As of July 1, later this week, South Australia will have the worlds highest electricity prices. Not only the highest but also the worlds most unreliable.
This is the stuff of Rome burning. And the political class are so pleased with their work as they go about vandalising the economy.
The irony in this is mind blowing when you consider that in the pursuit of low co2 emissions, or in this case NO co2 emissions, it is South Australia that is sitting on one of the worlds largest uranium deposits that we are all to happy to mine and export for others to use, but not use ourselves. There’s something morally corrupt and morally perverse in Australia’s position.
It’s not so much that Australia, the lucky country, is running out of luck, but in fact is trashing that luck and our heritage.
READ ON……
“…South Australians will be slugged with the highest household electricity prices in the world from next month, energy market expert Bruce Mountain says, in another blow to a state with the slowest population growth on mainland Australia.
The director of energy and utilities consultancy firm Carbon and Energy Markets said South Australia “unequivocally will have, both prior to sales taxes and after taxes, the highest household electricity prices in the world”.
Mr Mountain told The Australian that before taxes and levies, household electricity prices in South Australia from July 1 would be about three times higher than they are in Denmark.
“My calculation is that after July 1, the representative household electricity customer in South Australia will be paying slightly higher prices, after all taxes, than the representative household in Denmark, which currently has the world’s highest electricity prices. This comparison is at market exchange rates,” he said.
He was yesterday “lost for words” after a family-owned specialist plastics recycling company in South Australia was forced to close, with the loss of 35 jobs, after its electricity bills soared from $80,000 a month to $180,000 a month during the past 18 months.
Plastic Granulating Services managing director Stephen Scherer said power price hikes, driven by the closure of the state’s last coal-fired power station and a more than 40 per cent green energy mix, were the “final straw” for a company founded by his father 38 years ago.
“I am absolutely devastated,” Mr Scherer said yesterday.
“I literally kept a close daily monitor on electricity prices and at the end of the day we were simply unable to wear the extra expense.”
Mr Mountain said it was “absolutely astonishing” to see such increases on “what is a pretty standard utility … on top of what are already the world’s highest prices”. He said politicians had lost sight of consumers in a “climate war”.
As Business SA warned other businesses were also set to go under, ripples were yesterday being felt throughout South Australian industry, with almost 200 unsecured creditors owed $5.5 million from the recycling company’s collapse.
Supplier Clare Valley Waste has closed a processing centre and sacked six staff in response to PGS’s liquidation and is owed $11,000.
Director Gavin Mills said there was no alternative buyer of his plastic waste collected from six councils and more than 13,500 ratepayers in the state’s mid-north unless he tripled the rate he charged councils for collection.
He believed those costs would be passed on to ratepayers, already struggling with increased power and rising living costs in the state.
Drakes Supermarkets owner Roger Drake, who operates 60 stores with 6000 workers as an independent grocery retailer in South Australia and Queensland, yesterday said power costs had increased from about 0.9 per cent of sales to 1.6 per cent “and rising”, with his only option to cap his labour budget.
South Australian Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis blamed high power prices on the privatisation 15 years ago of the state’s electricity assets.
But opposition environment spokesman David Speirs said it was ironic the government’s “obsession” with renewable power had led to the closure of a local green business..” South Australia’s power prices to be highest in world