Quote:
Originally Posted by glend
I watched the SA news conference yesterday and can't understand how spending all that money is not going to raise energy prices in SA. If people living there are prepared to pay (forever), for it then fine. It does seem like a knee jerk political reaction to shore up support, rather than an element of a national energy infrastructure initiative. Of course, there is no leadership at all on a national energy policy so it is hardly surprising that SA would try to go it alone.
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prices will have to go up in the short term, but if we can get energy security and low carbon pollution into the future, maybe that will be a good outcome - could even result in significant new investment in the state and maybe some saleable IP, so it is not all bad news, even in the short term.
The alternative to more government inaction is to wait for the private companies that now own the system to do something - they have clearly indicated that they are more interested in making money than in providing a reliable service. For example, my understanding is that in the last SA brownout, the need for extra capacity was identified and the Pelican Point system was instructed to ramp up unused capacity. They refused because they did not have enough gas available at contracted rates and the market rules allowed them to refuse on that basis. So some of our electricity supplies came from the exorbitant spot market and load shedding was necessary. Presumably the supply companies did very nicely, but no-one else did. If a power system allows brownouts and unused capacity to co-exist, it needs to be changed.