Albo’s new energy shock appears just about over for this winter, with gas glued to his stupid $12Gj gas price floor:
And QMA power prices are about to top out at $155MWh:
It’s been a doozy and as prices fall into the off-season, I expect a higher low than last Spring.
Big coal is making stuff up again:
Major coal plant owner Delta Electricity has called for gas to be included in Labor’s Capacity Investment Scheme to back up renewables, as new data showed no new wind or solar project reached full output in June, despite a rise in green projects waiting to come online.
The scheme will see the government underwrite 32 gigawatts of renewable energy and storage capacity by decade’s end. However, industry players worry the exclusion of gas from the policy threatens to further destabilise the transition to a renewables-dominated power grid.
The scheme is designed to ameliorate the profit risk in rapidly advancing technologies, ensuring that investment proceeds today rather than being delayed for cheaper capex.
This does not apply to gas and its inclusion in the scheme would trigger investment anyway. The issue for gas is that there is no security of supply of the fuel because the export cartel dominates the market.
To wit, when interests control your politics, all of the most crucial policies end up on the platform of unelectable lunatics.
Opening up a new battlefront with Labor, Mr Bandt made clear gas loomed as the next frontier in the climate debate. He said there was no need to find new sources of supply when the big LNG exporters could be targeted to meet domestic demand.
“Australia is awash with gas, it’s just not being directed to the right places,” he said. “We’ve got a three-point plan to take on the big gas corporations.”
The first step would be to back “legislation to prioritise supply to Australian industry during the transition, including potentially restricting future contracts”.
“We are confident that it can be done in a way that is constitutional,” Mr Bandt said. “But it will involve taking on the big gas corporations and making it clear that the priority has to be making gas available domestically during the transition.”
In addition to restricting exports, Mr Bandt said step two of the Greens’ plan involved forcing the big LNG platforms to stop using gas themselves. “The biggest user of gas in Australia is the gas industry itself. The gas industry uses more gas for liquefaction than the (entirety) of Australian manufacturing put together.”
Mr Bandt said the third step was for government to provide “significant support to industry and households to electrify”.
Bravo. That is now the most rational energy policy in the nation.
It exposes Labor’s gas cartel corruption and it renders nuclear entirely unnecessary.
Here’s the chart:
Alas, this will now wedge the major parties away from gas market reform.
