Submitted 1 day ago by okwithmydecay@leminal.space to australia@aussie.zone
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/power-games-whos-driving-high-power-bills/
Power bills have become a growing source of stress for Aussie families and businesses. Many families are forced to make impossible choices: three in 10 parents are struggling to afford basics like food, electricity and insurance. Government rebates provided some relief, but this was only a band-aid solution.
Is it shareholder value?
It’s mostly privatisation. The regulators are supposed to regulate but they don’t do it effectively and competition isn’t working, least of all in distribution which is a natural monopoly.
There is a huge amount of money spent to blame it on renewables despite the evidence showing clearly that they aren’t the problem.
Unfortunately this takes the publics attention away from the real problem. This is becoming very common in today’s social media driven populist politics. People incited to anger against scapegoats while the real perpetrators sit behind the scenes pulling the strings.
Unfortunately not much for reasonable people to do but let the mob fuck things up and then let them pass into the history books and be a lesson for a few generations before they once again forget it all.
The government can’t win. If they move to fix the real problem they will be out on their ears in a week. If they sit on their hands the same people are organising against them anyway.
Capitalism is the reason.
Price stability only exists in a world where we nationalised energy infrastructure.
How will we pay for it? Wow, tax. Wow. What a novel idea. Maybe we’ll actually get paid for our natural resources. What an idea.
We don’t even need to pay tax for it. If you take the capitalism out of it and create a government monopoly; we still pay for the service, and it gets put towards funding the service.
Take out the Executive Salaries and other unnecessary overheads and it is much more cost effective.
“Renewables”. There’s no other answer. Ever since we started trying to eliminate the cheap, high energy density, reliable power sources (coal, gas) and started replacing them with unreliable, highly inefficient, spread out “renewables” our cost of power has skyrocketed.
The more “renewables” we put in the system, the higher the price goes. 50% of power bills are transmission costs, and the transmission costs for renewables are so high that the government refuses to disclose how high they are going to be. Pretty much every expert estimate puts it in the trillions of dollars.
You know you could just read the article
The renewables in our grid lowered average household electricity bills by up to $417 in 2024, collectively saving households up to $3.8 billion in just one year.
Thanks to the high share of renewables, wholesale prices nearly halved in the last three months of 2025.
And on your point the report says
Transmission – the highway system that transports power from where it is created, to where it is used. Transmission only makes up about 6-8% of an overall power bill.
Renewables did no such thing - the government subsidies did that.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Those lucky enough to own their own homes (or more realistically, have a mortgage) at least have access to solar panels and as of recently, batteries.
Those two combined have the ability to drastically reduce one’s utility bills to near-0.
For everyone else stuck paying rent, short of having a decent landlord willing to invest in their property, is shit out of luck.
We are living in two drastically different Australia’s.