News
22 November, 2025
Henry Somerset: Costly fakes
The problem with fake and fabricated ‘news’ is that it can be costly. Everybody is complaining about their electricity costs.
Costly fakes
The problem with fake and fabricated ‘news’ is that it can be costly.
Everybody is complaining about their electricity costs.
Few recognise now that generating electricity (across all modes from coal to gas to wind to solar) is less than 40 percent of your electricity bill.
If you run your washing machine during the day, even if you don’t have solar on your roof, the cost of generating the electricity during the middle of most days is zero or less.
That’s because the network is flooded with electricity both from solar (on household and business rooves) and coal fired generators that which have to keep the turbines turning even though they are earning zero or negative (ie. they pay to dump the electricity).
However from about 5 to 7.30 pm the cost of electricity can rise up to 24,000 percent, especially if gas generators kick in for 5, 10, 20 minutes as everyone turns on their air con and lights and oven as they come home. That’s part of what spikes your electricity bill.
Of your electricity bill, about half is for transmission - and there’s another trillion dollars needed to upgrade the poles and wires over the next decade.
And about 15 percent is the cost of reading your meter and the profit of your electricity retailer.
So if you really want to get your electricity bill down, it’s not about the net zero, anti wind turbine debates.
It is about harvesting the solar, especially that generated from your rooves (42 percent of buildings in our region have solar panels).
And that means batteries.
For many households, and especially those who are renters or live in group housing such as retirement villages and care homes, paying $10,000 to $25,000 for a home battery (of decent size and quality) is beyond their budget, even with government subsidies.
The best and fairest solution are community batteries, either for towns and villages, or for group housing.
This has been well proven in trials throughout Australia and especially in places as diverse as mining camps to Northern European communities.
One huge benefit is that it would hugely reduce the investment needed in major transmission lines.
A maze of community batteries, with the backup of a few major batteries, such as the pumped hydro proposed and under engineering study to our region’s north, would provide cheaper electricity with 24/7 security longterm.
The problem is this practical, sensible solution is under attack from the dumb, fake and fabricated.
This trio ranges from federal and state governments who can’t get their legislative and strategic and funding advice in order (I suspect the feds are just dumb and clumsy while I know the state governments is just trying to protect its state owned generating and transmission assets making a billion dollars a year but now declining fast).
This inter governmental coordination fiasco then provides a hotbed for the fake news warriors using social media to fabricate fears against wind and solar farms, transmission lines and community batteries.
The irony is that they do this on smart phones and laptops with much lower safety standard batteries than those they campaign against.
The tragedy is they are holding up the real practical, proven route to lowering your electricity bill.
Their fakery and fabrication is costly.
