The UK shut its last coal fired power plant a few weeks ago but there was much less fanfare about it than normal, especially from the green activists who normally pop champagne every time a coal worker loses his or her job.
Perhaps their subdued response was due to some data that was released by the UK Government in the same week as the coal fired power station shut.
This data showed that the UK now has the highest power prices in the developed world.
The penny is starting to drop on how much the renewable experiment is costing us all, except if only it was just pennies it was costing us.
Every country that has installed a significant amount of solar or wind power has ended up with much higher power prices.
The UK Government data shows that there is a statistically significant relationship between a larger share of power from solar and wind in a country and the higher their power prices are.
This would be a shock if you had only got your news about energy from the Australian Government or their agencies.
Those groups produce an uninterrupted stream of renewables propaganda. For example, the CSIRO constantly tell us that solar and wind power are the “cheapest” form of power.
The problem is that solar and wind power are only cheap when they are working.
When they are not working (it is often windless and night happens every day) things get very expensive.
We still need power at night and that means that any system which relies heavily on solar and wind power needs a costly backup system ready at a moment’s notice when the weather changes.
In addition, many solar and wind facilities are far from existing electricity grids.
The costs of extending transmission lines to these areas is another massive cost that is passed on to your power bills.
In recent years, the CSIRO has tried to correct for this problem by estimating the cost of “firming” a renewables system.
But their calculations are opaque and conveniently claim that the renewables firmed cost is still (just) cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear.
The CSIRO does not correct for the costs of extra transmission lines for renewables.
Other estimates though reveal why renewables are so expensive.
A paper in the academic journal *Energy* by Robert Idel in 2022 calculated the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity, which is the cost of providing a particular form of electricity for the whole market.
Idel also calculates an estimate if the power source was to provide 95 per cent of the market.
These estimates show that solar and wind power are more than double the cost of coal.
Given that the Albanese Government wants solar and wind to power 82 per cent of our power needs, these figures are probably more realistic than those of the CSIRO. They would also explain why our power prices get higher the more solar and wind power we install.
All of this is costing households a lot every time a power bill turns up in the mail.
But it also is a huge risk to our manufacturing industries like the magnesium plant in Rockhampton and the alumina and aluminium plants in Gladstone.
Another event happened in the UK in the week that it shut its last coal fired power plant.
The last steel mill in the UK shut too.
Higher power prices has forced the end of the British steel industry, once the largest in the world in the late 19th century.
That should be a warning to us too.
We have already lost most of our fertiliser, plastics and nickel industries thanks to higher power prices.
If we go down the British path of closing all our coal fired power stations, we could lose a lot more manufacturing jobs too.
