You can’t rely on renewable energy and so need to keep other options, making it still more expensive.

WUWT reader Dixon writes:

Tasmania, an island state in Australia generates a large proportion of its electricity from hydroelectricity. Thanks to generous government subsidies during the last 2 years of Australia’s now repealed carbon tax, the private company in charge ran down the dam reservoir to maximise the benefits gained from the subsidy. While Tasmania is known for usually having wet winters, a prolonged drought meant that left the dam reserves precariously low. So when a fault in the trans-Tasman cable that crosses the Bass straight and which connects the Tasmanian grid to the Victorian one a crisis emerged as it was no longer possible to rely on the cheap coal powered electricity from Victoria.

To compound the PR disaster, the drought was broken in spectacular fashion recently with a full 3+ days warning of severe weather that did not stop the hydro-power company proceeding with cloud seeding flights the day before the flood tragically took 3 lives in the State.

Coincidentally, South Australia also generates a significant proportion of it’s power from wind and makes a great deal of huff and puff about it. It doesn’t tend to point out as readily that this is only viable because it too can import electricity generated with Victorian coal when the wind blows too much or too little!

If there was any rational scientific, engineering and economic logic underpinning Australia, it would be building best-of-breed nuclear power stations. It’s tectonically stable, has huge amounts of uninhabited space to store waste and vast reserves of resources that it almost always ships offshore for other to do the value adding that comes from refining ores. Instead, they have lost their manufacturing (cars), they are selling their farm land, real-estate and strategic assets to foreign ownership and they wonder why the economy is heading south!

More: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-19/parliamentary-inquiry-into-tasmania27s-energy-crisis-to-begin/7522626

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