The Albanese government’s new solar sharer program is being touted as 3 hours of free energy every day because well,

if they said our grid is close to collapsing and we’re now resorting to demand management dressed up as energy giveaways, well, that wouldn’t buy them quite as many votes, would it? Our energy grid is so broken that prices have jumped by 9% in the last quarter alone. And yet they’re trying to claim that they’re able to give away free power. We are now paying 9% more for the same amount of power just 3 months later despite having already paid over $5 billion in taxpayer funded subsidies into the grid since Albo came to office, by the way. And now they’re saying, “Hey, you can have some free energy.”

What’s going on? Why are prices rising that fast? And why are they playing games with these free energy giveaways?

We have the same coal and gas plants that we had 3 months ago. And the sunshine and the wind puffs, well, they’re supposedly giving us more free energy than ever before. So the question is, what’s wrong? How come we have the most expensive energy we’ve ever had and free energy at the same time? What’s wrong? Well, the answer is kind of everything. This is one hell of a rabbit hole. Let me give you a taste before we get into the details in a minute.

Do you remember how the government urged people to get rooftop solar and they promised generous feed in tariffs so that you’d make your money back on those rooftop solar panels? Well, surprise. Right now in Australia, if you have solar panels, depending on where you are, you’re probably either being paid nothing at all for the energy you supply into the grid in the middle of the day, if you’re in, for example, Victoria or Queensland, or you might even be being charged money, 12 cents per kilowatt hour for the electricity you supply into the grid in the middle of the day if you’re in New South Wales or South Australia. Because being charged money to produce electricity, well, that is what negative pricing means. We’ll get to that in a minute.

But simultaneously, we have the Australian energy market operator demanding that people who funded their own household battery be forced to connect that to a virtual power plant, which is basically an arrangement where you no longer own the energy in your battery. It gets confiscated and managed by the government for the greater good, of course. And by the way, connecting to a virtual power plant, well, it’s not a precondition of getting the government’s 30% solar battery rebate right now, but the system that you use that you install has to be capable of a VPP in the future or else you don’t get the rebate. So, just like that solar feed in tariff bait and switch, well, they’re now trying to con you into spending your own money on false promises that you’ll make your money back on those batteries via savings on your power bills when in actual fact they’re using your savings to prop up their failing grid at some point in the future.

And at the same time as all of that is going on, we now have Chris Bowen announcing a new program, this solar sharer program, which will force energy companies to offer 3 hours of unpaid free electricity in the middle of the day. And it bans them from raising prices in other parts of the day to make up for the lost income. Now, I’m going to play you this video in full and break it down later on in this video because this new solar sharer program should send shivers down your spine for a range of reasons. But all of this, the solar bait and switch, the battery rebate, soon to be bait and switch, the billions a year in subsidies, and now this new solar sharer program, all of this is part of their increasingly desperate efforts to prop up the Australian grid as it is destabilized by unreliable intermittent solar and wind power.

Now, we’ll dive into the details of how and why in just a moment and also what you can do about it as well. But first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you and to cut through the crap that is spewed by our politicians and our media. I am 100% viewer supported. So please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you appreciate how I cut through the crap in my videos, then you will love how I cut through the crap in my books.

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The problem that all of these programs and subsidies and bait and switch con jobs are trying to fix is this. The Albanese government were very proud of the fact that in October the number of megawatt hours of energy supplied by so-called renewables was more than the number supplied by so-called fossil fuels. But if that rising yellow line looks kind of familiar to you, well, that’s cuz it is. It’s a lot like what’s been happening to our power bills over the last 10 years as well. And that’s not a coincidence. I covered in a previous video how the bid stack works, which is how prices are set in our electricity system, and how the whole system is manipulated to give so-called renewables every advantage and make them appear far cheaper than what they actually are, whilst loading every disadvantage and every cost onto coal and gas so that they can maintain this lie that renewables are cheaper and that it’s fossil fuels that are driving up the costs.

I’m not going to break it again down here. You can watch one episode 194 of the Topher project if that’s a topic that is of interest to you. But here’s the reality that the Albanese government cannot dodge. Everywhere you look in the world, the higher the percentage of renewables in the grid, the higher the cost of electricity. And Australia is no exception to that rule. As the percentage of wind and solar has increased in Australia, our prices have rocketed up as well. But now the Australian grid has run into a second problem on top of the cost and that is stability.

If you have a grid that is mostly made up of reliable base load power, you can add a little bit of instability on top, some intermittent renewables to that grid, and you won’t really notice it. It’s like having a deep bathtub with little ripples on top. Who cares? But as the percentage of unreliable and intermittent wind and solar increases, it’s like that bathtub is now being sloshed violently back and forth in huge waves as the supply of energy rises and falls enormously in ways that are only partly predictable and rarely actually match the demand for energy. Sooner or later, you keep sloshing that water around, you are going to end up with a mess.

Now, all these ideas from forcing people to connect their home to a virtual power plant to punishing people for supplying power from their rooftop solar

in the middle of the day to two-way charging for electric cars and now this latest hair brain idea from Chris Bowen, the solar sharer program. All of these ideas are desperate attempts to stop the grid from being overwhelmed by that instability of renewables. Let’s have a listen to Chris Bowen as he spews this new solar sharer program.

[From video]

Hey, today we’re announcing a new plan called solar sharer which will see many many more households benefit from solar power from cheap solar power even if you don’t have solar panels. It’s called solar share and what it means is that energy companies will be required to offer you if you have a smart meter 3 hours of free power in the middle of the day when we have so much solar energy in the system. More Australians have solar panels than backyard swimming pools. that’s great for them. But now at the level where we can share more of that power with more Australians. So if you’re in a position to run your washing machine or your dishwasher or anything really during the middle of the day, uh that you’ll get that power for free. And that helps us with the grid at night too because it means transferring uh the use of power from nighttime when power is more expensive because it’s being run more by coal and gas to the middle of the day when it’s being run by renewable energy. Now we’ve got more work to do. This is the beginning of a process. It will come into force next year. uh and it’ll come into force in New South Wales, South Australia, Southeast Queensland first and then we’ll work with the states to roll it out across other states as quickly as we can. Uh it’s called Solar Sharer and it’s a new deal. We’ll provide more updates here as we go. [End video]

There’s a few things in that video that should set your spider senses tingling. Firstly, these are government mandated price controls. Now, that is always a bad sign. If the government has to start manipulating prices, well, you know that things are already very badly broken. It’s always done for your own good, of course, but it’s one of the five key warning signs of danger. Albeit, it’s not the most serious of the warning signs, but it’s not one that we want to ignore.

Secondly, this is communist style redistribution. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that literally. This is taking from the producers, the people that actually spent their money to put solar panels on their roofs, taking from them to give to consumers, people who didn’t spend that money. Now, the government are marketing this on the basis that it will be good for renters and good for people who live in apartment buildings etc. And that’s true. It will be good for those people. But it is a direct transfer of wealth in the form of electricity. It is from each according to his ability to each according to his need and it creates a terrible perverse incentive to stop being a producer and to simply become a consumer.

But third and perhaps most seriously, Chris Bowen tells us point blank in that video that there are more of these sorts of programs yet to come. And that makes sense when you look at this graph and remember that they want the ratio of renewables to be even higher. In fact, way higher. If a 50/50 share of renewables is already forcing this much government intervention in the grid, this much government control of the energy market just to try and keep the grid stable, then increasing that percentage even more is only going to require even more government control. And that is another of my five key warning signs that I have spoken about in previous videos.

The nationalization of industries. Keeping in mind that nationalization isn’t always about ownership. The government doesn’t have to own an industry in order to control it because being nationalized, well, it’s about control. It’s about who controls the industry and we have a completely government controlled energy market here in Australia. It’s probably worth me going through the five warning signs in a dedicated video because I haven’t spoken about them in quite some time and it’s beyond the scope of this video for me to get into those details now. So, I will do another video on the five warning signs soon. Make sure you’re subscribed to me on YouTube so that you don’t miss it when I release it.

But the bottom line is that the government are now at the stage where they are scrambling for ways to prop up the stability of the grid.

And clearly all options are on the table up to and including the appropriation of your private property to give away the electricity that you paid to produce to someone that didn’t pay for it. They’re trying to manage demand via this solar sharer program which flips the whole idea of a utility on its head. Instead of electricity being there to serve us when we want and need it, now we the human beings, well, we’re being expected to serve the electricity, taking it when they tell us to take it during the day so that we don’t collapse their precariously unstable grid during the night.

In a way, this whole thing is a metaphor for the way our relationship with our own government has been flipped on its head. No longer do they regard themselves as our servants, but rather as our masters. No longer do they do what they’re told by us. Now we must do what we’re told by them. That same inversion is happening now with our grid. We use the power when the grid tells us to, not before and not after. Now, I’ve warned about this repeatedly. Back in episode 72 of the Topher project, I argued that Albo is Australia’s Hugo Chavez. And the evidence is sadly fast stacking up to suggest that I’m right.

So then the question is, what do we do about this? Well, options are limited. If you’re lucky enough to have the money, then I’d suggest self-funding your own rooftop solar and battery system that is not connected to the grid and for which you do not apply for any government subsidies. You don’t want the government to have any kind of claim or to be able to force you to hand over your investment in that rooftop solar and household battery system just to prop up their own bad choices with the grid. But if you’re like me and you don’t have that kind of money just lying around, yeah, this is not a good situation. And unfortunately, the best thing that we can do and the most important thing that we can do is to simply get the warning out to reach more Australians.

Tell people loud and clear what’s really going on and show them that programs like this solar sharer are not proof that renewables are working. It’s proof that they’re closer than ever to failing. Show them graphs like this one to help them understand that the rising proportion of renewables in our grid is exactly the reason why our prices have also been rising so fast, 9% in just the last quarter with no end in sight. And don’t get sucked in to bait and switch government programs like grid connected rooftop solar or batteries connected to virtual power plants. The government will gladly take your investment and use it to prop up their failing grid for that little tiny bit longer with no regard for how that may affect you.

The government has found a way to tax the sun. Not directly, of course, but indirectly, punishing you and driving up your cost of living in the name of using solar and wind energy to power our advanced economy. Well, I mean, it was advanced. kind of still is. But the good news is that as I covered the other day, the Nationals have now abandoned net zero and the Liberal Party look likely to follow suit. And One Nation, who were never conned into the one into the net zero fantasy in the first place, well, they’re currently at 15% in the polls and rising fast.

Now, what all of that tells us is that Australians are waking up and I think we’re closer to a return to sanity than most people think we are.

But we can’t sit this one out. We all need to get involved. at a minimum get involved in spreading the word and helping our fellow Australians to really understand what’s happening right now in Australia with our power prices. And here at the Topher Project, well, that’s what I do. I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense and to cut through the crap that gets shoved down our throats by the government and by the media. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate what I do, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books, DVDs, and merch, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you for watching all the way to the end. Please like, leave me a comment, make sure you’ve subscribed so that you don’t miss my upcoming video breaking down the five warning signs, how to spot them, and what to do about them.

And as always, think free.