JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Statistics
I want to keep mentioning this thing about Base Load, because it is so misunderstood, while at the same time, so important.
Rather than individually go to three or four sources each time I mention it, I decided to use the facility of having my own home site to collate the data into one place so it can be seen more easily.
To that end, I have decided to do a weekly Post for every Saturday, our time, listing the previous seven days totals. It will be an ongoing thing, and each week I will add that new Post.
The first one has been done, and even though it only has the last four days of data since I decided to do this, it does show exactly what that Base Load is. It is a snapshot in time, 4AM each morning when Australia wide power consumption is at its lowest.
Rather than just indicate the Australia wide total, 18,000MW Plus, I broke it down to the five States on the AEMO grids for those States.
I list each State’s total consumption, the Australia wide total, the total from fossil fuels, the total from Hydro, the total from wind power, and the total from each State’s coal fired power plants.
What it shows is that coal fired power makes up 80% plus of that 18,000MW total each day.
I have given each Post the same code, so that when the time comes, I (and anyone who wants to know) can link to that code at my site and just get these Base Load posts on the menu.
That first Post is at this link below:
Australian Base Load Electrical Power – Week Ending 8th July 2017
The code, if any of you wish to write it down for ease of access is OzBaseLoadTFO. At my home site, on the left near the top, under the World map there is a search Box. Just type that code into that search box, press enter, and just those Base Load Posts will appear on the screen.
Each week, as a reminder, I’ll mention it in these Unthreaded Posts, if that’s okay with you Joanne.
This is important, because that Base Load can only be supplied by power sources actually able to keep up a huge supply of power like this for the full 24 hours of every day.
And for those who don’t think it’s all that important, that 18,000MW is two thirds of Australia’s power consumption on any given day, all day, every day.
Tony.
601
That can’t be true Tony Jay Weatherdill clearly said that batteries were going to be the baseload of the future. I’m sure he’s right because he’s a politician, and knows so much more than me, a mere Electrical Engineer.
390
Bobl:
he and all the other politicians know so much more than any consensus of electrical engineers. You’ve probably noticed that they don’t listen.
150
Baseload, as a word, is also used to describe a thick level of course gravel surrounding the piles of buildings in earthquake zones, to absorb energy and thereby reduce the level of damage, in a major shock.
But you don’t need to use gravel. You can use other things as well. So, when “Jay Weatherdill clearly said that batteries were going to be the baseload of the future”, he was probably just getting a little ahead of the game. I am sure lots of batteries would be just as effective as lots of gravel.
130
Would that be a coarse course?
00
Of course.
00
Tony
FYI
“When the sun goes dark, California will lose the equivalent of five nuclear power plants of power.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/08/eclipseocalypse-electrics-brace-for-solar-darkness/
100
Eclipse viewing is often thwarted by clouds. Suspect the power loss pulse would not amount to much at all if it is a very cloudy day. That will make it hard to plan for.
40
We are talking about California here. A large proportion of the population are still grieving for Hillary, and will be to stoned to notice.
101
I suspect that the batteries aren’t there to power 30 000 homes overnight. They’re there to fire up the windmills when they all switch off at once and break of the link with Victoria.
50
Keep in mind that these batteries are connected to the grid.
In the event of a major blackout similar to the recent State wide blackout, as soon as a couple of those wind plants go down, and Demand is greater than Generation, then each individual power plant also goes down, and it all happens in 0.6 seconds, an instantaneous collapse of all power ….. including this battery plant.
Theoretically, if the State were to go down in total, and the battery plant stayed operational to supply the whole state, that charge in the batteries would supply the State for a little more than TWO MINUTES, but that’s theoretical, and even if it could do that, it would supply the whole state for around 0.1 second, closely followed by a very loud ….. KABOOM.
Theoretically speaking that is.
Tony.
121
Tony,
The battery would be current limited with an overload off-set. Depending on the situation, it would drop off pretty quickly as it is nominal 100kW. It will help,a bit with stability (at big expense) and still needs the synchronous capacitors that finkel recommends to address power factor for excessive transmission losses. After the last debacle apparently they changed some set-points on the wind inverters to increase the “ride-through” of rate of change of frequency to ease the drop-offs. There are problems with this particularly as wind machines in a storm are at max output about to shut down on over speed but then get a load dumped on them from a separate shut-down…the battery will be of limited use when push comes to shove but it will dampen smaller fluctuations a bit.
Transmission losses and fault current discrimination will be a bug-bare for them for a time to come because the vagaries of the surging intermitants really means it needs a different kind of grid design from the point of view of instrumentation and control. There will be bugs in the system for a long time.
50
The cost of doing all that is not known but it is a cost directly due to renewballs.
30
Oops, my 100kW should of course be 100MW.
00
What would the temperature of the battery be after one of those two minutes?
Medoubts that’s how it works.
Mind you, this system is a physical possibility. I don’t expect it to be an economic feasibility. I will be interested to watch it all happening, expecting SA to want us to pay for it whether it works or not.
Now to see if Elon Musk can get that battery across SA’s docks in 100 days.
20
The temperature would be zero, because dumping that much energy in that short time would cause such an explosion that there wouldn’t be a battery left to have a temperature. Just a crater where the battery used to be.
20
Tony, I reckon your plug-away strategy is the way to go. While the repetition may seem long and frustrating, you are like the ram in the Frank Sinatra song: you’ll finally make the hole in the dam. Or like the ant who finally moved the big rubber tree plant. Hard work, but your patience and application are appreciated.
What’s more, many who later play dumb and pretend they were misled will have your regular posts as evidence that all were alerted publicly, alerted clearly and alerted constantly. Especially if more and more of us use your posts as reference. You leave ’em no back doors or hidey-holes.
Because, to borrow Jo’s slogan, we really don’t want a perfectly good civilization to go to waste…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaPTweZ2_fI
240
Nice one Tony. Remember when Christopher Monckton used to do his Monthly CO2 Report without fàil until his point was unavoidably made. I can see you picking up the mantle for Australia’s new energy future. With the reality spelled out & staring them in the face lollies can only ignore it for so long.
90
Tony from oz
By base load you simply mean grown up power stations. It should be a very easy concept to understand but for some reason the ruling elite and their advisers have difficulty understanding, from which we must assume their dogma means they simply do not want to accept the truth.
Whilst renewables have their place as a green feel good measure it can not become grown up until battery technology improves. Even then it seems doubtful it can ever supply cheap, reliable power 24 hours a day to a modern energy hungry society
Tonyb
80
Would also appreciate the base load breakdown for WA Tony, or at least a link to where I can obtain this information.
20
Does anyone know where I can get that WA information similar to the AEMO data for those Five States.
I’m also missing the NT data, but that would be pretty minor really.
The ACT (contrary to their 100% Renewable claim) is just connected in total to the NSW grid and their data is in with NSW.
Tony.
50
This just can’t be, Tony. It is all about to change.
SA is going to install a huge Tesla coil that will solve everything.
And my dog Mork is getting his PhD.
50
Just as you have reiterated many times before, Tony, the solution to our dilemma is for Parliament to decree that all combustion of coal must cease immediately.
It would be all over, Red Rover, in an instant.
30
Scene in di Natale’s parliamentary office.
“What just happened then? Turn the power on on your way out Sarah, will you?
Tony.
90
Great work Tony.
One question, on each day hydro is providing power at 4am each day. Presumably that is from hydro other than the Snowy Mountains Scheme? They would be consuming power at that point wouldn’t they to pump water uphill in times of low overall demand?
Is pumping water back uphill the driver behind the remarkable consistency of the demand at 4am?
10
Dean,
at that point in time when Australian power consumption is at it lowest point, (4AM) that Hydro supply would virtually just all be in Tasmania, I might suggest.
If you look at the Hydro supply chart, (at this link) you’ll see that they are (very cleverly I might add) selling their power when they can get the most money for it, during the peak Power times of every day, that being 6AM till 9AM, when it drops off, and then from 5.30PM till 7.30PM, when it drops away again.
Look at similar graphs for Summer and they sell it during the daytime peak.
It closely follows both Summer and Winter load curves for actual consumption.
Why not sell your power when you get the most for it.
Coal fired power just lumbers along all the time, and because they generate so much power, they can sell it cheaply and still account for a huge amount of money at wholesale.
So if hydro delivers 3000MW for a couple of hours a day, they need to get a high price for their power.
Wind similar, only they are only managing an average of 1300MW a day, some days more, some less, again worked out on an hourly basis depending on the wind.
However, coal fired power is selling 15,000MW plus for the whole 24 hours.
Even blind freddie can tell that that of itself means coal fired power MUST be cheaper than any form of power generation.
Tony.
60
Tony. Theoretically the price is set by the demand at any given time. But the factors are not that simple. For insurance against shortages, “price” surely must lead “demand”, with demand being an expected demand plus a margin for error on the high side.
Who sets the price, and how much power is sold at or near the peak price? And what is the benchmark for assessing the peak price?
To me it looks like a system which is wide open for malpractice.
00
Oh, and I feel sure you would be astounded by how many Pumped Hydro power plants there are in Australia.
That astonishingly humungous number comes in at, umm, ONE of them, Tumut 3.
Tony.
81
Plus the Shoalhaven Scheme, Tony
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoalhaven_Scheme
Only small, I know, but bigger than Weatherdill’s battery.
20
Tony, unclear how roof top solar plays into this market – it doesn’t seem to be recorded by AEMO?
10
Tony, I think that it is also important to record gas usage, because like hydro, in an efficient system it would be used along with hydro for peaking, not for base load. But I guess with the wind blowing intermittently you need standby power running even at 4am.
30
Robber,
That gas usage can easily be worked out from my data. I didn’t include it because the vast bulk of power at that time (4AM) is coal fired power, and I didn’t want to have too much data there to make it seem a little unwieldy.
However, from that data I have, just take coal fired power away from fossil fuelled power and you’ll see just how small it actually is, between 900MW and perhaps as high as 2000MW, and if it’s that high, then you can see exactly where, Victoria, as its 2 remaining plants (Loy Yang with 6 Units and Yallourn W with 4 Units) are now stressed because of the closure of Hazelwood, and if even one Unit shuts down for maintenance then gas fired has to cover that.
Gas fired power supply very little power at 4AM, because the cost of gas means they need to sell their power when they get the most money for it, during those daily peak times.
To actually have to sell it at 4AM would be because Dan Andrews would be on the phone to them, saying that there will be hell to pay if you black out my State. (/sarc)
Tony.
50
With all the government expansion and rising debt (our debt) there’s a lot of strong talk even predictions of a disastrous economic collapse in the near future, knowing the vast knowledge and experience base here I would like to hear opinions on whether or not this will occur.
Not looking for or expecting concrete advice just interested in opinions/ideas on this subject, I’ll start by linking the Australian Debt Clock and ask how the current PM a Rhodes Scholar/Lawyer/Merchant Banker/Venture Capitalist/Multi Millionaire would see any benefit for a nation to rack up this amount of debt while losing its ability to produce?
190
China has a population of 1.3 billion and is the second largest economy in the world, contributing to world growth by 39% last year.
This is the Third Way, free of the boom and bust, there won’t be an economic collapse because new markets are being cultivated in the Third World. As you know, capitalism always needs fresh markets to avoid collapse.
70
Yes China is big but we are not, if any capitalist market collapse occurred in China wouldn’t they have a fall back position with a large Communist structure already in place?, with the few that lose out millions are still living very modestly and contributing to the state functioning, I may be way off if so please correct.
Australia’s population is predominantly market driven even with the expanding welfare industry so I’d consider any large economic collapse to hit harder on those not used to going without which is probably 95% of us?
60
China is our biggest trading partner, we are safe.
This economic collapse you speak of, how do you imagine it will come about?
60
I’ve said (several times this year) that I’m expecting an economic failure (crash) this year, about October 2017. It’s due to happen +/- 1 year. It wasn’t last year. It’s going to be interesting to see if it will happen (`on time’) this year. It may not and I will be surprised if it doesn’t. If it should happen then it shouldn’t be as bad as the 2008 one. That one will repeat in 2026.
The Economy is cyclic. Modern mis-educated economists call it `a natural cycle.’ It’s not. It’s man-made. The Economy is not natural, it’s man-made so any cyclicity in it is not natural, either, but man-made. It’s been traced back to Henry VIII and it’s almost as reliable and regular as clockwork. Calling it `natural’ demonstrates the economists’ mis-education and ignorance. In other words, they have no idea how it happens.
If I turn out to be right, I’ll tell all. If I’m wrong, well them’s the breaks, and I got it wrong.
Modern Economics, sometimes called the Dismal Science, is a Dogma, not a Science. If it was a science, economists could predict with some real accuracy. But as they can’t, and invariably get it wrong, then it fits every facet of being a dogma. Sound familiar? It should.
70
The dynamics of global economy have changed dramatically over the past few decades and with the northern hemisphere, many countries there in decline the southern hemisphere has taken over as the engine room.
Maybe POTUS Trump will continue to revive the US economy, I certainly hope so.
In my opinion a major contributor to economic decline is the man-made global warming climate change con, socialism masquerading as environmentalism to attack capitalism as we have known capitalism to operate. Socialism picking winners and losers by subsidising and penalising, and resulting in rising cost of living and general business operating cost problems.
However, developing countries are not prepared to get involved in the socialist’s agenda as they want to share in the prosperity the developed world has enjoyed for a few hundred years. China and India refuse to do the bidding of the UN Paris Conference, and so do many other countries. The US has now joined the protest and refusals to cooperate.
In Asia Pacific Region Australia has a major role to play in supplying farm produce, education, minerals and energy and other goods and services now in demand from our region.
I cannot rule out another northern hemisphere financial crisis at some time in the not distant future but despite the public debt Australian governments are now burdened with, as a percentage of GDP our public debt is manageable and is far lower than the countries now exposed to future shock if there is a new financial crisis.
Furthermore, governments come and governments go, leaders come and leaders go, but overall “The Lucky Country” has survived and prospered. I cannot believe that the present political crisis on both sides, the focus on foreign politics at the expense of local constituents for example, will continue. Too many politicians are opposing the union control and leftist lobbyist control of the major parties. On both sides the ordinary branch members are being ignored and are useful only as volunteer labour when needed.
The minor parties are useful but are not the long term replacement, they are too small, lack resources and influence. They would probably be more useful if they joined forces and resources.
Meanwhile Australia is slowly but surely clawing its way back from the 2007 to 2013 disastrous union controlled Labor years in government federally, with little thanks to the Turnbull government and some thanks to the Abbott government and their 2014 repair budget that was widely criticised based on Labor misinformation and deceit.
The overriding factor is The Lucky Country, Australia that survives despite politicians.
30
For clarity, Donald Horne said “Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.”‘
20
I don’t think it really works like you think, ultimately governments can set debt like this to rights by printing money to repay the bonds but depreciating the currency, which is enormously harmful to the people but saves the governmental bacon. Normally they don’t do this, but the oddly named Quantitative easing does pretty much that.
Private sector debt on the other hand is much more difficult because private individuals can’t create money from thin air like banks (and governments) can. Creditors don’t ever push so hard that government do this because they stand to lose big if it happens. Right now the government debt rate is less than inflation, so asset bought with borrowed money appreciates faster that the interest they have to pay out. Almost any level of debt, provided it goes into appreciating assets is probably OK.
More important to the people is the governments penchant for demolishing capitalism, the nanny state is crippling entrepreneurship by interfering with the free trade between willing parties to a transaction. For example by demanding quotas of people unsuited for a particular task, or price fixing wages, or legislating subsidies from one side to an unrelated third party.
How would you like it if the government said that you had to send 75% of your salary to a less qualified but more politically correct rival specifically for the purpose of enabling that rival to do you out of your job?. Coal plants manufacture for 4c per kWh and have to send 9c per kWh to their competitors by law for the express purpose of enabling the renewables to outcompete coal and destroy the coal industry.
The government forces companies into many unnecessary purchases, auditors for their books, environmental auditors, environmental studies, risk analysis, Inspectors, Quality assurers, compliance testing insurance companies, and a host of other hangers on that would not get a look in if we has a true free market. My god, we can’t even choose to buy a cheap 50c incandescent lamp if we want to! This drives costs ever upwards.
sO, It’s not so much government debt that is the problem, it’s the imposed cost of servicing it on the markets that is.
130
Thanks bobl, mostly my two main concerns is the decline of private enterprise/production that stimulates local economies and the cost of living increasing while less is produced, the overbearing government workplace regulation of free enterprise is killing off many chances for employment opportunity while every year a new batch of school leavers seek out employment many eventually giving up, problem is one day Mum & Dad’s investments will run out or have to be maintained so would they reason the government will help them keep any assets?
50
All the more reason for globalism, at least you can invest overseas and make a profit even if it’s virtually impossible here.
/sarc
If the government stays on this course, I’m going to go live next door to Roy in Trumps America… Ahh well maybe not, since Roy lives in California, but perhaps somewhere red a state or two away.
70
You should see if your local library can lend you Fred Harrison’s book “The Traumatised Society.” You could add to that with Michael Hudson’s “Killing the Host” and “J is for Junk Economics.”
All good scary reads.
Bobl: you could try Delaware. As far as I can see at the moment, they’ve been reasonably sensible.
50
I was thinking south Texas, only state big enough for an Australian
60
Bob,
I know Oz is a big place, too big to compare with any state. But if you want a big state wouldn’t California at least be in the running? I think if you add in all the swelled up heads it might even be larger than Texas. 😉
Of course if you want a well run state then even Texas may not fill the bill.
40
Well Roy, you might not want me next door, besides I live in a rural area, and I’m not quite ready for a 50 square metre apartment in democrat HQ. 5 acres would be nice. Perhaps some of the counties in the north west of Calif or west Nevada. The wife and I like the look of Iowa but property taxes were nasty and she wants to be driving distance to the ocean or a lake. Property tax would probably be the main determinant of where we chose to live.
Maybe Hawaii (almost bought an investment house there last year but the realtor couldn’t tell me the foreign ownership rules :-/ )
40
Don’t know why I wouldn’t want you next door. At least the regulars on Jo Nova — includes you — have all been friendly and accepting of an American who looks in and comments from time to time. So son’t put yourself down.
Property tax isn’t my area of expertise but California would bleed you to death if you bought anything meeting your requirement for 5 acres.
Hawaii has the highest cost of living of any state I know of. An investment property might be worth it because Hawaii remains a popular place to live with those who can manage the cost. But if you’re thinking of retiring to paradise it would cost you through the nose. My wife and I honeymooned on the strip, Waikiki, best of the best hotels. In the hotel coffee shop a lunch that would be around $10 or $15, $20 at the most extreme end of the price range on the mainland was $40. It was a simple Japanese style vegetable soup and noodles bowl. How much can that cost to make? But every thing except pineapple and sugar cane comes in by plane or ship. The middleman is getting rich.
I never stopped at McDonald’s while there so I don’t know what cheap eating would cost but decent meals are a pretty penny. Beautiful state though. But be a millionaire before you think of moving there.
90
And PS: I could use some space around me. The older I get the more I wish I could move to a place like Durango Colorado. A small town still with mountains and open space all around it, population 17,834 as of 2014, altitude ~6,000 feet. But all our family and friends are here and I couldn’t get my wife to agree to such a move no matter what I could do.
50
Hi Roy,
In about 8 hours I fly out to Saigon where the cost of living, at least for travellers, is relatively low.
KK
50
After a little searching I found this about foreign ownership of U.S. property. It’s all about taxation. What else would any jurisdiction be interested in? You would certainly be taxed in Australia and the U.S., double taxation to be sure but in Hawaii it might be worth it.
40
KK,
While in Saigon do me a favor and take some shots of the main street leading from the airport into town, Tu Do or some such spelling and I don’t remember it anymore, plus maybe the name has been changed under the new ownership. I think you have my email address so just email them to me. I’d really like to see how the place has changed since I was there. All those American style bars were an eyesore and the refugee encampment was even worse. War does horrible things to people.
And if you don’t have my email address anymore, Jo will be willing to send it to you.
Thanks! And I’ll owe you for this.
Roy
60
No problem Roy.
There is someone who wants to say hello to you.
He’s living here in Newcastle and was there later than you and spent time flying helicopters from a place he knew as BearCat.
I think that this was Ben Cat.
Col Tom.
When I get to a computer, now on the phone, I give him your email.
He’s currently back in the US for a while.
KK
50
Many thanks KK.
I remember one French style open front bar along that street where I would stop to have a beer on a hot day. I did that in spite of warnings about not staying still lest I become a target. We were all required to be in civies to go off base too so we wouldn’t be so obviously Americans. But then there were our military haircuts so obvious that a fencepost could tell we were Americans. I figured if anyone wanted to get me it wouldn’t matter much if I was walking or sitting. So I had a beer in that bar whenever I wanted to and never was bombed or shot at. I’ve no idea if that bar is still there but see if you can find it. It was the only thing like it along the whole street. I think it was on a corner because it was open on 2 sides.
And I’ll be glad to hear from a fellow veteran of a tour in Nam. I was not involved in the flying at all but as you know, I’m a pilot and don’t mind talking flying experiences or anything else for that matter.
Enjoy your trip.
40
Roy, I think if things get bad re: power and socialists gaining even more power, moving state could literally be a life saver.
Also, unrelated and an FYI, it occurs to me many who have swallowed the kool aid of CAGW resist our science-based message because they would have to admit to being fooled. Humans arent naturally humble, so FWIW it seems gently explaining to them that they have been deliberately deceived may be the go, as once the mind opens and accepts they have been fooled, then they will accept the message. I have a relative in my own family who is ardent CAGW supporter, and I keep speaking the truth as unless the alternative science-based view exists, people will become radicalized unless they have a referece point for the alternative.
I’m also uncompromising in the message – I dont back off and always use science, but never heavy handed, just “here are the facts”.
The old saying goes, “no one cares about how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
I keep speaking the truth and always say “Its becasue I love you I speak the truth”. They can take it or leave it, but I wont flinch from that. Eventually they will come around as people also admire people who stick to their guns….
30
Steve, I find that it is easiest to undermine the moral basis of the scare. You can do this by outlining what climate action does. Eg. Burning food as fuel, spending money on windmills instead of cancer. That poor people in africa need grid electricity not one solar panel and a light, that killing grannies in winter from fuel poverty is not moral. This undermines the idea that unreliables “couldn’t hurt”
Roy, if I do end up migrating to acreage there you are welcome to visit… you would even be welcome for a visit in Oz
30
Bob,
I would love to make it to Oz. But at 78 and with my mobility becoming restricted it looks more and more out of the question. From pictures Jo has posted and from other sources Australia looks like a beautiful place. Even — I believe it’s in SA — where a rail line runs through what can only be called desert completely straight without a curve for several hundred miles, there is a kind of stark beauty that from pictures rivals Death Valley. My brother rode that rail line maybe 10 years back and I’m working from memory of what he told me. And even if I’m not remembering it so accurately anymore, Oz must be every bit as picturesque and diverse as North America.
But frankly, any more traveling I do will be to the places in America that I still haven’t gotten to. And there are a lot of them. The best of the lot, Yosemite, is now so crowded in the summer that you need to make camping reservations several years in advance to stay anywhere on the valley floor. But if you want some of the best of Yosemite, just drive in over Tioga pass from the east side and down the road toward the west exit from the park and you’ll be in woods that rival anything in the world. Be prepared for a few mosquitos though. They somehow thrive around those high altitude meadows.
If you, or anyone else is ever going to be in Southern California, let me know. I’d love to arrange a visit. Jo can give you my email address if you tell her why you want it.
00
Steve,
I agree, they want to save face by not ever admitting having been fooled. That’s SOP human nature unfortunately.
I used to argue the science here on Jo Nova. But it’s been nearly impossible to make any headway and the minute I ask someone for empirical evidence that CO2 can actually do what they claim, they go silent. I’ve never had an answer back from a single person.
They hand out red thumbs very generously though but never an explanation as to why they object to what I said.
These days there’s almost no worthy troll still hanging around and about the only thing left is sarcasm and ridicule. Even Jo is doing it more and more. But I must admit that now there is beginning to be some headway against the climate change monster. Unfortunately it comes only after climate change has become a part of popular culture. So my guess is that it will take a long time to play out and do a lot of damage before it’s all over.
I’m watching the effect of Donald Trump on California very carefully. I would hate to abandon the state where I was born and raised, have lived for all my life and then let fools and idiots drive me out at this late date.
00
PS what\s the property tax like in Delaware
20
Probably high relative to Oz. It’s the correct and fairest way for governments to raise their income. Where it’s done properly, there are no other taxes and your overall tax burden is actually less than it would be with a bunch of other taxes such as Petrol Tax, Income Tax, Rates, Stamp Duty, GST, etc etc. These all add up to confiscation of nearly half your gross income.
At least with property tax, if it is done right, it’s the only tax you pay. No Income Tax (except Federal), no GST, no Fuel Taxes, no Rates etc etc. You know what you’re paying. And you know what you’re paying for.
Do a TTT comparison (TTT = Total Tax Take).
I worked out in 2003 that I was losing 42% of my income in sneak taxes. I looked at property tax and if we were taxed at pure land value with a national property tax, I would have paid just $4200 per year to Central Government and about $600 pa to Local Govt. As it was, my tax started at $24,000 pa for Income Tax and $1,500 pa for Rates which are levied on Capital Value. (The land proportion was $4.00 pa.)
Central Government took in $38billion the previous year. I used that as the benchmark + 10% to calculate the required tax take for 2003. I was paying not only my fair share of tax but also a share of the tax of all those whose money was `invested’ in land to reap the `Capital Gains’ (tax free) therefrom.
00
Yes, I agree, but I don’t know much about US taxes, US land tax in many states is much more than rates here in Oz and I assumed that you still have other taxes to pay like here. Since I would be living on superannuation (my pension plan) income would be minimal so land tax is relatively speaking bad, income tax is probably better for pensioners. I didn’t know though that land tax might be the only tax I would pay.
00
I’m not totally familiar with all the US taxes either, being a non-citizen and non-resident myself. States with properly implemented property taxes generally don’t have all sorts of `other taxes.’ That means you have sure knowledge of what you would be paying.
California, Michigan and Delaware are the states which ran on pure land tax, according to my reading. California changed in 1978, dumping its property tax wholly in favour of a scatter gun approach to taxing everything which twitched and went bust about fifteen years later. Michigan did it about 1995 and that killed GM and hundreds of engineering businesses in the 2008 crash. Parts of Chicago and Detroit have been depopulated. Delaware still runs on it to the best of my knowledge.
The Federal Tax is income tax.
Property tax is a fiscal measure. All states there would have people in your economic circumstances so they would have social policies rebating such taxes for the retired. I don’t know for sure so you would have to investigate for yourself. It may be that Florida, for example, attracts a lot of retirees for reasons other than sunshine, a temperate climate, peripatetic hurricanes and the Bush family. It’s something you have to research.
Good luck with your hunt.
00
Is Private Debt Bad Debt?
The numbers are large but there are a lot of people?
Individuals who are borrowing to create housing, and business enterprise should be a good thing (so long as their plans come to fruition). What they need is good government, rule of law, property rights and a stable banking system.
Government debt is likely bad because it undermines all of the above.
60
Private Debt per se is not bad debt. If banks could lend out only what they held in deposits, then there wouldn’t be these regular paroxysms as the economy readjusted —to over-lending. As it stands, they are only required to put aside some small fraction of what they plan to lend by lodging it with the Reserve Bank. If that sum is their whole deposit base then they can go on to `lend’ (or create `credit’) to a larger degree.
If the Reserve Bank requires, say 14% to be deposited as the reserve, then the bank making that deposit can lend from a pool 7.1 times that amount, minus that amount, or effectively 6 x what they have deposited. They have created ‘Credit’ of that amount (6xReserve). In NZ, the banks aren’t permitted to create credit so they borrow from a bank which can, and import the `money’ so gained, lodging whatever of the import is required as their fractional reserve (14% as our example rate) and begin lending the rest. These days, it’s all just numbers in a computer.
If we made governments take their income from LVT (land value tax) and did away with the inflationary fractional reserve monetary system, we would kill inflation almost stone dead. It would stop the regular crashes and recessions. But, the little guy would not be being plucked like a goose and nations wouldn’t be forced to sell off their intrastructure. The few who own the banks wouldn’t confiscate anywhere nearly as much of the world’s wealth. (Which is why we have the present system, inherited from the goldsmiths of Samuel Pepys’ day.)
10
18,000 MW , the number 42 of any developed country’s daily
minimum power requirement… Empiric data supplied by Tony
on a daily basis. Thx Tony.
https://papundits.wordpress.com/2017/07/08/australian-base-load-electrical-power-week-ending-8th-july-2017/
90
MAN cannot live on CHOCOLATE alone,
But Woman can….so buy some for Jo today!
140
Will do asap. Just having to buy a new freezer atm.
80
Ask the salesperson if they can fill it full of chocolate.
40
It’s an online purchase RW. The chocolate from them might not be adequate quality! I’m thinking G and B or Lindt.
20
G’day all,
Here’s an interesting twist in the recent price rises for electricity.
SMH Monday July 3, 2017 Letters
” The electricity price increases effective now have been reported in the media as being in the order of 19 per cent (“Surge in renewables to balance energy equation”, June 30). This is not correct. Energy Australia price increases on my contract are as follows: Peak 11.86 per cent; Shoulder 26.97 per cent; Off peak 39.27 per cent; Supply charge 10.86 per cent. More than half my electricity use is off-peak, and my weighted average increase in usage is 31.13%. ”
The quote is an extract from the letter by Rob Tannahill in:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-letters/tony-abbott-the-good-ole-days-are-gone-20170701-gx2u9x.html?btis
Such an increase would have a significan impact, not only on domestic users, but also on the proposed use of off peak power for recharging batteries, and other users of Tony’s base load power (above).
I expected at least some reaction to the letter, but have not seen confirmation, denial or comment.
Does anyone have confirmation of similar hikes by other suppliers?
Cheers,
Dave B
90
I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been told so emphatically that the only major power consumption during the night is from off peak hot water heating in domestic household situations.
That makes up around 12 to 15% of that 18,000MW, and only lasts for a couple of hours at most.
Tony.
140
Far from it, typical HWS heats up in 3-4 hours at the begining of the off peak period and only cycles a few times till dawn from heat losses. The bulk is public lighting, heating, cooling and ventilation as it is during the day.
120
That’s exactly what I thought also. I read through the SA electricity report and they explained something odd I saw on that SA power consumption Load Curve.
Take this link, and when the page opens, click on the SA tab along the top there.
See the greyscale dotted line for the load curve.
Note that spike at 2300 (11PM) and it always puzzled me until I read the recent electricity report for that State.
That report said that this was the off peak hot water turning on in that State. Note it’s just a spike, and then drops back away withing the next hour. Same time every night, same amplitude also, around 150 to 200MW every night.
This is the only State where it is so visible, only because total power consumption in that State, SA is so small, barely 6% of the overall Australian total power consumption.
Tony.
60
Most people don’t run their HWS cold, from cold a 3.6kW 50lt HWS takes about 30 minutes so your typical 270lt HWS takes around 2.5hours or around 4 hrs for a 400lt unit. Most consumers though don’t consume more than 25% of the energy stored in the water so typically heating times are 1/4 of the max. 15 mins to 1 hour. How well insulated your HWS is is very important for your water heating bill.
With huge off peak rises the cost of the daily service charge for water can exceed the benefit of off peak water and it’s becomes better to dump off peak water and use a timer.
70
I’ve had a faulty fuse switch ever since I bought my new house. It trips randomly and turns off the hot water system.
So some times when I get home the water is lukewarm to cool. But within 30 minutes of me turning the hot water back on, it’s back to max hot (maybe 50 degrees). It is a moderately small unit.
20
Industrial and commercial business in many instances operates 24/7.
10
G’day Tony,
I read the letter as saying all power used out of peak times, not just hot water, was going up by 40%, hence making all his overnight power more expensive, and significantly so. And doing the same for all that base load, if the other supplies do the same.
Cheers,
Dave B
50
A follow-up to my previous caustic comment on Friday.
WeatherDill is spending Other People’s Money on an overvalued foreign manufacturer of low density current-generation LiFePO batteries, when he could spend Other People’s Money more effectively on building more efficient fossil fuel plants while accelerating development of next-generation supercapacitors for energy buffering and electric vehicles.
An international team has recently announced a hybrid Li-Ion and Graphene capacitor with energy density of 222Wh per kilogram, about the same as most standard Li-Ion batteries, but at a power density of 400W/kg which puts it significantly above the power of most Li-Ion batteries. As long as land costs money, you would want to buffer wind power with a higher-density technology.
Closer to home, at Swinburne university a team has developed a prototype supercapacitor which still uses ions to store electricity but to me it sounds like it does not rely on chemical reactions:
In just a few years we may end up with Australian-invented, and Australian-patented, and Australian-manufactured graphene superconductors with a 25 year lifespan of daily charge cycles. So it’s possible the ionic and iconic “Elon’s Folly” in SA will be discharged from duty at about the same time these new supercapacitors become available for large scale applications.
Sure, in technology there is always something better just around the corner and you can’t wait forever. But this does not justify spending OPM willy-nilly today, especially on short-lived bandage solutions that work more effectively in politics than in practice. The alternative is already taking shape; a better technology being commercialised by private venture capital after passing due diligence examination and cost-benefit analysis.
80
Andrew: you forget that Weatherdill is facing an election by March 17, next year. He will spend what ever it takes (of OHM) to avoid losing the election. He has the 200MW diesel generators coming (somthing that his press advisers are very coy about mentioning), he talks about the 200 (or maybe 250MW) OCGT which will be ready in 2 years (so absolutely useless for avoiding blackouts before the election) and now he has ELON MUSK starring as the fairy godmother who will deliver a gigantic battery which would last for maybe 5 minutes (something his press advisers are also very coy about mentioning). Indeed it is highly likely that waiting until March will mean blackouts.
By an odd coincidence his great mate the State Treasurer (a title not a description) decided to tax the banks. They objected and the State Opposition has said they will vote against it in the Upper House and probably block the measure. So by the middle of Oct. when the weather warms up he will be able to claim that “we will be saved by the great battery” and go to an earlier election, blaming the Opposition for supporting the banks. There are probably enough gullible fools that would believe that except that by that time there will be a second wave of price rises.
90
A politically drowning man, the SA Premier….
40
And frantically thrashing around and likely to pull anything within reach down with him.
60
The good news is that there has been an electoral boundary redistribution in South Australia that reduces the “gerrymander” effect in which, in this example, Labor retains power even if the Coalition gains well over fifty per cent of the primary vote.
The SA Labor government challenged the Electoral Commission redistribution in the High Court of Australia and lost the appeal.
31
I just have to say this:
If the 50% of the South Australian population that did not vote against Weatherdill at the last election hasn’t yet worked out that Weatherdill is a dill, then the conclusion that can be drawn is that the South Australian IQ is significantly skewed to the downside.
10
Its a very insular society here Sam,there was a rumour not long ago there was an Ebola outbreak in Adelaide but never spread further than the inner suburbs.
Facts and figures are a bit like the Ebola
10
Monkeys in Adelaide Cracker?
https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html
00
G’day again,
Here’s a fascinating article by Peta Credlin, which I saw first in the hard copy of today’s Sunday Telegraph.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/malcolm-turnbull-has-to-get-climate-change-right-or-hes-in-strife/news-story/742225fcd1988956bef17ec9d578a565
Well worth a read.
Is she a follower of your’s, Jo?
Cheers,
Dave B
80
Good link.
30
She should get a slot on 2GB with that. Alan Jones where are you ?
30
If we could get Peta talking Tony’s numbers on BaseLoad power what would that do for Musk’s vanity battery?
40
Then Turnbull is in strife. The Hockeyschtick.blogspot.com carried an early paper by Ned Nikolov, (Ph.D in physical science) and Karl Zeller, (rtrd Ph.D., research meteorologist), in which they had analyzed other planets and moons in the Solar System. They selected which had hard surfaces and atmospheres including Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, Triton and the Moon, which has no atmosphere and used Nasa’s data as their evidence to derive their results. They seem to have worked any bugs out of their paper and it’s been recently published as “New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model” in the journal “Environment Pollution and Climate Change.”
It proposes a mechanism which controls the surface temperature of the planet, involving the sun’s energy (total insolation) the mass of the body (its gravity) and the air pressure of its atmosphere. This mechanism reduces to a simple formula which the authors claim correctly determined the surface temperatures of the studied bodies and accurately predicted the temperatures of other celestial bodies not included in their original analysis. Good bye the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect.
I’m pleased to see the paper has been published. It blows the IPCC’s version of Arrhenius’s hypothesis totally out of the water. Arrhenius’s hypothesis has been attacked by something like 70 or more papers over the 20th Century and it’s still, like a bad smell, with us.
See http://www.wnd.com/2017/07/study-blows-greenhouse-theory-out-of-the-water/ for more details.
You might still find the preliminary version on the Hockeyschtick site, but it would be about three or so years ago, so it might take some hunting for.
It’s going to make the current crop of politicians actions look totally reckless and could perhaps help with holding them accountable. (I wish!). It certainly backs up Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
It’s also going to interesting to observe the warmists trying to explain it away, debunk it and disprove it. I think they’ll probably try totally ignoring it in the hope it will go away.
20
Sounds like real science Soph!
00
Victorian businesses struggling with power ‘train wreck’ as wholesale prices triple since 2015
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/wholesale-power-price-hikes-victorian-businesses-struggle/8687322
90
No businesses to employ people, no union members.
10
The asylum gates must have been left open where the residents took up gloBull warmer positions.
I wonder if this crap will end before we as a nation end up bankrupted thanks to our corrupted governing class !
90
Trump memes.
https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/883771499336749056
+
https://twitter.com/dmichaelbowman/status/883810291523432450
+
https://twitter.com/wmmII88/status/882917635972902912
> this is the funniest thing that will happen at a sporting event this year:
https://twitter.com/iamjoonlee/status/873385285140307968
50
I was just looking at steel manufacture in different countries. One site claims CO2 output from Chinese mills is 2x that of Australia or the US. NO2 is much larger but only attacks the Chinese.
When Richard Di Natale suggested Whywalla could stay open (if they did not use coal, which is impossible), he is not only sending the export income and the jobs and forcing Australia into imports, he was proposing to double emissions from steel manufacture, but not in his backyard.
The theme of South Australia is that if they do not output CO2, they are saved. Send all manufacture overseas an live on ‘non polluting’ windmills? All done with other people’s money and leaving all the CO2 ‘overseas’. So what happened to Planet Earth? The same with rare earths, now available only from China thanks to the Greens (although others are starting). Of course rare earth prices have gone up x20.
Is it a coincidence that the Greens and Greenpeace want to send all manufacturing to China? Is this an attack on alleged pollution or simply an attack on Australia? Similarly with their immigration policies, or utter lack of them. Is the attack on CO2 an excuse to shut Australia down? The endless attack on everything Australian, from Australia day to our ‘Anglo’ culture to our Christian ethics is rampant. Why? Why is this Green? Or is it all deceit, like Global Warming. Why are the Greens and Malcolm Turnbull desperate to send all our money and jobs and CO2 overseas while driving us into massive debt? Why is the solution always to buy more overseas manfuactured things from solar panels to windmills to giant batteries. Why are we only allowed make submarines in Adelaide, when they will just be assembled here, maybe.
If it is not a conspiracy to destroy Australia, Australian culture, Australian manufacturing and Australian balance of trade (in the name of globalization), it sure looks like it.
171
Like it
And
Global warming = social engineering.
The mind set of the true believers is a truly frightening thing that is reminiscent of the world in the 1930s.
KK
121
From a previous post in this topic :
it occurs to me many who have swallowed the kool aid of CAGW resist our science-based message because they would have to admit to being fooled.
Humans arent naturally humble, so FWIW it seems gently explaining to them that they have been deliberately deceived may be the go, as once the mind opens and accepts they have been fooled, then they will accept the message.
I have a highly intelligent relative in my own family who is ardent CAGW supporter, and I keep speaking the truth as unless the alternative science-based view exists, people will become radicalized unless they have a referece point for the alternative.
50
My sister was a believer in the global warming hoax. She had a Ph. D in agriculture. I believe her being deceived was due to the fact that all the drivel is presented by others with Ph. Ds. As she would have passed her Ph. D with rigorous study and research, she probably believed the charlatans with their global warming would have done the same.
60
I had a chat with a retired Sheep & Wheat farmer a few days ago, we were discussing the heavy showers and resulting mud where we were camped. He was not an activist but stated firmly that nature is nature, man-made global warming is political nonsense. That his own farm records reveal the changes in weather, the floods and droughts, the heat waves and the cold snaps.
It seems too many people, regardless of their educational achievements, are gullible. I once heard a comment at a marketing seminar that the easiest people to sell to our professionals, solicitors and doctors were singled out by the lecturer. In his opinion they are trained to think profession but often cannot think outside that area of knowledge, and lack common sense. So they tend to accept what is presented as fact regardless.
80
Kinkykeith said:
… true, because those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.
20
I noticed in today’s West Australian (10 July 2017)that Andrew Mackenzie, the CEO of BHP had article entitled “We need a covenant to stem erosion of trust” He then drivels on about the need to solve major societal issues of our age – climate change. [snip]
10
What the weather was like this time of year, 65 years ago.
“Bushfire danger in some parts of the State has already become so acute that forest control burning a fire preventive measure has had to be interrupted.” The Sun Sydney, NSW July 1952.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/229782494
“All-out effort to stop mountain fires”…”Blue Mountains ” City Council Deputy Mayor Aid, Whittington declared today, “We want to reverse the impression that the mountains area has become too dangerous in which to live or spend a holiday.”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/229783033
80
It’s the old story.
If it’s not cleared out early, it will burn later.
With much greater intensity.
And do much more damage.
Whoed a thought that greenies were actually fire bugs.
KK
81
It suits the reenies implemnting Agenda 21, to let it burn and therefore later kick people out of more bush spaces “to protect them”….
See how it works?
Same deal as banning collecting firewood, so you are forced to either pay a fortune for gas, or die from the cold.
50
People who preach about climate change seldom have the slightest interest in…climate change!
1950 was a freakish year for Eastern Australia, the year Qld and NSW all but floated away. The 1951-2 El Nino which followed had massive regrowth to devour by fire. Just add winter/spring westerlies to sharp drought preceding!
A deadly situation occurred in 1895 at the start of the Fed Drought in north-eastern regions when, after years of average-to-good rainfall, some usually green places were reduced to desert conditions by failures of late autumn/winter/early spring rains. When the late winter westerlies came with that El Nino boost…disaster.
Of course 1895 was followed by what was likely our worst eastern heatwave in 1896, more severe than those of 1939, 1908, 1914-15, 1960, 2009 etc. but less documented. Dangerous place, this Australia, though the great monsoon failures of years like the mid-1890s were far more lethal to India.
But be careful of discussing climate change with people who use the expression “climate change” with any frequency. They only like the words, not the subject raised by the words.
90
just when you think things can’t get more bizarre!
9 Jul: Philadelphia Inquirer: Bob Tornoe: Australian journalist Chris Uhlmann’s scathing comments about Trump quickly go viral
(The Associated Press contributed to this report)
“He was an uneasy, lonely, awkward figure at this gathering.”
That’s what Chris Uhlmann, the political editor at the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said of Donald Trump in a blistering commentary after the president attended his first G20 summit, noting he appeared to have “no desire and no capacity to lead the world.”
Uhlmann’s blunt wrap-up of Trump’s appearance at the conference, which he had been reporting on in Hamburg, quickly went viral overnight Sunday morning, hours after world leaders lined up against the president and reaffirmed their support of global efforts to combat climate change.
“The G20 became the G19 as it ended,” Uhlmann said. “On the Paris Climate Accords, the U.S. was left isolated and friendless.”…
Uhlmann’s comments struck a nerve in the United States, especially among American journalists and political commentators. NBC Nightly News senior news editor Bradd Jaffy called the video a “a seeing assessment” of Trump, while NBC News correspondent Katy Tur wrote on Twitter, “This is something else.”
The White House did not immediate respond to Uhlmann’s comments…
Despite his anti-Trump comments, Uhlmann is known for his conservative-leaning opinions. Last year, he blamed a state-wide blackout in South Australia on renewable energy and published an essay calling Marxism an “intellectual virus” that was destroying the culture of western society.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/australian-journalist-chris-uhlmanns-scathing-analysis-of-trump-goes-viral-20170709.html
71
Uhlmann didn’t bother to comment on the Trump speech in Poland – probably the most statesman-like speech so far this century.
161
Translation: Trump did not regurgitate the progressive’s talking points. He eviscerated them. Rather rather than prancing about pleading for the US to be allowed to be a sacrificial goat, he projected a vision of strength and production of wealth by a free people willing to trade value for value with willing others.
Translation: By not being willing to sacrifice the lives and wealth of We the People of the USA, Trump left the rest of the G20 unable to cannibalize the US economy and drain its Treasury.
Translation: For the bulk of the journalists and commentators, a solution is only a solution if it increases the size, power, and reach of government and leaves the US economy destitute. Which was the clear goal of the Paris and G20 meetings.
200
Sadness: Much of the US and the rest of the world expects US to be nothing but a Shmoo.
To this Trump said “Not on my watch!”
80
Worth rereading, Trump in defense of Western Civilization.
http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/07/09/was_a_trump_doctrine_unveiled_in_poland_111753.html
50
Its the Australian Bolshevic Collective …who cares?
30
That is the view of the huge worldwide commentariat, a pseudo marxist international clique who believe all politicians should be compliant in globalization and especially the destruction of powerful democracies including the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Australia’s Turnbull and France’s Macron in particular are very rich and extreme left bankers who believe they have a natural right to rule.
Trump and Putin are the standout leaders at G20 not part of the world movement, which must be very annoying to devoted communists like Australia’s Rhiannon and Bandt. Every effort is being made to split them up, stop their cooperation and paint them as the real problem in an otherwise compliant set of tamed politicians led by Merkel.
Climate Change is simply the cover story for world domination by bureaucrats, the new autocrats. As we found out in BREXIT, there are 10,000 unelected bureaucrats in Brussels who earn more than the British PM and wrote 60% of Britain’s new laws. The new rulers of Europe have found common cause with China and every move sends more business and money to China. China in turn uses North Korea as a proxy to threaten the world, a direction sponsored by China since the 1940s against their mutual enemies, South Korea and Japan and their allies.
The only thing which keeps this uneasy balance is MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, not the party in Hamburg. In the interest of world peace, it is vital that Putin and Trump get on, despite the insistence that they are the problem and the only problem. No one questions Putin about Climate Change. Laughter would be inevitable.
It is sad that anyone can allege that Trump has no friends? What happened to Australia and the UK, who be speaking Japanese and German without the US.
130
Totally agree with your post.
I’m not sure if it is just my imagination but there seems to be a sense of panic and increased “volume” in the warmist articles recently. I don’t think it is just since President Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement. It is like there is something else going on in the background.
I read the great Peta Credlin article linked above by David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz –I think we’ll have to work out the number of turbines involved in the 1600 new power stations. The Australian public would understand the enormity of the growth of new coal fire power stations if it could be put in terms say xxx Hazelwood Stations equivalents, but would have to based on number of turbines if not actual power output.( turbine number while less accurate to the purists is easier for the average person to get their head around)
90
The SA thing has exposed the renewables fairy story for what it truly is – fairy dust, puppy dogs and free hugs, not proper engineering, so they know they are exposed.
The SA thing never ages, so make the most of it. They can never hide it.
80
I think that was part of Chris Uhlmann’s “interview” for a job at CNN.
90
‘…can’t get more bizarre?’ Ha Ha.
Say, there’s the Bazaar of
Climate-Change bizarre,
where there’s Mike’s Nature-Trick
and Mike’s bent Hockey-Stick,
Karl’s buckets before buoys,
Lew’s Recursive Fury selection ploys,
‘Come buy my wares at the bizarre
Climate Change Bazaar?’
60
if anyone can access this, they might like to post a few excerpts:
9 Jul: WSJ: Plans for U.S. Wind Farms Run Into Headwinds
More than a dozen offshore projects are in the works, but high costs and logistical challenges remain
By Erin Ailworth
After two decades spinning power from the gusts that sweep Europe’s North Sea, the offshore wind industry is finally turning to the U.S. A big hurdle: getting its giant turbines to American waters.
No one in the U.S. currently makes turbine towers sizable enough for use in deep waters — one of the many challenges impeding the buildup of offshore wind on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean…
https://www.wsj.com/articles/plans-for-u-s-wind-farms-run-into-headwinds-1499605200
also behind paywall, but some excerpts i found:
9 Jul: Financial Times: Investors warn tidal power project risks stalling
Investors in a proposed £1.3bn tidal power scheme in Swansea Bay have put further funding on hold and warned that the project risks stalling unless the government gives a green light soon. Over £200m has been provisionally committed by backers led by Prudential, the large UK insurer, with Macquarie and Investec, two other major financial institutions, ready to raise hundreds of millions more in debt and equity.
But investors are refusing to release further funds in the absence of a government go-ahead for what would be the biggest tidal power scheme of its kind in the world…
7 Jul: WalesOnline: Sion Barry: Theresa May told to stop ‘dithering’ on £1.3bn Swansea Bay tidal lagoon decision
Britain’s biggest union, Unite, has called on the UK Government to “stop dithering” and give the go-ahead to the £1.3bn Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project.
The union said the project would create 2,000 jobs and unleash an economic boost worth at least £500m to the Welsh economy…
???And if what is effectively a pilot project in generating green energy from the tide is approved, it could lead to a national fleet of six lagoons, which is estimated to contribute £27bn to UK prosperity – creating or supporting 36,000 jobs, with the potential to increase exports by £3.7bn per year…
And it’s the subsidy which has been the sticking point, as it has been ever since the project received planning consent.
The broad outlines of the negotiations on a subsidy are by now well known. It would mean a guaranteed – or strike price – for the electricity produced averaging out at ***£96.50 per megawatt hour over 90 years – although Hendry said the subsidy period should be 60 years.
The project has a lifespan of at least 120 years, with its turbines generating enough power for 120,000 homes…
Sources say the price could come down to ***£89.90 – which would put it below the £92.50 agreed for Hinkley Point C nuclear power station.
It sounds a lot, but according to Hendry it works out at around 30p per household per year – less than the price of a pint of a milk.
What may be the stumbling block is the initial strike price, which reports suggest could be more than ***£123 per megawatt hour. Tidal Lagoon Power needs to reassure its investors that they will get a good return on their investment within a reasonable timescale…
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/theresa-told-stop-dithering-13bn-13295630
***hard to work out what the “strike price” would be?
20
Dave posted a piece by Geoff Russell on jo’s blog last year, surprised it was published by New Matilda. here’s another:
from the writer’s bio: Geoff Russell: His concerns about climate change and the ineffectiveness of renewables led to a reexamination of his lifelong opposition to nuclear power. After considerable research he realised that the reasons people fear nuclear are built on obsolete knowledge about DNA and cancer. His second book “GreenJacked! Derailing environmental action on climate change” is an e-book available on Amazon.
lengthy, but TonyfromOz & others might like to comment:
9 Jul: New Matilda: Geoff Russell: Betting The Farm (And The Planet) On Alan Finkel’s Big Battery Adventure
The rate of scaling of storage technology assumed by Finkel looks environmentally questionable for pumped hydro and simply impossible for anything else.
https://newmatilda.com/2017/07/09/betting-farm-planet-alan-finkels-big-battery-adventure/
50
This is true, most of the fear and regulation is based on the linear no threshold model of radiation as if humans have no immune response to radiation damage. But research has shown that model is wrong, studies show that low levels of radiation are protective, your immune system gets stimulated to deal better with radiation damaged cells. If the linear model were true people who eat lots of bananas would be dead.
00
behind paywall:
9 Jul: UK Sunday Times: Solar panel blazes ignite safety fears
An investigation has been launched after fires at buildings, including flats and schools, fitted with the energy equipment
by Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Rhal Ssan
Fire risks posed by solar panels fitted to thousands of British homes, schools and businesses are being investigated after international warnings over the panels’ flammability.
The Building Research Establishment (BRE), a government fire safety contractor that is conducting tests on cladding after the Grenfell Tower blaze, is examining instances of solar panels catching fire and is due to report initial findings at an industry meeting this week.
About 80 firefighters fought a blaze at a new block of flats in Bow, east London, last Sunday in which the solar panels appear to have caught fire. The cause of the fire is being investigated.
A blaze last month at a block of flats in Thornton Heath, south London, is also being investigated after solar panels and…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/solar-panel-blazes-ignite-safety-fears-60mvb3265
??? plenty of solar shilling:
9 Jul: news.com.au: Matthew Dunn: The growing number of Australians moving to renewable energy solutions to combat growing costs
AS CRIPPLING energy price hikes begin sweeping across the nation this month, one business believes we have reached the tipping point.
Partly blamed on the closure of cheap coal-fired power stations, including Hazelwood in Victoria and Playford in South Australia, households are bracing for a 20 per cent energy bill increase.
The high price of gas, partially due to a shortage of east coast domestic supply, has also been a key driver in the rising cost of electricity.
Australia’s leading solar and battery installer Natural Solar believes we have reached a tipping point with rising costs.
“In the past six months there have been five times more installations than the company saw for the entire year of 2016,” Natural Solar chief executive Chris Williams told news.com.au.
“There has been a transition from early adaptors to a large number of mum and dad households looking for home energy storage solutions to help remove expensive electricity bills.”
With Tesla and LG Chem already offering natural energy solutions, Europe’s biggest battery provider Sonnen is the latest player to join the Australian market.
Having already got 60,000 customers in Germany, the solar battery provider is offering free power up to a certain amount for homes using its solar and storage system.
The “free power” deal removes Energy Australia, Origin Energy or other merchants from the equation, with Sonnen acting as both the manufacturer of solar power storage batteries and the retailer for your power…
In return for paying grid usage costs, customers allow Sonnen to access to a small amount of stored power from its batteries, which is made available to the grid during times of high demand — an amount usually less than three per cent of a fully charged battery…
http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/inventions/the-growing-number-of-australians-moving-to-renewable-energy-solutions-to-combat-growing-costs/news-story/ec37f3f843b7c785b776fc288607b822
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more shilling for solar, but some realism as well.
8 Jul: NYT: Hiroko Tabuchi: Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists
That growth has come to a shuddering stop this year, with a projected decline in new installations of 2 percent, according to projections from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
A number of factors are driving the reversal, from saturation in markets like California to financial woes at several top solar panel makers.
But the decline has also coincided with a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners to install solar panels.
Utilities argue that rules allowing private solar customers to sell excess power back to the grid at the retail price — a practice known as net metering — can be unfair to homeowners who do not want or cannot afford their own solar installations.
Their effort has met with considerable success, dimming the prospects for renewable energy across the United States…
Many more states are considering new or higher fees on solar customers.
“We believe it is important to balance the needs of all customers,” Jeffrey Ostermayer of the Edison Electric Institute…READ ALL
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/climate/rooftop-solar-panels-tax-credits-utility-companies-lobbying.html
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From solar panels, bin depots are faced,
With huge amounts of deadly toxic waste.
Electric meter wheels more cheaply turn,
For nations using HELE’s clean coal burn.
The West fears burning coal will bring us doom,
While in the East, clean coal enjoys a boom.
When cold days come around, don’t be surprised,
To find past colder days homogenized.
For cheap electric bills, it’s best be rid,
Of all renewables that fail the grid.
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http://www.wnd.com/2017/07/study-blows-greenhouse-theory-out-of-the-water/
30
Spencer has addressed this before:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/12/why-atmospheric-pressure-cannot-explain-the-elevated-surface-temperature-of-the-earth/
This paper has been linked at skeptical sites.
Similar theories were discussed here:
https://judithcurry.com/2011/01/31/slaying-a-greenhouse-dragon/
I don’t think the paper will catch on.
00
Hi folks just dropping in on a sunday whilst I am still sober , I learnt long ago that global warming is not about the science , its about ideology in all its memes , doesn’t matter if your ideology is political or religious its about the few controlling the many , history repeats itself . How many of you know that the beginning of the Christian faith was created by a Roman Emperor Titus Flavius in order to pacify the province of Judea , then later in the forth century the Emperor Constantine pacified not just one province but all the states inside the Empire by centralising religion to Rome , were the councils of Nicea any different from the councils at Paris ? at Nicea several religious leaders from Sun god worship faiths attended , such as Apollo , Horus and MYTHERUS , think about it , why where pagans allowed to help decide what went into the new testament , is it any different from gathering cultures and religions from around the world to Paris , where the high priests of global warming can persuade you to join a new faith by taking memes from your faith and putting them into theirs , think about it , if your a Christian at Paris and want to know whats in it for me , they can say as a Christian you believe in stewardship of the earth don’t you
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Interesting thoughts Dave, creating stability through a common cause or homogenising fears of a recurring threat is base tribalism I guess, stay sober.
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without looking it up Yonnie which philosopher said , we have to create a series of hobgoblins to keep the populace alarmed
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Yonnie , who was the philosopher in the last century that said , governments have to create a series of Hobgoblins in order to keep the populace alarmed
10
sorry about the double post , but who can remind me of his name
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Ive always loved Jo’s blog , she gives everyone a fair crack , but many of you have lost the spirit of this site , we don’t live in a bubble , its not a echo chamber , yet many of you dive in when you here views that you don’t agree with , remember the early days when we loved Michael Crighton and his essay on Eugenics , someone post it to remind me
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As I am obviously a glutton for punishment, I read this ABC piece on the battery powered adventures of Jay Weatherill and his deals with the snake oil salesman.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/elon-musk-is-the-100-days-or-its-free-idea-legit/8687996
As expected, this puff-piece doesn’t answer any questions, and most certainly doesn’t delve into detail the way it would if Trump, Hanson, or Abbott was involved. However, it did contain one sentence;
“…The 100 day deadline begins once the grid interconnection agreement has been signed…”
Can anyone explain just when this “grid interconnection agreement” would be signed – within the context of a (normal) project timeline?
I assume it would be the day before they have their big “look at me pushing the symbolic ‘on-button’ ceremony… but maybe I am too cynical.
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Saw an EV the other day. It was not in the best of circumstances. It was limping along in the emergency lane on the freeway at about 5 mph. While traffic was blowing by it at 80 mph. It was lucky it didn’t get its doors sucked off. It was a dangerous situation for the poor souls in the EV. They were in the middle of nowhere and the temperature was about 102 degrees F. They still had about 15 miles -3 hours- to go to the nearest town, and I’m pretty sure there was no EV charging station there. There was probably one about 40 miles farther along, but that would be of little comfort. I hope their AC was still working. I suspect if it came to a complete stop that plenty of people would have rescued them. There was a wind farm about 15 miles behind them and solar panel array about 30 miles ahead. Both useless to that EV under the circumstances
Why are people subjecting themselves to these kind of risks so unnecessarily? To reduce beneficial co2 emissions? Do they really think that driving an EV makes a difference to co2 concentration or that co2 is harming the climate? People are so misinformed it is tragic, and potentially lethal.
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With a proper car when it runs out of fuel you call your auto club breakdown service and they bring fuel to get you to the next service station.
What are you meant to do if your battery runs flat in an EV? The only solution seems to be a tow to the next charging station. I can’t imagine auto clubs putting huge generators in their breakdown vehicles to give a roadside recharge.
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A recently published Norwegian study found that the CO2 release from manufacturing the batteries for an electric car – with around 5 years battery-life expectancy, is the equivalent CO2 emissions to 8 Years driving a Petrol (gasolene) powered car !
But then at 5 yearsor so another car battery set is required and a further 8 year petrol-engine-driving equivalent of CO2 emissions is released to get another 5 years electric car use. Sheer lunacy.
Wind turbines do not save any CO2 emissions – a Dutch study published 3 or 4 years ago studied Eiregen (the Irish Generator) and the Dutch generator. The study showed that there was a small Increase of circa of between 0.5% and 1% from the introduction of wind turbines because of the need for conventional generation to be kept running on standby.
These facts are well known but still the “CO2 causes global warming” line is pumped out by people who know these facts – and are happy pushing ‘solutions’ which they know, or should know, increase CO2 emissions.
That alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the AGW climactivists and their supporting politicians have no real concern that CO2 affects or will affect climate – if they did they would go for nuclear.
It seems ever more clear that the underlying agenda is the de-industrialisation and economic destruction of developed nations – as Trump understands only too well.
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Australian Debt Clock.
It is increasing at about $10 million per hour.
http://www.australiandebtclock.com.au/
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I see that Gizmodo has more information on the proposed Tesla battery for SA. The battery farm, an expansion of the Californian Mira Loma 80MWh farm, will use ranks of Tesla 2 battery units, each with 16 battery modules that it appears are the same as used to power the Tesla S car. The battery farm will power 4000 homes, so I presume there will be an isolator switch to cut off the output from the grid.
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If you look at the picture at https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/all-the-details-on-teslas-giant-australian-batteryt/ there seems to be a lot of cooling necessary.
Also there are significant losses on charging and discharging. Since this is Tesla technology the suggestion at a Tesla forum https://forums.tesla.com/en_AU/forum/forums/battery-charging-and-discharging-losses is that charging losses will be 25-30% alone.
We now have a similar problem to quoting the nameplate capacity of a windmill whereby its real generating capability (even though it’s useless energy at random times) is only 30% of nameplate (at best). Batteries will need to be honestly rated to take into account their considerable charge and discharge losses.
If this weren’t such a serious crisis for Australia it would be laughable.
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There is a YouTube video that shows somebody destroying a Tesla car battery. While I dislike the destruction process, the video does show close ups of the power module construction, consisting of many 21 x 70 mm batteries, with a liquid cooling system in between the rows of batteries. So the Tesla 2 then has two lots of cooling- within the battery modules and a separate overall cooling system.
Now we should calculate the actual power available to each of the 4000 homes, assuming these high losses, and perhaps assuming that to prolong battery life, you can’t discharge below 20%.
30
Graeme #4,
As a distraction away from the main difficulty of a lack of cheap dispatchable power in Australia, then the battery idea is doing well.
As a method of powering Australia, or even as an asset to help stabilize the grid, it’s offers very little and I predict it will, after a short time (5 years or less), be proven to be a wasted opportunity of Australia but a reasonably good publicity stunt for Musk.
30
Think desal plants.
Doug
21
Calculations for a battery for backing up the entire United States. This emphasises how ridiculous grid scale battery storage is. The calculations relate to lead acid batteries which are still the cheapest and most electrically efficient although bulky and heavy. They are at least recyclable.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
50
What choices does Australia have?
1) If Turnbull is reelected he will continue to destroy Australia.
2) If Shorten is elected he will continue Turnbull’s destructive agenda.
3) There are probably not the numbers of true Liberals left to replace Turnbull with Abbott.
4) It seems that none of the alternative conservative parties will have the numbers to govern in their own right or even if they formed a coalition.
5) Even if there were a conservative party that had a chance of winning, a majority of Australians are now net wealth consumers and in receipt of some form of welfare and will vote for the socialists.
Are there any other alternatives?
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What is most likely is LNP forming a minority Government with Cory Bernadi or One Nation. The alternative is a Shorten Government during which time there will be anarchy and a strong right hand turn from the majority of the Australian voting public who will have finally had enough of political shenanigans.
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James,
We might as well be optimistic.
Doug
20
Suggestion for Jo:
Can you create a simple “go to” PDF doc that shows the numbers of solar panels or windmills needed for the equivelent base load generation that can be easily handed to someone so they can see the lunacy of the renewables?
Might also be useful explaining how the RET works and how thats impacting costs.
60
I have previously suggested a link explaining how the RET works. Most people and politicians and I suspect even people like Finkel don’t understand how it works.
If it were widely known about it could kill support for “renewables” in an instant.
90
I recently had a look at the 2016 Financial Report for one small community windfarm in Vic. It had an income of $1.2m made up of $400k energy sales and $800k RET sales to networks. So that’s an extra $800k from just one small producer that is tacked onto the costs of the networks forced to purchase RET’s from providers at the best rates or from the Government at a set rate. Wind farms are making out lkike bandits with this RET scheme. 33% income from product sales and 66% income from printing certificates.
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And according to that Annual report no dividends will be paid to shareholders because there was insufficient wind during the financial year, in other words wind availability below budget estimates, and there were unexpected maintenance repairs adding to operating costs.
60
Can you post it again?
00
I mean that one should be created.
00
8 Jul: Townhall: Paul Driessen: The Crisis of Integrity-Deficient Science
https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2017/07/08/the-crisis-of-integritydeficient-science-n2352114
no ego depletion on display at theirABC but, if u listen from 9mins onwards (if u can bear it – Baumeister is more than difficult to understand), there’s much that could relate to the CAGW debate – cherry-picked data, questions about peer-review, etc etc, yet theirABC would never dream of having one of these programs give the same treatment to the claims of their beloved
“climate scientists”:
AUDIO: 30mins: 4 Jul: ABC Beyond the Lab: David Murray: The problem for willpower
It’s one of those ideas that understandably has intrinsic popular appeal, after all, interpreted in a certain way Ego Depletion could provide that little bit of wiggle room you need to excuse some of your less self-disciplined moments.
But, it’s a piece of research that has also gone on to have huge academic significance within psychology.
The original research in Ego Depletion conducted by Roy Baumeister and colleagues in 1998 has since been cited by more than 4000 other academic papers and has been demonstrated numerous times in follow up studies.
There has been some conjecture about the exact mechanism behind the Ego Depletion Effect but the effect itself was pretty much considered rock solid.
But, that is starting to change.
Thanks to a recent wave of replication efforts – studies that attempt to repeat significant experiments to see if they can get the same results second time around – there are now doubts over whether the Ego Depletion Effect is as significant as we once thought it was.
Some even question whether it really exists at all…
http://www.abc.net.au/local/programs/438-beyond-the-lab/episodes/ep-2017-07-04-4696228.htm
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plenty of smears, plus the usual Greenpeace quote, but an admission Erdogan was correct:
10 Jul: Financial Times: Turkey push for climate funds adds to concerns about Paris accord
Some see Erdogan scepticism inspired by Trump decision to quit globlal warming treaty
by Stefan Wagstyl in Berlin and Pilita Clark in London
Germany has played down a threat from Turkey to abandon the Paris climate accord amid fears that countries could start using the US decision to quit the global deal to demand more money from wealthy nations…
More than 150 countries have formally ratified or joined the accord that came into effect last November but Turkey is one of at least 40 nations yet to take such a step…
There is no public evidence of this occurring so far and Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said Mr Erdogan’s position was “not news” and Turkey’s concerns were unlike those of Mr Trump, who claimed the Paris deal “punishes the US”.
Laurence Tubiana, a French climate expert who helped negotiate the Paris accord, confirmed that in the lead-up to the deal’s adoption in 2015, Turkey had been concerned about whether it would be eligible for support from a Green Climate Fund set up to help developing countries shift to a greener economy.
***She told the FT on Sunday that after France had consulted widely with other countries, it had found Turkey was already was receiving climate funding from other sources and Ankara had been assured that international agencies would be willing to continue such support…
https://www.ft.com/content/bbef9a42-64c0-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614
behind paywall…well worth a read, as it belies the meme that the anti-Trump mob have only recently begun questioning his mental health. as for Gillard’s comments on ABC mentioned in the article, this should be sufficient to declare her unfit to head Beyond Blue:
9 Jul: Australian: Amateur hour as clowns diagnose Trump
by Jennifer Oriel
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/jennifer-oriel/amateur-hour-as-clowns-diagnose-trump/news-story/d85d37e107d78f54f289e6accd0ccde1
meanwhile, heard a giggling young ABC staffer with some host I don’t know on local ABC this morning talking excitedly about how Chris Uhlmann’s embarrassing anti-Trump rant would be featured on theirABC’s morning news shows. juvenile. not waiting for any reprimand from the ex-google ABC boss.
given Trump totally dominated the G20, from the time of his Poland visit to the end of the talkfest, and continues to do so, hopefully causing more countries to back out of the Paris Agreement, Uhlmann’s analysis is a joke.
40
unattributed piece, more like a RepuTex press release anyway.
wonder how much of MSM advertising revenue (including scientific journals) comes from solar and wind or those with financial interests in renewables. commments are so politically driven, they aren’t worth reading:
10 Jul: Guardian: Ambitious clean energy target will mean lower electricity prices, modelling says
Energy analysis firm RepuTex finds clean energy target going beyond that advocated by Finkel Review would keep prices down for longer
The more ambitious a clean energy target is, the lower Australian wholesale electricity prices will be, according to new modelling by energy analysis firm RepuTex…
RepuTex modelled the effect of a CET that cut emissions from the electricity sector by 28% – like that modelled in the Finkel Review – as well as one it said was consistent with 2C of global warming, which would cut emissions from electricity by 45% below 2005 levels by 2030.
It found both scenarios caused wholesale prices to drop significantly compared to doing nothing, with the more ambitious scenario resulting in lower wholesale prices between 2025 and 2030.
In the “business as usual scenario”, RepuTex found wholesale prices would hover roughly around the current price of $100 per MWh.
Under a CET that reduced electricity emissions by 28%, prices would drop to under $40 around 2023, and then rise to nearly $60 by 2030.
The more ambitious CET had a broadly similar effect on wholesale prices. But RepuTex found it would drive prices down a little slower, but then keep them down for longer, stabilising at about $40 to $50 for most of the 2020s…
The RepuTex modelling also found the economics of the national electricity market no longer supported traditional baseload generation – such as coal power plants that were unable to respond flexibly to demand – and so they would not be built without the government distorting the market…
“In this context, renewable energy remains attractive to the market given it is able to deliver energy reliability, with no emissions, at low cost prices. This affirms that renewables are a lay down misere to out-compete traditionally fossil-fuel sources in Australia for the foreseeable future.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/10/ambitious-clean-energy-target-will-mean-lower-electricity-prices-modelling-says
10 Jul: CanberraTimes Editorial: Science an exercise in doubt, but no doubting climate is changing
Science is, at its heart, an exercise in doubt.
Scientists doubt their findings, challenge them until a theory can be proven, and move on to the next uncertainty about the world we inhabit.
Some of those looking to discredit scientific work use this doubt in arguments against even proven theories, such as the phenomenon of climate change.
Despite the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change, there remains uncertainty around individual events and whether they should, or can, be attributed to global warming…
Indeed, several notable researchers, responding to the UNESCO (Great Barrier Reef) decision, have reiterated that plans to build projects such as the controversial Adani coal mine in central Queensland could only exacerbate the existing threats facing the reef…
Mr Abbott has had a spotty record on climate change, as many observers have noted, as does the current government.
But he remains a powerful, if on the nose, figure in the conservative rank and file of the Liberal Party, and his position against action on renewable energy generally serves only those seeking to create further doubt around an established issue.
This position is not unlike that of United States President Donald Trump, whose actions, or lack thereof, on the Paris agreement, have led to an uprising among the individual states and major cities of the Union…
Perhaps we may yet see an uprising similar to that in the US among the states, a path already well-trodden in the ACT.
Or even residents and willing investors funding solar farms and similar infrastructure, particularly as the energy system falls into deeper crisis…
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/ct-editorial/science-an-exercise-in-doubt-but-no-doubting-climate-is-changing-20170706-gx629s.html
00
Their ABC had a segment on the much vaunted Adelaide big battery this morning. It’s imaginary function to provide cheaper electricity was hardly mentioned but all agreed that the big battery would be a tourist draw-card. The big battery will be able to take its place alongside such greats as the big gumboot, big lobster, big banana etc. After 5 years of charge and discharge cycles I imagine it will become decorative only, just like the other “Big” icons.
PS. Barnaby’s comment was the best “”You know, a grain of sugar is an advantage to a teaspoon, but it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.”
40
Please don’t forget my all-time fave, Big Wavepower:
http://cdn.fairfaxregional.com.au/silverstone-feed-data/acf844f3-e7ef-476a-9c49-79650cd95382.jpg
In its early life as a useless wreck, the Port Kembla wave generator was painted green. I don’t know why I find the colour funny. I just do.
Fans of useless wrecks don’t have far to drive from Kembla to glimpse the Sydney Desalination plant at Kurnell. I wouldn’t go in there without a hard hat, and maybe a brolly.
http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/882ed58a6a6b475584cedf9d253a29d9?width=1024
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The wave generator wreck should have big letters painted on it proclaiming “Monument to the folly of green energy”.
30
Monument to folly, ‘Love Power’ technology…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ht5we3qzY
30
don’t forget the Carrickalinga wave power Green hope. There since 2014.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/locals-exploring-options-to-get-rid-of-wave-generator-which-sank-off-the-coast-of-carrickalinga-in-2014/news-story/5cbf4cd737499c6837e98806d4c008a8
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I’m not sure how many have noticed that some of the commenters at the Bolt blog are moderators. One of Joanne’s favorites, Philip, has replied to my comments before they passed through moderation or when they were not even ever published.
I’ve written about the strange correlation between d[Co2]/dt and global temperatures before here and, while even sceptics don’t seem to care, I’ve yet to come across a reasonable rebuttal. Philip came up with this and I’ve been unable to get a reply past the moderator.
Basically, the reply points out that all experiments measure a finite difference in the independent variable, but its for practical reasons and not sinister ones. The logic is similar to trying to get out of a speeding ticket because the derivative of the distance with respect to time was really the difference in distance covered in 1 second. This was 0.02km, much less than the 60km you cover in an hour so its only speeding if you discard 99.97% of the data.
I’m just wondering why the reluctance to pick on the Keeling curve. Are arguments like Philip’s convincing?
20
You might want to look at the sad stories of energy poverty at the link below plus, conversely, warmists demanding even more “renewables”.
https://www.facebook.com/australianpowerproject/posts/1761901997170851:0
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Here is a teardown of a Tesla S battery pack. It reveals the construction method. I believe the same construction technique is used for Adelaide’s Big Battery. It basically uses 18650 cells, the same ones that you have in typical laptops that don’t use lithium polymer batteries.
https://youtu.be/NpSrHZnCi-A
40
No wonder the world of Malcolm-in-the-Muddle is off balance
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/turnbull-calls-old-socialist-macron-a-centrist/news-story/2965805441b1e1ec6bf1e563a9dd8c9b
20
Just listened to Podcast of Alan Jones & Cory Bernardi!
At 7:48 Cory says
Now this to me is a game changer, why didn’t he say remove it? The current RET is the cause of the price increases!
I was looking at AUS CONSERVATIVES, but not now.
PHON was a bit TOO right for me, but they are the ONLY ones that will scrap all RET, LETS (Or what ever they’re called), etc etc
Electricity is a right in a 1st world country.
I lived in PNG with a wonderful hydro scheme built by Australia.
Most of it is broken, beyond repair and they run diesel and gas generators in Port Moresby!
Sounds like South Australia. I also felt safer in Port Moresby than in Melbourne!
What a sad place we live in.
Is it possible to post Jo on all the different Australian Political Parties and their RET, environment, COP etc promises.
I can’t even get a response from the AUS CONSERVATIVES regarding RET policy?
40
CDP are at it again…let’s close all these companies down?
10 Jul: UK Telegraph: Just 100 companies are responsible for 71pc of greenhouse gases since 1988, report finds
By Jon Yeomans
Just 100 firms are responsible for 71pc of carbon dioxide gases released into the atmosphere since 1988, the year that climate change was first recognised as an international problem, according a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)…
Despite growing awareness of the role of fossil fuels in global warming, the CDP points out that the industry has “expanded prodigiously” since 1988, with coal use becoming even more prevalent. Approximately 833 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent were emitted between 1988 and 2015, compared to 820 gigatonnes between 1988 and the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th century…
The CDP is part-funded by private benefactors, governments and companies and counts former Financial Services Authority boss Lord Adair Turner as an advisor…
A spokesman for BP said that it was “determined to be part of the solution” to climate change.
“Specifically, we’re calling for a price on carbon, increasing the proportion of natural gas in our business, investing in renewables and low-carbon innovation, and pursuing increasing energy efficiency,” he said.
A spokesman for Shell said it backed the goal of a “net-zero emissions world by 2050”. “The greatest contribution we can make in the near term is providing more natural gas to replace coal in power generation, which reduces overall emissions in the global energy system,” he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/07/09/just-100-companies-responsible-71pc-greenhouse-gases-since-1988/
9 Jul: InsideClimateNews: 25 Fossil Fuel Producers Responsible for Half Global Emissions in Past 3 Decades
CDP traced the greenhouse gas emissions of 100 oil, coal and gas companies, together linked to 71% of emissions since 1988. Exxon is high on the Carbon Majors list.
By Georgina Gustin
Because of rapid economic growth and growing demand for power generation, especially among populous developing nations, more than half of the emissions in the centuries since the Industrial Revolution have occurred since 1988. That was the year that the United Nations founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to urgently study mankind’s role in climate change and advise governments on science-based policies to confront it.
“We can actually say that 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, which was the year climate change was recognized as a manmade creation, can be traced back to the processes and products of these companies,” said Pedro Faria, who authored the “Carbon Majors” report for CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project…
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10072017/fossil-fuel-companies-responsible-global-emissions-cdp-report
InsideClimateNews links to:
PDF: 16 pages: June 2017: The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017
Author: Dr. Paul Griffin
Partner: Climate Accountability Institute
10
less than a year ago Rick Heede/Climate Accountability Institute had this lengthy piece in Science….lengthy, but some bits well worth noting:
Aug 2016: Science Mag: Just 90 companies are to blame for most climate change, this ‘carbon accountant’ says
By Douglas Starr
(Richard “Rick”) Heede’s carbon accounting is already opening a new chapter in climate change litigation and policy, helping equip plaintiffs who believe they have suffered damages from climate change to claim compensation. “Rick’s work really helps connect the dots,” says Marco Simons, general counsel of EarthRights International, a Washington, D.C.-based legal group that defends the rights of the poor…
He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and then joined forces with Amory Lovins, the soft-energy guru who co-founded the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder…
Meanwhile, a new idea was coalescing in the environmental law community. For years, attorneys had litigated so-called environmental justice cases to redress the fact that poor people disproportionately suffer from pollution. By the early 2000s, it was becoming clear that the poor will also face the heaviest impacts of climate change. But how do you structure a liability case when the entire world takes part in the carbon economy? Can a Pacific Islander whose town has been flooded sue 7 billion people? Searching for more specific culprits, Peter Roderick, head of the Climate Justice Programme for Greenpeace International in London, commissioned Heede to study ExxonMobil and quantify total greenhouse emissions across its history…
Roderick commissioned Heede to look at the entire fossil fuel industry. To make the project manageable, they limited it to companies that produced at least 8 million tons of carbon per year, the so-called “carbon majors.” The research took 8 years. Money from the original grant ran out, and after the crash of 2008 Heede’s consulting business collapsed…
The result, peer reviewed and published in Climatic Change, showed that just 90 companies contributed 63% of the greenhouse gases emitted globally between 1751 and 2010. Half of those emissions took place after 1988—the year James Hansen of NASA testified to Congress that there was no longer any doubt that global warming had begun…
The data “just blew me away,” says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University and co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt, which compares the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco industry in its efforts to raise doubts about science. “Everyone talks about this as a problem since the Industrial Revolution, but I now think that’s incorrect,” she says. Heede has shown that the roots of the problem are more recent and easier to trace. In 2011, Oreskes joined Heede in creating the Climate Accountability Institute, a nonprofit devoted to quantifying the contribution of fossil fuel companies to climate change and investigating their alleged attempts to obfuscate the science…
Other people criticize the work as oversimplified and naïve. David Victor, a political scientist and energy policy specialist at UC San Diego and a co-author of the 2015 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, doesn’t question Heede’s numbers but says his approach is wrongheaded. “It’s part of a larger narrative of trying to create villains; to draw lines between producers as responsible for the problem and everyone else as victims. Frankly, we’re all the users and therefore we’re all guilty. To create a narrative that involves corporate guilt as opposed to problem-solving is not going to solve anything.”…
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/just-90-companies-are-blame-most-climate-change-carbon-accountant-says
ClimateAccountabilityInstitute: Board of Directors
PLUS Council of Advisors, includes
Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes, CHRISTINE MILNE (from bio: Christine recently retired from the Senate and has been appointed as a Patron of the Australian Solar Council, Ambassador for the 100% Renewable Energy Campaign of the World Future Council, and Ambassador for the Global Greens.)
Nov 2015: Australian Solar Council Patrons announced
By Jacob Harris
The Australian Solar Council has named three eminent Australians as its inaugural Patrons.
ACT Deputy Chief Minister and Labor MLA Simon Corbell, former Federal Liberal Leader Professor John Hewson, and former Senator and Greens leader Christine Milne, all agree that support for solar energy should be beyond partisan politics.
“Solar is absolutely central to Australia’s economic future,” says Australian Solar Council CEO John Grimes.
“Australia has the world’s best solar resource and the world’s best solar brains. We can and should be the world leader in solar.
“Our Patrons have all worked hard to build a strong solar future and are great examples of the depth and breadth of the support for solar across all Australian political parties.
“After a positive start the Solar Council calls on the Turnbull Government to end moves to abolish the Climate Change Authority, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and calls on all political parties to commit to more ambitious greenhouse emission reduction targets, and a positive solar plan for Australia.”
http://electricalconnection.com.au/australian-solar-council-patrons-announced/
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comment gone into moderation – followup to the CDP/Climate Accountability Institute report.
trillions plus! one we missed, but too funny not to post:
6 Jul: CleanTechnica: Joshua S. Hill: Nearly 400 Global Investors Managing Over $22 Trillion Urge G20 To Commit To Paris Agreement
The letter is actually a follow-up to a first letter which was sent earlier this year to leaders of the G7 nations, sent by over 200 investors managing $15 trillion. The letter remained open for endorsement until 30 June, and now sees a total of 389 investors managing $22 trillion…
“As long-term institutional investors, we believe that the mitigation of climate change is essential for the safeguarding of our investments,” the 389 investors signed on to say (PDF)(LINK), further urging G20 nations to…ETC
For more information regarding the work of these investors, check out the Investor Platform for Climate Actions, which currently represents over 400 investors across 40 countries, managing over $25 trillion…
“The G20 must move swiftly to put in place the frameworks required to improve the availability, reliability and comparability of climate-related information, and to ensure carbon pricing signals which will drive the incorporation of climate risks and opportunities into financial assessments,” said Paul Simpson, CEO of CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, who participated in coordinating the letter…
“Investors are sending a powerful signal today that climate change action must be an urgent priority in the G20 countries, especially the United States,” said Mindy Lubber, CEO and president of the sustainability nonprofit organisation Ceres, which directs the Ceres Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability, which was also partly responsible for coordinating the letter…
Earlier this year, a group of investors representing management of $2.8 trillion similarly sent a letter urging G20 nations to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2020. The group of investors included names such as Legal and General, Aegon Asset Management, and Aviva Investors…
“In line with the commitments already made by G20 governments, we need to see a clear plan to phase out subsidies to fossil fuels,” said Meryam Omi, Head of Sustainability and Responsible Investment Strategy at Legal and General…
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/07/06/nearly-400-global-investors-managing-22-trillion-urge-g20-commit-paris-agreement/
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If that is not rent seeking by wealthy individuals, I don’t know what is!
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Watching adapt 2030 on utube, big write up about BOM fraud in goulburn and our girl got a major plug.
Welcome to the big leagues Jo
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Australia has many “big” things as tourist attractions, e.g. the “Big Banana”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%27s_big_things
Well, as useless as South Australia’s battery is, at least the “Big Battery” can be a tourist attraction.
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I am sure we could paint orange and green and call it the big pineapple as a government statement to its people, I am sure the straw chewing queenslanders would not mind would they?
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I know an appropriate place for a big pineapple.
He’s on his way back from the Gee Up 20 as we speak.
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The Big Battery in South Australia!
I can hardly wait to add to my list of Big Things.
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Jeanine Perrett mentioned this on Paul Murray’s Sky show last night. Unfortunately, she saw it as a tourism plus. She also suggested that Townsville, NQ, should concentrate on tourism and forget about the Adani mine. She and Paul were in Townsville last week. I can just see all those out of work coal miners and truck drivers handing out ‘What’s On’ brochures to tourists on the Strand.
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Perhaps the mods could enlighten me as to why comment 38 is in moderation?
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Are there many from Melbourne and Victoria planning to go to see ‘Climate Hustle’? I’m not sure I can make it but might try. It’s a bit of a hike from here and not much fun driving back over the mountains late in the evening. How many Jo Novans are planning to go?
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I will be there.
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How will we recognise each other? Jo is welcome to give my email address to you.
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David, so sorry, but I can’t make it now. I really would like to be there but the logistics of the thing is difficult for us and we have so much going on here.
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Catastropharianism at its finest: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
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Got to realising, as I lit the fire this evening, that the only form of ‘renewable’ energy that there is is wood. Burn wood -> heat (energy output) and CO2 produced. CO2 + photosynthesis -> wood produced -> energy renewed.
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I need a little help. I posted this Friday 14/7 on The Australian article about the Energy ministers meeting, but it was rapidly censored.
Any suggestions on making it acceptable?
Half an inch, half an inch,
Half a inch onward,
Into the valley of Indecision
Stride the six hundred.
Forward, the dumb Brigade!
More charges for the public:
Into economic disaster
Stride the six hundred.
Forward, the dumb Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Though they knew
they had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs not to do and die:
Into economic disaster
Stride the six hundred.
Waffle to right of them,
Waffle to left of them,
Waffle in front of them
The public may thunder;
Storm and curse as well,
they will be ignored as well
Boldly, they waffled their way
Into economic disaster,
and may they go to Hell
The whole six hundred.
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