More bad luck for the renewables industry. Despite providing free energy from the sun and wind, electricity prices keep rising relentlessly, shockingly fast.

It was supposed to be cheap to collect low-level-energy across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Who knew that subsidized, unreliable energy would induce volatile pricing, allow the players to game the system, create obscene spikes, drive out the cheapest providers, require expensive battery storage, more frequency control, more maintenance, just as much back up supply, and extra long transmission lines? Who knew — Probably thousands of engineers.

Sydney Morning Herald

Electricity prices have jumped by six times the rate of the average pay rise, new figures reveal, as family wallets are increasingly squeezed by essential services such as education, utilities and fuel.

The most significant price rises were electricity, up 12.4 per cent, fuel up 10.4 per cent, domestic holiday travel up 6.3 per cent and fruit up 9.3 per cent.

If you think our economy is grinding down now, wait til we reach the 23% RET target, and pay for the $1 billion interconnectors and the $4 billion extra hydro storage that we didn’t need when we had enough coal power. Then after we reach the bottom we’ll have to pay more to build new USC coal baseload, because we were too frightened to upgrade the old cheap plants, and too frightening for any investors to even consider it.

Odd 2018 trivia: Three of the four fastest rising items are energy: energy for our homes and businesses, energy for human bodies, energy for cars.

Nothing that 5 or 10 nuclear plants and a few new gas wells can’t fix.

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