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
A news item tonight was about Australians paying the highest electricity prices in the world. No real explanation. Really just prices going up.
You have to credit the people who frame the RET legislation. It is not about ‘targets’, it is about how they are achieved. The % is irrelevant, a red herring.
The RET is extracting $6Bn a year in Carbon Taxes from Australia, exactly like Gillard’s tax but at retail $400 a tonne for gas and $200 a tonne for coal. Some of this comes back in windmills and solar panels which are all privately owned. $3Bn a year just goes overseas.
Still as the RET does not mention ‘carbon’ and is not a ‘tax’, it is not a carbon tax. While television commentators lament the high ‘subsidies’ and political leaders talk about the ‘Target’, none of the cash comes from the government. The most they do is pay comnpanies more state tax money to stay open in the face of the world’s highest carbon tax. So billions in total to Alcoa, Port Pirie, Whyalla, Portland/Alcoa. Outrageously the Victorian government has just bought our biggest timber mill which their own new restriction on logging has forced to close. This is Green madness. Foreign companies paid not to produce aluminium. A state mill paid not to cut wood. We are paying. As Margaret Thatcher said, the government has no money. It is our money.
When will a single politician recognize that this Coalition act, the Renewable Energy Act (Electricity) 2000 is the culprit? I even hear that privatisation was the problem, when even the Queensland government is making great profits from higher energy prices. Greedy governments, wilfully blind politicians.
Stop the RET. Renewables Energy Tax, not Target. It is killing us. 10% of the household budget for the poorest families who cannot turn on their heaters. All to save the world climates for the people of China, India, Russia and now the US? How does that work? How does freezing with no heating in -10.4C help anyone? Fiddling the temperature does not justify the RET.
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There are evil people at work.
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jorgekafkazar, the Abbott government was elected in a landslide in 2013 to abolish the RET and slash government spending. However the vote had a caveat… Clive Palmer, who convinced us that he was our very own Trump, got enough of the vote to hold the balance of power in the upper house, our senate. It was expected as people voted that he would approve the abolition of the RET.
Enter Al Gore, who somehow persuaded Clive Palmer to “protect” the RET, and other of the Gillard government’s big spending policies.
Indeed there are evil people at work. I would like to see a Royal Commission into the dealings between Al Gore and Clive Palmer.
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”
… and/or monumentally stupid!
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No…this level of manipulation implies intelligence and intent – the intent is what differentiates accident from malice…..
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You mean a carbon tax by stealth???
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Yes, and cunningly selectively levied.
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Financial breakdown of Wind Farms income:
33% income derived from direct energy sales to consumers.
66% of income derived from sale of REC’s to energy networks.
Purchase of REC’s by networks is compulsory.
REC’s are compulsorily purchased from Renewable Energy plants or Government.
The purchase of REC’s by networks is passed to consumers.
The average cost of REC’s to networks is 8.0c/kwh.
We are paying at least 50% more for energy than we have to because of the REC/RET back door ‘carbon’tax’.
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James, I am still puzzled by the often mentioned 8c /kWh for the RECs adding on double that to the retail price we pay. My understanding is that the 8 cents is just what is paid to these ‘renewable’ sources for the electricity they produce or maybe what they ‘could’ produce on a good day. As is often pointed out the actual amount of power these guys are producing is absolutely tiny and so that 8 cent figure is going to be pretty small in the overall picture. Even TonyOz the other day said he was surprised that such a small amount of energy from these guys could have such a large effect on electricity pricing. I have heard other claims that the effect is closer to 2 cents on the retail pricing. Can you explain how this 8 cents translates to the 50% increase (maybe an extra 17 cents?)in the retail price you mention? If we manage to get rid of the RECs and RET all together, should this result in a 50% decrease in the retail price or is there some other crazy factor in the high retail pricing? Our gas pricing for example is crazy with some of the Qld gas generators in mothballs (like the desal units) and yet economies like the US power along on lots of gas without that huge cost. One would think that modern large gas fired generators would be a good way to go because of their efficiency and flexibility. We don’t have huge regulatory scams on the gas driving up the prices, just a bit of protesting about where we can get it – but that doesn’t seem to be just a lefty driven thing either, with lefty states like Qld mandating something like 15% gas generation a few years back and I think that WA although not part of the NEM uses quite a lot of gas.
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Just a small couple of points to make.
The “flexibility” of a gas fired plant is only advantageous if you need to respond to unreliables.
Coal plants have been load following the consumer demand for decades all around the world. It’s still cheaper than gas and we have hundreds of years of supply sitting right next to the coal fired plant. Gas requires either on-site storage facilities or a direct pipeline.
I’m just conscious of not letting the greenies dictate the language around so called “efficiency”.
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How good is it having large coal deposits located conveniently about 100 – 200 km around the edges of big cities like Melbourne and Sydney? Yallourn Valley coal deposits are serendipitous when you think about it,thanks for your post Raven.
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Yes and I think most people don’t really grasp the sheer scale of what these coal power plants entail: I certainly don’t/didn’t.
Luckily we have TonyfromOz who keeps beating this stuff into my head.
Even from the (obviously compromised) Wikipedia article on Hazelwood Power Station . .
Imagine that . . in 2003 the eight units at Hazelwood used 16.9 million long tons of coal.
Running 24/7/365 that amounts to consumption of more than half a ton every second. That’s about half a CHEP pallet every second or about 12 bags of cement in the old money.
Every bleedin’ second!
Then there’s scalability. Something with which wind turbines cannot compete.
If we wanted to double the Hazelwood capacity, we’d build another one along side. To quadruple it, add on another two.
And I could still take a pleasant drive to Morwell and not see any of them.
Meanwhile, down in South Melbourne at that relatively new coffee shop on Victoria Ave. there are people, having ridden their pretty schmick bikes (it must be said) sitting in the morning sun sipping their latte’s and discussing how to implement micro grids or some such where people connect their roof top solar panels and provide power to each other and therefor stick it to those evil power companies . . or something like that.
It’s annoying because the coffee and the ambiance was good.
Luckily, there’s plenty of good coffee joints in Melbourne.
Having recently moved to Qld. the good coffee shops are somewhat rare, but hey . .
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If they live in South Melbourne/Trak, they probably *own* the evil power companies…..
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Joe,
Look through this: https://www.hepburnwind.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/FY16_Hepburn-Wind-Annual-Report-.pdf Hepburn is a very small bit community wind farm player with only 2 turbines.
Produced a total of 10,100 MW in 2016 and had an income of $1.2Mil.
That’s $118.00 MW.
Have a look at the the breakdown of income in round figures 33% from energy sales to it’s customers and 66% in compulsory REC sales to the networks.
You will see that they charge their customers $44.00/MW and they sell their REC’s back to the networks for $74.00/MW.
That’s about 8.0c/kw – they are selling bits of paper back to the rest of us to the value of 8.0c/kw and this cost is tacked onto our electricity bill because the purchase of REC’s by our networks is compulsory.
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Thanks James. That report shows a tiddly 9.9 GWh in 2016. The total production in Oz is around 25,000 times that and I think the total wind figure is only about 5% of that total so those REC sales for 7.4 cents effectively get diluted across the total production figure which is something like 250 TWh. Notably the REC sales only earned them 4 cents in the previous year. The wind ‘farms’ by definition are only going to get the minimum price for their ‘produce’ on the NEM to be able to sell it when they can. Those guys got 4.3 cents in 2016 and only 2.9 cents the previous year for the energy itself. So if the REC price gets passed through to the customers we might expect 5% x 8 cents from the wind and probably about the same from the solar. I am not sure how the hydro works with the RECs but they can also game a good price on the energy sales on the NEM as they can bid it at peak times unlike the solar and wind. Might be better off building hydro stations if you wanted to milk the system even more.
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Joe,
Compulsory sales of REC’s from renewable producers is only one factor.
As I also wrote REC are a compulsory purchase.
If REC’s from renewables are insufficient to to cover the amount of energy produced from conventional energy producers then the networks are forced to purchase Government REC’s for about $80/MW.
Each kw of energy produced by fossil fuels is offset by an REC purchased either from renewable producers where available or from the government.
Each kw of energy has the 8.0c/kw REC surcharge attached to ir.
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Where did Joe go?
Joe? Joe?
Hello?
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So what you are saying is that all 250 TWh (less the small amount of RE) attracts the 8 cents. That is some $20b per year. I think you are overlooking the effect of the ‘T’ in the RET. I think that ‘T’ is something like 20% right now and that the fossil fuel based generators have to purchase the RECs to the tune of that target, ie certificates to match a total of 20% of the total energy sold. So we probably have about 5%wind+5%solar+10%hydro already so they would not be purchasing them from the Gov. So if the fossils are 4 times the RE then that 8 cents gets divided by 4 and that is where the 2 cent figure comes from. Likewise if it was a 50% target then you would get the full 8 cents passed on. Happy to stand corrected though if it is not the case.
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Nope…
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… it’s not the case – Offset carbon credits is the case and for each carbon created MW an REC must be purchased – either from renewable energy producers or from the government.
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… and, Joe, that is because Australia’s fossil fuel generators contribute about 30% of the country’s carbon emissions – so despite your failed logic that the REC sales must be capped at 20% of energy production it actually means that they will be compulsorily purchased on every fossil MW produced until the carbon emissions contributed by fossil fuel energy producers falls below 20%. In this case the 20% is the total not the portion. The worst thing is that when coal powered plants are all closed then gas will only increase in price to continue to cover the cost of REC subsidies to renewables – this will only be a temporary energy state because REC’s, the RET and the NEM will cripple the country and the entire energy network will collapse.
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James, where does the money go when REC’s are purchased from government. Does it go into government revenue?
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Ok thanks James. Yes my failed logic was thinking that the RET scheme was based on the CO2 produced by the electricity industry only and not on the overall CO2 production including transport etc as you point out. I don’t disagree with your 30% figure there if that’s the case. So the 20% target that the RET scheme is based on is really trying to reduce that 30% overall down to 20%? I thought though that there was argy bargy about raising the RET target not lowering it, I thought that the target was the percentage of RE in the mix of the electricity generation sector only and I guess that is where I got it confused. I know that Jo and others have quoted those same figures as you but I just wanted to clarify how it worked. Thanks for your clarification.
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Dave,
My knowledge is limited to common sense from reading annual reports, and from that I can say the revenue from REC sales from renewable generators goes to the provider generating the Rec’s and the deals look like they are processed by the Clean Energy Regulator, which probably generates compulsory certificate sales on behalf of the government for any shortfall.
Joe,
To the best of my ability to assess the propaganda – the REC’s are a way of taxing all consumers to finance renewable energy generators to increase renewable generators until they provide 20% of our energy – the current Renewable Energy Target.
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The way RECs work is as follows:
Each registered “renewable” generator entity reports to the Clean Energy Regulator how much power they have generated. For each MWhr generated they are given a renewable energy certificate. Each retailer must then purchase those certificates in proportion to their total retail sales so that in total the RET for each year is attained. For 2017 that target is 14.2%, rising to 23.5% in 2020. If they don’t buy their quota then they must pay the regulator a penalty of $90/MWhr. RECs have been selling for about $80, so generally the government receives nothing, but in our retail prices we pay that $80 times the 14.2% share.
Coal/gas generators are not involved. They simply get paid whatever the wholesale price is, as set in the bidding process run by AEMO.
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Robber, I am confused. James says all coal power has the 8c applied to it, but you seem to be saying only a proportion equivalent to 14.2% of total coal production has the 8c applied to it.
Which answer is correct?
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James is wrong by my reading of the regulations.
“The Large-scale Renewable Energy Target creates a financial incentive for the establishment and growth of renewable energy power stations, such as wind and solar farms, or hydro-electric power stations. It does this through the creation of large-scale generation certificates.
Large-scale generation certificates are created based on the amount of eligible renewable electricity produced by the power stations, and can be sold or traded to Renewable Energy Target liable entities, in addition to their sale of electricity to the grid. Liable entities have a legal obligation to buy and surrender large-scale generation certificates to the Clean Energy Regulator on an annual basis.
The number of large-scale generation certificates required to be submitted by electricity retailers is set each year by the renewable power percentage.”
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Thanks too Robber for your input. That confuses things again and contradicts what James has explained. That was more or less my original understanding of how it worked and at that lower 14.2% RE, would equate to an impost of about 1.1 cents on the retail and not 8 as James, Jo and others here have consistently pointed out. The support for James’ figure judging by the green thumbs would suggest his is the more popular consensus, perhaps even our magic 97%.
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Beg to differ boys, but the way I read it is that 1 MW of fossil fuel energy is offset by the purchase of 1 MW REC.
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James, that was the way the carbon tax worked, not the REC. From the Clean Energy Regulator website:
“Accredited renewable energy power stations are entitled to create large-scale generation certificates based on the amount of eligible renewable electricity they produce above their baseline. As a guide, one large-scale generation certificate is equal to one megawatt hour of eligible renewable electricity.
Once created and validated, these certificates act as a form of currency and can be sold and transferred to other individuals and businesses at a negotiated price. Large-scale generation certificates are usually sold to liable entities (electricity retailers), who are required to surrender a set number of certificates to the Clean Energy Regulator each year.”
The impact on fossil generators is that in 2017 14.2% of power is to provided by renewables, and if retailers do not surrender enough certificates then they pay a penalty to the Regulator. In other cases the ACT government, to be seen to be green, entered into a contract with Ararat Windfarm to but RECs at a fixed price – and then they surrender them to the regulator.
Large buyers and sellers of Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) trade through the wholesale market with minimum parcel sizes of 5,000 certificates. The price for a parcel of certificates is called the ‘spot price’. Like any other commodity, the price for certificates is determined largely by supply and demand. Wholesale prices can fluctuate considerably. Spot price at end of July $84/MWhr.
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Send your comments to the ACCC that is currently holding public meetings and conducting an inquiry into electricity prices.
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The timetable from that ACCC reads:
Submission closed 13 July 2017
public forums 25 July 2017
A preliminary report is due to the Treasurer by 27 September 2017
and a final report by 30 June 2018.
Note, nine months to massage the final report, presumably so
conclusions are acceptable to Team Turnbull.
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Its a Claytons, the carbon tax you get when you don’t have a carbon tax.
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And bloody Jack Thompson would sell it too.
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When Gillard’s $23 a tonne carbon tax was repealed and it was a near thing with stiff Green and Labor opposition in the senate, we celebrated. However the real cost is not the $3Bn paid for certificates but this is done at wholesale level. Another $3Bn is added by the retailers who pay this tax on our behalf and they generally double it.
I read this week that the poor are refusing to shop around, that they are paying too much, by implication it is their fault for not being good shoppers. They assume they are getting a good deal when the RET Is being doubled. Over half the people can save 50% by shopping around and are not doing so. The silly poor people. Not smart enough to save themselves. Apparently.
Worse, as every industry is trying to tell the government while this (Electricity only) Carbon tax does not touch fuel, it is killing industry and all business. Everyone needs electricity. It is almost more important than fuel. Even those people who live on trams and trains will pay much more. State governments. Councils. Even Weatherill’s diesel generators as he will sell his electricty and it will be massively taxed too.
Everyone’s costs have gone up. Domestic, travel, retail, factories. The electricity costs just for Wilson Transformers, a major VIctorian manufacturer of electrical gear, have suddenly gone up $1Million a year. Why? Will they survive?
Aluminum CANNOT be made profitable, as it is packaged aluminum. Other smelting is impossible. Outside Whyalla, all Australian Steel is made in electric arc furnaces. Businesses will close everywhere.
In South Australia Weatherill is celebrating the closure of Motor Car manufacture because it increases their electricity supply and he is putting the giant and useless battery in the same location, as if that will somehow bring the jobs back.
It is madness. Business leaders are crying out, warning, threatening. Please, stop this terrible tax. The one no one knows about, even the people who brought it in. If they do, they should be imprisoned. It is not even a tax! The government does not benefit at all and that is us. The money flees the country and enriches strangers overseas for nothing at all. It is Green nightmare and they are celebrating.
Can someone tell me what good this does? It’s not even a tax. I believe no government should be able to enrich strangers directly like this, forcing the people of Australia to enrich strangers. It was the reason Magna Carta was written. Our government has lost reason and broken every tradition of responsible British government since 1215.
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Aluminium is packaged electricity. 95% of the cost is electricity. Aluminium needs alumina and electricity. Around the world it is usually part of base load generation and uses the excess, usually at night. In China the aluminum smelters are next to the generators. In Victoria Portland was chosen to win the seat, despite the then requirement to build a $250Million transmission line (Billions today) and at the cost of half the power. What politicians will do for votes.
That Alcoa Portland is still open is testimony to politicians again, State and Federal who met with Alcoa in New York and struck a deal. Once again we are paying secretly to keep the seat safe for politicians, nothing more. Alcoa, the US company Henry Bolte invited here, is probably suffering but we are all paying for those jobs.
Get rid of the RET. Make Hazelwood profitable again. Stop all these silent subsidies which are ripping into our state taxes, our Federal taxes and we stil have to pay the RET. The true cost could be as much as $10Billion a year, not counting all the suffering businesses who will have to push up prices. This is a politician made unnatural disaster.
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Normal business account settlement discount is up to 2.5% but electricity retailers are offering pay account on time discounts ranging from 10% to 22% which shows that their operating margin is very healthy.
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Yes. In business it is common to double yourcosts and even then it can be hard to make a profit. However the RET allows you to do this before paying, so people are doubling a cost they have not paid. An incredible windfall from a hidden tax which is not on your bills.
Weatherill does not have to pay for his windmolls. However his diesel generators will be hit with RET.
How Green is it to replace coal with diesel?
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And diesel cost about 45 times more than coal per unit of energy.
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TdeF, so if retailers are bunging on an amount equivalent to the RET figure passed through in the network charges with no justification other than pure profit, surely that is just as criminal as the Gov’s RET charge itself? So it seems that the free market is gouging us just as much as the Gov – until we remember that the Gov then also adds a 10% GST charge on top of the 2xRET charge – then it appears that the Gov beats the free market in terms of gouging prowess.
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Where does AU get its graphite\carbon to reduce alumina to the metal? What is that byproduct? Do yous guys make that from your own coal? Shame on you! 🙂
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The Australian smelters make their own anodes. They typically use petroleum coke. Most coke used to be sourced from USA but I think China is now a large supplier.
Some smelters have options to buy pre-formed anodes from Chine but that is a back up. From memory they have purchased them but at least up to 2012 they smelters were still forming their own.
It is been almost 5 years since I was in a smelter in Australia so my information may be a little dated.
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Australia has, or had one operating graphite mine – the Uley graphite mine in South Australia. They made some big announcements about recommencing production a couple of years ago, though am not sure if they are still going, as I recall they hit some financial woes.
http://www.minerals.statedevelopment.sa.gov.au/geoscience/mineral_commodities/graphite
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BTW SGL Group Germany, produces most all Graphite electrodes for Alcoa. They own all remaning coal reserves in Arkansas USA Have a plant on, what else, Carbon Plant Rd, Altus, AR 72821. We are so ashamed! MAGA
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Turning ores into metal is about reducing oxides of metal to metal. The best way to do it is with evil carbon, whether for haematite or bauxite. Both take massive amounts of coal for the electricity and carbon to reduce the oxides and produce CO2.
So a Green CO2 free world is one without metal. Wooden iPhones are next. Wooden bicyles. Wooden aircraft. Flintstone cars.
No concrete, also a major source of CO2 and without steel reinforcing. So wooden skyscrapers. Doctors can operate with wooden scalpels and you can use chopsticks. A Green world without CO2 would not exist.
I blame the self serving political classes, elites who are the ultimate NIMBYs. They lecture us on ethics, morality and every aspect of our lives while living off our hard work. Like fleas in the middle ages, they can devastate whole societies. The world’s biggest countries are not listening. They have their own real problems, not made up nonsense like drowning cities and man made bushfires and droughts.
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“not made up nonsense like drowning cities and man made bushfires and droughts.”
Indeed! I myself have lotsa empty aluminum (metal) beer-cans. They make excellent insulation for the walls of houses and cow barns. To get more; I need more neighbors that bring their own beer. 🙂
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Metal refiners like to reduce sulphides rather than oxides ,oxides are usually less rewarding.
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Without cheap, plentiful electricity, the 21st Century will inevitably come to resemble the majority of centuries that preceded it. The collapse of industry and prosperity precedes only slightly, the deflation of ‘civilised’ society, with its array of comfortable and comforting social affectations.
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Entirely agree. On this topic someone wondered if a simplified statement of the way RET works could be published. Given that the Act which st up the whole mess is over 200 convoluted pages long a short and catchy summary is a big ask.
Nevertheless electricity pricing in Australia has become the prime example of “Robin Hood in Reverse”
policy making.
The operation of the Renewable Energy Target (RET) and the National Energy Market (NEM) act as a giant Carbon Tax by stealth. For each 1000 Kwh (Mwh) that a ‘renewable’ energy supplier generates it can issue a Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) which it can then market to electricity retailers, who must buy enough to meet their required percentage of renewable energy of the total energy they individually sell (a percentage which is effectively determined by the percentage of renewables in the total energy supply. Thus by mandate, each REC must be purchased – a fully guaranteed market).
At the same time the retailers buy wholesale electricity on the market operated by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). The resultant artificially inflated wholesale prices are then increased by massive margins, resulting in the retail prices which are charged solely for the service of issuing accounts and collecting payments. At least this is the situation in Queensland.
This mess was created by COAG with the help of a study by KPMG management consultants, and is a bit like a camel (a horse designed by a committee). It is unlikely that any amount of government tinkering will produce a significant improvement. In fact it is likely to result in another costly level of bureaucracy, possibly producing a three humped camel!!!
The entire system should be scrapped, including the RET, the NEM, the AEMO, RECs and all subsidies to ‘renewable’ energy as well as the system of the private company retailing of an essential commodity.
This would involve a return to something similar to the situation before COAG messed it all up. Each of the States should be responsible for the generation of its own power and the marketing of it to consumers within the State. Of course the existing inter-connectors between the existing State grids should remain so that extra power capable of being generated by the energy rich States (NSW, QLD and previously VIC (until Andrews forced the shut-down of Hazelwood))can be transferred to the grids of South Australia and Tasmania when local demand exceeds the ability of the local grid to supply. Actually if sensible (non Green) policies applied, South Australia could be a low cost energy powerhouse using its massive deposits of uranium, while Tasmania could become largely self-sufficient if it developed the considerable remaining hydroelectric potential there.
Sadly none of this is likely to happen, at least until massive blackouts in some States (likely), or a return to the lower temperatures, which prevailed in the Little Ice Age and in earlier times, can no longer be hidden by massive manipulation of temperate records (they should not be called data since data ceases to exist once they are altered).The latter is quite possible if the current quiet phase of solar activity continues for a few more years, as many solar experts expect. One can only hope that sanity will eventually prevail.
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Just repeal the RET. Whichever party promises to do this will win in a landslide. The Greens have had their fun. Even the caring ones are feeling guilty when the poor are freezing and despite paying no tax, have to pay double and quadruple the electricity bills to just live. This is no longer a caring country. It is certainly not a clever country. As for our politicians, words fail. They care more about when men can marry men than whether their people are freezing or dying from heat in the summer. Are they back from holidays yet?
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So…in a nutshell…it doesn’t matter how much ACTUAL renewable power is generated, as the RET increases, baseload MUST pay more in indulgence’s (“good” tax) for each MW they generate. Therefore our power bills go up as a multiple of that RET indulgence.
How bloody cunning!
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Bring on REXIT….!!!!!
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Taken from Small Dead Animals, but seems fitting on the RET discussion.
HMT replied to comment from Oz | August 6, 2017 3:33 AM | Reply
Isn’t buying carbon credits kind of like cheating on your wife and paying your neighbor to say he did it?
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Some people you meet, after shaking hands you check to see if all your fingers are still there….
The RET shucksters fall into that category….
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You have no idea how much I would like a weekend with none of the problems of this messed up world invading everything I do. If it’s not climate change related trouble it’s political turmoil. And then there’s both at the same time but at least this is good news.
The United States has formally notified the United Nations that we are withdrawing from the Paris agreement.
There is always a catch or course. So it’s effective as soon as we are eligible to do so. But up to now, no one has had the brass nerve to go this far, essentially telling the UN to shove their climate change mitigation agreement.
The unfortunate thing is that Trump is still laboring under the delusion that it might be reworked to be more equitable to the U.S. and its taxpayers. So he leaves it open that we might rejoin if better conditions can be somehow, as if by magic, made to appear.
But for now and a very welcome change it’s
And that’s a rare thing these days. 🙂
I wish Trump showed signs that he actually understands what’s happening. But sofar no sign of it.
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Maybe the intransigence of the other major signatories who insist that the deal can’t be renegotiated will be our savior.
Hooray for stubborn insistence on economic suicide. 🙂
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Don’t know if you’ve seen the new ‘Dunkirk’ movie Roy but the flying and dogfight scenes were amazing, the sounds of the Rolls-Royce Merlin to the Stuka sirens made the hairs stand up, visually the entire movie was fantastic.
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Except for pilots wearing oxygen masks at sea level. Yellow- nose Messershmitts which did not appear 2 months later. Shots of the Spits were good though- rest was crap. My battle flight simulator is more realistic. The movie was well filmed. The rest was was odd.
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Forget about the nit picking Glen. Just watch and enjoy the movie, and respect the courage of the men involved. You can even ignore the incompetence of the British top brass that allowed the situation to develop.
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The “oxygen masks” were not just there to supply oxygen. They were worn in battle, because they contained the microphone for the radio. Once the engagement started, the pilots would be constantly talking, to each other as they covered each others tails.
The coloured noses on the Messershmitts were starting to be introduced, on a squadron by squadron basis, to indicate the section leaders in each flight, to the other pilots.
My father was one of those, stuck on the beach at Dunkirk, after the first wave of boats left. The men were ordered to fire at the aircraft with coloured noses. The man who gave that order, was an Intelligence Officer who happened to be the brother of the woman my father later married, i.e. my eventual Uncle.
It was a very odd time, and those involved were permanently changed by the experience.
You don’t get the smell of cordite, nor the taste of fear, from a flight simulator. Perhaps that is what the movie was trying to portray?
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Thank you, RW. I didn’t tumble to the microphone requirement. It would need to be hands free because the pilot needs his hands for other things and it would need to be shielded from the noise in the cockpit to be useful, both of which are accomplished nicely with the mic inside mask.
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Last night on SBS there was a show on Dunkirk that tried to resolve the issue that ground troops had at the beach- namely ;no RAF.! The show said that the RAF were I the battle all the time. Truth be known it was a light cover as the British were covering their losses in France in order to build up for the future. They lost many of their best pilots from May to June and this was a serious issue. What is never discussed was the political decision made by Hitler and that was he was allowing the British to escape by telling his divisions to halt. Goering was to harry the departing troops. There is a wealth of German files that indicate that Hitler- and others held out that an arrangement could be made with Britain. History and all that stuff.
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“SBS”?
As many dramatic bits, as will fit into 55 minutes. No more need be said.
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In case you missed it, the producer was aware of the coloured nose but included it in the film so the audience could tell the difference between the British and German planes.
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I wouldn’t swear to it but I think I recall the great British Ace Robert Stanford Tuck mentioning colored noses on German fighters over Dunkirk. He got his first kills there. He also ended up becoming squadron leader because his leader Rodger Bushnell and his first acts as such was to demand radio discipline by admonishing his pilots to quit “squealing like little girls” when in a dog fight and to institute his own ideas about combat formations.
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Yoni,
I haven’t seen it. But on your recommendation I’ll put it on my list. But my other half gets her say in what we see and so I don’t know yet what she’ll think of it.
Historical accuracy is something not always very good in movies. And as Glen Michael points out right below you, it can be glaring. But in the case of the O2 masks it might be policy rather than need. And never having been a military pilot, much less old enough to have flown at Dunkirk, I can’t say one way or the other.
40
Just trying to give you a moment away from the problems of this messed up world. 🙂
40
At least you haven’t spoiled the story by telling us how it ends.
60
SPOILER: HOW IT ENDED:
DON’T READ BEFORE YOU SEE THE MOVIE.
Ready?
The UK ends up being ruled by faceless, unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats residing in a European city starting with ‘B.’
220
But not for much longer.
50
You can read all about Dunkirk in any number of history books. So unless the producer wanted to defy history and have some different ending we know that almost every Brit with a boat came out to help get the troops off the beach. The air war may be another story and the hero may go down in flames or survive at the whim of the producer. So I will try to see it ASAP.
10
Sneak away and go to a matinee showing. You can always claim that you went to the library 🙂
40
I am disappointed that the reason stated for withdrawing is the unfairness of the deal rather than the science being wrong.
The President should have assembled a panel of honest scientists who clearly demonstrated that the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is invalid.
It would have been simple to disprove all the claims of AGW.
Had that been done, many other countries might withdraw.
132
“The President should have assembled a panel of honest scientists who clearly demonstrated that the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is invalid.”
That is going on now with the EPA. There is no scientific evidence that changing atmospheric CO2 levels changes Earth’s temperature at any location. Nor is there any evidence that it can not do so! No-one has bothered to find out! All a scam!
173
Me too. However, his whole campaign was about building up this country again, not tearing it down. So it might be a wise move to emphasize the economic impact, which would be huge.
What I really wish is that whatever reason he gives, he would make it final, period. Leaving it open is just an invitation for the camel to poke his nose under the tent again.
100
“he would make it final, period. Leaving it open is just an invitation for the camel to poke his nose under the tent again.”
P45 nullified anything obummer agreed to! Congress was not even asked to ratify. Obummer cannot return. Perhaps the camel no longer has a nose! Easy; get a new camel!
We use armadillos as post hole diggers! They quickly get dull in the rocks! 🙂
70
How would you go about that? It’s essentially an attempt to prove a negative and a well known fallacy.
It would not be very hard to present all the major claims, that is, the evidence they say proves that climate change is happening and debunk them. But that’s not really a proof because it’s still open for someone to come along and prove a link between weather anomalies or temperatures out of the ordinary and CO2.
It’s not hard to lose track of the fact that the weather 20, 30, 50, or 100 years ago was essentially the same as it is now and so people get mislead very easily. And once started down the wrong path it’s very hard to argue people back to realistic understanding.
60
You could disprove or invalidate AGW claims by:
-Showing there is no correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature. CO2 lags temperature by about 800 years.
-Show examples of widespread alteration of historical temperature data to cool the past and warm the present, done by NASA, BoM etc..
-Explain that CO2 is only a trace gas with little or no “greenhouse” capability.
-Explain that CO2 of anthropogenic origin is only about 5% of all CO2. It is implausible that this could cause the warming claimed.
-Explain that during periods of natural warming such as the Minoan, Roman and Medieval periods that it has always been good for mankind, even if warming were really happening.
-Explain that the main driver of global temperature is solar output and The Milankovitch Cycles.
142
-Also show how there is no “hockey stick” curve.
http://americanelephant.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/mwp-hockey-warming_graph.gif?w=420
-Explain how the IPCC climate models are totally useless and have no forecasting or hindcasting ability whatsoever.
102
David,
That has all been done! The religious zealots just keep selling knives that never get dull! 😉
82
I know Will, but Trump or his scientists could have made a statement to that effect.
73
Why insult your supporters? Most now already understand that you keep knives sharp by sharpening them! Or: you buy cheap armadillos from China! 🙂
31
Gentlemen, no need to go back and forth on the point. I’ll stipulate that Trump could have presented all of global warming’s points and the heavy weight of lack of supporting evidence to back them up and made a strong case. But the truth is that we can’t prove we’re right.
30
No Roy.WE are not allowed too.The Enemedia will not allow it.Just remember,Trump has his hands full,fighting the”Congress Critters”as well as the”Leftards”
21
Roy
I agree with your point above that,at this time, pointing to the economic issues was the right thing to do. It is valid and the most readily understood part of the issue.
Apparently Lord Monckton et al have a new paper due to be published very soon that uses a mathematical proof to blow AGW out of the water. Maybe the President is aware of this and is happy for it to do the talking. If it is as good as it is made out to be then it will turnout to be a very good tactical move on the President’s part.
10
Roy
I agree with your point above that,at this time, pointing to the economic issues was the right thing to do. It is valid and the most readily understood part of the issue.
Apparently Lord Monckton et al have a new paper due to be published very soon that uses a mathematical proof to blow AGW out of the water. Maybe the President is aware of this and is happy for it to do the talking. If it is as good as it is made out to be then it will turnout to be a very good tactical move on the President’s part.
00
Not only is all atmospheric CO2 a trace gas but the human origin component is only 3 or 4% of that.
The big killer for CAGW is that the main gas active in temporarily “trapping” energy in the atmosphere is WATER.
They would have been laughed out of court if they had picked on water so the obvious target had to be CO2 with the added benefit of targeting coal.
The scientific reality is that the most dangerous gas that humans can play with is OXYGEN.
Too much of that can be fatal whereas we have no problems in dealing with substantial increases in the CO2 levels in the air we breathe.
Very low CO2 levels in our bloodstream induced by breathing pure oxygen is fatal.
CO2, The essence of life.
KK
60
“The big killer for CAGW is that the main gas active in temporarily “trapping” energy in the atmosphere is WATER. They would have been laughed out of court if they had picked on water so the obvious target had to be CO2 with the added benefit of targeting coal.”
That is indeed the SCAM by natural gas magnates AlGore unt J.Hanson, the original AlGoresta cabil/clan/cartel/conspiracy! No crime but an excellent business plan.
It is a true wonder that stupid earthlings were not dominated by hardy Roches!
70
“The scientific reality is that the most dangerous gas that humans can play with is OXYGEN.”
Not at all! Try playing with acetylene C2H2. Above 200 psi C2H2 is highly explosive limiting its use for cutting to mild underwater. H2 combined with O2 can be used to all known depths of the ocean. 🙂
20
From “CO2 traps heat” to “CO2 temporarily traps energy.” We’re making progress. The former is wrong; and the latter is both an oxymoron and confusing/meaningless. How do you “temporarily trap” anything; and if you can, who cares? I’m predicting the evolution of the phrase “heat trapping” will pass through something like: “Not heat trapping per se, but you know what I mean.”
41
Water “temporarily”.
It undergoes a few phase changes from ground/ocean to a gas dissolved in air to cloud, to rain to ground again
10
If I may — the main killer for CAGW is the fact that they have been beating the same horse for so long that the poor horse has fallen down in the street and can’t even get up on it’s feet anymore and still they beat the horse and insist that it will not only walk but win the Kentucky Derby if only they beat it some more.
When has that ever worked?
You and I can’t afford to be so foolish because we would fail and we all know it. The CAGW pushers also know they’ve failed but they fear to admit it. Their desperation is obvious. But as long as they keep on beating that horse they can get more money to keep their jobs and keep on beating the horse. The horse is now dead and they will still beat it.
Climate change was dead as soon as it was proposed. It died a death of a thousand little cuts when climategate happened. It’s died every time a prediction has failed. It died every time someone could do a even a little independent thinking. It’s ghost is all that’s left and yet the whole world has embraced that ghost.
The truth is that it’s a game to the pushers in which the stakes are high, their jobs are on the line. And it’s a nice new fad to kiss up to for the believing public. B see’s A wearing X new style and runs right out to get her own X.
On both sides of that you gotta belong to get along. We are the victims of our own nature. When I taught college classes I didn’t dare say what I was thinking or I would have become a pariah immediately. So the horse will be beaten until the world is exhausted with the effort and some new fad cause pops up. It’s that way because we are that way. Independent thinkers are the exception, not the rule. Independent thinking requires swimming upstream not only against the current but against every other fish in the river. It’s hard, not easy, so very few will do it.
22
I do not dispute that, not in the slightest. But …
The people that we need to convince – the Millennial’s – have no concept of recent history, let alone a time period spanning twenty generations.
If it is not happening now, and is not being tweeted about, then it is just not relevant, within their horizon of experience. In fact, the more that it is tweeted about, the more “noise factor” it has, and the more notice they will give to the subject matter of, “the message”, be it correct or complete rubbish.
Add to that, an education system that transfers, “approved facts”, from the teacher, to those taught, but does so in a way that avoids any critical thought. In fact, questioning must be avoided at all cost.
This is why the education system makes a demon of “scepticism”. Being thought a sceptic, or associating with sceptics, is now something that should be totally avoided, if one is to remain accepted by ones peers.
I have no answer to this question. But presenting the truth, as a collection of verifiable facts, is no longer fit for purpose. We have to find a way to break through the systematic brain-washing of our kids (for that is what it is), in order to return to a world where people are willing and able to think for themselves.
30
There is a well-known part of science 1.01 that correlation does not prove causation, but that there cannot be causation without correlation. There is ample evidence both from geology and even in the record of recent centuries, that there is no reasonable correlation between CO2 levels and temperature, thus there can be no causation of changing CO2 changing temperature.
95
“thus there can be no causation of changing CO2 changing temperature.”
Time out? fingers moving vertically to opposing palm. or middle finger moving vertically to opposing palm. “Wait a frigin minute! Atmospheric CO2 levels must affect vegetation growth from tropics to poles. What does that do to local temperatures?
Your current meteorologist or climate skyentist have absolutely no clue to what is going on. Throw out the bums; until someone, anyone, can demonstrate some possible clue.
74
What indeed? And what does it mean for CO2, given that plants produce CO2 in the dark as they respire?
The inconvenient truth about plants.
10
Manfred! Have you been looking at pictures of stamen, again? You naughty boy!
10
Scientists argue on the Science, politicians argue on the politics. When scientists argue on the politics, or politicians argue on the science, people stop listening.. Each to their own.
50
No, don’t stop listening.
Just politely point out, to anyone within earshot that each is conversing, in bovine excreta, on a subject that they know little about.
00
Is it just me or is there really an outage just now in the South Australia Outages App.
https://outage.apps.sapowernetworks.com.au/OutageReport/OutageSearch
” Access to this SA Power Networks site is currently unavailable
outage.apps.sapowernetworks.com.au – Access Denied
Below are links to our services and contact phone numbers
“
90
Spare a thought, or a prayer, for the people of Venezuela. A country, wealthy in resources, that is currently being reported as now quickly passing the tipping point into economic ruin and despair as a result of ideology.
It is a stark reminder to all of us that terrible living conditions are much closer than we realise, just a step away, if idiots are allowed to have their way.
210
Yes, Venezuela seems to be the model Australia is following.
Australians should take a special interest in Venezuela because that’s the way Australia is heading. Check out the Australian Debt Clock as you read this article and watch it grow.
http://www.australiandebtclock.com.au/
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kirchick-venezuela-pundits-20170802-story.html
113
The important debt watch factor is total public debt combining federal, state, territory, local government and the private companies that governments own where debt is hidden in company accounts and not government budget papers.
NBNCo is one example but also state government electricity businesses. NSW Labor sold half of the businesses just before losing government after 16-years in office. The valuation range estimated the assets were worth from $12 billion upwards. The sale achieved $5.9 billion, and it is interesting to check who the new shareholder owners are.
However, because of the debt those companies had entered into, at the request of the state Labor government to be paid as extra dividends, all that was left was $800 million of the sale price $5.9 billion.
I understand other states including Queensland have government owned private companies.
100
SA seems to be the California of australia…..
One thing I notice is that SA seems to be a bit of a Marie Celeste in many ways. I recall many awful things just seem to happen in SA, like crimes like Snowtown bodies in barrels, now power failures and its slowly withering away…..
CA is run by green idealogues, has silicon valley but businesses are leaving as it self destructs. Hollywood is about as evil and vacuous as it gets, and the whole state seems, like SA, the Voyage of the Damned.
However there seems to be another dimension, a spiritual one, that just seems to scream hoplessness and seems to have a jusgement upon it that just cant be undone. Hard to describe – from my Christian perspective, its like the place has been cursed, literally…..
00
Did you mean to write Austravenezuala–the latest example of a socialism run amok?
20
My weekend overnight snow shoe walk and snow camp was cancelled because of a forecast severe blizzard but the SMH still managed to push out this story on “climate change” affecting the ski industry.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/snowy-retreat-climate-change-puts-australias-ski-industry-on-a-downhill-slope-20170804-gxp74h.html
153
The irony is delicious.
Even their ABC has picked up that the snow continues to fall.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-06/vic-weather-strong-winds-alpine-blizzards-forecast/8778700
How did that get past the ABC’s PC Commissar? Somebody will be sent to Siberia for re-education no doubt.
80
Please! Please!, Can I go?! Please!
60
Whow!
Thanks ROM
20
🙂
At the taxpayers expense, they’re already there.
Cf: 0034?. The PC Commissar on holidays.
10
You might get stuck in the ice…..
00
Nope!
Too much heat around for that!
And if I did get trapped in the ice then I might get rescued by a couple of those nice Russian ladies in their bikinis.
Come to think of it I wonder how I could engineer becoming trapped in ice in the right circumstances and right location.
Reality;
Some 26 years ago in 1991 whilst Russia was still under communism, just, was somewhat different to those pics in the Siberian Times.
Boarding our flight from Moscow to Krasnador down east of the Black Sea meant climbing aboard one of those 1940 type passenger buses where an old lend lease Ford type prime mover and semi trailer horse float type passenger carrying / stand up bus took us and our luggage out to the aircraft at one of Moscows main airports.
A set of airline steps were wheeled up to the aircraft passenger door and two lady sumo build type cabin attendents stood one on each side of the door and counted the passengers in.
When the aircraft reached its passenger capacity, one of the sumo build attendents stepped in front of the door, filling it quite adaquately, put her foot against the stairs and with a mighty shove with her foot , shoved those stairs full of 15 or 20 or so hopeful passengers a couple of metres away from the aircraft door.
There was a great deal of shouting, waving, no doubt swearing russians and much waving of tickets but we had a full load so shove off you lot.
I think the aircraft was piloted by an ex MIG15 pilot or a very frustrated wannabe one as we lit up, taxied out at speed, turned fast onto the runway without any slowing in taxi speed to the point where we were all leaning out over in our seats and hit full power as we hammered and bounced down along an extraordinarily rough runway before lifting off.
I suspected that our pilots were going to or had to get out of there before another aircraft landed, come hell or high water.
Reached about 7000 or 8000 feet and the whole cabin with its full load of maybe a hundred pasengers suddenly filled with smoke in seconds until you barely see in front of you.
Bloody hell! Fire! A pilot’s worst nightmare!
Then , hey no smell!
Ahh! water vapour condensation otherwise known as fog. I had to reassure some of our mob.
A few seconds later it cleared and all was well for a minute or so until one of our Australian mob began to sing that old hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee” so we all more or less joined in.
A couple of russians obviously understood english and the word shot down along the length of that aircraft in seconds about those crazy americans or as it truly crazy Australians which led to huge hilarity amongst the Russian passengers when they got the nationality of those westerners right.
So they joined in as well in a variety of languages.
We more or less crashed onto the runway at Krasnador and taxied in to a halt on the hard standing and then disembarked down the steps as one of those very small suzuki style trucks / utes came careering around the corner witha 200 litre drum and a hand pump in the back with the operator of aforesaid pump hanging on so as to not lose touch with the ute.
The driver steps out of the ute, picks up a length of old hose from the back of the truck and his pump operator goes into business as he holds the hose down between each set of the twin tire landing wheel asembly of the aircraft.
What the hell??
Ahh , another cunning Russian communist invention.
They were cooling the aircraft’s brake system down by flooding the brake assembly with water.
If not cooled down the heat from the brakes was soaked up by the tires and could and did apparently blow the tyres off the rim wrecking the wheel assembly and damaging the aircraft.
Which explained all those apparent brake oil patchs around every wheel on every aircraft we saw on every hard standing.
They weren’t oil. They were just a brake cooling water pool.
The fact that every now and then a set of brake discs disintergrated as the cooling and heating stresses became too much was a small price to pay for keeping those tires cool enough not to explode and keeping the aircraft flyable and landable.
The Russians of those communism end times had everything that we had .
It was just that it wasn’t very clean and it worked more or less, usually less.
And there wasn’t always much of it.
50
Experienced similar smoke in a Russian plane flying from Saigon to Hanoi in the nineties.
It took off and landed very level without the rapid climb of more recent aircraft.
A month after we got home a similar craft crashed in Indonesia, if I remember correctly, killing all on board.
I think it was a IIb.
00
Tupolev 134 b. 1997 at Phnom Penh.
00
A bit different state of affairs from the pictures conjured up by reading a book ‘As far as my feet will carry me’ by, I think his name was, Claude Forell (sp?). I read this many, many years ago. It was his story about escaping from an eastern Siberian mine post WWII and making his way home, taking a very long time. I was struck by the discomfort he suffered from the millions of mosquitos that showed up as the snow melted. The book was translated from German.
Does anyone else remember this book? Our family copy has gone missing unfortunately.
20
It was a good read and Peter Weir made a film, but there appears to be some dispute …. this will give you a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sławomir_Rawicz
10
That book name really rings a bell.
Sure I read it.
10
That sounds like someone different. I don’t recall his travelling through the Himalayas and Gobi Desert but I do remember reference to Lake Baikal. It might have been ‘As far as my feet can carry me’ rather than ‘will’. I’m stuck on that. I wish I could reread it. The mine was a lead mine IIRC.
00
It is someone different. I shoulda googled earlier! He was called Clemens Forell and I did get the title correctly the first time ( but not his first name). It was made into a film also.
00
Funny you mention that. I’m sure I read it from the local library.
The book name and author are a blank though.
KK
00
UHI
‘Heat waves have hit most of the country’s southeast over the past month. Shanghai, for example, recorded a temperature of 40.9 degrees Celsius on July 21, the highest on record in the city in 145 years. The extreme hot weather has increased the number of people suffering from heatstroke.’
China Daily
40
On second thought (putting on my cyclist hat) the 1870s were universally hot, so its probably not UHI.
20
Have you experience summer in Shanghai? 40.9 in Perth is a nice day. In Shanghai it is hell, but also meaningless.
The humidity is Shanghai is completely different. Singapore on the equator (4degrees) seems benign. I was in Shanghai in 37C. Mid summer in a pea souper fog. Amazing. You could see a meter or two and in fierce traffic. A few hundred meters was a long walk. Then the temperature dropped about 4C, a great relief but the fog crystalized into solid rain. You could get wet by moving quickly or waving your arms. Even people from hot cities like Beijing cannot stand the weather in Shanghai. Records mean very little.
This slavish devotion to records and thermometers tells very little about climates. Luck is involved in the weather every day. A one in a hundred year event can occur once in a hundred years without meaning a change in climate. However many people are trying desperately to convince us that we can change the weather. Nuts. Besides after building 350,000 windmills and spending at least $10Trillion the world has achieved nothing. Only very rich countries have windmills and they do nothing much.
110
Besides this hottest day ever business is a joke in a country which pretends the Federation drought never happened. Perhaps so they could say temperatures have gone up. A massive drought every hundred years is obviously the climate.
80
You make some good points Tdef.
You can’t discuss the impacts of temperature, without discussing humidity. And you can’t discuss either in any major city, without knowing the levels of airborne particulates.
Yemen is hot and dusty with very little humidity, with natives who aren’t very friendly with anybody. That is entirely different from Thailand, which is hot and humid, and dusty, with natives who just want the contents of your wallet. Both are entirely different to Jamaica, which is hot and humid and hungry for US dollars, but also quite pleasant, because there is always a breeze. All three countries sit on the Northern 15th parallel.
50
For the electric vehicle followers
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/04/tesla-model-3-cancellations-63k/
50
And the thread around this
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/08/we-dont-need-no-638.html#comment-1117086
30
Can anyone help me? I am trying to find any evidence that liquid water (in bulk not droplets) radiates infra red.
I know it is a powerful absorber, and several comments refer to it converting the absorbed energy into heat and evaporation. The Radiation Theory of climate change says that the surface absorbs the sun’s energy then radiates it as infra red, where it is absorbed by “greenhouse gases” to warm the whole Earth. As 70+% of the Earth’s surface is water that must mean that liquid water as in seas and lakes must radiate IR but I haven’t found any experimental data.
40
Hi Graeme, in some of my earlier posts I did away with such considerations by prefacing the assessment our CO2 guilt with the qualifier “IF”.
Meaning that even if all the supposed mechanisms were true there was one big stumbling block: the relative quantities.
Despite the popular myth that humanity is an all powerful force in the world we are in fact a piddling nonentity compared with nature in the production of CO2 and CO2 cannot “trap” heat.
There are even suggestions, Will can help here, that CO2 doesn’t even operate with the emission of IR until It is high in the atmosphere where temperatures are sub zero.
Whatever. We are insignificant producers of CO2.
Guilt free.
80
Interesting. Some one must have done the measurements, but who and when and where was it published?
This site gives the emissivity of a water surface as 0.98
http://www.infrared-thermography.com/material-1.htm
30
“Interesting. Some one must have done the measurements, but who and when and where was it published?”
I did that long ago! The results are still classified as tho enemies did not measure! Such has never been published. 98% normal emissivity is good for a bucket of water. Throw cigarette buts in, or pee in the bucket it stays at 98%. Watch out for angles!
40
I can help with that.
Liquid water most definitely radiates long wave IR. You can check this yourself with a Bolometer, which is a non-contact infrared thermometer.
http://imgur.com/a/twsQ6
It’s the red instrument in the attached image. You can obtain one for around $100 from Jaycar electronics. It detects LWIR typically in the 8 – 14 micron range.
However water does have some interesting properties compared to other materials. Most materials have a constant emissivity at all viewing angles. Water has an LWIR emissivity of near 0.98 when viewed perpendicular to the water’s surface, however emissivity drops dramatically when the viewing angle exceeds 55 degrees from vertical. This is because water emits LWIR from within the first 15 microns depth, not just from the absolute surface. What this means is that the full hemispherical LWIR emissivity for water is only around 0.67 not the 0.98 figure climastrologists wrongly use in their calculations.
By Kirchoff’s Law the corollary is true. Water has a hemispherical absorptivity for LWIR of 0.67. But this is where it gets strange. Normally surface incident LWIR can heat a material, or slow it’s cooling rate (even if that LWIR is being radiated from a cooler source such as a cold atmosphere above). But as water primarily cools by evaporation, surface incident LWIR emitted from the atmosphere does not slow the cooling rate of water. Ie: LWIR from the atmosphere is not keeping the oceans from freezing as the climastrologists falsely claim.
The reason LWIR from the atmosphere cannot warm or slow the cooling rate of the oceans is explained by the molecular / kinetic theory of temperature in fluids. Temperature can be seen as just the average vibration speed of molecules in a fluid. But not all molecules in a fluid are vibrating at the same speed. LWIR photons from the atmosphere only penetrate about 15 microns into the skin evaporation layer of water. Some water molecules a photon may hit are slow and may be sped up by the impact (warming). But some molecules are faster, and the impact of a LWIR photon can cause them to speed up so much they break surface tension (evaporation). In this second case the energy lost by a fast molecule escaping the skin evaporation layer is greater than the energy the impacting photon would have imparted to the water.
This of course leads to the next question – if LWIR from the atmosphere is not keeping the oceans from freezing as the climastrologists claim, what is?
711
Thanks Konrad,
I have an infrared thermometer (bolometer) of the type you mention. I will try measuring the temperature of a water surface at various angles. I expect that the bolometer should over read at normal because the instrument is set for some assumed average emissivity. From the table in my reference that should be in the range 0.8-0.95. At a low angle of incidence it should under read.
You have written about that before and I did confirm your diffential absorbtion experiment. Diffferential absorbtion plus heat capacity of the oceans plus ocean and atmospheric circulation plus wrong values used in the climastrologists simplistic radiation equivalence calculations clearly indicates how wrong they are.
A complete understanding of our atmospheric/ocean circulation system is still a little way off. However it seems to me that at least accounting for the above factors explains the apparent paradox of the 15C Earth average temperature with no input from greenhouse gases.
Of interest is that recent balloon radiosonde traces from the Antarctic bases during winter also throws the thermo-gravitational theory into doubt.
30
“I have an infrared thermometer (bolometer) of the type you mention. I will try measuring the temperature of a water surface at various angles. I expect that the bolometer should over read at normal because the instrument is set for some assumed average emissivity. From the table in my reference that should be in the range 0.8-0.95. At a low angle of incidence it should under read.”
The emissivity of the water air interface at greater than 2 micron wavelength ‘low frequency’ is more than 90% out to angle from normal of 54° Past that It drops like a rock from internal reflection. Hell at 0.5 micron wavelength with grazing angles you can see the entire NYC skyline reflected from across the river. Still ponds are easy to measure; the moving ocean not so easy!
40
“moving ocean not so easy!”
No, but easier now after the invention of the infinitely tunable LWIR Quantum Cascade Laser and detectors. Because the laser is so bright, reflectivity from water can be measured with little effect from background LWIR. As LWIR reflectivity is directly proportional to LWIR emissivity, LWIR emissivity of water can be calculated from measurements of its LWIR reflectivity at a range of discrete frequencies.
20
” moving ocean not so easy!” No, but easier now after the invention of the infinitely tunable LWIR Quantum… ”
Indeed! But they are coherent, highly polarized, and spendy! Nothing at all like a bucket of water! We always used BRDF to calculate emissivity at large angles.
Yous still paying for red thumbs! 🙂
42
But BDRF only holds true for opaque surfaces. Water is translucent to LWIR up to 15 microns depth. Empirical experiment with the Quantum Cascade Laser is the way forward.
Also, “red thumbs” without counter comment means those down-voting are just displaying that they have no countering science.
28
“But BDRF only holds true for opaque surfaces. Water is translucent to LWIR up to 15 microns depth. Empirical experiment with the Quantum Cascade Laser is the way forward.”
Nonsense! Correct BDRF also measures transmission through the mass. Specular emissivity is the result at every angle, if temperature does not change!
“Also, “red thumbs” without counter comment means those down-voting are just displaying that they have no countering science.”
So why are you paying them, punk? 🙂
10
Peter,
while getting absolute measurements for the change in LWIR emissivity with angles off vertical is difficult, there is an easy way for you to observe the effect with just a bolometer.
In that attached image is a blue pyramid thing. That was a cryo-cooled sky used to eliminate background radiation from the room. The problem is that as observing angle decreases and emissivity decreases, LWIR reflectivity increases. This means radiation from the roof and walls of your room start to confound measurement. However the cryo-cooled widget is difficult to set up and use.
Instead I recommend using a wide container of hot water. If the water is significantly hotter than the walls and roof of the room, the change in emissivity with change in observing angle is easier to see. For example readings from a pan of 50C water in a 20C room should drop by 1 – 2 degrees as observing angle changes from vertical to 20 degrees from level.
PS. I remember that you did the “Deep Black Sea” experiment. I have recommended your method of mixing the water after the period of solar exposure to average the temperature and save on thermometers to other trying it on the cheap.
37
“Of interest is that recent balloon radiosonde traces from the Antarctic bases during winter also throws the thermo-gravitational theory into doubt.”
That thermo-gravitational theory is simply the ideal gas law corrected for variable density, pressure, and temperature. Gravitational atmospheric compression does that for every solar system body. Even the SUn!
20
Well yes the thermo -gravitational theory is simply the ideal gas law. And if we are talking about a parcel of an ideal gas which is thermally isolated from its surroundings it works as advertised.
However it does not seem to describe our real atmosphere accurately.
Firstly the ideal gas law predicts a temperature profile (lapse rate) of 9.8C/km. The radiosonde balloon flights do not come close to that, even in the tropics where the lapse rate is the highest. The balloon flight from Darwin this morning has a lapse rate of about 7C/km. It never gets higher than that averaged over the whole troposphere. and I have looked at 100’s of flights now.
Secondly in the temperate latitudes the tropopause is lower and part of the flight extends into the lower stratosphere. The balloon flights go up to 16km above the ground. In the lower strastosphere the air is not mixing much and the lapse rate drops to zero (ie isothermal). I have now seen that 100s of times.
Finally in the Antactic the troposphere is even lower (down to about 9km). The stratosphere is still isothermal. In summer the coast is ice free and water circulates right up to the shore (where our Antartic bases are), bringing ocean heat to the shore. The lapse rate in the troposphere is still about 7C/km but to a lower altitude.
In winter however the seas around Antartica are frozen over, so no ocean heat gets transported to the coast and interesting things happen. At times when the local winds are light (which is uncommon) the lapse rate drops right down to 3C/km or even slightly less.
I do not see how the ideal gas law can explain that. It seems to me that the rule is; “the sun heats the ground and the ground heats the air”, not the other way round. The lapse rate represents a thermal gradient between the ground and the tropopause. When the sun stops heating the ground the lapse rate falls toward zero.
40
Thank you Peter,
“Well yes the thermo -gravitational theory is simply the ideal gas law. And if we are talking about a parcel of an ideal gas which is thermally isolated from its surroundings it works as advertised.”
Such always works with what is accurately observed.
The gas law and that theory are static. Something to be deviated from in any dynamic atmosphere. How much?? Measure what happens!
“describe our real atmosphere accurately.”
indeed! Please describe our real atmosphere accurately!
Engineers only hope that the damned thing does not break badly!
10
“describe our real atmosphere accurately.”
The best I can do currently is this:
The Sun heats the Ground and the Ground heats the Air, not the other way around.
40
“Firstly the ideal gas law predicts a temperature profile (lapse rate) of 9.8C/km. The radiosonde balloon flights do not come close to that, even in the tropics where the lapse rate is the highest. The balloon flight from Darwin this morning has a lapse rate of about 7C/km. It never gets higher than that averaged over the whole troposphere. and I have looked at 100′s of flights now.”
Not at all; the ideal gas law predicts a lapse of -14C/km. The measured is between -10C/km and -5C/km depending on local atmospheric water, never WV! Earth’s atmosphere is always at a higher temperature than predicted. This radiates excess atmospheric sensible heat to space. Earth’s surface temperature is hardly involved!
17
“throws the thermo-gravitational theory into doubt”
If by this you mean Nikolov & Zeller’s maths, then this was always in doubt. The problem is they ignored surface properties (their work still refers to our ocean planet as a “rocky planet”). This means they are still looking for how our atmosphere warms the surface, rather than looking for how our atmosphere cools the surface. They got seduced by limited measurements of the Venusian atmosphere that appeared to show earth surface temperatures at the 1 bar pressure level and went on to build a castle on sand.
There is however one part of their work that deserves further study and that is the speed of adjustment of vertical atmospheric temperature profiles in response to changing surface temperatures. This appears to be faster than conduction and convection (adiabatic theory), slower than the speed of light (radiative theory) but closer to the speed of sound. More investigation is required.
27
“slower than the speed of light (radiative theory) but closer to the speed of sound. More investigation is required.”
Indeed! watch the whole atmospheric columnar mass temperature change during LunaSolar eclipse the whole column changes temperature while maintaining local lapse. Time constant (delay) for 30 km a we-bit more than 5 minutes! What is that? Surface heating the atmosphere my ass!
26
Thanks for the responses from all who contributed. Even the red thumbers who demonstrated their lack of understanding of science.
24
More doom and gloom from Karl Kruszelnicki. Unfortunately a lot of youth believe what he says.
https://www.facebook.com/triplej/videos/10159332443110160/
33
I was once forced to listen to Dr Karl Marx during a short bus trip and someone rang in and questioned him on the ocean acidity claim , he stumbled for a bit then went on the Co2 dissolves causing and acid reaction but the caller then butted in with natural buffering and the oceans weren’t acidic but basic or alkaline and DR Karl just said he believes the consensus of 1000s of scientists , next caller .
170
No mention of the 31,000 US scientists who signed the letter to POTUS Trump telling him to ignore “the science is settled” con?
140
I wrote this here on the blog in late January this year:
I had the displeasure to see him at a lecture once, back in the days of 35mm slide projectors rather than Powerpoint and LCD projectors. The slide projector got stuck, as they were prone to do, and he started abusing the female volunteer running the projector and started saying how she was making him “look bad” and demanded her replacement with “someone who knew what they were doing”. All this in front of an audience of perhaps 200 people. A very unpleasant individual and his only employment is in taxpayer funded jobs where the Left love his globull warming nonsense.
112
Sounds like my experience with David Suzuki, a very unpleasant, uptight individual.
102
Same here David when I encountered him on a street in Torquay Vic, he just flew off the handle with uncontrolled emotions, I wouldn’t trust him in any situation that required the recognition of immediate reality.
31
It truly is a mad mad world.
Once again TdeF outlines the issue so clearly that we don’t even have to ask why is this happening to us.
The answers are right there so obviously staring us in the face.
For the management in Vic and S.A. it’s about spending the voters money to create an image that appeals to the virtuous green element.
They have “bought” voters using the voters own hard earned cash. Is there something twisted about that?
And at the national level we have “Government” presiding over an electricity system that is making more people jobless every day while quietly funneling huge amounts of our cash to places unknown.
I suspect that professional criminals must look on all of this with envy and amazement.
To Roy, don’t be too disheartened, at least the US has openly rebelled against the ruling political class while here in Australia we are suffering and still haven’t mustered the collective will to strike back at the real problem: self interested politicians.
Politicians are not stupid, they know exactly what they can get away with and are doing very well thank you.
The production and distribution of electricity is such a simple thing.
How has the production and distribution become so corrupted and distorted.
The answer lies in the news media.
Here in VN I get to see CNN and N.
At best I can stomach about 10 minutes.
Today I watched a segment on how President Trump had misbehaved in a phone call to our PM while we here applaud his actions.
Our PM obviously doesn’t care about the excess household burden of $600 p.a. on our electricity bills, nor about the unemployment being “generated” by excessive power costs to business.
Wake up Australia!
Between the media and politicians we are losing.
Lions 2
Christians 0
KK
120
I viewed a US television journalist speaking on this subject and he said that the Australians don’t care about stateless people.
He did not of course mention that the people are only stateless because they attempted illegal immigration and when picked up they had no passport or visa to enter Australia. And accordingly most have not been accepted by their countries of origin.
Or that Australia is behind the US and Canada on a per capita basis for resettlement of genuine refugees sent by the UNHCR, and for many decades past to present day intake. Norway is fourth.
30
AND the biggest percentage of those Stateless People being Islamic and passing through the 4000 kms long archipeligo of the largest moslem nation on earth from other moslem nations another few thousand kilometres further west to get to a nominally christian western nation. Aiustralia where they will be given lots of money, more than most older native born Australians get in a pension plus a mobile phone, international calls all paid for, which pensioners and low income native born Australians have to buy themselves, to ring their relatives at home to arrange for their refugeeing to Australia or to arange for their air travel for their annual holiday back home .
The true refugees, the middle eastern christians are now by the statistics, the most persecuted religious group on the planet and are the refugees we really should be welcoming as their cultural background is far closer and more compatible with our Australian cultural background than the islamic culturally shaped life style.
Fortunately it does seem that our immigration authorities are aware of this and are very quietly adjusting the refugee intake to reflect that true refugee status of the middle eastern christians who make it out here to Australia.
From direct contacts, the Indonesian christian communities are now also coming under steadily increasing pressure and an increase in the always rampant discrimination and hate directed towards and against christians through the increasingly hard line application of islamism in the rural and far flung island chains of Indonesia.
150
Over at watermelon central in NZ,
Power bill subsidies for lower-income families, under Greens’ power policy
Not the slightest whiff of critical journalism to be seen. More politically puffery in a country engaged in social engineering to no where under the euphemistic guise of ‘energy transition’, a journey into cold, impoverishment and diminished health.
Read what the social ‘experts’ have to say: Phenomenal amounts of handwaving, dreaming and chastising, but nothing substantive except the unwritten obvious, that the social engineering derived from the ‘settled politics’ of a non-problem will cost us dearly, for our own good, and the good of the planet.
This policy is already written into the UN Sustainable Development Agenda:
Resistance is NOT futile. It is indispensable.
140
Rex Murphy: Canada so ripe with green activism old-fashioned employment has gone out of fashion
50
Getting paid to not watch TV in Vic & SA this summer!
Customers in South Australia and Victoria may be asked to cut power usage at peak times in return for discounted bills.
Both states are contemplating summer without a power supply from the Port Augusta Power Station in South Australia and from Victoria’s Hazelwood Power Station.
In preparation people with generators, or who are willing to sweat it out, may be asked to volunteer to switch off appliances such as pool pumps or air conditioners at times of peak demand.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-04/power-bill-discounts-offered-to-switch-off-air-con-sa/8772370
70
Yeah it’s another Baldrick cunning plan , next it will be how to halve your electricity bill by turning your power off at the main for 12 hours each day .
Any blackouts this year the blame lies squarely with our communist states , I might do an opposite of earth hour this year , if we see a message about power at capacity please conserve I will turn every switch on in the house and flat out whatever I can control that way .
90
Reversing Into Tomorrow.
Turning off the air-conditioner is like putting progress in reverse:
“It enabled the sweeping postwar development of the South, where all new single-family homes today include central air.
In automobiles, it made the commutes between air-conditioned homes and air-conditioned offices possible.
In the Southwest, its arrival facilitated new methods of rapid construction, replacing traditional building designs that once naturally withstood the region’s desert climate.
Parts of the United States whose historical development never depended on air-conditioning increasingly resemble the regions whose growth wouldn’t have been possible without it.”
How Air-Conditioning Conquered America (Even the Pacific Northwest)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/the-all-conquering-air-conditioner.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1
40
They don’t mention it by name but this is the very appropriately named DRED technology. Demand Response Enable Device. I wrote an article on it in Silicon Chip April 2017.
In the ABC article they say there was a similar system in use for hot water heating in the 60’s and 70’s. That is being disingenuous because that system was not designed to shed load but utilise cheap off-peak night time power.
You can see the first of three pages of my article here:
http://www.siliconchip.com.au/Issue/2017/April/DRED%3A+they+can+turn+your+aircon+off%21?res=nonflash
41
A question for weather data followers:-
Has there been a significant change in radiosonde performance over the last maybe 25 years?
Reason for asking
We’re located about 150 km east of a major met station which launches radiosondes.
In earlier days it was common to come across remnants of these.
Laterly it is extremely rare.
So has there been a change in performance or has there been a change in the direction that they travel?
40
A possibility might be that they no longer launch them or launch fewer because of the inconvenient data they provide which doesn’t fit the official warming narrative.
11
The Week in Pictures: White House Daze Edition.
10
Thanks Fly, I originally got the links from Tom on Catalaxy files who also posted a daily link for Bill Leak’s cartoons, respect for the mod squad, cheers.
30
More on EVs
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/08/we-dont-need-no-640.html
And the comments
Plus re wind power
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/08/we-dont-need-no-639.html#comment-1117632
And thread
30
As Jo has pointed out in the previous thread, Global Warming is definitely man made.
50
“As Jo has pointed out in the previous thread, Global Warming is definitely man made.”
Indeed! Any detectable change in the environment at any location; NONE 🙂
45
But the concept is probably man-made.
24
🙂
10
Image problems ++ IMO
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2017/08/social-justice-warriors-in-one-photo-virtue-signalling-actual-change.html
30
The CLOUD experiments at CERN ‘recently found that the impact of decadal fluctuations of galactic cosmic rays on aerosols would have a limited impact on clouds.’
30
“fluctuations of galactic cosmic rays on aerosols would have a limited impact on clouds.”
Good to know! Do they have any info on other variations of the Sun”s variable electric\magnetic field strength? How about vast angular momentum adjustments between all Solar system bodies?
40
I don’t think the folk at CERN try to fool others! They’ve got all they can handle trying to keep from fooling themselves! 🙂
70
Revisionism found in Germany.
‘The now climate-activist DWD has developed a habit over the past years of issuing warmed up “preliminary” monthly summary reports to describe the month’s weather.
‘Usually these reports get issued 2 or 3 days before the end of the month, and so Germany’s mean temperature for the month is an estimated value, and later gets revised after the final data come in. So what better opportunity for activists to fudge the preliminary figures on the warm side, and feed the press with them? Later of course the temperature results get quietly revised downward.’
Notrickszone
81
I’m trying to put the terms ‘cash cow’, ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘Queensland Government’ into the one sentence.
Another week with the average base Load for Australia above 18,000MW, with coal fired power supplying 80% PLUS of that, and with each week, I learn something new.
While NSW and Victoria have less coal fired power than the total Demand, Queensland always generates more from coal fired power than their total power consumption at that 4AM point in time, the lowest daily power consumption, and that’s because they supply power into Northern NSW on a regular basis, you know, like 24 hours of every day.
The average power generation from coal fired power in Queensland is around 6200MW average across the day. At 4AM, it’s usually around 5800MW, and at that time coal fired power in Queensland is supplying between 93 and 96% of all the power being consumed in Queensland, and the remaining 800MW and more goes into Northern NSW.
So then in Queensland we have 8 coal fired power plants, four of them SuperCritical, the most modern coal fired plants in all Australia.
Two power plants, ancient Gladstone supplying the Aluminium smelter there, and modern Milmerran are held in private hands.
The remaining six plants are held by the Energy Corporations CS Energy and Stanwell, oh, and both those Corporations are State Government owned.
Around 70% of all the coal fired power being generated in Queensland is owned by the State Government.
So 70% of 6200MW every hour, for a year and selling that at wholesale at an average of around $48/MWH, and note I’ve gone on the low side here, means an average income for the State of Queensland from the sale of electricity of around $1.83 BILLION each year.
So here we have a State Government proposing to go 50% Renewable by 2030, A State with NO wind power, so starting that proposal from a base of zero to be achieved in what is now only 12 years, a State where coal fired power provides 96% of its power at 4AM, and around 80% of its power all day, the youngest and most modern coal fired power fleet in the Country, and making an absolute Motza selling its power.
No wonder the main finding from the Renewable Panel was that NO coal fired plants would be closed in that time period.
The hypocrisy, how it burns.
For this week’s data and analysis on that Base Load, here’s the link:
Australian Base Load Electrical Power – Week Ending 5th August 2017
Tony.
171
Could somebody here please help Tony out with the very secret location of the Queensland governments supply of politician exclusive magic mushrooms and the farms where they are produced.
The Premiers own personal and apparently well used magic mushroom farm is likely located under the Queensland’s government house”Fernberg” so as to facilitate immediate access by the Queensland Premier, “Palacechook” whenever a question about the Queensland Government’s energy policy is raised.
70
And I presume the more trouble southern states have from closing coal fired stations the more Qld will make?
30
As I mentioned, those Qld coal fired plants would only be supplying power into the Northern part of NSW. There are losses associated over distance with the transmission of power, so it’s not a case of Qld being able to supply Sydney, Victoria, Tassie, or SouthAus.
NSW has virtually all the coal fired plants running they can get. Even ancient old Liddell is almost constantly running all four Units.
Victoria without Hazelwood is getting all it can out of Loy Yang (A and B) and Yallourn W. They are generating an almost constant 4000MW across every day, with just the slightest dip at around that 4AM time, and that’s almost at maximum all of the time for all Units operational.
Watching that power sharing between the States is interesting, and Qld usually has both Interconnectors running at almost max throughout the day, both of them feeding power into NSW, and again, all of that is coal fired power.
This last week, there were four days when wind power was between 4 and 6% of that absolute requirement of 18000MW. There was one day when wind supplied 0.4% (not a misprint) and two days of around 14%.
On all seven of those days, coal fired power still supplied its regular amount, 80% plus of all that power, so even when wind power is high, it makes no difference at all. They just run less Natural gas units.
The two main takes outs from this exercise I’m doing are that coal fired power is cheap, and that there is really no choice other than to replace those old coal fired plants, and when you’re talking those huge amounts of power, the ONLY thing that can replace old coal fired power with is new coal fired power, and it better be done pretty d@mned soon, especially in Victoria, and to a (slightly) lesser extent, NSW, because the next one most likely to close there would be Liddell, now itself almost 50 years old, and take that away, and NSW definitely becomes as stressed as Victoria is now without Hazelwood.
SouthAus will be okay though, as they have that GIANT battery. (Yeah! Right! Of course they do.)
Qld will be okay to a point, as keep in mind again, the losses of power over distance, and with Qld so decentralised, they will be needing large amounts of power in the North of that State themselves.
People who think we can do without coal fired power are quite literally, dreamin’.
Tony.
231
There was a huge debate going on over at WUWT on wind turbines and their role in future power generation.
I’ll try to get around to it sometime [ got a few problems on my plate at present ] in trying to show that wind derived power generation is a complete dead end both technologically and economically.
In a nut shell wind power generation technology cannot get past an absolute maximum power generation of more than around 4watts per square metre of area with most at around one to two watts per square meter of power generation.
Mostly due to the Betz Law; from Wiki;
The limits of technological advances inherent in turbine technology can only be mitigated by battery storage to smooth the power flow.
A battery storage technology which does not yet exist on the scale that would be usefull for a industialised economy and which itself suffers even greater losses in efficiencies due to its very low utilisation.
Plus once again the very expensive, massive and rarely ever utilised maximum capacity of the grid links required to both charge and then to utilise the power in those battery banks.
With technological advances in wind turbine technologies becoming almost impossible to take any further, sight has been completely lost of the major advances taking place in the transportable modular nuclear technology reactors which the british have already let out preliminary tenders and for which with a widely distributed and located grouping of relatively low powered modular reactors instead of a massive centralised power generation capability, it will disaster proof large parts of the economy with only localised parts of the grid being blacked if a disaster of some sort strikes a nation or region and the modular reactors supplying that region and its grid are put out of action.
As wind turbines only rationale for their existence is the supposed reduction of CO2 emmissions then the real failure here is that Coal, gas, oil and other fossil fuels used in power production can be seen being consumed right at the power generation point.
Wind turbines and solar panels on the other hand have all their major equallying or worse, polluting processes way such as the metal refining and plastics and rare earth production systems way back up in the production chain where the public will rarely see them operating.
The technological advances in the construction of the generators and boilers burning of that devlish polluting mineral Coal is on the point of passing Wind turbines built from the raw mateials through to and including the construction in its cleanliness and lack of pollutants and very considerable advances in boiler burn fuel consumption efficiences in commercial power generators by 2022.
The Japanese have cracked a new system of burning coal reducing CO2 emmissions by up to 30% and lowering fuel ie; coal consumption by 15% from a roughly 40% burn efficiency on up to a 55% coal burn efficiency compared to a HELE power generator.
Which reduction of emissions effectively passes the combined sums of the entire production chain of wind turbines and the products they are constructed from as compared to the same production / construction criteria as applied to the new Japanese developed coal burning technology power generation technology.
An Australian federal minister has had a look over this Japanese technology a couple of months ago.
Japanese technology squeezes more power out of coal
And then there is fusion, the ultimate power source that will when cracked, see out mankind and all his energy needs for the entire span of humanity’s future sojourn on this planet.
The Chinese have reached tens of seconds of controlled fusion power a few months ago.
The Germans using a different fusion containment configuration have achieved near fusion temperatures.
The British are also quietly making progress.
An American private corporation [ Tri Alpha ; Bill Gates has shares as does a few other high flyers ] have quite unexpectedly and to their surprise have increased their fusion containment and temperatures with a new plasma configuration.
The Russians are doing what the Russians do.
In short, all the hype about turbines and perhaps solar are ignoring the probability that wind at least with little further advance in technology viewable on the horizion is going to get severely slam dunked by at least one of the rapidly advancing in power and efficiencies, Nuclear, Coal burning and further out but inevitably coming, Fusion power generation technologies of the next few years.
Not that you could convince the addled brained, smugly superior in their outright ignorance, morally and ethically and thoroughly corrupt green blob of this.
120
It’s funny really, and a bit like like reading the reviews for music albums. Not long after I began my large collection of vinyl LPs, I learned never to trust a review of any LP, because I found that in virtually every case, both me and the professional music journalist reviewer were listening to two entirely different albums, even though it was the same album from the same artist or band.
The same applies to what journalists write about coal fired power. They write so d@mned seriously that it is a failed technology with nowhere to go and will soon be off with the dinosaurs, and they even have their trendy new term for coal fired power ….. stranded asset!.
And then I read what ROM has written above about the Japanese and coal fired power, and I also see, almost on a daily basis, how many Billions of dollars, literally, are being sunk into coal fired power technology, the plants themselves, the generators, the turbines, the boiler/furnaces, and everything to do with coal fired power.
The main thing I wonder about is why these journalists just can’t see that.
They have their standby meme, follow the money, and see how it’s going into renewables.
Well I say the same thing. Follow the money, and see that more of it is being channeled towards coal fired technology than the toys that renewables have become by comparison.
Trust me on this. Coal fired power has a huge future.
Tony.
151
Thanks ROM, interesting outline. Liked the detail on advances with fusion.
20
You just did.
20
James Bradley above mention wind farm financials.
Here is the latest 2016 fiscal year report for the Hepburn Wind cooperative. I suggest someone saves it before it disappears.
It appears that about 63% of their “generation revenue” comes from “renewable energy certificate sales”. In fact, they have generated nothing, just pieces of paper that other people are forced to buy.
https://www.hepburnwind.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/FY16_Hepburn-Wind-Annual-Report-.pdf
112
My reading of this..
A loan of $2.5Million.
Plant and equipment valued at $9.4million
Operating revenue is $417K for electricity and $743K for Large Scale Certificates.
Consolidated profit for the year 306,215
So ask yourself, is this plant to generate cheap, affordable electricity or to make money from the RET scheme?
—————————
“The market price for renewable energy certificates stabilised during the financial year and the renewable energy certificate price has subsequently increased to an all time high to be back in line with the original forecasts prepared by the Group. Should the market remain stable over the coming year the Directors hope to offer a return of capital to members shortly after the end for the 2017 financial year.”
So firstly the company would be out of business without the RET. The business plan is to make money from the LGCs, which is reasonable. However for ever megawatt hour sold to the community they are paid for 3. All so we can have some wind generated electricity? How does this help anyone except the investors? How is any community, state, government, anyone better off except the investors. Consider too that as wind power is 2x the cost of generation of brown coal, we paid six times the going price for their electricity while Hazelwood closed, forcing up power prices.
Their nett return on the capital is about 4.3%. They hope soon to start to pull their capital out, leaving this wind farm pumping money from the public more than supplying electricity. Paid for by us. Owned by the co-operative.
To be fair, they are only taking advantage of the absurd RET scheme while we, the public, are forced by law to pay people simply for the fact of generating wind electricity, not for the electricity itself. That is extra.
No wonder we have the world’s highest electricity prices!
60
“Hepburn Wind Project formally launched their share offer on 25 July 2008, and as of June 2011 over 1700 members had subscribed a total of $9.0 million. The project has secured over $13.1 million in funding with the additional funds being bank debt and Government grants. Shares have been issued with priority to the local residents of Daylesford and Hepburn Springs.”
However while any community action is to be applauded, this whole endeavour means everyone in Victoria pays a premium for this and a community earns say a 4% return not with their electricity but by the mandatory sales of Large Scale Certificates. Carbon taxes. Given that there is no storage, these people will find their own electricity charges have quadrupled, cancelling out the benefit while everyone pays for their windmills.
Having forced the closure of much cheaper electricity sources including Hazelwood at 4c kw/hr, the good people of Hepburn Springs may find that they are far worse off.
Of course this is all about stopping Climate Change in China, Russia, India and the US. How does that work?
Hepburn Springs is a very cold place. I would have thought they could handle an extra 0.4C.
60
9,873Mhwhr for an income of $417K, so 4.22c kw hr. Not bad, assuming all the energy was actually sold which is debateable. As such it seems half the cost reported for most windmills which is closer to 9c kw/hr. That would indicate half the electricity was not sold, but who knows?
However they get paid anyway at least 8c kw/hr whether it is sold or not, so as their report says, they earned 11.4c kw/hr, triple that of Hazelwood.
What is in question is why we are paying anyone 8c kw/hr just to produce random electricity any time they like.
We had to pay them even if we bought our electricity from Hazelwood. So their electricity is far cheaper, forcing the biggest, most reliable producer out of the market. In fact they would make a profit even if no one bought their electricity. Government guaranteed. Paid for by every other consumer and doubled in the retail market.
However to listen to the pundits, windmills are cheaper. So why are windfarms paid cash for electricity produced and sold by others? How can anyone think the fault is with anything but the RET?
As the directors wrote, everything is going to plan with Large Scale Certificates finally going through the roof and our electricity prices with them while adequate and reliable electricity supply disappears.
20
Public serpents and politcians are frequently quite stupid and incompetent but it took an evil genius to dream up this civilisation destroying scheme.
30
David Maddison posted SMH’s CAGW means no more snow rubbish:
5 Aug: 9News: AAP: ‘Blizzard of Oz’ brings record snowfall and gusty to south-east Australia
The Snowy Mountains are certainly living up to their name this weekend, with ski fields across southeast Australia recording bumper falls amid blizzard conditions and gusty winds.
The clouds rolled in overnight dumping 25 centimetres of fresh snow on Thredbo, while an additional 15 centimetres has dropped throughout the day with temperatures hovering around minus 4 degrees.
Perisher, the largest ski resort in the southern hemisphere, has copped 40 centimetres since Thursday night, to the delight of avid skiers and snowboarders who were treated to a powder playground.
“This extra snow is going to ensure conditions are truly epic right through August,” a spokeswoman for Perisher Ski Resort said.
According to Weatherzone, two major fronts are forecast to bring an additional 40 to 70 centimetres of snow to all major resorts, even Mount Selwyn, between today and Monday, ensuring the biggest snowfalls of the season so thus far.
“Some resorts should gain about 50 centimetres worth on Sunday alone, most likely Buller, Hothan and Falls Creek,” Weatherzone meteorologist Brett Dutschke said.
“By early next week we should see natural snow depths of 120-160cm at all major resorts.”…
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2017/08/04/11/42/victoria-melbourne-weather-extreme-snow-blizzard-wind
30
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html
Now,I know this is the Daily Fail,but what else is Cobalt used for?
20
It’s a dirty forbidden word in the horse racing industry and I’m sure it’s an alloying element used in some steel making .
10
“what else is Cobalt used for”
An alloy for permanent magnets! You should see what a platinum-cobalt magnet can do! The platinum is the cheep metal. 🙂
30
It has a number of uses as a catalyst in various reactions.
10
John Mansell,
From a quick look thro’ some interweb pages I find —
Lithium cobalt oxide is used as an electrode in lithium batteries.
Rechargeable NiMH batteries also contain a little cobalt.
Paints, varnishes and inks can be made with cobalt if a certain color or shade (cobalt blue?) is needed.
Cobalt is usually added to alloys to create what are known as ‘superalloys’. These alloys have a stable temperature so are widely used in jet engines and gas turbines.
Various cobalt alloys are used in prosthetic hip and knee joint replacements. Also some false teeth are made using cobalt to avoid adverse nickel allergies.
Permanent magnets are also made from cobalt alloys.
Several compounds of cobalt are very important in industry as they act as catalysts, speeding up important chemical reactions. Liquid fuels and polymers are two things that are obtained through the use of cobalt catalysts.
Some porcelain enamels are made from cobalt salts.
And a few isotope of cobalt (Cobalt-60 and Cobalt-57) are used in medical procedures.
20
For aficionados of the BOM. Adelaide’s radar—and its enthusiastic exaggerations—appears to have died. The alternative at Sellicks Hill has its problems of coverage but is otherwise much more accurate.
11
It has returned!
10
Wasn’t the buckland park Doppler radar down for months for upgrading? What is the point of the BOM if they cannot keep a good radar network up and running?
30
btw last nite I heard a pensioner from Ulladulla, in her mid-80s, phone 2GB/4BC to say her last two electricity bills have shown increases of $200, bringing her bills to nearly $500, or approx. $2,000 per year.
and this is BEFORE the latest price increases have even worked through the system.
she said, when the first bill arrived, her son thought that maybe she had not paid her previous bill. not so.
she contacted the provider (I won’t name them) and claimed she was told she had to pay the extra $200 for electricity to pass by her house! this makes no sense to her because she has always had an electricity pole in front of her house.
she’s almost blind, can’t cook for herself, so gets meals on wheels. says she doesn’t have a heater or airconditioning. her voice was trembling. she can’t see any way out other than selling up and moving elsewhere. the talk show host said that won’t help, because it’s the same problem everywhere and getting worse.
she has no idea how she’ll find an extra $800 a year.
theirABC/Fairfax and all the FakeNewsMSM who have pushed FakeCAGW down the throats of Australians for years – and who probably consider Obama a PROPHET for saying the cost of electricity will necessarily skyrocket – are party responsible for this woman’s despair.
shame on them all.
240
Yes its a crime and anecdotal evidence around where I live is much the same as the pensioner from Ulladulla. Deep Green has a lot to answer for, but at least we have one honest politician.
‘Hughes MP Craig Kelly said high power prices meant many households were unable to adequately heat their homes.
“People will die,” he told AM.
110
More watermelon ideas from their ABC .
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-06/big-data-devices-get-more-free-energy-from-sun/8774584
10
Not wishing to preempt the findings of the Review, BoM should be shaved off from Environment and Energy and given to Ag.
30
From the Australian Fin Review Aug 4: California’s energy experiment shows how it can be done.
Spruiks the work of Danny Kennedy. He is a clean-technology entrepreneur, an environmental activist, and the author of the book Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy—and Our Planet—from Dirty Energy (2012). Kennedy serves as managing director of the California Clean Energy Fund, a non-profit dedicated to optimising the clean energy transition.
Record rollout of 100 MW of battery storage in 6 months.
A $200 million project funded by Macquarie Bank will use a 90 MW (360MWhr) battery to help Southern California ConEd deal with grid constrained pockets in west LA.
California has 26% renewables and aiming to have 50% by 2030. But article doesn’t describe where the extra renewables will come from. Gas currently supplies 37%, nuclear 9%, hydro 10%, and 14% is imported from other states.
30
4 Aug: ClimateChangeNews: Trump to submit notice of Paris withdrawal to UN – reports
By Karl Mathiesen
The Paris deal does not allow signatories to make any formal application to leave until three years after the deal was struck. Then it requires one year of notice…
Therefore any communication with the UN on Friday would carry no legal or formal weight…
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/08/04/trump-submit-notice-paris-withdrawal-un-reports/
read all the following. I get the impression the Church is invested in fossil fuels!
4 Aug: Bloomberg: The Church of England Takes on Climate Change—and Generates a 17 Percent Return
The low-key $10 billion fund that finances missions, cathedral costs and clergy pensions was instrumental in passing Exxon shareholder resolution.
By Laura Colby
Witness the investor victory over Exxon Mobil Corp. management on May 31, a day before the Trump decision.
Over the Exxon board’s objections, almost two-thirds of shareholders voted for a proposal asking the company to provide a detailed report on how curbing climate change could affect its business. Leading the charge was the giant New York State Common Retirement Fund, which manages $192 billion and is a veteran activist. Its partner was a far smaller and lower-profile newcomer taking one of its first public stands in the U.S.: the Church of England.
Through a £7.9 billion ($10 billion) fund that finances the church’s mission activities, cathedral costs, and clergy pensions, the church has been quietly—and successfully—engaging with European companies in the energy and mining industries for the past few years. BP, BHP Billiton, and Royal Dutch Shell have all voluntarily adopted similar climate change steps to those sought at Exxon…
“We see ourselves as active, rather than activist,” says Edward Mason, head of responsible investment at Church Commissioners for England, as the fund is formally known. The Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church, is the state church of England…
The Church of England rallied dozens of U.S. religious investors—from the Maryknoll Sisters to the Unitarian Universalist Association—to back the Exxon shareholder resolution, along with giant institutions such as Hermes Investment Management, AXA Investment Managers, and CalPERS. It won 62.1 percent of the vote. Exxon’s board will now reconsider its opposition to the measure…
The church has a long history of activism on climate…
The fund has reduced risk by divesting from coal and oil sands and now has more than 4 percent of its portfolio in low-carbon investments, Mason says…READ ALL
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-04/the-church-of-england-takes-on-climate-change-and-generates-a-17-percent-return
10
So the new Climate Change religion has superceded the previous focus of worship for the church?
KK
30
Hopefully that means the C. of E. just want to make some money from the present craziness.
10
Hi Peter, perhaps I’m a bit more cynical than you having seen the constant virtue signalling of the current incarnation of the church I spent 9 years in as a kid.
A great experience in the Congregational church which morphed into the Uniting church with its’ bigger cousins.
Current billboards encourage guilt in the best modern progressive tradition and have previously embraced the climate change issue.
I think that the name of the C of E fund says a lot.
Can’t escape climate change, it’s everywhere.
🙂
10
***Brown does not include link to first Lloyd article which included the following, which Brown ignores:
“While Goulburn station is not a listed ACORN-SAT station, it is used to homogenise Canberra and ***Canberra is an ACORN-SAT station,” Dr Marohasy said.
nor does he mention it was ***SIX:
BoM statement: “Initial analysis indicates this has occurred on one day in Goulburn and on ***SIX days at Thredbo.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-08/01/c_136490945.htm
4 Aug: TheConversation: Another attack on the Bureau, but top politicians have stopped listening to climate change denial
by Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor, Monash University
Disclosure: Michael J. I. Brown receives research funding from the Australian Research Council and Monash University, and has developed space-related titles for Monash University’s MWorld educational app.
Just this week The Australian has run a series of articles attacking the Bureau of Meteorology’s weather observations. Meanwhile, the federal and Queensland governments continue to promote Adani’s planned coal mine, despite considerable environmental and economic obstacles. And Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions are rising again…
But something has changed.
Those at the top of Australian politics are no longer debating the existence of climate change and its causes. Instead, four years after the Coalition was first elected, the big political issues are rising power prices and the electricity market. What’s happening?
A few years ago, rejection of climate science was part of the Australian political mainstream…
Which Australian politician most vocally rejects climate science now? It isn’t the prime minister or members of the Coalition, but One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts. In Australia, open rejection of human-induced climate change has moved to the political fringe…
Have those who rejected global warming and its causes changed their tune? In general, no. They still imagine that scientists are up to no good. The Australian’s latest attacks on the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) illustrate this, especially as they are markedly similar to accusations made in the same newspaper three years ago.
This week, the newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd wrote that the BoM was “caught tampering” with temperature logs, on the basis of measurements of cold temperatures on two July nights at Goulburn and Thredbo. For these nights, discrepant temperatures were in public BoM databases due to automated weather stations that stopped reporting data. The data points were flagged for BoM staff to verify, but in the meantime an amateur meteorologist contacted Lloyd and the Institute of Public Affairs’ Jennifer Marohasy…
Homogenisation is used to produce a continuous temperature record from measurements that may suffer from artificial discontinuities, such as in the case of weather stations that have been upgraded or moved from, say, a post office to an airport…
Lloyd’s articles from this week and 2014 are beat-ups, for similar reasons.
***The BoM’s ACORN-SAT long-term temperature record is compiled using daily measurements from 112 weather stations. Even Lloyd acknowledges that those 112 stations don’t include Goulburn and Thredbo…
http://theconversation.com/another-attack-on-the-bureau-but-top-politicians-have-stopped-listening-to-climate-change-denial-81993
EXPAND THE COMMENTS AND READ ALL FROM BOB FERNLEY-JONES, MICHAEL J. BROWN AND FRANK ROSSER EARLY IN THE COMMENTS, PLUS SOME OF THE REST, INCLUDING SUGGESTION JENNIFER MAROHASY BE INVITED TO RESPOND, WHICH IS SHOT DOWN BY BROWN AND OTHERS.
PLENTY OF COMMENTS HAVE BEEN REMOVED.
52
While I might dispute the term “Top Politicians”, the statement does reflect the lack of responses (to my emails) that I have had from:
Malcolm Turnbull
Greg Hunt
Josh Freydenberg
Daniel Andrews
Lily D’Ambrosio
30
What’s happened is a big ENSO, which has given alarmism a second wind and tempted the MSM and the allied clerisy to go farther out on the limb they had been beginning to back off of. The tide may change again.
10
by ENSO I meant El Niño, of course.
00
It is not so good to be top of the world.
Graph here.
I notice in Singapore, a country with very few natural resources, except intelligent people and politicians, their retail household electricity is very low. Currently for households, the electricity tariff is about 21.39 cents per kWh (about Australian 20 cents).
30
Ref: Singapore Electricity tariffs to increase from April 1
20
I thought we had uncontrollable sea ice melting in the Arctic. Nothing seems to have happened in the last 10 years.
Another hiatus! Of course The Guardian doesn’t believe this.
71
The Guardian is still in denial over the cause of the hiatus.
This is their tipping point.
https://sunshinehours.net/category/arctic-sea-ice/#jp-carousel-12228
00
the concept is not new, writes Kristine, because “some of the same researchers” said pretty much the same thing two years ago!
12 Jul: WaPo: Earth is on its way to the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs, scientists warn
By Kristine Phillips
“This is the first mass extinction which the cause knows what it’s doing and is harming itself,” another co-author, Stanford University biology professor Paul Ehrlich, said. “When the asteroid hit 66 million years ago, the asteroid wasn’t making a choice. Now the driver is human overpopulation and overconsumption by the rich, and that’s generally accepted.”
For instance, wildlife habitats have been plowed, paved and replaced with buildings, strip malls and agricultural lands, Ehrlich said…
Ehrlich said the point of the research is exactly that — to cause alarm.
“I am an alarmist. My colleagues are alarmists. We’re alarmed, and we’re frightened. And there’s no other way to put it,” he said. “It’s largely a political and economic problem. We have a government that’s doing everything they can to push these things in the wrong direction. We have economists who think they can actually grow forever in a finite planet.”…
Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, agreed with the researchers’ conclusion that the window for humans to take action is quickly getting narrow.
“The study is right in raising alarm bells … especially with our ***CHANGE IN CLIMATE,” Greenwald said. “We really need to protect as much habitat as we can now. Our population continues to expand, our consumption continues to expand. We’re going in the wrong direction, quickly.”…
The concept of a sixth mass extinction is ***not new, and the study is not the first to make the case that Earth is already in the middle of it.
Two years ago, ***some of the same researchers argued that species are disappearing at a rate unparalleled since the Cretaceous mass extinction of dinosaurs…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/12/earth-is-on-its-way-to-the-biggest-mass-extinction-since-the-dinosaurs-scientists-warn/
40
pat:
given Paul Ehrlich’s record of successful predictions in the last 50 years we can stop worrying about mass extinction and worry about loss of life among the elderly and poor caused by the deliberate policies of the Greens.
60
Wait until the USA gets 2 or maybe 3 hurricanes this year (or maybe next year, well soon), these same Greens will be out screeching it’s all Trumps fault.
20
America added more than a million jobs since President Trump took office.
The U.S. economy added a strong 209,000 jobs in July, more than economists had expected. The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, matching a 16-year low. Just after the Great Recession in 2009, unemployment peaked at 10%.
91
Trump has done a number of very good things to make America great again, but it is only the hiccups which receive any media coverage.
Just have a gander at BoP and DJIA if you are in any doubt as to Trump’s successes.
Unfortunately, the swamp is far more extensive and infiltrated with vermin than anyone could have imagined.
72
President Trump addresses his nation …
http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2017/08/president-trump-has-a-message-for-julia-gillard-virginia-trioli-andrew-okeefe-and-you.html#comments
21
July 2017: Göbekli Tepe: Neolithic Gathering and Feasting at the Beginning of Food Production
“Rising 15 metres and with an area of about 9 hectares, the completely man-made mound covers the earliest known monumental cult architecture in the ancient Near East. Constructed by hunter-gatherers right after the end of the last Ice Age, they also intentionally buried it about 10,000 years ago.”
http://asorblog.org/2017/07/18/gobekli-tepe-neolithic-gathering-feasting-beginning-food-production/?utm_content=buffer83713&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
40
Oops. Also this update:
02 Aug, 2017: Is this stunning bracelet made by Paleolithic man for his favourite woman really 70,000 years old?
http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/could-this-stunning-bracelet-be-65000-to-70000-years-old/
Feb, 2016: 40,000-year-old bracelet made by extinct human species found
Amazingly, the skill involved in making this adornment shows a level of technique at least 30,000 years ahead of its time.
http://archaeologyhub.info/40000-year-old-bracelet-made-by-extinct-human-species-found-3/
40
this would be the same Arsenal, who recently flew all the way to Australia and China to play a few “friendlies” … for $$$, of course.
check wikipedia for their good/green billionaire owners – Stan Kroenke (67.05%) and Alisher Usmanov (30.04%).
Jess paints such a heart-warming story:
4 Aug: Bloomberg: Jess Shankleman: Arsenal Soccer Club Tackles Climate Change With Clean Energy
Arsenal Football Club said it would power its stadium with renewable energy produced from wasted food and solar panels in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
The North London club signed a contract with Octopus Energy Ltd. to source energy from anaerobic digestion plants and solar farms. It is offsetting carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
The contract signed on Thursday for an undisclosed value followed a year long trial by Arsenal, a spokeswoman for the utility said by phone. Wasted food from the club will be sent to the AD plants that break down organic waste to create biogas and electricity…
Octopus was started in April 2016, backed by renewable energy investors at Octopus Capital Ltd…
Arsenal isn’t the only soccer club to use green energy. Forest Green Rovers is a vegan team based in Gloucestershire, owned by the clean-energy supplier Ecotricity Group Ltd. Chairman Dale Vince, who wants his club to be the greenest in the world, is building a new stadium made almost entirely of wood, and already uses a solar-powered robot lawnmower.
Other companies like Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google parent company ***Alphabet Inc. all plan to run only on green energy over the next few years, marking a growing drive by corporates to buy renewable energy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-03/arsenal-soccer-club-tackles-climate-change-with-clean-energy
***31 Jul: Bloomberg: Alphabet Wants to Fix Renewable Energy’s Storage Problem — With Salt
The latest idea from the X ‘moonshot factory’ is code named Malta
By Mark Bergen with assistance by Alistair Barr
Alphabet Inc.’s secretive X skunk works has another idea that could save the world. This one, code named Malta, involves vats of salt and antifreeze…
“If the moonshot factory gives up on a big, important problem like climate change, then maybe it will never get solved,” said Obi Felten, a director at X. “If we do start solving it, there are trillions and trillions of dollars in market opportunity.”…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-wants-to-fix-renewable-energy-s-storage-problem-with-salt
2 pages: 4 Aug: InvestorPlace: Will Alphabet Inc (GOOGL) Stock Sustain Moonshot Wounds?
GOOGL seems to live and die on the whims of Larry Page, which ultimately must stop
By Will Ashworth
Perhaps you’ve read about it. Code named Malta, the people at X are looking to develop a system for storing renewable energy that could put the lithium ion battery and other existing methods of storage out to pasture.
“If the moonshot factory gives up on a big, important problem like climate change, then maybe it will never get solved,” said Obi Felten, a director at X. “If we do start solving it, there are trillions and trillions of dollars in market opportunity.”…
While this all sounds wonderfully exciting, not to mention innovative, investors shouldn’t simply accept that this project is a necessary cost of growth…
CFO Ruth Porat was specifically brought in to ensure Alphabet wasn’t wasting a ton of money on expensive hobbies. In the process, she’s become known in the tech world as “Ruthless Ruth,” a less-than-flattering moniker.
In the latest quarter, Alphabet’s “other bets,” which includes X, had an operating loss of $772 million, 9.7% lower than a year earlier, on $248 million in revenue. In fiscal 2017, those wagers will likely lose more than $3 billion, about the same amount as it lost in each of the two previous years.
Rather than invent stuff that’s out there, Google should innovate for the masses, because that’s where the real money lies…
http://investorplace.com/2017/08/should-you-be-worried-about-moon-shots-effect-on-alphabet-inc-googl-stock/#.WYR1uJKQzcc
10
Hi Jo and friends,
Just in case you missed it. It was announced yesterday on our ABC that the new head of the USEPA, Scott Pruitt, will be visiting Australia soon.
In the report the ABC labeled him a critic of climate change science (whatever that means) and gleefully added that activist groups were organizing to disrupt the visit. Note: not organizing to put scientifically valid and reasoned arguments to support their views but organizing to disrupt i.e. shout down anyone who might disagree with them.
We’ll see what happens but I guess that maybe a few hundred activists will turn up to evens and the media will use extreme close-ups of the foaming at the mouth mob to imply that 1000’s were there.
I would suggest that sceptics could turn out to support Pruitt however as sceptics of carbon dioxide induced climate change tend to have full time jobs to go to I suppose that wouldn’t work.
100
I shall be one of the deplorables, perhaps waving an Oz flag
ter show allegiance with anti-Supra-state-Brexit, who turn up
to the parade and mebbe ‘don’ 🙂 the message tee-shirt that
says … ‘Rage, Rage Against the Lying and the Fright.’
A serf.
60
The usual rent a crowd with tie dyed t shirts and dread locks who are mostly on the dole and do this sort of thing full time , the same ones who throw urine at the cops who get in their way and then squeal like little girls when they get nabbed .
Pity they don’t go over to Syria and protest about the war .
82
Dieter Helm not “extreme green” enough?
13 Jul: Guardian: Renewable power critic is chosen to head energy price review
Government’s preferred choice of Oxford economist Dieter Helm is controversial owing to criticism of wind and solar power
by Adam Vaughan and Nick Hopkins
While acknowledging that renewables are remaking the energy landscape, the professor of energy has criticised the cost of today’s windfarms and solar technology, calling them “expensive” and highlighting the “sheer cost” of electricity generated from renewable sources…
Instead, Helm believes funding should be directed at next generation renewable technologies, such as more efficient solar panels. He also backs emerging technologies such as smart grids and battery storage.
Hannah Martin, head of energy at Greenpeace UK, said: “Dieter has a well-known preference for gas and has historically failed to grasp the full potential of renewables…
behind paywall:
6 Aug: UK Times: Caroline Wheeler: Solar critic to review energy bills
The choice of Helm will be controversial to some because of his criticism of wind and solar power.
On his website he has said wind farms and solar technology were “expensive” and highlighted the “sheer cost” of electricity…
The Guardian & Times’s concern was unwarranted!
6 Aug: UK Telegraph: Christopher Hope: New Government review into soaring energy bills, but green taxes will stay
Green taxes which are blamed for adding up to £150 to every power bill will not be cut as the result of a government review of rising energy bills announced today.
Dieter Helm, an Oxford academic and critic of wind and solar power, has been hired to lead the official review of energy bills – but has been told he cannot suggest any “detailed” changes to green taxes…
The terms of reference of the review “will consider the key factors affecting energy bills, including but not limited to energy and carbon pricing, energy efficiency, distributed generation, regulation of the networks, innovation and R&D”.
But it added: “The review will not propose tax changes.”…
The review also said that the Government’s “carbon targets need to be met, while concurrently ensuring security of supplies of energy, in the most cost effective way”…
Will Hodson, co-founder of consumer collective The Big Deal which focuses on bringing down energy bills, added: “Energy prices are an urgent problem for British households right now.
“With this review, the Government is simply kicking the can down the road.”…
***Prof Helm has previously been highly sceptical that green energy can do enough to cut emissions.
He wrote in the Spectator magazine: “Current renewables like wind turbines, rooftop solar and biomass stand no serious chance of making much difference to decarbonisation. It’s simply a matter of scale.”…
Greg Clark, the Energy secretary, said: “We want to ensure we continue to find the opportunities to keep energy costs as low as possible, while meeting our climate change targets, as part of the Industrial Strategy.”…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/05/new-government-review-soaring-energy-bills-green-taxes-will/
totally pathetic…and it sounds familiar!
10
Australia could sell him Dr Finkel’s useless report.
40
Just received my Council rates $1800 in southern suburb Perth WA
Lots of charges for little supplied
Now Water Rates
note : the two month billing cycle
How do they get away with this in Australia , Roy from Cal would be horrified with these numbers , $27 dollars for water and $190 to supply it every two months .
The supply charge used to be annually around $400 and the water cost $40 round abouts
From Water Corp
Notice the two month date
Water Use and Service Charge Account
30 DRYANDRA WAY THORNLIE LOT 160
Meter reading details
Meter number
This reading
BK0347231
3 Aug 2017
Last reading
3125
31 May 2017
3108
Use (kL)
17
Total water used in 64 days was 17 kilolitres (17000 litres)
How your water use charges have been calculated
Water use
17 kL at $1.5860
$26.96
Water use charges
YOUR NEXT USAGE PRICED AT
next 107 kL
$1.6810/kL
next 350 kL
$2.2410/kL
over 457 kL
$3.1730/kL
$26.96
Your average daily use was 266 Litres at $0.42 per day.
How your service charges have been calculated
Water residential
Sewerage residential
1 Jul 2017 to 31 Aug 2017
Service charge for 1 residence
1 Jul 2017 to 31 Aug 2017
Based on the rateable value of $20540
$42.53
$146.39
Service charges
Total charges
$188.92
$215.88
Your new rateable value of $20540 applies from 1 July 2017.
The rateable value of your property is the gross rental value (GRV) determined by the Valuer-General. You can object
to the GRV within 60 days, visit landgate.wa.gov.au for details. Your charges must still be paid by the due date.
Now I understand Our Government , its better that we do our ablutions in the street like the third world Country they are designing for us , all fecal matter will now be forwarded to Mr Trumble and his dance partner Bill Shorten .
Have to love the way they play off policy`s with 2,7,9,10 media like a little marriage spat all the while achieving their agenda with nothing to do with Australia`s Governance
prosperity or Sovereignty .
Beautiful Country Australia
now to expensive to live in and visit
40
Maybe that should be
“now to expensive toooo live in and visit
in keeping with the cost increases?
20
read all. disrupt industry, business in the name of CAGW, fine. but protesting against wind turbines/”renewable” energy not so much:
6 Aug: RTE Ireland: Councils warned over blocking wind farm development
The Government has warned local authorities against bringing in unapproved guidelines to obstruct the development of wind farms.
In a letter sent to the heads of all the country’s city and county councils last week, Minister for Environment, Planning and Local Government Eoghan Murphy has threatened to use his powers to revoke any local plan which he believes improperly blocks wind development.
It follows the move by a number of councils, including Donegal, Laois, Westmeath, Wicklow and others to bring in new guidelines that would diminish the amount of available land to build wind farms.
In the correspondence, seen by RTÉ’s This Week, Minister Murphy reminds the councils that they have an obligation to make sure any decisions they take on county development plans has to be in line with national energy policy.
The Government has said it will place a significant reliance on on-shore wind as a means of meeting Ireland’s international obligations on sustainable energy and climate change, with the latter signaled as a priority by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar after taking office…
The letter also tells the councils that where local authorities breach their statutory requirements in a manner that fails to reflect national policy, the minister will consider using his powers under Section 31 of the Planning and Development Act, in which he direct a Local Authority to amend any provision in their development plan which he feels is incompatible with national policy and statutory guidelines.
https://www.rte.ie/news/enviroment/2017/0806/895587-wind-farms/
20
I gather this gushing piece was on Ch9 tonite:
6 Aug: 9News: Inside the town with a world-first floating wind farm
by Michael Best, UK correspondent
Past its protected harbour, the North Sea becomes wild and windy – ideal conditions to harness wind power.
But until now the sea has been too deep to install the turbines.
Enter floating turbine technology. The turbines are 253 metres tall. That’s two and a half football fields…
They can sit in depths of more than 100 metres(? SEE LINKS BELOW STATING 1,000 METRES), rather than the maximum of around 40 metres for the established offshore wind farms.
It’s incredible technology, especially when you consider it has been developed by an oil company! (NOT NAMED, BUT IT’S STATOIL PLUS SIEMENS GAMESA)…
A whole field of the turbines are being towed over from Norway right now…
???It’s a little more expensive than the land-based turbines that are now Scotland’s cheapest power source, but costs are coming down fast…
More floating farms are planned off Scotland, England and France, and the technology is described as perfect for the steeper undersea descents off California and Japan.
A representative of Scottish Renewables told me Australia would also be perfect. Although, who knows with the current political “debate” over climate change policy…
One thing is for sure: they’re huge examples of impressive engineering.
And perhaps a glimpse into the future, in a town that’s traditional fresh battered haddock, with some mushy peas and chips, is also worth celebrating.
http://www.9news.com.au/technology/2017/08/06/20/57/inside-the-world-first-wind-farm-in-scotland
it’s just a demo:
3 Aug: OilPrice: The Race For Floating Wind Farms Has Begun
By Precise Consultants
The £190m Hywind project will ultimately see five 6 MW floating turbines in depths of up to 120m in an area close to 4km close to Peterhead. Each tower is taller than Big Ben, at 175m and the blades themselves are almost the wingspan of an Airbus at 75m long. At the bottom of each turbine is a 78m deep tube which is filled with iron ore. Average wind speeds here reach 10m per second and it’s expected it’ll provide enough power for around 20,000 homes…
Hywind is building on a ***demo project that was run off the island of Karmøy. The turbines are being dragged from this site by remote-controlled submarines…
According to Quartz (LINK), the critical advance is new software and responsive blades: “Statoil developed some nifty software that twists the blades of the floating turbine in response to the motions of the wind, waves, and ocean currents. These dynamic blades, along with ballast at the base of the structure, keep the 175-meter tall, 10,000-metric ton turbines (574 feet, 11,00 short tons) upright. The floating structures can operate in water as deep as 1,000 meters.” …
Off California’s Central Coast on Morro Bay, a now disused gas plant could hold the key to the next stage of the US energy revolution. A start-up base in Seattle is proposing what would be the world’s largest floating wind farm. The ambitious plans would see 60-100 turbines able to produce a gigawatt of electricity. Getting the electricity back to land could have been problematic except a tunnel created decades ago by the power plant to carry wastewater already exists…
Statoil’s collaborators in the Hywind project is Siemens Gamesa…
http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/The-Race-For-Floating-Wind-Farms-Has-Begun.html
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***note all the changes to this story are in the final paras…ESPECIALLY THE UPDATE ON PRICE WHICH WAS ONLY ADDED LATER:
27 Jul: CarbonBrief: Jocelyn Timperley: Q&A: How viable are floating offshore windfarms?
Statoil, which is developing the pilot Hywind windfarm, says the project aims to demonstrate the feasibility of future commercial, utility-scale floating windfarms…
But with the technology still in its infancy and the costs relatively high, the question remains when, or if, they will be able to compete against fixed offshore wind turbines or other sources of energy…
Rhodri James, a manager in Carbon Trust’s policy and innovation team, says these designs have been adapted from oil and gas technologies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The key difference is that, whereas oil and gas consists of a small number of very large platforms, floating offshore wind requires a larger number of smaller platforms.”
(It’s worth noting the relative use of the word “small” here. The structures used for floating turbines still reach up to around 3,000 tonnes for steel designs and roughly 12,000 tonnes for concrete designs.)…
The promise of floating offshore wind turbines lies in their ability to be tethered in deep waters of 50-1,000 metres…
The five turbines of the Scottish Hywind project, for instance, have been assembled in Norway and are in the process of being towed to the Scottish coast off Peterhead. This mobility could also be an advantage for heavy maintenance operations, where the turbines could be towed back to port…
Finally, their location further out to sea could offer a remedy for some public opposition to windfarms. Visually they would be even less prominent, while, according to RSPB, they could also be less harmful to birds than farms placed closer to the coast and, thus, seabird nesting sites…
Aside from the cost due to being a nascent technology (see below), there are several technical challenges floating windfarms are faced with.
The floating nature of the turbines themselves could pose some problems. Bobbing of the turbine about on the water could reduce its capture of wind energy and risk damaging windmill components. However, this is not believed to be a major challenge since tools have been designed to mitigated it by making alterations to the turbine control system…
However, several bespoke elements will need to be developed before they are used at large scale. These include dynamic electrical cables, mooring and anchoring systems, and floating substations…
As a young technology not yet commercially deployed, the costs of floating wind currently remain high. Early projects will need to be subsidised, meaning the rate of progression will depend to a large extent on political support. (It’s worth noting that the Hywind pilot is currently heavily subsidised by the Scottish government.)…
A 2015 Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) report found that large-scale floating windfarms could deliver a levelised cost of electricity of around £85 per megawatt hour (MWh) by the mid 2020s…
Meanwhile, in the UK’s 2015 Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction, offshore wind’s status as a “less established” technology meant it was granted the higher-than-average strike price of £117/MWh in 2012 prices, also index linked…
Any attempts to estimate the costs of future commercial projects will inevitably contain a great deal of uncertainty, since the technology is still in its infancy with few demonstrations actually in the water…
The 253m-tall turbines are of the spar-buoy design (see above), with 175m above the water and 78m below…
***Hywind is subsidised under the UK’s Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) scheme, through which it will receive ***£160/MWh on top of the wholesale price of electricity (currently around £40/MWh)…
It’s worth noting that despite their generally favourable outlook on floating windfarms, the RSPB ***was opposed to the Hywind project as it is concerned that too many offshore turbines in the area have already been approved…
***This story was updated on 28/7/2017 to include the cost of the subsidy Hywind will receive under the ROC.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-viable-are-floating-offshore-windfarms
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My quick analysis of Hepburn Springs Windfarm was to demonstrate how the awful act works.
Imagine you opened a coffee shop. The council then said you had to pay a competing coffee shop $8 for every $4 cup of coffee you sold. The other coffee shop did have to make coffees, whenever they like and in any quantity they liked, but they did not have to sell them. They received your $8 anyway. Then if they sold them, it was of course under your $12 price and they received an additional $4. How long would you stay in business? Does a council even have this right to force you to pay someone else? I thought that was only the Mafia?
Worse, the customers are buying takeaway on behalf of someone else and they double the price, so the coffee from your store is now $24 and from your opposition $8. Who goes out of business? The low cost hard working shop or the people who open when they like?
I cannot believe the RET is even legal. It could be challenged in the High Court on the basis that it is mandated enrichment and against a basic principle of law. Governments have the ability to raise taxes for the ordinary business of government, the ability to charge for services. They do not have the right to demand you give your money to someone else for nothing! This is a very wrong law.
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TdeF
Quick resolution of doubts about legality should be available from lawyers. You make a good case for illegality, but it is still bush lawyer material in the eyes of professional lawyers. A problem I have met many times.
There is also suspected illegality around smart meters esp in Vic where I am most familiar.
My overarching difficulty is this: I have seen so many ideas I detest become policy in the last decade. Community support grows, unbelievable at times. You reach a point where there are so many people in favour – or at least not opposed – that you wonder if democracy is being shown in its legitimate form, no matter how much you personally detest it. Geoff
10
Eureka!!!! Monckton cracks it in the bath. I’m looking forward to seeing this paper which shows the Climate feedbacks to be essentially nett zero.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvuCeULm2CU
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He could publish it in the same journal as his cure for malaria or AIDS or cancer
03
Lord M is basically a mathematician and consequently is attacking the maths of the claimed climate crisis.
What he is doing is very welcome but the real issue is the basic physics and chemistry claimed to support Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming is not only wrong but deliberately so.
Lord M’s work is just confirming the scam of CAGW from a different angle.
The interesting part of the video was about Mr Comey and the death of a U.S. citizen.
You won’t see that on CNN and N.
🙂
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A mathematician who knows some electrical engineers. The Climate Op-Amp. Has he got something there?
10
but you might see cnnnn making light of his medical breakthroughs. You wont see that on wuwt
01
You should check out the red pill expo that LM spoke at.
So many other admirable folk taking the risk to put the truth out there like this guy
https://redpillexpo.org/speakers/richard-gage-aia/
and him
https://redpillexpo.org/speakers/g-edward-griffin/
00
so how many of you have woken up yet , can you not see that when the Flavons created a new religion , it was supposed to be a put down of Jewish faith , when Constantine held his Councils at Nicea who was invited to help create the new testament , why where the pagen sun worshipping faiths invited to decide what went into the new testament
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Article with useful graph about Australia’s expensive electricity. Price comparison with other countries.
https://amp.afr.com/news/australian-households-pay-highest-power-prices-in-world-20170804-gxp58a
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Why are the councils at Paris any dfferent from the councils at NICEA ,
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The Councils in Nicea resulted in long lasting changes.
And by the way, Constantine only converted to Christianity on his deathbed (authorised version). Before that his symbol was the sun, so presumably he worshipped that.
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Graeme No.3,
As the ever unreliable wikipedia says about Sol Invictus and Constantine —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus#Constantine
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Jo
FYI
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/08/ghcn-software-version-2-0/
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Paris under yet another microscope
Link at
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/08/blowout-188.html#comments
And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/08/maths-is-hard.html#comments
and comments
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So why cant you see that when Constantine held his councils at Nicea he put the clothes of pagwn mythology around the character Jesus , just look into the sky on the winter solstice , observation trumps consencus every day
00
‘Merkel’s mind seems made up. But however hard she tries to position herself as the virtuous green, the fact remains that German emissions rose last year, while America’s fell three percent (thanks to cheap, abundant shale gas displacing coal). Words matter, but so do numbers, and the data tells us that lately—whatever Trump is trumpeting—the United States is doing more to combat climate change than Germany.’
Charles the mod at WUWT
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Of course, Germany still makes stuff, due partly to its sound “mittelstand” industrial tradition, and partly to its captive EU market. It reduced its emissions by having a GFC and any recovery means burning more brown coal or increasing its dependence on Russian gas via Nord Stream 2. (Er, something has gone wrong with the idea of piping Qatari gas to a Turkish hub via a dismantled Syria. There may be a slight delay due to new wars if Turkmenistan defies other Caspian states to get its gas flowing west via the sea and Azerbaijan.)
Capacity of Nord Stream will soon be doubled to 110 billion cubic metres but Europe is only taking 22.5 because Russia is just too naughty. So the EU depends on German industry which has to depend on its own coal or Russian gas. Which is why it prefers to change the subject to green fairy-dust.
And in this global context little Australia leaves its uranium and coal in the ground when it isn’t urgently selling them off to be consumed elsewhere. For an explanation turn on “your” ABC, undisputed media giant of the Australian nation. (Hey, I said an explanation, not a good one.)
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There is another big player in the market as the Americans are now exporting LNG to a new hub being set up in Poland.
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Yep, US oil and gas, linked to the idea of Poland as a US-favoured leader nation (slyly promoted by the likes of Stratfor). Soon there will be new players and new factors again, making mess in the mess.
And Australia’s answer to this geopolitical tangle is to buy into every problem by sacrificing its main domestic advantages on the altars of Big Green and Creepy Globalism.
While the Asian powerhouses import and burn Australian coal at a furious rate, we are told, even by some GetUp types who pop up on this site, that burning Australian coal in Australia is just not “economical”. Which is true, in the sense that getting a headache while hitting one’s own head with a hammer proves that you need to buy a ute-load of aspirin, not that you need to stop hitting your own head with a hammer.
40
I have been puzzling over what sets wholesale electricity prices in South Australia, and why they are generally the highest in Australia. (for the financial year 2016/17, average SA price $108.66/MWhr, Vic $66.58, NSW $93.12, Qld $81.22. For 2Q 2017 after Hazelwood closure, SA $112, Vic $102, NSW $92, Qld $84 – source AEMO).
Over the weekend there has been remarkably consistent wind generation in SA around 1200 MW per Anero.id website (so consistent that I wonder whether it has been constrained).
Daily average prices in SA per AEMO for Sat/Sun Aug 5/6 were $78.95/$80.49/MWhr, well down on the July/Aug average of $113/MWhr.
But if you look at AEMO’s spot prices versus demand for Sunday you get the following:
10.30 am Sun $85/MWhr, demand 1333 MW (so wind providing 90% of demand)
12.30 pm Sun $80, demand 1242 MW
3.00 pm Sun $75, demand 1590 MW
6.00 pm Sun $113, demand 1967 MW (peak demand, presumably supplied by gas, and some Vic imports?)
8.00 pm Sun $125, demand 1808 MW (so lower demand, but higher spot price?)
11.30 pm Sun $88, demand 1477 MW
3.30 am Mon $40, demand 1009 MW (minimum demand, so shipping wind interstate to Vic?)
7.30 am Mon $138, demand 1588 MW
The forecasts for Monday show prices around $90 through the day, but for the evening peak at 6.30 pm spot prices soar to $354 to meet peak demand of 2150 MW.
Conclusion: When the wind blows SA can enjoy relatively low cost off peak power, but meeting the peak demand means turning on standby gas that comes at a premium. Wind is certainly not free (and these prices exclude the extra $80/MWhr that the wind generators receive from retailers through the sale of clean energy certificates that are included in retail prices, making SA retail electricity prices the highest in the nation, and perhaps in the world?)
20
[ I have been puzzling over what sets wholesale electricity prices in South Australia, and why they are generally the highest in Australia. (for the financial year 2016/17, average SA price $108.66/MWhr, Vic $66.58, NSW $93.12, Qld $81.22. — JN]
The spot price is based on the lowest cost of those bidding into the NEM to supply the LAST MWh for each 5 minute dispatch interval – highest price in the stack actually used. The spot price is the 30 minute average price of 6 dispatch intervals. There are also network services such as spinning reserve required that must be met for each dispatch interval.
Inevitably gas generation makes up the last MWh in the SA market so that sets the price. There are times when intermittent output has to be reduced for stability reasons. The system voltage and frequency depend on generation exactly meeting demand plus system losses. So it is not possible for generation to exceed demand although there is the possibility in SA that there is actually more wind output available than can be used. At times quite a lot of wind generation is sent to Victoria.
The only benefit of intermittents is the slight reduction in fuel usage in the gas plants. The gas plants are still required and they must be ready to fire up at short notice so those that need staff are staffed.
Intermittents displace coal because coal is not economic when it is constantly ramped up and down in tune to the wind blowing or not. That means more gas plant is required as the coal is shut down. Intermittents do not replace fossil fuel plant they just reduce the fuel requirement slightly.
As the intermittents increase, gas will gradually displace coal. That means gas is gradually monopolising the NEM and can charge what they like – already the situation in SA. Gas plants make more as each coal plant closes and the intermittents make more through the increasing wholesale price plus the income from their LGCs. So gas is a winner; intermittents make a bundle. Consumers pay heaps to save the planet.
20
That is why BP and Shell back the CRU at East Anglia University war on coal and CO2.
20
This morning in the Australia, a vague rambling article about how electricity companies need to get their act together and state governments need to allow exploration again (as if that will fix any short term problem!). Also about how Turnbull can sell his ‘new’ CET.
Now the RET was the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act. There was no ‘Target’ in 2000, no Tax, no mention of Carbon anywhere, just ‘fossil fuels’. The word ‘Target’ is used to avoid the nasty word Tax. So is the direct payment. Now we are talking about a CET, a Carbon Emissions Target but I think it is diversion again when we all know he means a Carbon Dioxide Emissions Tax.
Also the article says 50% of the cost is in the distribution. Amazing. What do those people do again, or is that the 100% markup by middle men, largely on the RET itself as I explained.
As if we are not suffering enough, the Liberals want to tax Carbon Dioxide again. Again the nasty word Tax is missing. We could end up with our possibly illegal RET and Malcolm’s CET. Thanks Malcolm.
Oh, and they say that the LGCs have dropped from $90 to $85. What a relief! So much better than the $20 a few years ago. It’s hard to be grateful enough that Malcolm is putting ‘pressure’ on people. What a champion!
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Then you get the investors in the Hepburn Spring wind farm with its two towers. All about Climate Change. However the company is all about making profits and the LGCs and electricity generally is exactly where the directors predicted it would be. Only the Government is suprised. None of the investors.
Also they helped force the closure of Hazelwood as uneconomic. Celeberations.
Except
1. exactly as much CO2 is being generated as the other power stations are running harder and the need has not changed
2. the system is more unstable
3. blackouts are more likely, everywhere
and worst
4. they also have to pay much higher electricity bills.
The trick is to live overseas, push our electricity bills up with a huge carbon tax and not suffer the consequences. So as front page in the Australian this year, $3,000,000,000 of the RET money goes overseas. In fact the locals $12Million largely went overseas to pay for the windmills.
Who is actually better off for their concern about ‘Climate Change’? You can make a list and you will not find the investors in Hepburn Springs or anyone else in Australia. CO2 levels are exactly the same for all the suffering.
50
Because it will never snow again.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-06/vic-weather-strong-winds-alpine-blizzards-forecast/8778700?pfmredir=sm
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Also in the Australian, Turnbull loses another Newspoll. According to his mouthpierce Nikki Savva (He employed her husband), Turnbull regrets ever arguing that losing newspolls was a reason to be removed as PM. Is that contrition? Of course not.
Anyway, he is losing the election so obviously but takes solace in the fact that many Australians think he is better than Bill Shorten! Same policies though, carbon tax(emissions ‘target’), gay marriage (marriage ‘equality’), renewables and now even a push for a Republic, Turnbull’s other reason for being in politics. So while he has cost the Liberals everything, even their self respect and their finances, Turnbull is the preferred PM. That’s partly because he has only knifed one sitting PM, where Shorten has knifed two.
60
As Peta Credlin argues, with the modern crop of politicans, it is all about them. They could not care less what you, the public want. Most Australians can count the politicans who care on the fingers of one hand and they include Hastie, Abbott, Bernadi, Hanson. Most of the rest are pushing their own agendas and worried almost exclusively about their jobs and perks. Personally I cannot believe Lambie is in parliament. As for Hinch, when he is not sleeping, he proves it is easier to criticize than to lead but was elected because he appeared to have real political conviction, something he shares with Hanson.
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A couple of weeks ago ren correctly predicted a cold air outbreak from Antartica, momentarily collapsing the intense subtropical ridge.
Craig acknowledges that a strong STR (in the wrong place for this time of year) is recognised as a global warming signal.
http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDY65100.pdf
Any guesses where it goes from here?
10
It cold in Melbourne today and even colder in the hills.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-07/blizzard-of-oz-creates-winter-wonderland-at-australian-snowfield/8780612
10
An obvious sign Australia has lost its way is the preoccupation by the mainstream media, politicians of all sides and much of the people on unimportant issues of the day, such as SSM, the Republic, a treaty with indigenous people, and climate change, instead of focusing on far more important issues, such as the ever increasing cost and instability of energy, jobs, deteriorating education of our children, state of our hospitals and other infrastructure. I think there are many people who are interested in the more important issues listed above but they are being drowned out by the media and politicians. I am convinced the main reasons are it’s all in the “too hard” basket and secondly they are boring news items. If this continues, and there doesn’t appear any reason why not then this country will wake up one day with a rude shock scratching their heads why everything is crumbling around them. They have only themselves to blame for continually voting back the same old parties again and again. Populous definition of insanity is… well we all know that by now, right?
20
Breitbart’s Tony Lee doesn’t make a connection between this ***Mob and the CAGW scammers. pity.
5 Aug: Breitbart: Tony Lee: Ex-SF Mayor Suggests GOP Foreign Policy Estab. Wants Trump Impeached
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown suggested that the Republican foreign policy establishment may want to see President Donald Trump impeached after dining with two of its most prominent members.
Last weekend, the legendary California Democrat wrote about a dinner invitation he received from former Secretary of State ***George Shultz and his wife Charlotte. In his San Francisco Chronicle column, Brown revealed that former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger attended the private dinner along with Michael Bloomberg, California Governor Jerry Brown (and his wife Anne), Tom Steyer, California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newson (and his wife Jennifer), and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (and his wife Anita).
“The Republicans, at that level, do not want Trump in the Republican Party. They don’t want that burden,” Brown told Politico’s California Playbook this week when asked what his main “takeaway” was from that dinner. “And I think that’s going to translate into impeachment.”
Just a week after Brown wrote about his dinner, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, a prominent neoconservative who has also been one of embattled national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s fiercest defenders, revealed that he is plotting to oust or primary Trump…
According to a New York Times report, Kristol “said he had begun informal conversations about creating a ‘Committee Not to Renominate the President.’”
“We need to take one shot at liberating the Republican Party from Trump, and conservatism from Trumpism,” Kristol added…
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/05/ex-sf-mayor-willie-brown-suggests-gop-for-policy-estab-wants-trump-impeached/
29 Jul: San Francisco Chronicle: Willie Brown: Trump turning friends into enemies, and that’s a bad plan for him
The other night, my companions included Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Jerry and Anne Gust Brown, Gavin and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Ed and Anita Lee, and Tom Steyer…
Of course, Jerry is all about trying to head off global warming. So it was a bit ironic that the dinner table’s centerpiece, an ice sculpture of Earth, was little more than a puddle of cool water by the time the last course was served…
It was a great sight on Treasure Island the other day when Gov. Jerry Brown joined his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the signing ceremony for legislation extending the state’s landmark cap-and-trade emissions control program through 2030.
No other state has such a duo willing to work together on an issue of world importance.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/williesworld/article/Trump-turning-friends-into-enemies-and-that-s-11656713.php
00
A bit off topic, Musk is raising a large junk bond issue to float his battery and car production.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-offering-idUSKBN1AN13I
The company is on a financial edge.
But Tesla has yet to make an annual profit and its stock is a favorite among short-sellers, who continue to bet Tesla will fall short of its shareholders’ high hopes.
So far, Tesla has been raising money to pay its bills with a combination of equity offerings and convertible bonds, which eventually convert into shares. In March, the company raised $1.4 billion through a convertible debt offering.
Following the announcement, Standard & Poor’s reaffirmed its negative outlook for the automaker and assigned a “B-” rating for the bond issue – deep into junk credit territory. S&P also maintained its “B-” long-term corporate credit rating on Tesla.
Perhaps SA will be helping it go under if Musk fails to deliver.
10
Yeah, I know, coal is dying, blah blah blah!
Hmm!
A new coal mine has been approved for just West of here in Rockhampton.
That also adds to the earlier approval for the Byerwen mine, and the re-opening of three others around here as well, the Isaac Plains mine, the Blair Athol mine and Collinsville.
Makes you wonder eh!
Maybe Adani is a diversionary distraction for all the other mines to get going.
The Queensland Government, you know, 50% Renewables by 2030, (huh, right) will be making an absolute Motza from royalties, you can bet.
Coal dead. Not quite.
Link to article
Tony.
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The Bray cycle is tantalising.
‘….. the Arctic and North Atlantic oscillations enter a persistent negative phase during the lows of the Bray cycle, causing an intensification of winter climatic effects and making this region particularly sensitive to low solar activity. This explains why the Little Ice Age, while global, was particularly strong over Europe and North America.’
Javier (guest post) at Climate etc
00