The Energy, The Money, The Problem

It's always money-grubbing.
 

  

How To Grub Money Out Of Anything

Run one of the largest polluting powerplants in Australia? No problem. Get government money to upgrade it? No problemo! Gimme pronto! Now do what you got the money for, be prepared with enough clean energy to replace your big pile of precambrian forest polluting sh*t? Give us a break guv, we agreed readily to the first two. We need another handout first. Make it a yearly one this time, hey? 

It's like the huge almost Victoria state-wide blackout a few weeks ago. The grid company was taking all the "service" fees from energy operators and sellers for transporting that energy - and pissing it up against the wall, apparently. They certainly didn't use it to maintain six key transmission line towers. Storms took them out in a chain reaction that dropped power system after power system until over half the State was black. 

Some people only got power back almost three weeks after the initial failure. Lord FSM () knows what chewing gum and string they've lashed together to replace those towers... I mean - it begs a few questions does it not? (Pastafarianism icon by Icons8)

Like: If they can suddenly afford to either reassemble the twisted wreckage of them or completely replace them, then WTFSM was the reason for not doing the scheduled maintenance? Surely maintenance would have been cheaper than replacement? And if it wasn't - then why not replace them at a sensible lifespan? Why wait until it totalled life for half a million people and some, for over two weeks? And yeah - opting not to pay for the tens of thousands of dollars' worth of food that was spoiled thanks to their negligence.

I think that maybe the charters of energy companies should be changed. Maybe they should have a condition that for every day or part thereof that their power is unavailable at an end customer's premises they refund a week's worth of "service fee." Some people could be free of service fees until next summer...

I think that maybe for every month they keep using fossil fuels right now, they should pay 20% of their supply tariffs from the offending plant to the government for remedial work to be carried out to undo their damage to the ecosystem. 

And I think that for every month they fail to meet the deadline for whatever they were given a grant or assistance payment, they should forfeit another 5% of their total tariffs for all fossil-fuelled power plants for that month to the government for damages. 

But no government in the world has the guts to do that and stick by it. Meh. We're soooooo screwed...

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