WTF?

ttbn states: "They know that their electricity bills are soaring."

I'll assume this statement is true. My own electricity use is heavy subsidised by my own solar panels but I am aware of increases that took place on 1st July.

But what is causing this increase? Let's look at some historical wholesale prices. In QLD the wholesale price peaked at just less than $350 per MWh in the second quarter of 2002. In the second quarter of 2025 the cost was just less than $150 per MWh.

This is a decrease in cost of around 43% and, while the price fluctuates, has averaged around this price since the fourth quarter of 2022.

At the moment in QLD the spot price is -$13. The energy companies are essentially been paid to supply electricity.

Don't blame renewables - they are responsible for the wholesale price drop.

Where I live there is only one provider. No "invisible hand of the market" here.

Please excuse my Maths - In my post above it should read a decrease of 57%

wtf

You can find the average price since 2009-2010 on the AEMO website.

https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem

The experience of renewables is one of rising electricity costs for consumers.

John,

"That’s what “too much clean power” looks like, and it’s a problem every country should be so lucky to have."

No, the Chinese curtailment was because there were no transmission lines to take the power to where it was needed, not because the power wasn't needed. In any event, curtailed power is wasted power, in theory about a third of generated energy is wasted in a stand alone wind and solar system. Waste like that is nothing to crow about, especially as nuclear power, with less curtailment, generates cheaper energy over its lifetime.

Fester

Of course I know about the AEMO site - that's where the spot price is found.

I also know from AEMO documents that the 2024 estimated levelised costs of electricity is $102 per MWh for coal, $70 per MWh for wind and $43 for solar.

Renewables are clearly less expensive than coal generation. The source you suggest to look up clearly states that.

Fester,

You’ve just confirmed it - the issue wasn’t lack of demand, it was transmission bottlenecks. That’s a grid upgrade problem, not a failure of renewables.

And no source runs 100% of the time - coal, gas, and nuclear all get curtailed too. The difference is China’s already building 30,000 km of new ultra-high-voltage lines to fix it, and the wind/solar capacity will keep cranking for decades once connected.

Got Chinese cost data showing nuclear beats wind/solar today? Lazard and the IEA say otherwise.

And as WTF has pointed out, that AEMO link doesn’t show what you’re claiming.

Their own Quarterly Energy Dynamics reports show wholesale prices spiked during the 2022 gas crisis, then fell sharply in 2023-24 as renewables’ share grew. Retail bills are driven by far more than the generation mix - network costs, retailer margins, and global fuel prices all hit long before renewables ever could.

If you’ve got AEMO data isolating renewables as the driver of higher prices, post it. Otherwise, that’s just correlation dressed up as causation.

The table I linked showed the average electricity prices since 2009. The recent spike was due to the natural gas price spike associated with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I think that coal was less influential because of long term supply contracts.

wtf's "black is really white" claim about the AEMO link is countered by John's "correlation is not causation" non sequitur. The idea that calculating the cost of energy is a statistical exercise is ludicrous. Calculating the cost of energy is an accounting exercise. It is not a complex and uncertain task undertaken by statisticians and medical researchers. It is true that future costs are never certain, but current costs, like the AEMO data I linked, are precise.

Perhaps John and wtf could treat olo as a place to share and learn? For all their contributions they never seem to learn a thing.