Energy bills are set to rise across Australia, with the worst-affected areas to see their power increase by almost 10 per cent, largely due to an increase in the cost of productivity and the transition to renewable energy sources.

Grattan Institute Energy and Climate Change Director Tony Wood joined Peter Fegan on 4BC Breakfast to discuss why.

Mr Wood told Peter Fegan on 4BC Breakfast, “My view has been for a long time that this was never going to be as cheap and easy as some people had hoped, because the challenge is that whilst wind and solar electricity are the lowest cost way of generating energy… They’re both intermittent, and that means that we need to be able to have something there when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.”

“These solar farms and wind farms in areas where they’re further away from where the population centres are, coal-fired power stations used to be reasonably close and the cost of connecting all that, that transmission and the battery storage to back up wind and solar, pretty well offsets the lower cost of generating electricity.”

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