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https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2024/05/07/richard-denniss-climate-change-electricity>
"Markets aren’t nearly as efficient as they are cracked up to be. Our housing
market focuses on building holiday homes for the holiday homeless rather than
actual houses for the actually homeless.
Our supermarkets send tens of thousands of tonnes of fresh produce to landfill
each year, rather than offer it to consumers at low prices.
And our electricity market currently requires solar farms to be switched off in
the middle of the day (the polite term is we ‘curtail’ them) while our
governments invent new ways to subsidise gas and coal-fired power stations to
keep operating.
Despite the fact that climate change is caused by what economists call ‘market
failure,’ we are often told in Australia that market forces are the best way to
fix market failure.
It’s clearly not working.
There’s absolutely no chance that market forces will fix the market failure of
climate change, if only because our so-called ‘National Electricity Market’
(NEM) is, in fact, no such thing. Rather, the NEM is a government creation of
over 1,000 pages of administrative rules and regulations that are so poorly
designed that switching off solar farms when the sun is shining brightest is
considered ‘efficient’.
Hint: it’s not.
It’s hard to think of a less efficient thing to do with billions of dollars
worth of solar farms than to switch them off when it’s sunniest. Not only are
we saying no to lots of low-cost renewable electricity, but we are also
reducing the profits earned by those who have invested in renewables when we
are supposed to encourage rapid investment in renewables.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy land of Australia’s energy policy."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
