Electricity prices fall from ridiculous peak but it’s still not cheap and it’s not due to renewables

By Jo Nova

This week the agitprop-media was full of contrived good news about electricity prices in Australia, associated suggestively, in the loosest, most meaningless way with the word “renewables”. Not one of them said that long term prices were still higher than when we started trying to add unreliable wind and solar power to the grid, and not one of them said prices would be one half of the price now if the country was lucky enough to run off brown coal.

These misleading stories were disguised adverts for renewable energy pretending to be “news”. They were on display at The Guardian, The ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald, and every other paper across Australia. Not one journalist apparently had the wit to ask the AEMO how this compared to long term prices. But all of them obediently repeated that prices this December were 48% cheaper than the December before that, as if Australians like to discuss that sort of thing across the BBQ. Were monthly average wholesale prices good for you Jim?

Wholesale power prices across Australia’s main electricity market almost halved at the end of 2023 compared with a year earlier, stoking hopes households may soon see smaller bills.

Spot prices in the National Electricity Market (Nem) that serves the eastern and southern states fell to an average of $48 a megawatt-hour (MWh) in the December quarter, down 48% on the previous year, the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) said in a report released on Thursday. Carbon emissions also dropped to record lows.

The newspapers were conveniently parroting the half-truths and half-lies of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) which had issued a media release designed to mislead. What none of them reported was that current prices were merely a partial recovery from the obscenely high peaks of 2022, and not as cheap as most of the years when the grid had more coal.

This graph below from the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) only shows annual prices, but the trend is clear. The more renewables we have, the more expensive electricity becomes. That’s a cause and effect thing. Renewables didn’t cause the last downward spike.

If our whole electricity grid was 100% brown coal, electricity would be half the price

The newspapers blame fossil fuels for the freak pricing of 2022, but if Australia had more brown coal generators running, and allowed more gas exploration, we could have avoided some or most of the “war time” peaks. The peak was due to Net Zero policies trying to change the weather. Australia ran out of gas and couldn’t ramp up brown coal plants it had already blown up. If we could have shifted back to brown coal, we could have saved a fortune on electricity, and made a bonanza selling more black coal and gas to our desperate allies.

The thrill this week was that December prices returned to “just” $48 a megawatt hour. But this was nowhere near as cheap as brown coal was still supplying and winning bids at. The prices for the last quarter available here show that in Victoria, brown coal generators were still supplying electricity for $16/MWh, or one third of the whole monthly average cost. The negative prices for wind and solar power just prove the market is screwed. No business can operate by paying customers to use their product. It’s only subsidies drawn from the poor of Australia that keep the unreliable generators swimming in profits they do not deserve.

The cheapest energy in Australia is brown coal, bar none, and the “newspapers”, the academics, the Minister, and the paid staff of the AEMO are hiding that from the taxpayers and subscribers who pay their wages.

What do we pay them for? The AER doesn’t make these graphs easy to find or read, and the AEMO often doesn’t graph the price setting bids at all. The $15 is in the brown part of the last column, which was Q3. The AEMO quietly state that the average winning bit for brown coal in Q4 was $16. (Page 18 of That’s the price brown coal suppliers were still bidding and winning auctions at in Q3. Inflation my foot…

The news that matters to Australians is that the less coal power we have, the more expensive our electricity is getting.