Dear Ms Spender...
Lessons from a public forum
Allegra Spender MP did a good thing this week - she hosted an online zoom meeting free to everybody and anybody to attend, featuring an invited guest to discuss energy. Good on her.
The session was billed as an opportunity to learn how our energy bills work.
The format followed the usual plan - introductions followed by Allegra interviewing the guest speaker, and then some time spent addressing questions raised by the zoom attendees. Me being me, I asked a couple of (in my mind) critical questions and was fortunate to have several others ‘upvote’ my main question to the top of the list.
This has become my main question in these things and is intended to prompt those asked to follow a more structured thought process when crafting their response. Unfortunately (understandably??) this question was not taken to the expert, although to be fair a couple of other questions were.
Anybody who has seen me present will be familiar with this image:
For those paying attention to the screenshots the modern technology allowed me to listen to the zoom from my phone on the car radio while larping as a chauffeur for the kids after-school activities. Lucky them!
Technology also allows me to send those screeshots direct to OneDrive (thanks 4G and data centres) where I can send them straight into this substack post.
When I got home and had a few minutes I reflected on the comments made in the zoom and wrote the letter below, emailing it to Allegra’s APH email address a few minutes ago. Yes, everything above is the intro!
Ben Beattie BE (elec) CPEng RPEQ
Brisbane QLD 4121
24 November 2025
Allegra Spender MP
Member for Wentworth
Edgecliff NSW 2027
Dear Allegra
RE Zoom about energy bills with Amandine Denis-Ryan
Thankyou for hosting the zoom session, it is important to hear peoples’ views and have open discussions. There is not enough objective discussion on energy, a particularly challenging topic. It should be noted that Amandine represents IEEFA, an organisation with the stated aim of advancing renewables. They say so on their website.
Most of the information presented was pretty close to correct but some key points were not mentioned. For example it is true that domestic gas price has become very closely correlated to wholesale electricity price since the Queensland LNG exports commenced. But it’s also true that Victoria banned new gas developments as their gas supply was depleting.
Several contradictions about coal made their way into the conversation. One example is the lack of reliability from coal plants can cause price spikes. It is also true that wind and solar cannot prevent price spikes. Further the inherent variability of wind and solar generators has fundamentally altered the structure of the wholesale market to make it far more volatile – in both supply and price – than it used to be. The obvious counter point is that more reliable coal means less volatility and lower prices.
A point was made about gas royalties and the PRRT, but the PRRT only applies to offshore projects in commonwealth waters, which is nothing to do with the east coast electricity market. Higher gas royalties would make electricity derived from gas more expensive – recall the correlation…
The claim that industrial wind and solar reduces wholesale electricity prices is true at some points in time but wind and solar projects primarily sell their output on fixed price contracts outside the wholesale market. Even if the wholesale price is reduced at some times, retailers still pay the contract price which is passed onto consumers.
Another point was made about negative wholesale prices being good for consumers. Negative prices are still a cost for participants in the wholesale market and these costs are still passed onto consumers.
I appreciate that energy is a complex topic and there are many variables. I’m sure you’ll agree it is in everyone’s best interests for our politicians to be as objective as possible in all matters.
Yours sincerely
Ben Beattie
When I
Too much information for this muddleheaded wombat!
We need a simple story to convince people in the street that wind and solar can’t replace coal.
Windless nights are the overwhelming problem so what if all the people who hate windmills make a point of conversationally telling people when there is not enough wind for a hot breakfast and coffee on the way to he office?
Start with your family, then the people at the bus stop, the coffee shop, the uber driver and on it goes.
No need to be hectoring or aggressive, just conversational, you could even tell them about good wind days to introduce them to the widget.
On good RE afternoons you could tell them that the transition is going gangbusters, and hope they will tell the family about it at dinnertime. LOL.
Weather used to be the great default option for casual conversation, so lets make talking about the weather great again!
The threat of rain droughts haunts farming communities not just the farmers and now all the countries doing net zero have become wind farming communities. See what that means, when you think about it.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/wind-power/briefing-note-20-1-the-choke-point-when-the-wind-fails-and-the-grid-dies-2