SA Premier turned down a $30m coal deal that could have saved a billion dollars, by Joanne Nova.

The SA blackout cost around half a billion, and building a new gas plant (with a $170b in green bribes) adds another half.

It’s now emerged that Alinta offered Jay Weatherill a deal to keep Port August Power running which he turned down. If he had paid just $30m to keep the Northern coal fired station in business, there might have been no statewide blackout, and no need for regular load shedding. Wholesale electricity contracts in SA have risen from 8c per KWhr to 14c since mid last year. …

Having knocked back such a sensible offer, the SA government did what any self-serving government would, and kept the offer hidden, even after FOI requests. Weatherill cited a confidentiality clause. Nonetheless, the Libs have the whole document, and now so does everyone else.

Presumably Weatherill could not bring himself to “subsidize” coal power — how the Greens would have howled. But how screwed up is the free market when the cheapest form of electricity needs subsidies to compete with other subsidies offered one of the most expensive competitors. All Weatherill would have been doing is giving back some of what Big-Government had taken. Alinta closed the cheapest power source in SA because it was forecast to lose as much as $10m a year by 2020.

Weatherill made a billion dollar mistake presumably to stop people like [Greens Senator] Sarah Hanson Young calling him names. How much more will the people of SA have to pay for Weatherills ideological zealotry?