This week’s electric shock had mostly outside causes. But it is a grim warning for the politicians supervising an electricity system with a huge transition in front of it.
Until now, the National Electricity Market has been one of the great pro-market and pro-productivity reforms of the 1990s. It turned five siloed feather-bedded state electricity monopolies into players competing against each other to provide power for one big pool of wholesale energy supply to the east coast. Customers could negotiate the best deals, or just change their retailer, rather than take what was on offer.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s dramatic temporary suspension of the NEM should not be the cue for yet more intervention, such as the unwinding of privatisation as South Australia’s new Labor premier Peter Malinauskas suggests. Instead, federal and state energy ministers need to get on with the 2025 blueprint for modernising the NEM that has languished as a paper plan for years.
But the climate wars have vetoed this economy-wide price signal. Instead, state government targets and subsidies have accelerated the pace of renewables, which now co-exist uneasily with coal-fired power which is essential to keep the system working but increasingly unviable. That has made a new set of market rules to provide a safety net underneath the system even more important, but as yet there is none.
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