Today, we bring you a dispatch from the land down under with a rather uplifting story on how a media campaign against renewable energy crashed and burned.
First, some background. For the past few weeks, electricity prices in South Australia have been extremely high, averaging $321 Australian dollars per megawatt hour (MWh). Compared with $80 per MWh for July of the previous year, this was certainly troubling. But what was to blame for the spike in prices?
Unsurprisingly, the Murdoch media machine and the coal industry immediately decided to blame these high electricity prices on wind energy, using it as an example of how reliance on renewable energy is a bad thing.
Michael Slezak has a great, deep dive in The Guardian on “How the campaign against South Australian windfarms backfired,” but we’ll hit just the highlights.
The Murdoch-owned Australianreported that not only were the wind farms failing to produce enough energy to meet the nation’s demand, the wind farms were actually using high amounts of energy themselves thus amplifying the problem. They also ran a piece calling South Australia the “canary in the coalmine” for high electricity prices due to reliance on renewables.
Multipleexperts have debunked this theory, pointing out that the spike in electricity prices was actually caused by a doubling in gas prices, since gas supplies 90 percent of non-renewable electricity generated in South Australia. A sudden surge in cold weather and a disruption in the connection between the South Australia and Victoria power grids were also contributing factors.
Even former resources minister Josh Frydenberg, who once said there was a “strong moral case for coal,” couldn’t get behind this attack on renewables. “To say that [this price spike] is the fault of renewables is not an accurate assessment,” Frydenberg said. His refusal to attack Oz’s Renewable Energy Target was the straw that broke the deniers’ back, since, as The Guardian points out, “the media hostile to wind has been almost completely silent on the matter” since Frydenberg’s remarks.
Better luck next time, deniers.