Early days in a longterm plan. AGL board rejected the takeover. I think shareholders know its a net negative longterm asset and the proposed (by AGL board) dismemberment is an attempt to get stranded assets ring-fenced.<p>An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less, the future for AGL is very rocky. If the liberal government lose power in the coming federal election their assumptions about price support are toast.<p>Coal powered electricity has been in decline since the 5 minute bidding came into law, and before. It's also horrendously unreliable now.
An admirable project, and it's great to see a tech billionaire trying to do something like this. A major barrier can be seen in the infamous "lump of coal in parliament" video. Scott Morrison is Australia's current Prime Minister. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-a-chunk-of-coal-into-parliament-video" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...</a>
The coal price [0] is completely out of control. When there is that much money on the table, it is impossible to have any impact by buying a company and shutting down coal fired plants early.<p>AGL is more at risk of shutting their coal plants down because they can't afford the coal than because of any boardroom activism by M C-B.<p>Although I would be buying coal mines if I had that sort of money. Not to shut them down, but to get rich.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LQ*0/historical-prices?orderBy=contractExpirationDate&orderDir=desc" rel="nofollow">https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LQ*0/historical-pric...</a>
Controlling stakes in large public companies typically go for at least 25% above the trailing 52 week average. This wasn’t a serious offer, instead they are probably aiming to get media attention and traction for a long boardroom battle ahead.
This sounds good but probably isn’t. Let me explain.<p>The demand for power in Australia doesn’t get any lower by shutting down a power plant. The only thing that will happen is that the other power plants will ramp up to keep up with the demand. A true solution would be to provide new installed capacity to the grid that would price out the existing assets. And if the new capacity is less CO2 intensive than you lowered the emissions.<p>Question is what is that other source? If generation of the renewables is lower than peak load (times a reasonable factor like 1.5) than you build renewables. Otherwise you focus on bringing power from hours with lots of renewable generation to the rest of the day aka you build energy accumulation. If the accumulation solution is too expensive (either CAPEX or OPEX) than you have to invest in lowering that down. If you lower that down with your money, it will become more favorable for others to build this solution around the world. Others will come and build this solution of yours. This way you effectively lowered way more emission for the same money (assuming you will come up with something reasonable).
More in-depth coverage at the Sydney Morning Herald website. Also not behind a paywall.<p><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/brookfield-cannon-brookes-launch-bid-for-agl-to-accelerate-coal-exit-20220220-p59y25.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/brookfield-cannon-...</a><p><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-rejects-cannon-brookes-brookfield-s-takeover-bid-20220221-p59y5w.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-rejects-cannon...</a>
I have to say, on the one hand Mike Cannon-Brookes seems like an upstanding guy who cares deeply about the environment.<p>One the other hand, he helped create JIRA.
You may call me sceptical, if my face gets wrinkles, when I think of the combination of Atlassian, one of the worst offenders in terms of CPU load when loading any page of their platform, be it Bitbucket, Jira or the Atlassian wiki, and therefore energy waster, is to buy a big polluter, to "make it green". Perhaps Atlassian should focus on actually getting their software in order first, and become greener that way.