The dotty Right and dirt-cheap renewables in Oz

Note that the blue areas in the west of the country are deserts, with normally very low rainfall. 
Even a small increase creates a record high.  

The "Liberal"/"National" coalition is in power at Federal level in Australia.  A far-right minority within the government has hijacked the party and caused it to veer to the right, especially for climate change policy.  They have scuttled down the rabbit-hole of denialism and coal worship.  The L/NP has also, over the last 30 years embraced the mantra of privatisation, selling off Federally owned and state-owned bodies such as banks and electricity utilities.  This has led to a dramatic rise in retail electricity prices, taking our electricity costs to more or less double the USA's. 

Meanwhile, the "National" Party, formerly the Country Party, which has (or had) its strength in the bush, has stopped caring about the welfare of farmers and essentially now works only for the interests of coal and gas resource companies.  Even in the bush, perhaps specially in the bush, people know that global warming is happening, because they experience the effects of record temperatures in summer, record droughts, and record floods.  And they know that burning more coal will just make things worse.  Recent Federal by-elections and state general elections have shown conclusively that the public wants action on climate change.  So the L/NP government is pretending to tackle the issue.  It has threatened to force electricity utilities to cut prices (how?) has stated again and again that Oz's emissions are falling, in the teeth of the evidence, and is still planning to subsidise new coal power stations, which it needs to do if they are to be built at all, because coal is now so much more expensive than renewables.

Dear L/NP--you want to cut electricity prices? Switch to renewables. Snowy River (owned by the Federal government!) recently stated that it got average prices of $40/MWh for its tenders for wind and solar power. That's for the whole tooty: capital cost, depreciation, interest charges, and maintenance.  Of course "fuel" is free. They also stated that the fuel cost alone (i.e., before maintenance) for coal-fired power stations was $56/MWh. Even adding the cost of "firming" (i.e., converting the variable output of wind and solar to the profile offered by fossil fuels) renewable electricity would cost just $60-$70/MWh. (Source)

This is below the wholesale electricity price, which is $93/MWh in Queensland, $104/MWh in NSW and $128/MWh in Victoria. (Source)

So if we switch to renewables, we would halve wholesale electricity prices.  And tighter regulation of the (now) privately owned grid would help push down retail electricity prices on the back of that.

What is it about the Right that they remain so ignorant?

Their cretinism goes deeper than that.  To show just how much they love coal (who is crossing their palms with silver, I wonder?) they plan to build more heavily subsidised coal power stations to replace Oz's aging generation fleet.  They can't stop the shift from coal globally, but they think that if somehow they support coal in Australia, then world coal demand will hold up. A kind of magical realism.

But it won't, for two reasons.  (Need I say it?)

The first is the obvious one: although the Nats (and the rabid right wing of the Libbies) continue their simple-minded faith in the climate denialist cause, the rest of the world (apart from the quite demented Republicans) has moved on. The rest of the world knows that climate change is happening, that we are causing it, that a major cause is burning coal.  Recent heatwaves in Europe and China have made the fact of global warming obvious.  

The second is that renewables are cheaper than coal, in some places (US/Australia/India) cheaper than the fuel cost of coal power. So even if the increasingly demented L/NP funds Ozzie coal power stations it won't make a blind bit of difference to world demand. Coal is finished.

Rational people would accept this, and start planning for the new reality. Not the L/NP! There was a time when the Right side of politics was rational and pragmatic and it was the Left who believed in Utopian ideals. Now the Right has discarded logic, truth and common sense, and digs deep into the poisonous pit of delusion. It will end very badly for them.