How Big Green screwed Australia's energy consumers

Bloomberg:
A bungled transition from coal to clean energy has left resource-rich Australia with an unwanted crown: the highest power prices in the world.

New Yorkers pay half as much as Sydneysiders to keep the lights on, despite Australia boasting among the world’s largest coal and natural gas reserves, as well as ideal conditions for clean power generation. A decade of political dithering and climate policy missteps have set its patchwork power system adrift, ratcheting up manufacturing costs and hurting consumers with a doubling in electricity prices since last year and rising risks of blackouts.

“It is not a bit of a mess, it is a major mess,” said Sanjeev Gupta, 46, the British billionaire owner of Liberty House Group, who saw firsthand the effects of policy neglect after buying an ailing steel-making business in blackout-beleaguered South Australia in July.

Natural gas was meant to bridge the electricity supply gap left by the shutdown of decaying coal-fired stations and the gradual shift to solar and wind energy. But rising exports of the fuel to higher-paying overseas buyers created a local shortage.

With no long-term solution in sight, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull threatened gas producers with export restrictions unless they plugged the domestic shortfall. The government is also trying to convince power generators to patch up old and dilapidated coal-run stations, prolonging dependence on a fossil fuel the rest of the developed world is spurning.

“It takes a while to cause a train-wreck this bad,” said Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute, a Melbourne-based think tank. “And it also takes a while for a government to think about how they get out of it.”

The nation’s largest power generators are urging Australia to ditch coal and join the renewables revolution. Turnbull, whose harbor-side mansion is powered by solar panels, is reluctant to remove the fossil fuel from the energy mix lest it boosts power costs further.
...
It is not clear to me why local users can't pay competitive prices for natural gas.  Whatever the price for gas may be, it would certainly be cheaper and more dependable than solar or other green energy projects.  Australia's attempt to transition to green energy is the cause of this mess, and they need to rethink that policy.  Solar energy is a very ineffective resource for making steel.  In fact, I don't think it works at all given current technology.

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