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This is the story of how a fund chaired by former Labor PM Julia Gillard acquired a wind farm project just six days before Labor Energy Minister Chris Bowen underwrote its future revenues with taxpayer money.
Today we've learned Julia's fund is trying to flip it. For a profit.
HMC Capital's 'Energy Transition Fund' rushed to acquire the Neoen Victoria portfolio. They hadn't even raised any money in their fund. They closed with almost a billion dollars worth of borrowed money and IOU's.
Less than a week later, Chris Bowen announced Kentbruck Wind Farm to be successful in the first round of the Capacity Investment Scheme. My rough calculations suggest they will receive something like a billion dollars from taxpayers (and maybe much more) over 15 years.
Sweet deal. A billion dollars of fancy financial monopoly money one week. A billion dollars of promised taxpayer dollars the next.
I want to emphasise that I have no evidence of anything illegal or improper taking place. Rather, I want to point out how odious and repugnant the official, proper, legal business of renewable energy has become.
Yesterday Chris Bowen announced he wanted to supersize the CIS subsidy scheme, yet again.
Today Ross Garnaut seemed to cheer this on, whilst pointing out "There are now virtually no new investment commitments for solar and wind generation that do not have CIS or other Government underwriting,"
What happened to a sense of propriety? Since when do we celebrate people rushing to put their snouts in the trough? Or rushing to fill the trough even higher?
Unlike the UK who publish a 'going rate' for technology subsidies, our renewables are subsidised through a secret tender process. Every project gets to ask for whatever revenue they want to proceed. @AEMO_Energy facilitates a secret beauty pageant, where they award points for things like indigenous participation or community engagement, alongside financial value.
And Chris Bowen makes the final call.
The bids remain secret. There's no cap to the pay-outs. Since AEMO is a private company, there is no scope for an FOI request, and AEMO aren't not subject to parliamentary oversight through Senate Estimates.
So no-one can ever prove an allegation that Bowen has bestowed special favour on a friend's project if that was what he did. But equally, he can never prove that he selected strictly according to merit. We are just expected to trust the black-box of Bowen's subsidies.
So I'm going to say out loud, with full voice, that I hope everyone can agree on:
If this is what the future of 'clean energy' looks like in Australia, it looks absolutely FILTHY.
Any firm that talks about ESG seriously should start taking the "G" a bit more seriously and steer clear of projects that thrust their snouts into Bowen's hopelessly opaque, bottomless trough of government funds.
Or at the very least, purge their boards and senior leadership of all the former Labor staffers, donors, and industry lobbyists who have had a hand in designing the trough, and filling it up.
The reality is that there are no natural profits to be made in generating renewable electricity in Australia.
Every dollar of profit in this industry is really a cheque signed by a politician, with Chris Bowen signing all the biggest cheques, worth untold billions, in the next three years.
It's all legal. It's all official. And it's absolutely obscene.
Mega-thread below.
(It'll come in stages)
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