Aidan Morrison

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) 1/

More significantly, the new regulations that give AER a mandate to squeeze retailers don't come into effect until 1 July 2026. Ie NOT for this DMO. The AER is just doing Bowen a solid by writing this DMO as though the new objective and regulations are already in effect. 2/2

A little catch up on the Default Market Offer. I should have noted that it's not a secret that the AER has been instructed by Chris Bowen to squeeze retailers profits in the Default Market Offer. He's passed a bunch of new regulations to say so.

@SkyNewsAust Leaving this here.

Households and small businesses are set to see lower power bills as increased renewable output finally eases pressure on wholesale electricity prices. skynews.com.au/business/energ…

@DavidOsmond8 @aergovau Conceptually quite possible, to be investigated further.

@FootnotesGuy @aergovau Unless I'm mistaken, the 50th percentile plus a volatility allowance may end up looking very similar to the 75th percentile. Or it could be even lower. All depends on the size of the volatility allowance.

So the @aergovau has just released the Default Market Offer. Bowen is claiming it's proof of the energy transition working. Actually, it might be more about methodology changes. Like lowering how AER assesse wholesale costs from 75th pecentile last year to 50th this year. 1/

More methodology changes.... All pushing down. Lowered assessed cost of acquiring customers, and cost of providing for bad debts. I'll have to come back for a more detailed take. But this looks like real news is about the regulator squeezing retailers. 3/3

Oh, and they've just halved the allowable retail margin for small business customers. More downward pressure. 2/

And in the budget... The Government actually does go on to support the moonshot of Australian solar and battery manufacturing. Right down to the polysilicon. That Treasury wouldn't touch. After Hormuz, all this stuff, for SECURITY, is just laughable. 24/24

Ponder that. Net-Zero stream should be just temporary assistance, to realise our potential. It's now permanent. And the security stream, should be critical minerals, that we export to global partners, and re-import manufactured. The sound logic of national interest has been twisted to support the most bizarre conclusions. 23/

The "National Interest Framework" re-read during a military clash over a crucial oil transport corridor reads like a bad comedy sketch. There's this perfectly serious and sensible logic about protecting critical supplies...Applied to all the wrong things. Solar panels and batteries. 🤨 Which we don't ever plan on producing, but might help mine critical minerals for, which we'll get China (and hopefully one day allies?) to process and manufacture into useful things. Then in the budget papers... we actually do want to manufacture those things. 🤦‍♂️ And then there's the whole premise that the entire world is moving towards net-zero, will pay whatever premium is required to do that, and that we have a massive potential competitive advantage there, but the government needs to support industry to get ahead of the economic bonanza. Things like Green Hydrogen. That has all aged like milk. Pure farce. A quick 🧵. 1/