> These companies, with no regard for your, the citizen's, vote or input, prioritize profits above all else.
And they are easily reigned in by the Australian Electricity Regulator, while governments owned businesses are not.
We recently had a price cap put on coal and gas prices, private companies had to eat a massive loss, government owned generators huffed and puffed until they got billion dollar bailouts from the rest of the nation for their coal guzzling power plants that should have been shut down years ago had they not been taxpayer liabilities.
There's simply no evidence of these things driving up prices. We have a huge government owned pumped hydro power storage project underway that has blown out from $2b to $10b in the spacce of a few years, if this was privately owned it would have gone bankrupt, instead more and more cash from electricity users will eventually have to be paid to fund it. It's costing 5x more than simply putting grid scale batteries in the cities and the government has sunk cost fallacy that it can't walk away from.
This is the problem with government ownership of electricity assets in Australia, politics gets completely in the way of good decision making and projects that should have failed long ago.
As I said before, where's the evidence, because all I see is ideology.
This is what happens when governments run electricity projects:
> He assured the electorate it would cost $2 billion and be up and running by 2021.
> By April 2019, a contract for part of the project was signed for $5.1 billion — and that doesn't include transmission costs, which will cost billions more.
> Who will actually pay for transmission is still being decided.
> "Someone's going to pay for it," Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad told 7.30.
> "The taxpayers will pay for it through your taxes, or you pay for it through your bills.
The current cost is $10b and the project has blown out to the end of the decade. No one is admitting how far they've dug or the status of meeting targets. The transmission bill is still up in the air but will likely be an additional $5b added onto household bills.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/snowy-hydro-2.0-expen...