Renewable snowflake investors false tears for “certainty” (Gimmedat guaranteed income!)
When investors cry for certainty, what they really want is “no risks” and “your money”
The renewables industry only exists because of government largess. What the government giveth, so can it sucketh.
Now that the bountiful wheel of the Turnbull government is turning slightly toward other beneficiaries, the Australian renewables industry are holding crisis meetings. Feel the entitlement! Sophie Vorrath reports in
RenewEconomy on the green industry disappointment with the NEG — (the theoretical new Australian plan for Weather-Management-with-Socialist-Electricity-Grids.)
The government is still picking winners, it’s just different winners:
NEG will block renewables, favour hydro and big retailers
Oliver Yates, head of UPC Renewables:
Yates said that setting emissions compliance cost on a path to zero could “pull the carpet out” from under existing solar and wind energy investments and actually stop future investments. “This is very bad for our industry and very bad for the nation as a whole, as this orderly investment and orderly transition towards using new generation assets is required.”
And – “as a banker” – Yates also warned against the mentality that the NEG could be legislated now, and tweaked later, under a future Labor government, or a more enlightened Coalition.
According to the Smart Energy Council,
no one in Australia knows more about renewables finance than Oliver Yates. Boy is this industry in trouble.
“It is impossible to invest on the assumption of election results,” he said.
Dear Oliver, coal investors and everyone else, have been doing it for decades. It’s called “risk”.
“You cannot explain to your board, when you’re asking them to put money into a transaction, that the structural price of power could bounce around wildly, depending upon the outcomes of various state or federal election campaigns.”
The problem is not that governments and voters may change their minds, it’s that they should never have been messing with this market in the first place.
There is more than one path to “certainty”
Yates again:
“The only way that we can get certainty… is if the federal emissions level set within the NEG is around 50 per cent for the electricity sector.
No. No and double No. We get far more certainty with the free market where the price, demand and need for green electrons is zero, and the certain profits are
nothin’. Since the effect of
CO2 has been minimal for the last 500 million years, the price of CO2 will trend toward its true value. This is the kind of certainty that will last until the Sun goes supernova. We’ve got the next billion electoral cycles covered. How long will your bubble last?
Shovel it on with a spade:
“I can ensure you that no investor ever anticipated that the electricity sector would only reduce its emissions between 26-28 per cent by 2030. . . .
solar power
