I don’t care how badly you think the government is screwing you over on energy prices.

It is way, way worse than whatever you think it is. And I’ll prove it because the cost of electricity that you see in your bills is only the beginning. And it’s proof, if any more were needed, that net zero should be called net zero because it is an unaffordable fantasy that should be abandoned as soon as possible.

But while we’re talking about our electricity bills, remember when Albanese said your energy bills were going to get cheaper? Well, Pepperidge Farm remembers. And that certainly feels like that promise was made a very long time ago. And I don’t know about you, but my bill hasn’t gotten cheaper yet.

But I have some good news for you. If you’re already rich enough to be ready and willing to drop, let’s say $7,000 or more on a house battery, then the government, sorry, then taxpayers will chip in the rest, about $3,000, to get you into a brand spanking new household solar battery so that you, rich person, can save money on your energy bills. Sure is good to be rich, right?

This scheme was launched less than a month ago and already there’s been more than 11,000 installations each applying for as much as $13,000.

As relatively wealthy Australians are yet again paid by the government to screw over taxpayers and other energy users who aren’t rich enough to jump on this scheme. And I say yet again because this is an exact repeat of the rooftop solar program that got us into this mess in the first place. With taxpayer-funded handouts of up to $8,000 back then.

And just like that old rooftop solar program, this new battery program helps people who have money to spare and promises the rest of us that we’ll get cheaper electricity. But what it gives us in reality, well, it gives us what it’s already given us. This Australian solar battery scheme is the very definition of what Harry Brown was talking about when he said that the government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, “See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.”

The fact is that these solar batteries are just a very expensive crutch that the Albanese government is using to prop up the electricity grid. The grid which they broke in the first place. We paid for them to break our grid. And now we’re all going to pay again for the crutch to keep it hobbling along.

My name is Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please head over to topherfield.net and buy me a coffee via the button that looks like this one. And if you like my videos, then you are going to love my books, starting with Good People Break Bad Laws, which by the way has a 4.8 star rating on Amazon with no reviews lower than three stars and lots of five-star ratings.

And you’ll find both of my books on Amazon, but it’s better if you head over to goodpeoplereakbadlaws.com because there you’ll not only find my books, but you’ll also find my multi-award winning DVD and my t-shirts, including now, by the way, long sleeve t-shirts just launched the other day and hoodies and a range of different designs. And I really appreciate your support.

Australia are world leaders in rooftop solar with more than 3 and a half million installations Australia-wide.

And we’re supposed to all agree that that’s a good thing. But the pricing data, well, that tells a slightly different story. See, globally, the trend is very clear. The more you add so-called renewables, wind and solar, the higher your retail electricity prices become.

And yes, there is a widespread between countries because every country has a very different mix of energy supplies. Some are rich in hydro power, for example, while others might have a lot of base load power coming from coal, which is cheap and helps to keep their prices lower even as they add more wind and solar on top. But the fact is, if you keep adding more wind and solar, the result is inevitable. Those prices will go up. The data is clear.

Now, check out that cluster of countries in the bottom left of your screen. 10 cents per kilowatt hour or below. All with less than 5% wind and solar. Now, Australia is not actually shown on this graph in its present position, but if we were with our 29% wind and solar and our 33 cents to the kilowatt nominal energy price, we’d be right there, which is exactly on trend. It’s exactly where you would expect us to be given our absurd devotion to expensive and unreliable wind and solar power.

But it wasn’t always like this. This graph from the Australian Energy Regulator shows the nominal energy price or electricity price in each state in Australia. And yeah, sure, it bounces around like a frog in a sock. But even so, the uptick in the trend from about 2010, about halfway through that graph onwards, is absolutely unmistakable.

So, what happened around 2010? Well, you’ll be shocked to learn, absolutely flabbergasted at the sheer coincidence of it, that 2010 is right when the amount of solar in Australia began to take off. And right around 2018, which is when the amount of solar really took off. Well, look at that. So did our electricity prices. What a coincidence. Now, I know correlation doesn’t always mean causation, but come on. Really? You’re going to argue with that?

So this is the problem which Anthony Albanese is now trying to solve. The rooftop solar program was so successful that it broke our electricity grid at great expense to us all, driving up our energy prices and making the grid less stable, not more. And that’s not just according to me either. It is a well-established fact that in order for a grid to function, you have to pretty well balance the input of energy to the consumption of energy. And that’s fine when you’re using base load power where you control the inputs. But what if the clouds are controlling the inputs?

Well, if that’s the case, then you risk moments of grid overload like what happened here back in September last year. Now, these sorts of events are becoming more and more common and are set to become more and more of a problem as the percentage of solar continues to go up. So another way to look at this graph is that the share of solar as it goes higher, not only do prices go higher with it, but so do blackouts and grid instability.

Right? So that’s the broken legs. What’s the crutch? Well, the crutch that the government is now offering us at our own expense, I will hasten to point out, is batteries. Lots and lots of batteries. Now, if we ignore economics and we ignore the cost of living and we ignore the environment, then batteries are a great way to stabilize the grid because they soak up excess solar power during the day and they supply it back to the grid overnight. Perfect.

The trouble is that here in the real world, economics and the cost of living and the environment all exist.

They actually matter. Now, I’ve talked at length about the absolute environmental vandalism that is the green energy revolution. The sheer scale of the mining operations, let alone the refining, the toxic waste that needs to be dealt with, the transporting and manufacturing needed for grid-scale battery backup, plus of course all the electric vehicle batteries that we’re apparently going to need as well. It is just insane.

Estimates vary, but we would have to do something like the total amount of mining ever done in human history. We would have to repeat that amount of mining every year for about 30 years in order to supply the raw materials for the green energy environmentally friendly revolution. That’s what they call environmentalism these days. And let’s remember that batteries do not produce a single solitary kilowatt hour of power. They don’t add any new energy into the grid whatsoever.

So all that mining and environmental damage is being done just so that we can control when the solar power goes to the grid. It doesn’t increase the supply. It’s literally the crutch designed to prop up the electricity grid that the government broke with too much rooftop solar. And once again, we are the ones paying for it.

Now, typically a house-scale battery will cost about $1,000 per kilowatt hour installed for systems of 10 to 20 kilowatt hours. The government, or rather you and I as taxpayers, we are stumping up 30% of the cost on all new systems up to 50 kilowatt hours with no cap on the number of installations which we are funding under this program, which all adds up to a heck of a lot of money.

Where’s that money coming from? Well, it’s coming from general taxation revenue. They are specifically making sure that it doesn’t go on to the cost of electricity. They are burying those costs elsewhere.

Now, why does that matter? Well, it matters because it allows them to produce deceptive propaganda like the Residential Electricity Price Trends 2024 report from the Australian Energy Market Commission. It’s a fascinating report, if only because it shows so much about how to lie with statistics.

Let’s start with this little gem on page 25 to get a bit of context. This graph shows the amount of new generation capacity being built each year. So, think of each of these bars as being added on top of the existing grid year-by-year. Now, most of that new capacity is wind and solar because, well, we’re not really building anything else right now, are we? That orange bit in the middle, that’s the past 7 years up until 2024.

That green section where the bars get much much bigger, that’s 2025 onwards. That’s the future out to 2034.

In other words, what they’re saying with this graph is that the amount of wind and solar that we’ve already built is nothing compared to what we’re about to build in the next 10 years. And keep in mind what’s happened to prices while we installed the solar that we’ve installed so far. That increase in electricity costs was caused by just the orange part in the middle of this graph. What do you think will happen to prices as we build way, way more, build way faster in the green section of this graph?

Well, according to the same report, prices over the next 10 years are going to go down. Yep. According to them, prices will be flat to slightly falling over the next 10 years, even though we will be adding record amounts of solar faster than ever before. And we’ll be building all the batteries that we so desperately need to smooth out the solar supply so that the grid doesn’t collapse because of all the money that we’ve already spent on solar.

It’s amazing. The prices are going to go down. Actually, it isn’t amazing. It’s unbelievable. And I mean that literally. It is unbelievable that given the strong correlation historically between renewable energy increasing and prices increasing with Australia being right on trend, exactly where you would expect us to be, that somehow magically that’s all going to change and in the next 10 years we are going to massively increase our solar and wind production and build battery backups for the whole grid. And yet somehow our electricity prices will go down and not up.

Yeah, I don’t believe that claim for a second, but there is a handy explainer page about the cheaper home batteries program from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment, and Water, or as its mates like to call it, the DCCEW for short. Catchy. And they state in their website point blank that the program is funded by the government to ensure no extra costs are passed on to consumers. Now, that’s just a fancy way of saying that these costs, they won’t show up on your power bill. They show up in your taxes. They show up on the national debt. Because let’s not forget that nothing is government funded. It’s all taxpayer-funded.

And that’s how they get away with this. That’s how they’re going to spend all of this money and keep your power bills lower. Now, I don’t actually believe for a second that our power bills will actually get any lower. I think they’ll continue going up, but it’s a fact that they are shifting the costs of your power onto general revenue in a cynical attempt to try and make our power bills appear lower.

So, what they’re doing with this battery program is not just providing a crutch to prop up the grid that they broke with their rooftop solar program.

It’s not just throwing vast amounts of good money after the bad money that they’ve already wasted. It’s also designed to hide the true cost of the green energy revolution and these solar batteries, paying for it all through general revenues so that you don’t see it in your power bills. Which means that your power bill, as bad as it is, it’s not even close to being the full story. There’s money being spent, money being wasted on the net zero fantasy that you don’t even see until it shows up in your taxes or it shows up on the national debt. All you know is that you’re getting taxed out the wazoo and you ain’t getting much in return.

Now, I’m pleased that at long last this net zero madness is being questioned by the Nationals and even some of the state Liberal parties. And it seems like maybe the momentum is shifting on this, but a huge amount of damage has already been done and is being done right this moment. The fact is that this battery subsidy is economically illiterate and pure environmental vandalism. All so that they can make our electricity prices even more expensive, whilst further driving up solar as a percentage of our grid, which is going to mean that even with loads of batteries, we’re still going to face stability issues and we’ll be paying more than ever before, either through our electricity bills or hidden in our taxes or both. It’s nonsense. When does this stop?

Well, it doesn’t stop until we turn the political incentives in this country on their head. Anthony Albanese continues to do this stuff because it’s a vote winner. Because most Australians, unfortunately, believe the media, the press releases, the headlines, the 5-second sound bites on the nightly news. And they don’t spend even a moment of their time trying to understand what’s really going on.

And that’s why I do what I do, the Topher project. The whole purpose of this is to cut through the crap, the media, the politicians, the spin, the noise, and to help busy people like you and others that you know to make sense out of the nonsense. And not just to know what’s going on according to the news, but to actually understand what’s going on and where it’s likely to lead us.

Now, you can help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you want to know more about political incentives and how to change them, then check out my books all about politics, power, and civil disobedience, especially this one, Good People Break Bad Laws. Plus, there’s my DVDs and my T-shirts and my hoodies, including this nyet zero design, which is my way of saying no or nyet to net zero. They’re all available now in long sleeve tees as well as short sleeve tees and hoodies. And it’s all available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you for watching all the way to the end. And the algorithm loves you and so do I.

Please like, comment your thoughts on what’s going on and whether we’re about to see the end of net zero. Subscribe

And as always, think free.