Gold plating the grid
The following grids are considered to be main-grids:
National Electricity Market (NEM) grid (Eastern states) |
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Regulated asset base of NEM transmission companiesRegulated asset base of NEM transmission companies
Building new poles and wiresBetween 2010 and 2015 the spending on new poles and wires is $20 million per day. Ref |
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Regulated asset base (2011$million) per MW of peak demand and per MWh of energy delivered |
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It is well established that each 2kW air-con units adds $7,000 in costs, mostly in the form of network upgrades. The explosion in air-con demand was mostly responsible for the bullish consumption forecasts for the electricity grid, which in turn was used to justify the huge investment in network upgrades. Now we have too much transmission and the electricity companies are having to charge more to make up for the lost custom. This in turn causes people to use less electricity, which causes increased charges, and so on. This is called the death spiral.
It has been calculated that those who don’t have air-con are paying a subsidy of $330 a year to those that do. Yet the power companies insist on blaming subsidies for clean energy. |
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