I live in Victoria, Australia. Energy bills are through the roof - almost literally as "insulation" is a thing just about no-one here has any competence with. Whatsoever. I'm talking about builders and building code designers specifically.<p>Ironically (see the top and bottom positions of the chart), I spent the first 40% of my life in Norway where things do get proper cold as opposed to in Australia where it's accepted to just have a heater pumping hot air through literal slits in the building (e.g. 0.5cm gaps under the external doors, that sort of nonsense), resulting in houses that are never properly comfortable at horrific expense. Yet in Norway the houses are actually insulated for deep, real winters and don't even need active heating at the temperatures costing Australians a fortune (eg 5-15c). I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get single glaced windows in Norway (because it's actually illegal to use), yet here it's a "luxury" item which is priced as you'd expect when not a standard. This gets my blood boiling (hey, free heating).<p>On a side note, I just started ETH mining on a Pascal GPU, and can still turn a profit. If I still lived in Norway I'd buy a lot of GPUs..
And instead of turning to solar power, they are letting Adani power build a coal plant? What is wrong with the government of Australia. And solar power's prices are on decline and are now getting lower than coal and it's clean energy, check any major business news sites like Bloomberg, NYTimes etc., If I am not wrong, Australia is a sunny place, so going solar was an obvious option and Elon Musk was even talking for giving them solar panels & batteries. WHatever happened to that?!!
This article is very poor.<p>The actual report this comes from is here:<p><a href="http://cmeaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/160708-FINAL-REPORT-OBS-INTERNATIONAL-PRICE-COMPARISON.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cmeaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/160708...</a><p>Note how they pick the one stat where AU prices are high. They say 'excluding taxes'.<p>Looking at the full report a lot of Australian prices INCLUDING TAX are actually fairly cheap.
I moved to Newcastle, Australia from the US (Los Angeles) about two years ago. I was shocked when I received my energy bill.<p>Australians in general are hesitant to use their AC or electric heaters, opting to just layer up when it's cold or try to use fans in the summer. Many (most?) households don't have clothes dryers, using clotheslines instead.<p>I would like to see how much energy the average Australian household consumes. I'm not sure how much consumption would go up if power got cheaper, but mine sure would... I really dislike being cold inside my own house. That said, I much prefer living in Australia to the U.S., especially while raising a family.
Hmm. Price per kWh is not really a good way to compare.<p>My last bill in Ontario had about $10 in usage in kWh but on top of that there are mandatory 'delivery' charges which, in my case, amounted to $90.<p>The real rate I pay (before taxes) is essentially 10x the supposed kWh rate.<p>And from the news reports locally, I'm getting off very lightly.<p>My bills are multiples what they were in the UK (for the same usage) and based on that and the chart in the article, of the UK @ AU$0.30 vs just under AU$0.40 as the AU peak price, it seems more likely Canada (specifically Ontario) is much more expensive.
> And basically, they stuffed that up for consumers by deciding to let the networks earn a guaranteed rate of return, based on their costs. That is, the more they spent, the more they earned.<p>This is an ignorant criticism. Every way of structuring utility markets has one problem or the other. If you deregulate the market, you end up with limited competition because of high barriers to entry. If you set rates to guarantee a fixed return on investment, you incentivize gold plating the network. And if you have the government set price caps, you get politicized prices that are too low and starve the utility of money needed to improve the network. Out of the alternatives, rate of return regulation is probably the least bad option.<p>Also, there are worse things than high prices limiting demand for coal-based electricity.
There's an old joke where in Heaven the cooks are French,
the policemen are English, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and the bankers are Swiss - whereas in Hell the cooks are English, the policemen are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss and the bankers are Italian.<p>I'm pondering an updated version where in hell the healthcare system is American, the energy market is Australian... Anyone care to finish it off?
> "Power lines are natural monopolies. Traditionally they were all government owned. Jeff Kennett privatised Victorian networks, but until very recently, distribution networks in other states, such as NSW and Queensland, have remained government owned, with regulated pricing."<p>This author sounds confused. An electrical network operator is a regulated monopoly whether it is government or privately owned. The regulation may be good or bad, but it is independent of who owns the assets.<p>And why is it a surprise that building ANY sort of distribution network is inefficient in the third most sparsely populated country in the world[1]? At least in the West there is now a strong push for standalone power projects with a view to decommissioning some of the redundant infrastructure.<p>[1] - <a href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density" rel="nofollow">https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popul...</a>
Sort of on-topic but I recall once an Australian company called Enviromission that was wanting to build solar updraft towers in the outback. With so much incredibly solar-rich, un-used land, I thought Australia would've gone all in for solar by now.
Funny, as a Kiwi living in Victoria it seems to me that, while prices have climbed a bit over the last few years, electricity costs here were incredibly low... I wish NZ was represented on that chart.<p>That said, my per kWh charge is about half the "market" price shown for Victoria there (although I do pay $0.94/day on top of that, which I guess brings it up a little), and that's after a 10% price hike about a year ago. Who's paying those prices?
It really is a death spiral in the making.<p>As grid electricity prices rise:<p>1. Insulation and rooftop solar/domestic battery storage become more competitive / cost effective<p>2. Which drives adoption (including retrofitting to existing structures), reducing the demand for grid electricity<p>3. Which, due to the fixed network and distribution costs, becomes more expensive per kwh.<p>Australia is primed for boom in domestic battery storage.<p>Why? There's already a significant amount of roof top solar installed. And feed-in bonus tarifs (up to 40c/kwh which were used to drive roof top solar adoption) don't transfer when you sell a house. This means it's far more cost effective to keep the energy on site rather than sell it to the grid at 6c/kwh and buy it back at 25c/kwh. This combined with rapidly dropping costs for battery storage... It's going to be an interesting time to be a politician.
If you'd like a good insight into the mismanagement or corruption (interpretation is left to how gracious you're feeling on the day) have a read of The Monthly's article from a couple of years ago headlined "How network companies lined their pockets and drove electricity prices through the roof"<p><a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jess-hill/power-corrupts" rel="nofollow">https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jes...</a><p>For a country that generates so much wealth <sic> from digging stuff out of the ground and burning it (or selling it to other people to burn), the regrettable state of the nation could appear to the casual observer to be quite mysterious.
30c/KWH = ~18p/KWH [1] before tax.<p>It varies by where you live and what tariff you're on but I pay ~10p/KWH, and this website suggests similar before the 5% VAT charge is put on [2].<p>1. <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=30aud+to+gbp&t=lm&atb=v55-6&ia=currency" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=30aud+to+gbp&t=lm&atb=v55-6&ia=cur...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.ukpower.co.uk/home_energy/tariffs-per-unit-kwh" rel="nofollow">https://www.ukpower.co.uk/home_energy/tariffs-per-unit-kwh</a>
On the other side, Paraguay is said to have one of the least expensive energy bills. According to a friend that moved a few bitcoin mining machines over the fence, Paraguay got free energy in exchange for letting Brazil build the Itaipu Dam on the Brazil/Paraguay border. This dam produces the same amount of energy as burning 434,000 galons of oil every day and supplies Paraguay with approximately 78% of its energy needs (Paraguay even sells some energy surplus back to Brazil).
Some more context.<p>South Australia went "all green" shutting down all their coal plants and betting big on wind and solar. However due to the peak issues etc. they now buy a lot of their power from the eastern states.<p>Victoria uses brown coal (about 20% less energy when burned)