17 Group on Market Failure

The next meeting of the 17 Group will be held at 7 pm on Tuesday the 6^th of December 2022 at the BrisWest Senior Citizens Centre, at 132 Latrobe Terrace Paddington.  It will be addressed by Trevor Berrill, the extraordinary  Sustainable Energy Systems Consultant and Educator.

Trevor will already be familiar to many of you.  For he has previously given a number of excellent talks to the 17 Group, notable for their detailed factual basis, cogency of argumentation, and attractiveness of presentation. The title of this talk will be “The 2022 Energy Crisis & Market Failure in Australia”.  To assist in our organising of the event, it would be appreciated if you could use this RSVP link if you are intending to come to the 6^th of December talk:

https://forms.gle/An9YFsVg6Zjvpqfh7

Short summary:

As professor John Quiggin has observed:  “The national electricity market is a failed 1990s experiment. It’s time the grid returned to public hands.”  (Quiggin, The Conversation, 22 June, 2022). Other energy experts have reached similar conclusions. For example, Dr Roger Dargaville states “… the primary role of the energy sector to provide general benefits to Australian residents and businesses has been lost.” (Dargaville, The Mandarin, 16 Jun 2022).

While articles by these and other experts above provide some history and insight into this failed experiment, these articles seldom provide the full hard evidence of privatisation’s failure. This presentation offers a more in-depth critique of this neo-liberal experiment. It examines the privatisation of the electricity market in terms of its failure to reduce costs to end-users, and failure to improve reliability and customer service. It analyses the factors that contributed to these failures.

Privatisation has impacted adversely all major formerly public services such health, energy and water supply, nationally and internationally (Mazzucato, 2019 – The Value of Everything). Also considered are issues around the need to improve oil supply security, reduce oil demand and decarbonised the transport sector, by electrifying our road and rail transport. The overall context of converging factors such as globalised markets and supply chain failures, the climate crisis, pandemic and war in the Ukraine are also considered. Finally, some solutions are provided, including a shift back to a different form of public ownership. 

A full research paper by Trevor on this topic can be found at his website – www.trevolution.com.au

Short biographical notes:

Trevor Berrill is an award winning, private consultant in sustainable energy (SE).  He has worked in both renewable energy (RE) and energy efficiency (EE) for over 40 years, including:

• Solar and wind system design and installation – on and off-grid,
• Design of energy efficient homes and units,
• Research and development at UQ, QUT and GU,
• National RE technical training development and implementation,
• Public education and policy with Renew and the Smart Energy Council

He was past branch president of the Smart Energy Council and a founding member of the Renew (formerly the Alternative Technology Association) and the Australasian Wind Energy Association.

Trevor is trained in mechanical engineering and energy auditing at QUT and has a Masters of Environmental Education degree from Griffith University.

He lives in a fully solar powered, energy efficient home, windsurfs regularly at Wellington Point, just to test the power of the wind, and drives a solar powered electric car and bike.

We had emailed Leon to tell him about this forthcoming discussion about energy.  When we got to his unpretentious little solar-powered flat he was re-reading his broadcast address given in the Moscow Polytechnical Museum on the 1^st of March 1926.  It went by the title “ Radio, Science, Technique and Society ”.  He looked uncharacteristically depressed as he quoted one bit in a low hesitating way:

“The most outstanding of our scientists say that science, and physics in particular, has in recent times, arrived at a turning point. Not so very long ago, they say, we still approached matter, as it were, “phenomenally”, i.e., from the angle of observing its manifestations, but now we are beginning to penetrate ever deeper into the very interior of matter, to learn its structure, and we shall soon be able to regulate it “from within”. A good physicist would, of course, be able to talk about this better than I can. The phenomena of radio-activity are leading us to the problem of releasing intra-atomic energy. The atom contains within itself a mighty hidden energy, and the greatest task of physics consists in pumping out this energy, pulling out the cork so that this hidden energy may burst forth in a fountain. Then the possibility will be opened up of replacing coal and oil by atomic energy, which will also become the basic motive power. This is not at all a hopeless task. And what prospects it opens before us! This alone gives us the right to declare that scientific and technical thought is approaching a great turning-point, that the revolutionary epoch in the development of human society will be accompanied by a revolutionary epoch in the sphere of the cognition of matter and the mastering of it … Unbounded technical possibilities will open out before liberated mankind.”

  It was only when, at his hospitable request, we went over to the vodka cabinet and saw on the adjacent table that his laptop had opened a link https://www.trotskyana.net/GuestContributions/irvine_prophet.pdf. which was part of Lubitz’ TrotskyanaNet, and led to “ The Prophet Misarmed — Trotsky, Ecology and Sustainability ” by Sandy Irvine, that we got a clue to his low mood   

Among other criticisms Sandy  was saying that Leon “ showed great insight on many issues but his biggest blind spot concerned ecological sustainability, now the greatest issue of our times. His thinking reflected the technological cornucopianism [wow!] that bedevils the socialist tradition. Unless addressed it threatens to render the movement unable to address today’s primary challenge.”

“Just come to the meeting “ we said, to buck him up.  “ We all make mistakes from time to time.”   “ P’raps I should “, he said, to our surprise, and went on rather sadly to quote Dylan’s famous line : “ I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now “. 

Dan O’Neill
28 Nov 2022