australia has shot itself in the foot by creating an artificial shortage of firming power (gas). This has made the energy system more fragile and expensive when major disruptive events occur.
Edited Transcript:
We’ve got a lack of capacity. Basically, the base load power via coal got knocked out, and we didn’t have reliable firming power to then pick up the slack.
One of the biggest disasters this country has created on the east coast is that we’ve made firming power, namely through gas, incredibly expensive and in shortage when we’ve actually got an abundance of gas.
This is because we’ve decided to sell it all offshore, and we’ve basically forced ourselves into paying international prices.
So, this is just the thin edge of the wedge. We’ve engineered an energy crisis—an energy shortage—in one of the most energy rich nations on Earth.
It’s a deplorable policy.
