By Andrew Bolt
When we will wake up? We’re destroying our future by chasing a green mirage:
SOUTH Korea and Taiwan are managing to produce cheaper power than Australia, even though they have to ship the Australian coal that fires their furnaces.
In self-sufficient Australia, households are paying one-third more for electricity than those in Taiwan and South Korea – two of the biggest buyers of Australian coal.Residential power prices in Australia have surged 12.4 per cent in the past year, four times the rate of inflation…
Industrialists yesterday declared that Australia’s surging power prices could rob the manufacturing and mining sectors of their competitive edge…The Energy Users Association of Australia yesterday claimed power prices were on track to double within five years and triple within a decade as utilities spent billions of dollars on infrastructure, and the federal government forced them to source one-fifth of their supplies from renewable energy by 2020…
Industry analyst Ben Freund, the chief executive of energy price comparison website GoSwitch, … said Australia had not built any new coal-fired power stations for two decades, despite surging demand from a growing population fond of power-hungry air-conditioning, clothes dryers and flat-screen TVs…
“If demand is increasing, we should just be producing more of it; supply should meet demand as it does for any other commodity and we shouldn’t be seeing these sorts of skyrocketing prices.”
Way to go. We’re pricing ourselves out of the market in part by demanding much more expensive ”green power” – a largely token gesture – and frightening off investment in coal-fired power by threatening an emissions trading system.
Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.
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Andrew Bolt’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and is a regular commentator on Channel 9′s Today show and ABC TV’s Insiders. He will be heard from Monday to Friday at 8am on the breakfast show of new radio station MTR 1377, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.
