Two years ago the Bureau of Meteorology forecast that we would have a long, dry summer thanks to the re-emergence of a La Nina weather pattern.
Many farmers sold their cattle, at depressed prices, in anticipation of not having enough feed to keep them.
They lost a lot of money when instead the La Nina never arrived.
Weather forecasts used to be more important for farmers than electrical engineers.
But that equation has changed since we started installing massive amounts of weather dependent wind and solar energy.
Predicting the weather is tough unless you believe in the energy models used by our regulators to assure us that the lights will stay on.
In their models, you do get La Ninas, it is just that the engineers can predict them with perfect foresight.
So when a La Nina event arrives, say in 2028, it just so happens that a whole lot of batteries are built in the couple of years beforehand to prepare for the event.
None of this should fill you with confidence that our energy regulators know what they are doing.
A new paper released last month, authored by Paul Simshauser (a former director-general of the Queensland Energy Department) and Joel Gilmore presents this issue in stark relief.
In their model, they do not give the energy tsars perfect weather forecasting capability. Instead, the weather is random just like it is in real life.
Their data shows that with a predominantly renewable energy system in Australia, our energy supplies drop in the months of May and June, just as our energy demands increase during cold months.
This large gap between energy supply and demand, which is even larger on cold days when weather demand peaks, is costly to fill by gas, batteries or pumped hydro.
It is becoming impossible to fill these gaps with more investment in renewable energy.
So instead our regulators are reaching for the stick, and are trying to penalise Australians when the weather does not quite match up with the perfect conditions needed to make our fragile renewable energy system work.
A few weeks ago around 8000 Queenslanders got a rude shock when the state-owned energy company, Energex, turned off their airconditioning on one of the hottest days of the year.
The action was part of the former Labor government’s PeakSmart initiative, which aims to save our crumbling energy grid by involuntarily cutting electricity demand at peak times.
If you signed up to the scheme you got $400.
Not surprisingly, most of the uptake of the scheme has been in poorer, outer suburban areas.
The Politburo class living on the riverfront can happily cool their house to a Mediterranean climate and just pay the higher prices.
In a similar development from July this year customers of Essential Energy in Sydney will be forced to pay a “sun tax”.
That is when your solar panels generate more electricity than you need, you will be charged for that power to be sent back to the grid.
So much for solar panels cutting your power bills.
Our energy commissars say that this is simply an incentive for people to buy a $10,000 battery so that they store that energy and use it later, helping the fragile climate-driven grid.
Again, that’s fine for people who can afford it, but the poor will have no way to escape the heat or the tax on the sun.
The state control of basic goods and services has the hallmark of Soviet-era Russia: “Go without comrade to usher in the worker’s utopia.”
As the state government explains on its website about the PeakSmart scheme, it can “significantly reduce carbon emissions, contributing to a more sustainable future”.
Do we want a society where the reliability of your electricity depends on your ability to pay for it?
Do we want an Australia where if you are too poor you must let the state control your life?
I thought the left wing of politics wanted to help poor people, not punish them.
Australia has the greatest supplies of energy per person anywhere in the world.
We export coal, gas and uranium to the world.
There is no reason that we should not be able to guarantee the necessity of electricity to all Australians.
If we do not want a two-class climate in Australia we need to build reliable coal and nuclear power stations. Building a few new coal-fired power stations in Australia will not blow up the planet and in the longer term we should build nuclear too. And, if climate activists are not willing to cut back their consumption, in accordance with their statements, why should we listen to them?
