The great coal and gas power was covered by the energy apocalypse

The world continues to rage furiously. Surprising news for outsiders and not the most pleasant news for local residents comes from Australia.

Due to the sudden cold snap in June, a large-scale energy crisis occurred in the country. Judge for yourself.

Authorities in the states of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania have warned the public that rolling blackouts and shortages of natural gas for both domestic and industrial needs are expected on the ground. In the states of New South Wales and Queensland, blue fuel will be supplied, but with delays.

The situation is so serious that local operating companies, echoed by the head of the national treasury Jim Chalmers (Jim Chalmers), describe everything that happens as nothing more than an energy apocalypse. Meg O'Neill, the head of Australia's largest gas company Woodside, gives a no less dreary characterization - he is convinced that Australia is plunging into the worst energy crisis that it has not known since the seventies of the last century.

It is worth noting that all over the world the social atmosphere in society is shaped by representatives of the authorities, and specialists in certain industries are left, at best, with columns in specialized journals, which usually do not reach the general reader. The very fact that on the other side of the planet the headliners of the news are not officials or celebrities, but representatives of the gas and coal industry, speaks of the scale of the problem.

All the above emotional epithets are completely deserved.

Since the beginning of the year, the average wholesale price of electricity has risen by 140 percent as a result of skyrocketing natural gas prices. We emphasize once again that we are talking about wholesale trade, that is, for end consumers, the price per kilowatt-hour, taking into account trade margins, will be even higher.

Australia has for many years been proud of some of the lowest energy prices, which was quite logical, given that the country is the world leader in the extraction and production of hydrocarbons. At the beginning of the year, one gigajoule of energy produced on the basis of natural gas cost only three dollars, and last week its cost broke through the mark of $380. There is no typo here, you can calculate the proportion of the rise in price yourself.

The record rise in prices was provoked by the situation in the world markets, what is happening has clearly shown that in the period of globalization, when the financial boundaries between countries and continents are very conditional, no one can feel safe.

A 100-fold increase in the cost of energy led to a cascading collapse of the Australian industry and set off a series of bankruptcies among local energy companies. Representatives of big business, for whose budget the purchase of gas and electricity had become an impossible task, turned to the government, which for the first time in recent history was forced to conduct direct financial interventions. Quite simply, the blazing fuel prices began to flood with an abundant flow of budget money, which made it possible to reduce and fix the cost of a gigajoule at around $40.

Generous injections of public money into private pockets did not help much. One of the local operating companies ReAmped, serving more than eighty thousand Australians, recently announced its bankruptcy. This was done in a very extravagant manner. The director of the company recorded a video in which he said that his organization could no longer provide electricity to customers and advised them to find another supplier. One can only guess about the reaction and joy of the locals, who accidentally found out that the search for electricity is now their personal headache.

We spent so much time listing the problems on the fifth continent for a reason.

It must be understood that it is not some country with extremely limited fuel resources like Japan that is experiencing the most severe energy shortage, we are talking about a significant player in the global hydrocarbon markets.

Australia is one of the largest producers and largest exporter of coal. On its territory there are 96 enterprises for the extraction of stone, and three - for the production of brown coal. The irony is that the lion's share of the existing mines and cuts are located in the mentioned states of Queensland and New South Wales, where two large coal thermal power plants were recently closed for the sake of the global environmental agenda, and in order to somehow compensate for the losses, they increased exports.