And read Giles Parkinson on this:
It’s one thing to feel you are being held hostage by privately owned provider of an essential product, but quite another when the stand-off may involve a publicly owned company providing a service as fundamental as electricity.
The extraordinary scenes that emerged in Queensland over the long weekend, and which quickly infected NSW, where generators threatened power shortfalls unless they got paid more money – come from an electricity system – its markets and its regulatory environment – that are completely broken.
It has turned into a state of complete farce when, in Queensland, a state dominated by publicly owned electricity generators – apparently can’t guarantee an essential service because they can’t make sufficient profits.
Even he doesn't really explain how to fix it properly, though...
Update: I suspect JQ is right -
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Yes it is amazing that units in coal fired power stations breakdown in winter not summer and it is renewables that get the blame.
ReplyDeleteGoebbels at his best or worst
Yes Quiggin is right on this one. The privatisers were more loyal to the banks than to the country. You have the government own the roads, but the trucking companies privately owned. You have the government owning the pipes, but private gas suppliers feeding into their gas network. And so forth.
ReplyDeleteWe have to renationalise a bunch of stuff. We have to have this very clear separation between what is communist and what is private. On Jason's catallaxy I tried to go into what it would take to have competitive private infrastructure. And it would have required tunnelling rights. The right to tunnel underneath other peoples property and claim property rights under the ground. I couldn't get anyone to so much as understand what I was on about. So no its got to be a clear division. Its okay for the private guys to own trains. But the government must own the tracks.
We now see how vital it is that we carefully separate the communist from the private. The American defence procurement has all these big firms who are in reality rent-seekers and welfare queens. Boeing. MacDonald Douglas and so forth. If we get confused and call them private firms, rather than welfare queens we are headed for trouble. The Russians have no such confusion. So they are now the number one superpower in the world. Right now they are up against the entirety of the Nato powers and sundry allies and Russia is pistol whipping every one of them. They are raining down 60 000 artillery shells per day. Imagine trying to contract to all these welfare queens in order to match that kind of delivery? Thats a years production used up in weeks or days and horrendous defence budgets. Americas defence spending is really just a bludgers enrichment scheme.
ReplyDeleteThe Mexicans like us couldn't get that communist/private separation and they produced Carlos Slim. When you can produce someone who at one time held a number one ranking for richest guy in the world, and its in traditional rather than innovative technology. Thats market failure. Our telephone industry is ridiculous in the way it mixes up communist with private enterprise. Even when we had the chance to repair it with the fibre optics scheme they go and cock that up by making exactly the same conceptual mistakes. Quiggin is not merely right. He's fist-pumping right. Except for the last sentence. Where he, really quite good in his own field, always accepts idiot consensus in other areas not his own.