Features Australia
A new government program plans to rob consumers of their own energy supplies
Getty Images
4 March 2023
9:00 AM
The Albanese government and the Greens have a hidden agenda and it’s not good for you. Why you might ask did the Greens demand as their trade-off for supporting the government imposing price caps on gas, that the government provide tax-payer funded subsidies to get households to get rid of their gas appliances and go all electric. You might also wonder just why there is such a rush for electric cars. The two are connected.
AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) publishes information that provides some answers but it never gets publicly discussed. The fact is that part of the government’s plan involves use of devices owned by you. The plan is called the Distributed Energy Resources Program or simply DER and it’s designed to suck up your stored energy. That is the energy stored in for example your car battery, your solar panels and your domestic battery storage system. The plan is to allow AEMO to fill shortages of electricity in the grid with your stored energy and ration your use of electricity by turning off your hot water system or air-conditioner through your smart meter which you will be required to have.
The push for electric cars is about making more battery storage available – not to improve your driving experience. As long as your car battery is charged up at home, it’s ready to have its stored energy siphoned off. All of this is known to the cognoscenti but totally unknown to everyday Australians being fed a constant diet of propaganda as to how cheap and simple renewable energy is.
And then there is the inevitable new database ready to hack – and thereby compromise – all of your DER devices so they can source your stored energy.
AEMO describes DERs as, ‘consumer-owned devices that as individual units can generate or store electricity or have the “smarts” to actively manage energy demand’. It then lists examples of DERs as rooftop solar photovoltaic units, wind generating units – residential or commercial, battery storage systems, pool pumps and air-conditioners, smart appliances and electric vehicles.
AEMO describes its desired two-way energy system stating ‘DER devices are “plugged in” to the energy grid with the objective of secure and reliable power for all’. In other words, it is admitting the grid needs a base-load energy resource and how your car battery and other devices will provide it.
This is where the Greens demand for subsidies to get people out of their gas appliances fits in. You cannot plug in gas-powered devices so they want people to have electric devices that are available for their stored energy to be fed into the grid. This cannot be done with gas hot water systems, nor can this happen with a car with an internal combustion engine but it certainly can with an electric car battery.
Much is speculated about the importance and potential success of big batteries termed BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) or ‘grid-scale’ batteries, a term which might cause one to believe they are something large and special but they are not. In the words of AEMO they ‘consist of rows of domestic or lithium batteries installed together’.
In their grand plan, these systems are seen as essential to the wish to move off fossil fuels, but the language is aspirational and hopeful for the future, not concrete or factual. Quotes from AEMO clearly show this:
‘New innovations in technology are overcoming limitations… as technical innovation expands storage capacity, batteries will be able to deliver power for longer periods of time’. ‘The 300 MW battery to be completed in Geelong will have the theoretical capacity to service the average needs of 400,000 household for one hour’. ‘System strength and system restart are two key services provided by coal/synchronous generations that are not currently provided by batteries. However, as technology improves, and with sufficient batteries installed they may be able to take on this role with the potential to operate as a vertical synchronous machine’.
This they hope will take on some of the role of coal-fired power stations which provide over 60 per cent of our power needs.
All this just confirms the technology to get rid of base-load power provided by coal and gas does not exist. There are hopes and aspirations that it might in the future but at what cost, inconvenience and risks to households and businesses alike? AEMO’s forecast demand for 2030 and 2050 is that maximum demand is for 44 gigawatts for 2030 and 55 gigawatts by 2050. The cost estimates for achieving this through a grid powered by renewables are eye-watering and estimated in the trillions – and in the words of Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute ‘is just an exercise in magical thinking’.
Having access to capacity to store energy in individually owned personal devices is essential to the government and Greens dream to rid Australia of fossil fuels which we will continue to export as it pays our nation’s bills.
The estimated capacity is 69 gigawatts of power from rooftop solar panels and 31 gigawatts from domestic and electric vehicles with charged-up batteries ready to be siphoned off by a government agency. DER scenarios require the owners of these devices to foot the bill and the more batteries that are cycled the more they wear out.
The DER program is designed to try and fill the gaps in the dream or fantasy of having Australia’s homes and businesses powered by wind and solar. Thousands of square meters covered by panels (which, along with the thousands of windmills, have a limited life-span and are thus all destined for landfill) will not give households and businesses all the power that is needed. Even the addition of hugely expensive grid-connected power generators, 13,200 km of new transmission lines, Snowy Hydro 2.0, new pumped storage schemes, grid stabilisation controls, cost of property leasing, and transmission line rights of way still won’t keep the lights on.
By closing coal-fired power stations prematurely, restricting gas exploration and generation, and refusing to entertain nuclear solutions, the politicians forcing this upon the nation without telling the truth of what is entailed place individuals and the nation at great risk.
Nelle's journey 