cant they just eat cake ?
sorry Im being extremely naughty.
I get what you are saying here, problem is that much of our alternative industry is very much driven by "the subsidy".
When you live by the subsidy from a job/business perspective, you also die by the subsidy.
Jobs in the replacement areas are hard to come by.
ta
rolf
What is the subsidy? As someone who knows this game you can easily tell when people don't know what they're talking about.
The whole electricity transmission system was built to the coal fields, using public money that was also used to build the power stations, at costs of capital that the private sector can only dream of. The reality though is that today:
- wind and solar are considerably cheaper than the cost of new coal power stations, or gas for that matter
- it would be considerably cheaper for everyone to have solar with batteries in their house than it would be to build the power grid with today's dollars, for the same power quality
- I could go on but you get the drift
The only reason renewables require a "subsidy" is because power networks are a mandated monopoly and the forty year old coal power stations were built using yesterday's dollars and don't owe their owners anything anymore. So they hold them together with sticky tape and ear wax hoping to get another few decades out of them than they were designed for.
So we build our nation building energy policy on the back of forty year old power stations and power lines that are mostly going to need replacing soon ( which is why network charges are skyrocketing with no reprieve in sight).
Nothing like getting on the front foot and transitioning to the lower cost technology in an orderly way like we used to do. Now we have to wait for the incumbents to utterly fail before we let the next technology have a go. We just have to hope they can ramp up fast enough.
But there used to be a time in the history of Australia when governments saw we had to make a transition to cheaper sources of energy production and distribution and put in place the necessary subsidies for that to happen, so the incumbents could be put out to pasture. That time is clearly not now - as governments around Australia mostly own the incumbents or are trying to sell them they are doing everything possible to protect them.