lee wrote on Mar 7^th, 2023 at 2:28pm:


The expense is in the firming (storage), and the new transmission required. Solar and wind, as power sources, are the cheapest form of new generation.

lee wrote on Mar 8^th, 2023 at 4:02pm:


Correct.

..."storage costs" being the necessary public infrastructure required to transition to a renewable economy.

And you know how the public sector CAN finance itself, if those infrastructure resources are available for purchase by the currency-issuing government ...

lee wrote on Mar 8^th, 2023 at 6:40pm:


in fact it's an "opportunity cost" - in resources used, not a money 'cost' for a currency-issuing government.

Quote:
 

Addressed head on, above: available resources, not money.

Quote:


Note this tweet today from Dr. Steven Hail (MMT lecturer at Torrens university):

@StevenHailAus
The world's central bankers are essentially incompetent, because they are biased by their model, which is an unrealistic and abstract one, and are largely immune to an objective assessment of empirical evidence, even when they have gathered that evidence themselves.

Oh dear: neoclassical economic orthodoxy is "abstract and unrealistic"....

lee wrote on Mar 9^th, 2023 at 11:29am:


You mean, you still believe the fiction that currency-issuing governments must tax or borrow in order to spend, even after the pandemic revealed Lowe buying back govt. bonds at the rate of $20 billion/month during the pandemic lockdowns....which of course Lowe himself lied about:


http://www.rossgittins.com/2021/03/funding-budget-by-printing-money-is.html

Last month it decided to buy another $100 billion worth. Under questioning by Labor’s Dr Andrew Leigh at the parliamentary committee, Lowe and his deputy, Dr Guy Debelle, revealed that $80 billion of the first $100 billion had gone on federal (as opposed to state) government bonds, which represented about 10 per cent of the feds’ entire stock of bonds outstanding.

The further $100 billion would take the Reserve’s holding of the feds’ total debt to 20 per cent. If there was yet another $100 billion purchase after the second, that would take its holding to 30 per cent. With the Reserve buying second-hand bonds at the steady rate of $5 billion a week, it was buying more than the new bonds the government was issuing to fund its huge budget deficit, Debelle revealed.

In his opening statement to the committee, Lowe insisted that “the RBA does not, and will not, directly finance governments. The bonds we own will have to be repaid in the same way as if they were owned by others.

“We are lowering the cost of finance for governments – as we are for all borrowers – but we are not providing direct finance. There remains a strong separation between monetary and fiscal [budgetary] policy,” he said.

That last sentence is the key to why Lowe is drawing such fine distinctions. Fiscal policy is controlled by the politicians, whereas monetary policy is controlled by the Reserve, which is independent of the elected government.

The Reserve is buying all these second-hand bonds of its own volition, and doing so because it believes QE is part of monetary policy’s best contribution to getting people back in jobs. It’s not acting under any directive from the government to fund its deficit directly. So the problem of the pollies continuing to spend beyond the point where this becomes inflationary doesn’t arise.

All true. But Lowe can’t suspend the truth that money is “fungible” – all dollars are interchangeable. Funding the deficit indirectly rather than directly may be important from the perspective of good governance, but from the perspective of the economic effect, they’re the same.

Of course the reserve HAD to create dollars ex nihilo, to avoid locked-down workers starving to death....no taxes required...

lee wrote on Mar 9^th, 2023 at 12:52pm:


Not MMTers, just mainstream journalists with a brain, which you are sadly lacking as proved by your refusal to acknowledge the difference between resource opportunity costs and your supposed 'money' costs - which are immaterial to a currency-issuer so long as the resources are available for purchase.

lee wrote on Mar 9^th, 2023 at 2:44pm:


And you still showing your lack of capacity for reasoned analysis.

'Resource opportunity costs'...oh never mind.... 

From another forum:



One petajoule (PJ) of gas, equals 1 000 000 000 000 000 (1015) joules. Joule is a unit of energy equalling 0.24 calories. 1 PJ = 31.6 million m³ of natural gas or 278 million kilowatt hours of electricity.
We export some 5000+ Petajoules of natural gas.... 158,000,000,000m3 of natural gas... which equates to roughly 1,390,000,000,000kw hours of electricity.
That is 1 trillion, 390 billion kw hours of electricity.
49.1 billion worth.
But it's all Russia's fault remember.

thegreatdivide wrote on Mar 27^th, 2023 at 11:35am:



And now  NOT in the USA.