The local gas price has managed to ease slightly below Albo’s catastrophic $12Gj price floor:
Only in war have we never seen spring average power prices like this:
Meanwhile, the national discussion is consumed by irrelevance:
Victorian households can continue cooking with gas after the Allan government moved to exclude gas stovetops from its net zero road map in a policy shift that will also see state Labor introduce laws aimed at encouraging new offshore gas storage projects.
Gas lobbyists and businesses on Monday criticised the decision as a “cynical political exercise” and questioned the logic behind backing down from phasing out gas stovetops but not adopting the same view on gas heating and hot water systems.
How can supposed experts be so wrong?
You can thank the Origin Energy-sponsored Grattan Institute, which characterised the need to get households off gas as essential to fighting climate change when, in truth, it is immaterial:
The author of the rubbish is former Origin executive, Tony Wood, who is still being celebrated at the ABC, even though Origin still sponsors Grattan.
The Grattan/Origin great distraction hides the fact that the gas industry uses 5x the volume of households just to freeze gas to send it overseas!
And none of this alters the underlying shortage, which Origin/Grattan also engineered at the policy level. We still need gas to support the National Electricity Market (NEM) and always will.
On that front, there is some better news:
Proposed new laws will pave the way for a massive gas storage project in waters off Ninety Mile Beach at a cost of $500 million, as the Allan government seeks to soften its public stance on gas amid looming supply shortages.
If the laws are passed, the Golden Beach Energy Storage Project off the coast of Gippsland is the most likely candidate to move ahead first, with plans to harvest more than 30 petajoules of gas from the area in 2027 before using the site for storage from 2028. This first phase would have a capacity of about 19 petajoules.
Origin Energy has signed a contract securing the Golden Beach gas and 40 per cent of its storage capacity.
That’s a decent start but we need much more. We should be preparing to pump domestically reserved gas south from QLD all year to fill vast tanks for the VIC winter.
And more good news:
An apparent gas strike by energy giant Shell deep underground in onshore Queensland has fuelled industry hopes of a potential major new source of energy that could ease the threat of shortages in the tight east coast market.
But, there is a problem.
Both Origin and Shell are members of the east coast gas export cartel. More gas and more storage will make zero difference to local prices if there is no competition.
Honestly, when gas cartel executives get together, they must scream with laughter at Australia.
