Crazy World Quiz #2349:

Let’s close the cheapest generators of electricity. Will electricity bills:

a/ go down,   b/  go up,  or  c/ be paid by The Tooth Fairy?

A quarter of Australians don’t know. A half think the answer is “b” or “c”. It’s that bad.

A new survey came out this week which fans of renewables are using to argue we need more renewables, but hidden in the data is the big misinformation that underlies this attitude.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

Adam Morton says:

The wisdom of a campaign by the Turnbull government emphasising the risks of moving too rapidly to renewable energy has been thrown into question by polling that suggests a majority of its supporters don’t agree.

Not at all. The real issue, that Adam Morton misses, is that so much of the country is horribly misinformed. All the key questions in the survey depend on what would happen to electricity prices, and nearly half the country lives under the delusion that “renewables” make our electricity prices cheaper.

All Malcolm Turnbull has to do to turn these figures around is to tell the fact that coal fired electricity is generated for 3 – 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Then run this survey again, and see support for a renewables target crash.

Most Australians have no idea that coal fired power is the cheapest power by far. The Tooth Fairy subsidies mean that some people with solar panels on their roof think they are getting “cheap electricity” when really someone else is paying part of their bill.

Just find us one nation running on wind and solar that has cheap electricity. They don’t exist. The only cost effective renewable energy comes from hydro. Wind and solar theoretically provide cheap electrons sometimes, but we need electricity all day every day, and the net effect the intermittent sources have on the whole grid makes for expensive electricity. The intermittent generators stop us from getting cheap electricity. The subsidies to pander to them (like the RET)  force the cheap generators out of the market.

..

If the Australia Institute really wanted to understand what Australians think they would have told Australians the price of coal fired electricity, told them the cost of the subsidy (RET = 9c/KWhr) and asked people if they would rather have lower electricity prices.

h/t David B

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