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OT - new carbon tax 2-Mar-2011 At 12:54:03 PM Philtown

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On 2/03/2011 lacto wrote:
>Scaremongering re the rapidly rising power
>bills ignores the fact that 90% of the increases are due to rapid escalations
>in peak demand (airconditioning) versus our ability to generate this power
>with very slow response time on coal fire plants and high costs of peaking
>capacity which is really only needed for a few hours a year .

Actually no. All of the increase is due to investment in the distribution and transmission infrastructure. In Victoria this is due to 2 things: 1) upgrades to tighter specs following the Black Saturday inquiry and 2) past underinvestment that the infrastructure owners are catching up on.

In NSW it's all the second one, since prices hardly rose at all for the 10-15 years previous since no-one was investing in their networks. Now their infrastructure is worn out and dying and there's a painful catchup period. Blame NSW labor for wanting to keep bills low in the short term.