Renewable Rorting – Subsidy Scam

 

And now its clear  why Turnbull’s son and the Turnbull lovers love this massive money making gift. The biggest, the best scam ever invented.

and Scotty boy won’t touch it as too many of his friends are making money from the scam.

Annual Cost of Australia’s Solar Subsidy Scam Hits $2 Billion & Sends Power Prices Into Orbit

The line that Australia’s rocketing power prices will soon plummet is just a cruel hoax.

The subsidies for large-scale wind and solar under the Federal government’s Large-Scale RET will total more than $60 billion over the life of that scheme: the Renewable Energy Certificates issued under the LRET have already added more than $15 billion to power bills, so far.

And then there’s the billions in taxpayer’s money ladled out by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation in soft loans to wind and solar power outfits, as well as billion dollar gifts and grants from the ARENA fund, eagerly lapped up by renewables rent seekers.

The other game in subsidy town is the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES), which is another Federal government subsidy rort, that benefits householders and businesses who slap solar panels on their rooves. The piddling amount of ‘look at me, I’ve saved the planet’ power produced when the sun’s up and the sky is clear is hardly worth the $1.3 billion a year cost of subsidies, born by those without rooftop panels.

For $1.3 billion (the current annual cost of SRES subsidies) Australia could have laid a pretty solid down-payment on a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant, delivering power 24 x 365, to all and sundry, not just the privileged few.
The poorest and most disadvantaged will never afford solar panels and plenty of families simply can’t afford power from the grid, either.

Australia’s renewable energy debacle has left more than 42,000 families either without power or facing a daily struggle to pay for it:

Australia’s Renewables ‘Transition’ Leaves 42,000 Families in Abject Energy Poverty

For the wealthiest though, the $1.3 billion annual subsidies to small scale solar allow them to reduce their power bills at their poorer neighbour’s expense, while pumping up their virtue signalling egos.

The SRES, like the LRET, runs until 2031. Which means that subsidies paid to householders under the SRES will add at least $17 billion (13 x $1.3bn) to the $40 billion in subsidies to large-scale wind and solar. For that kind of money, Australia could have built the best part of 5,000 MW of nuclear generating capacity, lasting a life time, instead of the short dozen years of economic life expected from solar panels and windmills.

The cost of the LRET and SRES is staggering; the consequences an economic disaster.

Here’s The Australian looking at the second greatest rort under the southern sun – and it looks like the earlier estimate of the annual cost of the SRES scam – at $1.3bn – is shy of the mark by a cool $700,000,000.

$2 billion solar subsidies to send household bills through the roof

Energy consumers are set to pay nearly $2 billion for rooftop solar installation subsidies next year, hiking power costs by up to $190 for every household, an expert analysis has found.

The federal government’s small-scale renewable energy scheme (SRES) — which the competition regulator wants wound down and abolished — will result in the cost of subsidies ballooning by 50 per cent to about $1.8 billion including GST in 2019, according to Sydney-based renewables trader Demand Manager.

The additional impost amid high electricity prices may accelerate calls for the scheme to be junked as new federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor comes under pressure to reduce household power bills.
The solar industry has previously called for the government to rule out ending the small-scale solar scheme, saying it would deprive households and businesses of their only means of lowering power bills.

But analysis of the cost of small-scale technology certificates, which are handed to consumers installing solar panels and then bought back by electricity retailers, shows a soaring cost to all power users.

About 30 million new certificates will be created this year and more than 36 million certificates are forecast to be supplied in 2019, the trader says. The “cost per household in Australia is in the order of $190 per household”, Demand Manager owner Jeff Bye said in a report released yesterday. “The SRES is effectively an uncapped program — the more solar installations, the higher the SRES program cost.”

A change to the solar subsidy may be imminent given the government’s focus on reducing power prices, Demand Manager told its clients in the report.
The government-run Clean Energy Regulator earlier this month released figures showing 1600 megawatts of small-scale solar capacity would be installed this year — a 44 per cent jump on 2017 — and the equivalent generation that Victoria’s Hazelwood coal plant supplied to the national grid before it was shut down.

Victoria’s push to have 650,000 owner-occupied households receive cheap rooftop solar over the next decade will add a further $1bn to the overall cost of the SRES subsidy over its lifespan, its analysis found.
Origin Energy revealed in August the government’s small-scale renewable energy scheme and state-based solar feed-in tariffs now accounted for up to 15 per cent of bill charges.

Consultancy Deloitte says that with solar and wind power in Australia now competing in price and performance terms with fossil-fuel sources of generation, the country’s clean-energy industry should move on from any ties to subsidies.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission also savaged the subsidy in its July blueprint to reset the national electricity market, arguing government support for household solar had been a well-intended but misguided policy.

Solar schemes were too generous, unfairly disadvantaged lower-income households and had failed to adjust to the changing economics of household solar, it said. Rooftop solar subsidies should be axed and the states should take on the cost of “excessively generous” solar feed-in tariffs to ease the burden of green power schemes that it estimated cost households up to $170 a year.

 

CREDIT:

The Australian
Perry Williams
17 October 2018

The Australian