Power and gas is to expensive.

[corndog]

The government is spouting off about making things cheaper for consumers. Guess what I got today. A notice for a rise of power and gas charges. Looks like Turnbull really scared them. Time to switch..... Again.

[Bird]

The government is spouting off about making things cheaper for consumers. Guess what I got today. A notice for a rise of power and gas charges. Looks like Turnbull really scared them. Time to switch..... Again.

we just switched.. and went backwards.

[krisandkev]

Come on, hard to blame him. It all started when each government started to sell off the power stations etc.  Now you have big companies whos job is to make money.  Just be glad you can switch. We have no choice because we do not live in south east Queensland.  Kevin

[JusyApples]

Unrealistic clean energy targets
Governments unwillingness to build new coal or nuclear power plants

[gronk]

Governments unwillingness to build new coal or nuclear power plants

They are all scared....of their own jobs. With the green wave sweeping the world, no one in this country anyway, are game to build a coal powered station, even though we will need them for at least a fair few yrs yet ....

[tryagain]

The government is spouting off about making things cheaper for consumers.

It's never going back to how it was, best case scenario is they can fiddle around the edges and slow the increases but prices are only going one way with the transition to renewables.

[Nomad]

I just did the one big switch thing..........don't know if it will change much but was sick of paying origin stupid amounts of money.....if buy now switching round energy providers I can help bring more competition to the market I will do so to atleast try and keep the snouts from the trough

[glenm64]

I just did the one big switch thing..........don't know if it will change much but was sick of paying origin stupid amounts of money.....if buy now switching round energy providers I can help bring more competition to the market I will do so to atleast try and keep the snouts from the trough

Yeah right, just like the petrol companies.
They dont screw us either.

Cheers Glen

[speewa158]

Turn the power off , don't use it . That will show them your meaning business  , or lack there of                   Go camping forever or cough up           

[briann532]

Turn the power off , don't use it . That will show them your meaning business  , or lack there of                   Go camping forever or cough up           

Or run your house like you do at camp..............

Minimise power usage and go solar. Gas for cooking and wood for heating.

[JusyApples]

They are all scared....of their own jobs. With the green wave sweeping the world, no one in this country anyway, are game to build a coal powered station, even though we will need them for at least a fair few yrs yet ....

Yet they are happy to export our coal across the globe

[corndog]

Or run your house like you do at camp..............

Minimise power usage and go solar. Gas for cooking and wood for heating.

Do all of the above. But with my 3 kids  they don't like camping, and they don't have to pay it.   

[Bill]

Come on, hard to blame him. It all started when each government started to sell off the power stations etc.  Now you have big companies whos job is to make money.  Just be glad you can switch. We have no choice because we do not live in south east Queensland.  Kevin

No choices here either...
Bill

[Cruiser 105Tvan]

Yet they are happy to export our coal across the globe

Not just Coal, have a look at our LNG & LPG export figures over the last 20+ years.

[listo]

I don't like to be political on this site... or any other, I hate politics, but that's privatisation for you. Everyone will go up every year, just like rego, but private with most likely be higher.
One to to remember for the Queenslanders here

[arjay]

The bit I have trouble with is who approves the increases each year  - is it a Govt dept that allows the price rises?
If so, why don't we have better regulation on that instead of a talk fest.

[edz]

Stuff the lot of them, Watch reruns of Back to the future and Chinese engineer the Flux Capacitor, get the  Plutonium from O'l Kim Jong and power the Flux capacitor, No more power or fuel problems  ..
Mean while brace to be rear ended and reamed by Government and anyone else that controls those consumables, Oh and start becoming self sufficient with your own food and everything else you like, as its going to go through the roof in cost too .

[prodigyrf]

Here's the problem-
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/june
and naturally we all know about solar when the sun don't shine.

Now Australia's wind turbines (and they're largely in my State of SA) produce on average typically 30% of installed capacity over the year but you can see that hides a multitude of sins re reliable voltage and frequency and a lot of expense goes into the network to overcome those shortcomings both for wind and solar.

With the taxpayer subsidies and mandated 'renewable' power naturally that's lead to a lot of subsidy mining by everyone from large scale wind farms to rooftop solar for homeowners which has left thermal power stations to pick up the insurance tab for which they haven't been paid. Consequently the owners have been running them on sticky tape and string in order to extract the last drop of revenue from them before they close one by one as we're witnessing. Solar and wind energy have negligible marginal cost to produce so naturally they've been engaged in a form of dumping on the national grid, aided and abetted by taxpayer subsidy but the day of reckoning is fast approaching with their lack of despatchability.

What should have happened is no tenderer of electrons to the communal grid should have been allowed to tender anymore than that which they could reasonably guarantee (ie short of unforeseen mechanical breakdown) 24/7, all year round to level the playing field. That way these unreliables would have had to invest in storage (batteries or pumped water storage, etc) and/or partner with thermal generators in order to lift their average tender amounts and pay them their just insurance premiums. That hasn't happened and now it's time to pay the Green piper or face the rolling blackouts.

Essentially we haven't begun to pay the true cost of these unreliables but nobody wants to admit that and hence all the political funk going down at present. If you think the public circus can run power stations of whatever type more efficiently than private enterprise then you're part of the problem too, but if Gummint in their divine wisdom decides to actively encourage subsidy mining and snouts in the taxpayer trough then that's where the AGLs, etc will go to get a feed as they're not Mother Theresa.

In SA, Premier Weatherill is now rolling out diesel generators and Mr Tesla's battery (another subsidy miner par excellence) What! Not more solar panels and windmills Premier? Instead it's diesel gennys to gulp 80,000 litre of diesel an hour and a big lithium battery as a tourist attraction! What does that tell you? 

[suby]

To be fair, or governments have NOT invested in required infrastructure. And still not doing the correct thing. The power stations that will be closing down over the next few years are stuffed. Apparently Liddell is only running at about 40 to 55% capacity in recent times because of old infrastructure, the thing has had it. Its the worst possible decision to keep it running, its going to be a money pit to keep online.

Renewable energy is now the cheapest kind of new power generation that can be built today, less than both new coal and new gas-fired power plants and reducing. I saw Lateline on TV the other night and interestingly Solar pumped storage is a third of the cost to run then gas, and according to professor Andrew Blakers working on the example project in Katters seat, QLD has many many sites that could be used in QLD alone for the type of generation.

From the link: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2016/s4729057.htm
There's more than enough space in Townsville to provide all the storage required for a 100 per cent renewable electricity system for the whole of Australia.

I don't think the current government has considered its own expert chief scientist Dr Finkel report, and is pushing coal for its mining mates interests.  We should be investing in better grid technologies and local storage to get over our problem. We have NO leadership in my view.

[gronk]

The main thing we need is base load power. These ideas about pumped storage etc are just that, ideas. Good to be thinking outside the square, but we need power now, not in 5 yrs time when some of these new ideas "might" get off the ground.
Pumped storage still doesn't supply base load 24/7.......it still doesn't account for a week of rain ..

[suby]

but we need power now, not in 5 yrs time when some of these new ideas "might" get off the ground.

We are stuffed then. The old coal power stations are not running at full capacity now, in 5 years time they will be even worse, and a money pit in terms of cost.  Investing in grid technology so we can shift power around and storage are still a better investments according to the experts, then putting a tone of money into old coal.

[Bird]

If so, why don't we have better regulation on that instead of a talk fest.

That's all governments do "Look into it"..
They are Shit sacred of all these big companies right down to Coles/BigW/Bunnings/Energy/Fuel/ etc etc Why do you think they only threaten to "NAME AND SHAME" fuel companies - that we already know who they are? Imagine if these fuel companies pulled out of AU... or the energy companies? or if any of these big employing companies decided they didn't want to take any more governments Shit... how many low skilled workers do Coles/Big W/Bunnings etc employ... 

[MDS69]

They are all scared....of their own jobs. With the green wave sweeping the world, no one in this country anyway, are game to build a coal powered station, even though we will need them for at least a fair few yrs yet ....

World wide there are approximately 60 nuclear power stations under construction.
Apparently China earlier this year suspended construction and/or planning of 85 coal fired power stations

Australia needs to grow some balls and build nuclear power stations.

[edz]

World wide there are approximately 60 nuclear power stations under construction.
Apparently China earlier this year suspended construction and/or planning of 85 coal fired power stations

Australia needs to grow some balls and build nuclear power stations.

Lifted from a Nuclear imformation page ..
That is probably the biggest risk with nuclear: It takes so long to see a return on investment, if one comes at all. Imagine you start building a nuclear power plant today. If, at some point in the next two decades, some hardworking genius builds a battery capable of storing wind or solar energy, scrubs the carbon out of coal emissions, or plugs the methane leaking from natural gas, the odds of there being a market for your expensive atomic energy by the time you finish construction is pretty slim.
"What we have seen from the last seven years is a number of old plants being shut down well before they are required simply because they are not able to compete on the electrical market," says M.V. Ramana, a physicist at the Nuclear Futures Laboratory at Princeton University.
The only reason that nuclear energy powers 80 percent (and falling) of France, and powered 30 percent of pre-Fukushima Japan, is because those countries don't have the wealth of natural resources the US has. And that's not just coal and natural gas (though it is mostly coal and natural gas). US solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric utilities are growing fast, and getting cheaper. Currently, renewables generate over 13 percent of US energy.
Even people within the nuclear industry think it is an impractical choice. "You can make a pretty strong argument that it’s really foolish to burn a resource that's as special as nuclear energy making something as inexpensive and ubiquitous as electricity," says Arthur Ruggles, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee. By becoming more efficient and scaling up renewables, society could save the uranium for cool stuff like powering interplanetary spaceships.
And space ships might be necessary sooner than you'd expect, if society can't find a climate change solution it can agree on.
#CLIMATE CHANGE#NUCLEAR POWER#SAFETY

[corndog]

I think there are some advanced countries still building coal power stations but can't remember who.
Anyways why don't we build our wind generators in Canberra. With all the hot air up there we wouldn't need any other generators.