That Australia’s Eastern Grid is on the brink of collapse with a complete ‘system black’ on the cards comes as no surprise.

The $7 billion in annual RET subsidies pocketed by wind and solar generators were designed to allow them to underbid Australia’s reliable and affordable coal-fired generators, destroying their profitability and, ultimately, driving them off the grid. As a direct consequence, Australia’s Eastern Grid (that covers QLD, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and SA) is literally on the brink of collapse. The new Federal Labor government is in a flat panic, using Stalinist bully boy tactics in the vain hope of undoing the inevitable consequences of the so-called ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar. The market for electricity has been co-opted by governments, and taxpayers will be left to foot an enormous bill to compensate generators forced to dispatch power at a loss, on top of the $billions in subsidies already…

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

My last CFACT article pointed out that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) mades and enforces the regulations governing grid reliability in America. The looming threat of numerous summer blackouts, which they just announced, is therefore their fault. They have obviously failed to maintain reliability, which is their specific mission. See my “Silence of the power engineers? NERC does nothing” at https://www.cfact.org/2022/06/02/silence-of-the-power-engineers-nerc-does-nothing/.

I have now done some digging into this mess and the news is not good. As NERC itself says, the blackout threat is at least partly due to utilities rapidly replacing coal fired power plants with wind and solar generators that are intrinsically unreliable. So I looked to see how their rules, which are called Reliability Standards, address this recklessness, if at all. Turns out the problems are deep.

I find it a questionable policy, that the American grid is regulated…