The Morrison government wants to bail out coal-fired generators. Guess who'll pay? | Tristan Edis

This is a desperate quick fix to try to rescue power station owners from an onslaught of renewable energy they should have seen comingLargely unnoticed by much of the press, the federal government and its Energy Security Board have dreamed up a plan to bail out the owners of coal-fired generators, and it's you who will be paying the bill.Most of the private-sector owners of these coal-fired generators bought these power stations for a song, at prices well below the replacement cost of the power plants. One of them, Trevor St Baker (number 149 on the Financial Review Rich List 2021 with a net worth of $727m), picked up his power plant - Vales Point - for less than the price of the average Sydney home at $1m. AGL, which paid a fair bit more than $1m for Liddell and Bayswater, nonetheless still boasted to investors that it had paid so little for these power plants that it could shut Liddell immediately and the deal still made fantastic money. Continue reading...