By Jo Nova
Once upon a time Australians were rich enough to afford electricity on demand
Now obedient Australian’s are impressed with getting tiny refund for having voluntary mini-kinda-blackout.
Presumably, people are either desperate or already so trained in paying unnecessarily exorbitant electricity bills that they are grateful just to get a tiny fraction of their electricity payments back as an incentive for switching off when it suits those managing our inadequate infrastructure.
Demand response is a sales term for a voluntarily “doing without”. The ABC describes it as a wonderful new market force held back by selfish corporate greed (wouldn’t you know it?). The ABC doesn’t mention that electricity used to cost much less before we artificially forced renewables onto the grid and drove out the cheap reliable baseload generators or make the remaining ones less efficient and more expensive. But who remembers 1995? Were ABC researchers even born then?
It’s like 50 years of history doesn’t exist:
Another graph the ABC won’t show on TV
Behind-the-scenes battle over future of Australia’s energy market
It’s called demand response – it allows customers to save thousands of dollars by switching their appliances to lower electricity use at peak times.
