I found out today what was puzzling me in the first post below, namely why current renewables/ wind farms may not be viable in the future, if the RET is changed. Short answer is that they won't be able to price gouge as much.
From Nick Cater at the Australian, describing the new Mafia.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opin...5a8aeadc03065b
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Wind farms may be ugly but they are certainly not cheap, nor is the electricity that trickles from them. No one in their right minds would buy one if they had to sell power for $30 to $40 a megawatt hour, the going rate for conventional producers.
But since the retailers are forced to buy a proportion of renewable power, the windmill mafia can charge two to three times that price, a practice that in any other market would be known as price gouging.
As if a $60 premium were not reward enough, the transaction is further sweetened with a renewable energy certificate that they can sell to energy producers who insist on generating power in a more disreputable manner.
The going rate of $40 a megawatt hour means the total income per megawatt for wind farms is three to five times that of conventional power, and unless the government changes the scheme that return is only going to get better.
In an act of rent-seeking genius, the renewable lobby managed to persuade the Rudd government to set the 2020 target as a quantity — 41 terawatt hours — rather than 20 per cent of overall power as originally proposed.
Since the target was set, the energy generation forecast for 2020 has fallen substantially, meaning the locked-in renewable target is now more like 28 per cent.
That will send conventional producers scrambling for certificates, pushing up their price beyond $100. It’s a mouth-watering prospect for the merchant bankers and venture capitalists who were smart enough to jump on board, ... but of little or any benefit to the planet.
The cost of this speculative *financial picnic will be about $17 billion by 2030 or thereabouts, *according to Deloitte, which produced a report on the messy business last week."