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Electricity Prices Down 30% in Australia Expose Idiocy of Trump's Attacks on Wind, Solar
Despite its small population of about 2 million, the state of South Australia is widely seen as a demonstration project for what the renewables revolution can mean for the lives of people in the industrialized democracies.
Feb 16, 2026
The government of the state of South Australia announced recently that its wholesale electricity price fell in Q4 ’25 to $37 AU per megawatt hour ( / MWh) (that would be $26.22 US). That’s the lowest wholesale electricity price in all of the continent of Australia. The reason the price is so low is because South Australia has a lot of wind, solar and battery power, and output was high late last year. Remember, October – December in Australia is spring into summer.
That’s 2.6 US cents per kilowatt hour. The average cost of electricity in the United States is roughly 17 cents per kilowatt hour, because it is mostly generated by expensive, dirty, planet-wrecking fossil fuels.
So here’s the thing: in Q3 of last year, the price of wholesale electricity was $104 AU / MWh.
That’s right. In one three-month period, the price fell by a third.
Since South Australia is demonstrating that wind, solar and battery can cause the wholesale price of electricity to plummet, it is also pulling the curtain from the Trump administration’s con game in the US.
It was not a matter of usage falling off. The government says, “underlying demand in South Australia ticked up by 1.2 per cent to a fourth quarter record high of 1,624 MW.”
Of course, how the fall in the price of wholesale electricity gets translated into consumers’ home electricity bills is politics, not engineering.
Some 74% of South Australia’s electricity consumption is provided by renewables, and the state plans to make that 100% by 2027, in only two years. Wind, solar and battery generated 100% of the state’s electricity for 99 days (27% of the time) in 2024, the last year for which full data are available as yet.
50% of homes in the state have rooftop solar. South Australia has been a pioneer in mega-batteries combined with its solar generation. The country as a whole has 3 gigawatts of battery storage capacity. South Australian needs more battery build-out, so as to smooth out the excess generation from rooftop solar at noon and during early afternoon, which has been producing negative energy pricing, forcing utilities to pay people to take their electricity.
South Australia, despite its small population of about 2 million, is widely seen as a demonstration project for what the renewables revolution can mean for the lives of people in the industrialized democracies. Its Labor government has been committed to the project. Only a decade ago, most of its electricity was coal-generated. Alas, its Liberals (i.e. conservatives) are now campaigning on more fossil fuels. Since so much of the progress was grassroots, with people just installing solar panels, the transformation seems difficult to halt or even slow substantially.
What the state is showing us is that wind, solar and battery power, when combined, are extremely inexpensive. Moreover, there is every prospect of solar panels becoming cheaper, more efficient, and less bulky over the next decade as scientific research burgeons. Renewables are already much less expensive than fossil fuels.
What the state is showing us is that wind, solar and battery power, when combined, are extremely inexpensive.
It is true that because they are a new source of energy, they are attended by construction costs, whereas old coal and gas plants built years ago have already sunk that cost. But wind and solar are now so cheep that in many localities it is less expensive to build a new solar farm and operate it than just to keep an old gas or coal plant in operation.
Since South Australia is demonstrating that wind, solar and battery can cause the wholesale price of electricity to plummet, it is also pulling the curtain from the Trump administration’s con game in the US. By using the might of the federal government to bolster coal and gas, Trump and his minions can keep expensive and dangerous sources of power in place, making you pay more for your electricity and arranging for your money to line the pockets of his Big Carbon campaign donors. If fossil fuels were competitive, Trump wouldn’t have to try so hard to stall permitting for new wind and solar projects.
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No, We Can't Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence
Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.
Dec 21, 2025
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,
On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?
Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.
Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.
But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.
And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.
And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.
As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”
And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).
All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”
Flush ’em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.
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What Bondi Beach and Brown University Reveal About Stopping Gun Violence
Australia’s response to a December 14 mass shooting reminds us that violence is not an inevitability to be endured; it is a problem to be confronted.
Dec 19, 2025
Days ago, two tragedies unfolded on opposite sides of the world—each marked by gun violence and grief, yet met with starkly different national responses.
On December 14, on the first night of Hanukkah, a gathering on Bondi Beach in Sydney turned into horror when a father and son opened fire during a “Hanukkah by the Sea” celebration, killing 15 people and wounding 40 in what Australian authorities called an antisemitic terrorist attack. The carnage would have been much worse were it not for the heroic act of Ahmed al-Ahmed, an Australian citizen who migrated from Syria two decades ago.
The day before in Providence, Rhode Island, a shooter opened fire at Brown University during finals, killing two students and wounding nine. As of this writing, authorities are actively searching for a suspect—and a motive.
These shootings—one at a beloved public beach, the other on an Ivy League campus—expose not only shared grief but radically different understandings of responsibility. In Australia, sorrow was quickly followed by collective resolve. The US followed a familiar ritual: shock, condolences, and political paralysis. If I had a dollar for every politician’s “thoughts and prayers,” I could join the billionaire class those officials so eagerly protect.
If we are serious about honoring the victims and survivors in Sydney, at Brown, and everywhere else touched by mass shootings, expressing grief is not enough.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the Bondi Beach massacre as an act of “evil beyond comprehension,” pledging solidarity with the Jewish community and signaling renewed efforts to strengthen gun laws: tougher licensing, tighter oversight, and renewed limits on gun ownership.
Australians remember what followed the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Within days, the country banned rapid-fire weapons, bought back and destroyed nearly 1 million firearms, and created a national gun registry. The result? Decades with virtually no similar mass shootings.
In the US, by contrast, each new tragedy yields the same results: more guns, more shootings, more grief; this in a country with more guns than people! And once again, the gendered reality of this violence is almost entirely ignored. There's a reason we never hear the phrase, gunwoman.
The overwhelming majority of US mass shooters are male—frequently young, usually white, and commonly driven by grievance, isolation, and entitlement. This is not incidental. It’s a pattern demanding honest cultural reckoning. For decades, we’ve failed to challenge destructive norms of masculinity. No surprise that those norms keep finding their most lethal expression through guns.
Let’s be clear: This is not about demonizing men. It’s about telling the truth. We train boys to suppress vulnerability, to equate manhood with dominance, and to interpret frustration as humiliation. When that script collides with easy access to weapons designed to kill many people quickly, the outcome is predictable. Every time. Full stop.
Australia acted on that reality. After Port Arthur, it banned fully automatic weapons, semi-automatic rifles, and pump-action shotguns—and treated firearms not as sacred objects, but as regulated tools with enormous public risk. Rather than deny their grief, Australians transformed it into collective responsibility, identifying gun violence as a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions.
In the US, mass shootings are still framed as isolated incidents—acts of deranged individuals—or worse, as unavoidable features of national life: school shootings; movie theater shootings; grocery store shootings; church, mosque, and synagogue shootings. Together they form a normalized nightmare we refuse to confront honestly, ignoring the 393 mass shootings so far in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
At Brown University, students and families are now living with the trauma of a field of learning turned into a killing field. Final exams meant to test academic mastery became tests of life and death. The remainder of the semester was canceled, and students headed home to process a violent assault rather than celebrating the end of the semester.
And yet, even as Brown students grieve, politicians employ familiar distractions—talking about mental health or spiritual resilience—anything to avoid confronting easy access to weapons of mass destruction.
Australia’s response reminds us that violence is not an inevitability to be endured; it is a problem to be confronted. Their approach is not perfect; nor is their country. Their strategy reflects a fundamental belief: Government exists to protect lives, not to fetishize weapons. The US, trapped in a twisted love affair with the Second Amendment, continues to block meaningful reform.
Still, this country has a choice. We can center honest conversations about masculinity and how we raise boys. We can invest in early interventions for alienated youth. We can regulate weapons of mass killing. Or we can keep normalizing trauma and, laughably, calling it freedom.
When Brown students return to campus, many will have already spent weeks organizing for tougher gun laws. I predict students across the country will join them.
If we are serious about honoring the victims and survivors in Sydney, at Brown, and everywhere else touched by mass shootings, expressing grief is not enough. Action—the antidote to despair—is required. Now.
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