By Jo Nova
How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.
Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.
With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.
We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.
Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.
It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our research stations in Antarctica.
Again, this is now a feature of our weather dependent electricity grid, unless the government can stop these high pressure cells or conquer New Zealand and build a bridge.
But sadly, there is no “building” our way out of this. One thousand more wind-plants won’t keep many lights on, and $100 billion dollars of interconnectors will not connect us to wind power if there is a high pressure cell 5,000 kilometers wide, which there is every two or three weeks.
Wind power went from producing 7.2GW in the early hours of Wednesday to 0.09GW by lunchtime Thursday. It was sheer luck it bottomed out at lunchtime on a sunny day when solar panels were at their peak. Seven gigawatts of power disappeared in just 36 hours. If we lost 7 gigawatts of coal plants in a week, we’d never hear the end of it.
It’s the minimums that matter
Paul McArdle at WattClarity has all the grid data, and provides a spectacular graph of the system-wide peaks and troughs of our wind generators over the last 13 years which he has updated recently to highlight how bad the months of April and May were for wind production in Australia. Click to enlarge this graph to really appreciate the devastating message. While the total wind farm “capacity” has grown massively (the grey columns on the graph), the minimum lowest guaranteed production has not shifted much at all. This is the generation we can rely on, the minimum monthly points are marked in dark green at the bottom.
Ten years ago the lowest monthly minimum was practically zero (reaching just 3.7MW one day in July 2014). But since then we’ve built 8,000 MW of extra wind power, at an effective cost of $16 billion, and only bought ourselves effectively two diesel generators worth of reliable electricity?
Source: WattClarity
If someone asks how much wind can we rely on, the answer is “about one percent”.
UPDATE: Paul McArdle at WattClarity confirms that this event occurred, was only 88MW and 0.77% of capacity, and that it was not caused by any human management or curtailment, just by being becalmed.
h/t Apoxonbothyourhouses
Hi Jo,
You say it so much better than I ever can.
I know I sound like a broken record.
I wrote all of this up, in great detail, as to what the meteorology is, and the devastating effects it has on wind power, with real-time data examples in a scholarly paper published in 2012.
The authorities took no notice then, and are still blithely ignoring it.
For interested readers, it’s still freely available.
Search on “Wind Farms in Eastern Australia – Recent Lessons”.
And, not forgetting for a moment the huge body of work over many years now by “TonyfromOz”.
“Two diesels” – what a great descriptor!
Regards,
Paul Miskelly
780
Thanks for this very useful information Paul, and all you efforts in recording it. A few days ago I looked at WA SWIS grid and noted that wind was only 1.56% of the total energy being delivered.
470
And thanks Paul, for your tireless efforts and please thank Andrew Miskelly as well. Anero.id is better and more useful than any of the government or industry websites. It is a scandal that one man (in both your cases) can do so much for free that the AEMO, AER, and CSIRO and all our universities do not. I have downloaded your paper. You are both assets to your country. Thanks!
271
There’s the true scientist impelled by curiosity
and the careerist impelled by what pays most or
befits their politicks, one above ground, the other
straight
down
the
rabbit
hole.
111
200
I first came across a valuable measure of power from a source, the reliability point, from one of your previous papers:
Miskelly A & Quirk T 2010, ” Wind Farming in South East Australia”, Energy & Environment Vol 21, Vol 20 Number 8 – Vol 21 Number 1 / December 2009 – January 201
Unfortunately I have lost the paper. However Tom Quirk produced this definition:
This is the minimum percentage of power that may be relied upon for 90 per cent of the time. For wind farms it is about 5 to 10 per cent: so, for example, for 300MW and a reliability figure of 10 per cent we can rely on 30MW. The comparable figure for thermal power stations is again 90 per cent or more.
When you combine that with the capacity factor of wind and solar which is the average power they produce as averaged over a year as a %, about 30%, of the installed capacity of the installation you realise that wind and solar are a grotesque joke.
The final aspect of the failure of wind and solar is that both their reliability point and the capacity factor are totally unpredictable; much like the BOM forecasts!
The people advocating wind and solar are either criminally ignorant or just criminal in knowingly intending to starve Australia of power to the detriment of our economy and society.
211
I am sure Cohenite that it is the latter. The communists among us pretending to be caring for the environment are actively destroying both it and the economy. I will make an exception for Chris Bowen for he suffers from an incurable disease, stupidity. He really believes this rubbish just as he really believes he could be a Prime Minister. It does show that the Labor talent pool is very shallow.
61
Its got to be calculated over 25 years of loan repayments and running costs. Try A$150B. A$6B/yr. Just how could this be the cheapest form of electrical power?
You don’t have to know anything about wind power to realize even thinking about using them is insane. I did this calculation in a few minutes.
531
We keep getting told that by “experts” such as in Their CSIRO (Government funded woke scientific research organisation) but anyone can see that the more we get, the more expensive electricity becomes.
581
As it must. A simple cost/time/output calculation. More windmills, more capacity cost. No wind, no output. Greater distribution, more connection costs.
Costs keep rising, output/costs keeps falling. A cost curve to output would show wind power could NEVER be viable for a large grid. AEMO must have such a curve, there is enough data for the eastern seaboard.
This is a country destroying policy error. The policy debt will keep building while business is paid by taxes to do nothing. Climate Change will destroy us now, not in 100 years.
511
Correction: Climate change activism will destroy us …..
191
G’day Geoff,
You ask: ” Just how could this be the cheapest form of electrical power? ”
It’s really quite easy for the CSIRO, just calculate the at-the-site costs (possibly with some accuracy), don’t even mention that it might be falsely assumed to be the wholesale price, ignore transmission costs, ignore those pesky certificates – LGCs – let alone where they’re applied, ignore GST, ignore retail suppliers’ costs and markups, and omit the concept of retail completely in their submissions.
And assume 100% availability, so need for backup.
Saves them a lot of work.
Cheers
Dave B
430
We’re getting the same ‘Renewables are cheaper’ line from Engineers Australia via their monthly ‘Create’ magazine!!
170
Engineers Australia is just another organisation captured by the left. No real engineers left there.
120
I was a student member for about a year. Then I changed major and studied Oenology instead. They wanted me to renew and of course I did not. They ended up sending a letter that I had been DELETED as a member. I hung it on my wall, as I was glad to no longer be studying engineering!
50
Engineers Australia proved last week that they are a bought /captured entity when 1 tweet from Simon Homes a Court had an advocate for nuclear cancelled from a speaking event at short notice.
60
The latest GenCost did assume some time for backup, but it was so small as to be meaningless.
100
Thanks G4,
That reminds me, they don’t include any estimate of the cost of a System Black event across the eastern states, with an evaluation of when it will occur, and I didn’t include it in my list either. Sorry.
80
Yes, absolutely. Instead they tried to apportion backup to each renewable generation source, instead of considering how much backup would be required when both solar and wind were both absent, as discussed here. A MAJOR error in their assumptions and calculations.
160
I was an instructor in Military tactics for a good few years and if a students appreciation of a particular problem was as bereft of fact and so full of assumption it would fail. Why we pay huge money to an organisation that simply asks their Labor friends what answer they want before declaring it found is beyond me. A bunch of activists have annihilated a once highly respected scientific organisation and just use its name to further their agenda. The CSIRO now have the credibility of the BoM; bugger all.
90
And anywhere there is weather, the situation will not be appreciably different.
And despite that, both ‘mainstream’ parties in the UK [together with the religious Greens and Limp Dumbs], still want to go ‘Nut Zero’.
It is NOT POSSIBLE to run a 21st Century Economy on Wind and Solar – even with batteries which cost literally years’ of national output in all sectors.
I don’t think the religious Green care – as they want ot see us back to the 18th Century AD [I’m being kind, it may be BC].
Auto
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No … that was running on coal and they won’t allow you to operate an coal fire, nor coal mining.
No … they are doing their best to outlaw wood fires as well … they don’t even want to leave us with the option of ancient technology. You probably won’t even be allowed to have a horse or cow.
310
That is so true. They are opposed to any use of resource, it’s way worse than the past.
190
Like everything the Left does, wind power is based on a lie coupled with, in this case, bad engineering.
The theoretical installed (nameplate) capacity is utterly meaningless.
The only number that counts is deliverable, dispatchable power and unless the wind plantation is coupled to an infeasibly large and expensive battery which it almost never is, the actual dispatchable power rating of any wind plantation is ZERO.
Wind plantations don’t deliver usable power.
They serve only two purposes. 1) To contribute to the destruction of Western Society by destroying the economy with expensive, unreliable, useless power. 2) To allow Elite subsidy harvesters to make vast amounts of money from the expensive power thus produced.
Of course, that’s not to mention the tremendous environmental damage attributable to wind plantations and their power lines.
430
But, but.. there’s always the batteries -they’ll save us and they’re getting better we are told. What a shambles.
300
Like these ones:
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/48209/20230727/solar-farm-battery-fire-in-jefferson-county
40
Eighty odd years ago, George Orwell warned about a kind of Nationalism that can affect the intelligentsia, a Nationalism which he distinguished from patriotism. Orwellian Nationalism is a better description for those responsible for the present global insanity.
110
Apologies to all. The paper can be found at the publisher’s site:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/0958-305X.23.8.1233
Regards,
Paul Miskelly
250
And world predictions of growth in oil are rocketing..
a. the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) raised its 2024 global oil demand growth forecast to 1.1 million barrels per day, up from its previous estimate of 900,000 bpd.
b Goldman Sachs has an even more optimistic view of the market, expecting global oil demand to grow by 1.25 million bpd in 2024.
c. (OPEC) held firm to the most optimistic demand growth outlook, again refusing to amend its initial forecast for 2.25 mbpd of growth for 2024
Note that “OECD is expected to grow by 0.1 mbpd, while non-OECD is forecast to increase by 1.7 mbpd.”
So much for controlling CO2 with Chinese windmills.
On the bright side, nothing humans have ever done has had any effect on total CO2 which has been climbing very slowly and steadily at 0.2% a year average for 250 years. Likely caused by very slight ocean surface warming and release of CO2 from the deep ocean.
But in this new non science world, politicians insist that windmills fix everything, even if they have zero effect on CO2 or even oil sales. They do however cripple Western democracies, which seems to be the whole idea.
470
And that’s possibly due to delayed warming of the oceans after the Little Ice Age due to the large thermal lag of the oceans.
In any case, more CO2 is good. We narrowly missed a mass extinction event had CO2 kept dropping to below 200ppm. Hopefully it will settle down with a decent buffer zone at 800-1000ppm.
440
Another problem is that there’s no obvious exit strategy form this utter madness.
There are too many people who through inexcusable ignorance or outright lies have committed Australia to this insanity and are now profiting from it or have staked their reputations on it.
No one will admit they’ve made a mistake or were/are a grifter.
Plus, the cost to terminate contracts would also be huge.
430
If there is a viable exit strategy, please let me know.
I think Australia is unusually locked-in and fanatically committed to the wind, solar and Big Battery madness, much more so than even other woke countries
There is no way out, especially with present Labor or pretend-conservative Liberal non-leadership (Uniparty).
I think economic collapse is inevitable. Look to Venezuela as the model.
Plus the masses are already being conditioned to think that food, energy and freedom are luxuries, not guaranteed as they once were.
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All political parties in the UK (Except Reform UK) are committed to huge increases in wind, solar and big batteries. You are not alone in this madness.
110
David,
I have much more optimistic view that there should be a big turn-around
in the first part of 2025.
We’ll have to wait and see if my crystal ball is cloudy or not.
40
I’m also hopeful for a turnaround in ’25.
They are being outed.
Renewables only survive because so many have their fingers in the pie in different ways and at different levels and need to perpetuate the story that holds it all up.
The former liberal, John Hewson, was a big investor.
Here locally, in Novocastria, we’ve just had public news of a local government official who is also getting a board membership payment of $100,000 pa for “looking after” the superannuation of NSW local government contributors. I suspect that the investments are heavily “green” and that a change in national renewables strategy would be unacceptable.
Still, reality is coming, like it or not and many super funds managed by Union Reps are going to be affected, hopefully soon.
This won’t end well.
40
Actually, there is.
Require wind and solar generators to “bid into the load” on day-ahead, guaranteed delivery contracts for power delivered.
Just like thermal plants must do. That’s a level playing field. Either the contract is met, or whatever it costs to meet the obligation, without limitation, is on those who signed the contract for guaranteed delivery.
You’ll see a much more realistic position taken, immediately.
Wind/solar play the “heads I win, tails you lose” game, because they are not held responsible for failure to deliver.
That responsibility changes everything.
271
I would love to see a detailed text on how this all works?
20
It’s like buying a car without an engine – it’s really cheap running down the hill.
But now invest in a truck to tow it back to the top of the hill.
460
Possibly the best analogy I’ve ever seen .
181
That’s the old Rolls Canardly. Rolls down one side of the hill and can hardly make it up again.
191
And one of the EV bus fleets in the U.S. couldn’t handle the many hills on the bus routes.
120
Thank you for the red thumb. It was a bad joke I learned as a boy. And I still laugh. But you are right. I shouldn’t.
30
That’s what Nikola hydrogen trucks did, literally.
110
It’s like buying a car with two engines. One primary engine (wind) that you are told is reliable and be cheap to run, and a second engine (FF) that is needed when the primary engine fails, and it will fail.
30
Isn’t that what a hybrid is all about? You pay for the extra motor setup, the extra complexity and the extra weight in the hope that sitting at traffic lights all day will lower the total cost of running it.
20
Consider the economics of the diesel electric train “movers”.
Hopefully there will be a “movement” towards implementing a similar “solution” in smaller rubber tired vehicles.
10
This graph shows electricity generation by type
On the 13 June wind (green) disappears (providing only 0.4% of NEM generation at noon) and once the Sun sets and peak demand occurs at 6.30pm wind was only providing 1.4% with gas ramped up 26.2% and coal to 57.2% so that fossil fuel was providing 83.8% of demand.
Our dams are now full {despite the predictions of Flim Flam Flannary) – “Even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”.
This allowed hydro to be ramped up to 14.6%.
However, what happens when Australia next experiences several years of drought? How much hydro can be relied on then?
https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time
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Windless nights make net zero impossible
By David Wojick
https://www.cfact.org/2024/06/10/windless-nights-make-net-zero-impossible/
The beginning: “It is very simple. The cost of storing electricity is so huge it makes getting through a single windless night under a net zero wind, solar and storage plan economically impossible. This is especially true of cold nights where blackouts can be deadly. I recently made a legislative proposal to Pennsylvania along these lines so let’s use them as our example, keeping in mind that this is true everywhere.
Pennsylvania peaks at around 30,000 MW so let’s consider a windless night with a constant need of just 20,000 MW. There should be lots of these especially in winter. Cold snaps are typically due to windless high pressure systems of arctic air with lots of overnight radiative cooling. In the world of solar “nights” are 16 hours or more long since solar systems just generate a lot of energy for 8 hours a day. It is likely less in a Pennsylvania winter where it is dark at 4 pm.
So to get through the night we need to have stored at least 20,000 MW times 16 hours or 320,000 MWh of juice. For simplicity we ignore all sorts of technical details that would make this number bigger, like input-output losses. The present capital cost of grid scale batteries is around $600,000 per MWh. Again this ignores all sorts of technical factors that make that number bigger, like buildings, transmission, etc.
Simple arithmetic says this works out to an incredible $192 billion dollars just for the batteries. Clearly this is economically impossible. In round numbers two hundred billion dollars just to get through the night!wind and solar plus batteries simply does not work. Even if the cost magically dropped 90% it would still be an impossible $20 billion just to buy the batteries.
This is so simple one wonders why none of the utilities, public utility commissions, independent system operators and reliability agencies ever thought of it. Or maybe they did and decided not to mention it.”
More in the article including the legislative proposal.
Net zero is impossible. Spread the word.
381
And David, that’s only for one night.
An allowance should be made for many windless nights in a row, maybe ten.
And then how do you recharge the batteries especially as there may also be many cloudy days in a row? And you would need vast numbers of solar panels, probably covering more area than available land. And even cloudless days in winter will result in minimal solar output.
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The propaganda is going to be, you get batteries on your house that keep you going. The more sophisticated propaganda is all houses and cars will themselves support the actual grid, share the load.
That’s my tip on how people will think about it once it becomes clear this current vision won’t work. They are already telling people with the charge for rooftop solar – the first crack exposing the lie of solar – that the answer is to get a battery.
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David, Pennsylvania has a population of about 12.9 million , so nearly half of Australia’s population in 2024. Yet it is very small in surface area, but I’m sure a lot of your calculations of your costs for W & S + batteries would be less than trying to service the Aussie grid.
Our connecting costs for new poles and wires for our huge surface area would be much higher than a small state.
And B O Bowen’s idea of trying to build even more expensive Wind turbines in the sea would be even more destructive and their lifespans would be much shorter as well.
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David, you aren’t listening. The narrative now is that demand should adapt so that it relates better to supply. To get through the night we just have to turn everything off. In our Orwellian world, we plebs should not expect to cook food on a still night or to use a computer on a cloudy day. It’s all very logical, especially the bit that says that the people who make the rules have to fly to the conferences that discuss the rules, otherwise the plebs wouldn’t benefit from the energy discipline that the rules require – such as the benefit of turning everything off at night.
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Where I live, and any place I have every lived, the wind usually stops blowing with the setting of the sun. It blows in the day time because of the day time stirring of the atmosphere. Unless, there is a pressure gradient caused by an approaching low pressure system, nights are generally windless.
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The extreme ups and downs of unreliable, TOXIC W & S proves they are a disaster and new W & S farms(?) should be stopped ASAP.
But have our experts really tried to lobby the state and Fed govts and then tried to explain the years of data?
And have they also talked to the state and Federal opposition parties to try and make them understand?
This defies any common sense and yet we seem to have nobody who can expose these disasters.
So why not ask Sky News to try and blow this up in a hurry? We’ve waited for years to see a group expose the frauds and con tricks of dilute, expensive, toxic W & S and yet only a tiny minority of Aussies really understand the environmental mess we’re causing.
So why not contact or lobby Bolt, Credlin, Murray, Kenny, Markson or the Outsiders team etc?
220
Andrew Bolt and Chris Kenny do cover the stupidity and impossibility of wind and solar from time to time, but it would be an ideal subject for a half- or one-hour documentary with a range of experts who can put this across without getting the audiences’ eyes to glaze over from big numbers. The Outsiders cover it every weekend, just about.
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We’ve been told some real whoppers when it comes to the energy transition. It’s reminiscent of the COVID bollocks, tell a big lie, repeat it often and use propaganda to sell it.
Coal is dirty, old tech – lie, you can upgrade to HELE, USC or SC.
Wind /Solar is cheap, because its provided to us by nature for free – lie, costs heaps to harvest and you can only produce economically 14-27 % of the time.
Wind/Solar is more environmentally friendly – lie, turbines chop birds and both (windmills/solar panels) uglify the landscape.
You can shop around your energy bill for a better deal – lie, the “cheaper” plans are about the same anyway and all the retailers are equivalent.
There are no on-shore economic gas reserves left in Victoria, so the state cannot depend on it – lie, you mean apart from this huge one near Sale which compares favourably to the past Bass Strait reserves?
There’s lots of jobs in Wind and Solar plants- lie, some unionised workforce in initial build, but skeleton crew after that when running.
Pumped hydro is a great way to store surplus energy from those wind/solar installations- lie, the Snowy Hydro 2 boring machine is hopelessly stuck and how can pumping water uphill and around in circles be energy efficient anyway?.
Your energy bills will be cheaper – my goodness, that lie is so big it puts nearly all the other claims in the shade.
Lies, damn lies and statistics – basically sums up the whole Green Energy scam.
400
Here we see the latest map and you’ll notice the high pressure stretching from the Southern Ocean to central Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDY65100.pdf
This is not supposed to happen in a warming world, which is why BoM is probably wrong when they say its going to be a warmer winter.
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Unbelievable, the models are still saying temps are going to be above average.
https://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/winter-2024-outlook-for-australia/1889508
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Here is a surprise from 2014, it turned up in my mail last week, a decade on and I don’t recall any mention of this work, what about you guys Paul and Anton?
https://stopthesethings.com/2014/05/13/wind-power-myths-busted/
Paul McArdle has been watching wind droughts for a decade or more but he is making his living out of the ponzi so he can’t tell the truth in public although he went close a few years ago when he put a note in small print in one of this charts saying it is going to get messy if storage doesn’t turn up on time and on budget.
It all over Red Rover, simple as ABC.
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/11/approaching-the-tipping-point/
130
I read this week that Dutton had reignited the “Climate Wars”.
What Climate Wars?
Dutton and Albanese are in complete agreement. They are only talking how, not if. Both want zero.
The elites in Canberra all agree Australians should never output CO2 or methane. Nothing nett about it. Zero.
Otherwise we would have halved CO2 emissions by just going to higher temperature boilers. And far cheaper. We would be at 50% today.
But there are no Climate wars. All politicians agree on ZERO.
We should have a referendum on more wind or at least a survey.
So the people could tell politicians what we think about our cheaper electricity and free wind and sunshine.
I can guarantee the deplorables (that’s everyone) would be against more windmills. Even Dr Bob Brown. The destruction of the environment on shore and off shore is appalling. And for nothing, whatever you believe.
And it’s simple arithmetic. All the wind in Australia? Near zero output. And double zero is still zero. So why continue?
210
The future of Australia on its present trajectory is at a subsistence level but with the use of some remaining but rapidly decaying infrastructure from previous tines of plenty. Like Venezuela or South Africa.
220
Wnen WW3 kicks off and of course China sides with Russia, trade and trade routes gets shut down, what happens to virtually every Oz business that relies on Chinesium products?
Lights out.
An overnight S Africa…
170
And of course mass lawlessness in Australia. It will be absolute anarchy.
130
That is the aim of the communist and the Greens are all communists. They glorify Revolutions. Especially the Russian revolution, which was in fact a lethal military coup from the party which lost the democratic election.
A year later Lenin ordered the 30,000 sailors and their family on the island of Kronstadt, the ones who made him successful, all murdered in one night by soldiers who crossed the ice. The sailors had lost faith in the Lenin’s Glorious Revolution. They were disposable. And their families.
The murders of Russians by Lenin and Stalin were in the tens of millions and the concentration camps and Gulags. They were the model for Hitler.
Our Green’s leader Adam Bandt is a student and great admirer of Lenin. And Albanese of Trotsky, murdered in Mexico on the orders of Stalin. That should tell you everything about their intentions. Tell them what they want to hear and when we get power, we do what we like.
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I say more like Argentina. Australians aren’t as nutty as full-blown socialism, they like a quasi socialism, which will see it to a mid-level South American form.
70
Never let facts stand in the way of a good totalitarian agenda. 😁
100
This is what changed my mind from being in favour of wind and solar as power sources, once I realised you still need 100% back up. And if that is so, what’s the point?
210
Unreliables. Imagine a hospital, an aircraft, a car, a factory running on unreliables.
The actual need is for constant reliable adequate commandable power. That is the definition of what wind is not. Which was why it was abandoned across the world once they had the steam engine.
Australians do not want wind. Only politicians.
140
Sorry TdeF, but it’s not only the pollies. I think there two other large groups: the nasties behind and supporting the WEF/WMO/WHO and including news organisations and bureaucrats; and the indoctrinated innocents.
The first group needs confrontation, the second enlightenment.
Unfortunately the first group seems to be able to censor nearly all attempts to enlighten the second.
160
You are right, but the WEF/WMO/WHO and UN/EU/Washington have no power at all, except that ceded to them by our elected representatives.
All their power comes from controlling real politicians in real parliaments. Consider that in Australia politicians just tried to change our Constitution to give them even more power, even direct power over public service, courts, even the parliament by a politburo of their choosing.
The problem is our politicians and politicians in general. And the UN/EU are made from retired politicians. There are 40,000 full time people in the UN and 40,000 contractors. Who are they? What do they do? Why do we need so many?
It’s all about trying to be an illegal world government. The Paris accord has no power, but our politicians even our judges treat it as if it is international law.
And in Australia all the politicians agree we should build endless windmills. I would guarantee that if put to a National referendum, no one would build another windmill. And all these endless carbon taxes have no mandate at all. “There will be no carbon tax in a government I lead” has been the promise. And all political parties have broken that promise.
90
Co2 is the GAS OF LIFE if there is no Co2 we all die. Why are we trying to get rid of it???? or reduce it. Co2 is .04% of the atmosphere. The question is how to make politicians get the message. Government are not our bosses we are there boss, how has it become so screwed around that they can spend billions on a nonproblem where is the accountability. Should there be a federal court case to prove Co2 is not an issue. Can us “the people” sue the government for wasting money.
[Apologies this took so long to approve Mark. – Jo]
190
A truly engineered system requires initial estimates and assessments of all factors.
For Renewables this was deliberately not done, in fact engineers were locked away out of sight and threatened if they showed their faces.
Proper engineering assessment would show that renewables could not provide electricity that was cost effective, long lasting, reliable and environmentally friendly.
It has always been about damaging the West and Money.
CO2 is innocent!
230
Beyond any sense of rationality.
Our Feral Gummint has just approved construction of a Wynde Farm off the Ilawarra coast.
140
There’s always that old ‘adage’ we have heard so often ….. the wind is always blowing somewhere. So they ‘blanket cover’ a vast area and resort back to repeating that adage.
Look at that Synoptic chart that Joanne has included here. See that Huge High there. See the number printed there ….. 1024. (HectoPascals)
In the area sitting directly under those actual numbers is the South East of South Australia, and Central Western Victoria. A little to the South is Tasmania, also directly under that High Pressure weather system at the same time.
Just in that area, (and keep in mind this is no small swathe of land, but a really large area) sits 60 of those 84 Industrial wind plants.
Those 60 plants have a total Nameplate of 7633MW, and that makes up 67% of ALL wind generation here in Australia, two thirds of all of it.
Around the time of the Synoptic chart, and comparing it to the image of the power generation at the low point, those 60 Wind plants in that large area were generating just 66MW ….. from a total Nameplate of that 7633MW, at a Capacity Factor (CF) of 0.86%.
Less than 1%.
Okay, when I’ve brought up similar situations before, wind supporters have said (you know, the expected response) Yeah, you’ve just cherry picked one point in time here.
Fair enough.
However ….. what do you do when there are times like this?
This is electrical power generation. It’s ESSENTIAL that it is in place all the time. And it’s not like it’s right back up to maximum within minutes. Across this same day, the whole 24 hours, the average was only 290MW at a CF of 3.8% ….. FOR THE WHOLE DAY. That’s 24 hours with virtually nothing. You can’t operate anything when power is that low, let alone a whole Country, even if wind is a part of the mix. And 24 hours, and the days either side when it’s trending lower, and then trending higher ….. use the power or charge the batteries, (and how many of them would you need to cover times like this) because you can’t do both. It’s one or the other. Use or charge.
Even that power generation chart Joanne shows. Look at the total power actually being consumed, that black line Load Curve at the top, and then that green part showing just wind rolling along the bottom. (And seriously it’s not really much higher than that for the year round average, and this link is to an image of what that year round average actually is) That gap between the two is, well, it’s scary really, because we’re told this is the future of power generation.
And speaking of maximums, the total Nameplate for wind generation across the whole of Australia is 11,409MW. It has NEVER even got close to that maximum. The highest it has ever been is (again, also a cherry picked single point in time) is 7909MW, and that was a year ago.
Huh! Then there’s that ancient old dinosaur at almost 40 years old, the Loy Yang power plant. It has six Units and a total Nameplate of 3210MW. For 21 hours on this same day, 13th June, those six Units averaged a power delivery of 3375MW at an average CF of 105%.
Wind generation ….. if anything else operated as poorly as wind power does, it would be ‘howled’ out of existence.
Huh, wind power even makes the Trabant look good.
Tony.
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Given that blown coal is so “dirty” compared to black coal one would expect brown coal generation would be wound back on the occassions when there is plenty of wind and solar power, however it is black coal power generation that is wound back!
That is because brown coal generated electricity is so much cheaper than black coal generated.
At the end of the day money still rules.
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It’s no dinosaur! Like a factory, it is easily maintained and upgraded. There is no reason it should not last forever like a car if all the parts are maintained, even replaced. In this it is utterly unlike Windmills and solar panels which are disposable.
Much of the ‘factory’ is in fact in the mining, not the power generation. However if we were seriously talking about higher efficiencies, it would pay to install a new generator. That would halve CO2, but that it is far less important than requiring only half as much of our precious coal and doubling the life of our resources. Or we will run out.
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For a grid, only ONE thing matters. Generation matching connected load in real time, at voltage, at frequency.
Anything else is useless and destructive to a national economy and security.
If the wind/solar crowd cannot do the “One Thing” that is necessary, then their output is meaningless except to offset fuel costs at a thermal plant when feasible.
The wind/solar crowd ought to be paid only in terms of thermal plant fuel offset savings. Because that’s the only value they provide. And that value only after the costs of O/M, Transmission, Distribution, and FCAS support costs are factored into their paltry contribution.
The only reason anyone contemplates grid scale wind/solar is because politics have divorced economic and practical reality from the analysis. Wind/solar are simply conduits to fleece the populace, aided and abetted by politicians.
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Sometimes, I wonder why I even bother doing comparisons like this.
I mentioned Loy Yang, that ancient brown coal plant, which has been in place now for TWICE the best case hoped for life span of any wind plant.
So then, here’s the comparison.
ALL Australian wind plants – 84 industrial wind plants with around 3800 individual turbines – Nameplate – 11,409MW
Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B – SIX turbine/generator Units – Nameplate – 3210MW (so wind power is 3.55 TIMES the Nameplate of wind)
On this one day, just two days ago now, the 13th June 2024, EVERY single wind plant in Australia delivered 16,300MWH to the Australian (AEMO) grid across the whole 24 hour day.
On the same day those six Units at Loy Yang delivered 79,800MWH to the same Australian grid, so 4.9 TIMES what wind delivered.
Those six Units had a small ‘dip’ in their power delivery from 2PM till 5PM.
So, as the day begins at Midnight, with all six Units delivering 3375MW at a CF of 105%, then those ancient old ‘totally and utterly unreliable’ six Units at Loy Yang delivered the same total daily power to the grid as EVERY wind plant in the AEMO ….. by, umm, 4.50AM, and then just kept on humming along for the rest of the day.
So, TWENTY BILLION Dollars worth of wind cannot even replace ONE dinosaur of a brown coal fired plant not worth a cracker ….. so they say. Just not economically viable any more.
It seems to me that coal fired power is what makes renewables look so good. Take it away, and then see how good renewables REALLY look.
So to further expand ….. naah! why bother!
Tony.
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Tony, it is important that you do.
I love your posts.. Why?.. because your research and concise authoring makes it easy for anyone to understand.
I wish I had that skill. (I have an engineering background in Fire/Mining).
You may think you are a broken record stating the same things over and over.
Yet,
If the Australian Energy Minister, can constantly state, week after week, that renewables are “more reliable and cheaper”.
Then it is Ok for you to call out his B/S every week.
Great work Tony, keep it up!
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And so say all of us!
As William stated, you make it easier for the layman, (me), to understand.
I very much appreciate that.
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Seconded, keep it up Tony, it is actual, inarguable data.
One day you will have the satisfaction of “took you so”.
Geoff S
90
X3 to that
Helps remove the “wriggle room”
20
Tony we all love your posts. I do a word search every time there’s a new blog post, looking for your name and your comments. Call me a crazy fan LOL.
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Thanks Tony,
Your work is much appreciated, even if not actively acknowledged.
Your knowledge and experience allow you to produce a useful, relevant and timely comment which I think we all rely on. I, for one, cannot remember enough of the detail to even attempt the sort of comments you produce.
Please don’t down play our reliance on your input.
Cheers
Dave B
200
Take coal power away from China and you will have to kiss goodbye to all wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing.
160
Thanks Tony,
I totally agree with William and David and I fully appreciate all the time and effort you must put into collecting all the data and presenting it so clearly and precisely for us all.
Sincerely
RexAlan
150
The success of a renewable energy system should be measured by the maximum non renewable demand during a given time period, not the maximum renewable penetration.
10
Tony, I always take the time to fully read and understand your posts. Mate, you’re a gem.
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That single paragraph should end the debate about the viability of wind energy. Less than 1% of nameplate production! Wow!
It would be nice to see this being reported by the MSM but I live in the real world so I don’t think that is likely to happen.
261
The GenCost2023-24Final_20240522.pdf page 85, claims that Wind generators cost $2.936 billion / GW (2023) which would make the cost much greater than you mention. They also claim claim on page 90 that onshore Wind generation capacity factor (CF), in Australia, is 48% while observations here indicates 30%. They claim 53% CF for offshore wind while it is known that the UK wind CF is 40%. That would put all of their calculations of required renewables to meet our demand way off.
John
150
The cost of wind generation could be ZERO when the wind is blowing.
It is the cost of providing electricity when the wind is NOT blowing is the cost to worry about.
If batteries are to be used for back-up then the costs run into the $Trillions.
80
Absolutely. CSIRO surely must have been aware of Tony’s data for average wind CF, measured over more than five years, yet they have chosen to ignore the correct figure and instead choose an even more ridiculous figure.
190
How much is generated is irrelevant.
WHEN it is generated is the important metric.
70
John,
Good comment but have you asked the authors why this mistake is not corrected by them?
Some of us are more shy than others to be so direct, but after the first few direct approaches it turns out to be easy. You have to contact them to do much good, but be prepared for no replies. I used letter, never used social media. Geoff S
40
Geoff, I contacted the lot at the BOM, I forget the name of the group, possibly NTF, about the way they were making the end point error when evaluating the sea level increase. After three attempts, they ceased responding. They did not have the graph that I was conversing with them about after that in future issues of the report. Probably something similar will happen here.
John
20
I am reminded of a study done at my college cafeteria. Run by the students in one of the health streams to reduce our intake of evil salt. They devised a simple experiment of reducing the size of the shaker holes to restrict flow (Forget about the idea a student would keep shaking until they saw the right amount on their food..someone thought it was an unconscious action to grab the salt regardless and give three or four standard shakes) Indeed, they found a result. Yes, they could reduce the size of the hole until said subject would invariable grab a fork and open up holes, resulting in desired amount applied in two or three standard shakes on their cup of chips. That outcome is the same with this green “experiment” The subject will tolerate a certain amount of rate increase and network unreliability until it dawns on them it is a “who” rather than a “what” that is causing the problem. A pitchfork will be grabbed and a hole (..in the bowels of the “establishment”) will be opened up until the desired outcome results. /sarc!
90
The so called roaring 40s over King Island seemed to be suffering another lousy wind drought this morning.
Diesel and Solar are doing the job and battery yet to be charged.
Again the so called windiest area but wind still can’t do the job. Will they ever wake up?
https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/hybrid-energy-solutions/success-stories/king-island
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Yeah but, Neville, look at all that SNOW up on the hills of NSW/VIC – unless webcams are now spreading Russian disinfo too…
That Tasman Low has parked-up for a while: sadly you guys are on the cold side while we’ve lucked-out on the warm side (comparatively speaking). The pointy heads said we’d soon have Sydney’s climate if we didn’t change our ways – bring it on! – yet as expected, the opposite rears its weathered head.
Good luck keeping the lights on, and please, don’t ‘conquer New Zealand and build a bridge’. 😃
70
Incredible amount of malinvestment in what amounts to tissue paper infrastructure assets (and solar) that will not deliver and degrade rapidly.
70
It is a problem for democracy. Most people in Australia do not want wind power. They do not see why China which produces half the world’s steel should be able to do as they please where Australians with 1/64th of the population cannot.
But all politicians are afraid to speak out. It’s not their money and they are paid well to say nothing and look after their own interests.
The parliaments of Australia are full of people looking after themselves. And they all agree that windmills are not their problem and not their money. Utterly without ethics in this matter. Duck and cover. The lot of them.
170
“It is a problem for democracy.”
First definition of populism from my DDG search:
“A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.”
Here in the US, our heroic Democrat saviors of “Our Democracy”, consider Trump a ‘populist threat’.
Nancy Pelosi recently flew her 80+ derriere to the UK to debate a fired rock band banjo player whether or not ‘populism is anti-democratic’.
Your comment, per the usual, scrapes to the nub of the issue.
The ideal of ‘democracy’ as been usurped.
We shall be witness to a continuing parade of Medieval lords riding out to convince a horde of angry peasants that “we do this for you!”.
‘Global Warming’, later ‘Climate Change’, was the foundational agitprop construction to facilitate the tragic situation you describe.
‘Pandemic’ is a turning point.
Which direction the turn goes remains to be seen.
60
I love the term populist. It absolutely reeks of liberal elitism. As if a populist encourages the most basic instincts in ‘deplorables’.
What about a populist who is just popular because he says what everyone believes and makes perfect sense? Which means he disagrees with the 98.4% of Washington DC folk who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The world needs more populists like Farage and Meloni and Orban and Melei from Argentina.
Economist Melei took over a country with run away inflation with a promise to fix the total disaster. His first move was to fire all the public servants. And now merely months later, inflation is under control. It can be done. Runaway politicians and public servants hate populists. And despise the people who vote for them. Utterly arrogant Pelosi and Clinton are great examples.
50
The basic theory of efficient electricity generation to grid customers was settled a very long time ago and the pathetic cries of the greens do absolutely nothing to change that identified reality, no matter how ‘clever’ the woke may believe they are. Every means of generation needs back up when necessary for maintenance or for when it fails for whatever reason even the plentifully efficient hydroelectric units.
How on earth can the greens believe the money they have accessed is money well invested when it is painfully obvious the efficiency and accessibility of solar and wind is, at best, barely worth the effort as compared to the reliability of gas and coal to keep the grid alive and healthy at all times with minimal environmental destruction as compared to turbines and fields of panels?
What is the minimum IQ required to make decisions these days? Clearly not enough.
140
No,no,no,lies,conspiracy, misinformation. We just need to chop down 100 000 000 more koala homes and cover them in big ugly made in the CCP windmills, you know, fir good of the “environment”…signed the GREENS/TEALS…my shout for environmentally friendly lattes at our inner city Melbourne cafe’…
80
But isn’t all we have to do is install more turbines and solar panels and big batteries as well as some more hydro dams and all will be well? That’s what they keep telling us. Oh and then we can install huge inter-connectors between countries because the wind is blowing and the sun is always shining somewhere.
60
20,000+ mouths, many often 100s of kms away and none of them, certain of food, all feeding one unmovable stomach. Nature would have a psychotic episode pondering that insanity even without a general famine. I am no expert in the relevant field but even the mathematics leak more of hope than of reality and the cost alone should have kept it as its actuality: a climate lunatic’s pipe dream.
As I am still awaiting the arrest, prosecution and gaoling of those bureaucrats responsible for the CV19/Vaxxine murders I have little hope that the bureaucratic criminals who backed this will go the same way as the Flannery’s of this world seem as untouchable as those, they help make billions.
40
I just cited this thread on a US blog with this explanation –
“Now you’ve probably heard that “The wind is always blowing somewhere else”.
Here is a map of the wind farms in eastern Australia –
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
When you view it realise that Australia is roughly the size of continental USA –
Which will give you an idea of where “somewhere else” was that day.
90
What I love about the giant windfarms in South Australia, the sunniest place in the world, is that the SA government has such faith in their output for a small population of 2 million people that they have installed massive diesel generators to keep the government going when the power fails. There is what people say and what they do.
And it also made me think about who paid for all the windmills. I looked at the South Australian budget and found it did not cost a cent. So who paid? And the answer was you did, Australian consumers of electricity. It’s in your electricity bills by law and you don’t even get to own the windmills or the billions income. That goes to ‘investors’ who were given your money so they could own the windmills. That’s what I call theft.
So this is the new ‘privatisation’. All Australians pay massivelv carbon taxes hidden in their bills. Why else would electricity bills have skyrocketed?
And all the money goes to third parties. The old system is that the tax payer build the power stations and the electricity was as cheap as they could make it. No longer. And in my opinion, the Renewable Energy(Electricity) Act 2001 would be thrown out by the High Court as illegal. I asked John Howard about it, and he just ignored the question. It was his act.
The old system was also that electricity was based on mineral resources, coal, gas, oil. They were free and belonged to the state. So the gnomes of Canberra came up with windmills and solar panel and bypassed the states. This puts all electricity, all energy in Australian in the hands of Canberra public servants and politicians. It’s nothing to do with Climate Change.
Mao Tse Tung said ‘power comes out of the barrel of a gun’. In the modern world, all power is electrical and in Australia is controlled by Canberra. Which is why they don’t want us using our own coal and gas and oil, our biggest exports. If we want gas, we have to import it, even our own gas. Soon we will be importing our own coal.
130
Paste this one on the noticeboard!
20
Back in the 1970s 80s when we were finding more mines in remote places and working out the best way to give them electricity, we would study the rough figures on wind for windmills and it would be part of the rejection in favour of diesel.
If the wind strength numbers were telling then, why did we go ahead as we did, on the scale we have started for what is planned to be our main national source, the windmill.
Somebody in a high place of planning has botched it. Time for them to fess up. Could be in AEMO, perhaps, or done the damage and fled elsewhere.
Shame on CSIRO for not looking at reality and saying STOP IT.
Geoff S
80
Geoff
The SWER lines started to cover western Qld around the 1970’s.
It was observed that the Dunlite wind chargers were early casualties.
But around that time in Colorado where the reckoning was that “This year’s ecofadist is a person that bought their mountain cabin last year” Dunlite wind chargers were common
20
The loony left RE advocates have always been all art degree and no science. If they had any understanding of engineering then they would realise that energy systems need to be designed on the worse case scenarios. In the case of wind, which is a random weather generated force, what is the worse case scenario ?. This question has no definitive answer, but as you (Jo) rightly point out, the wind regularly stops around this time of year when the sun sets early and we’re left with an ever increasing energy deficit, especially during peak demand periods. To manage this growing shortfall, the grid operators have effectively given up on providing a solution and have decided to force us off the grid by imposing extreme demand management pricing. Unless you have a high paying job, energy is now a luxury, rather than a commodity. How many families can afford $0.70+ cents per kw/h during peak period ?. And for those with sufficient income, we’re going to be forced to install batteries that can also be managed by the grid operators to help cover for this growing energy shortfall, which is locking us all into enormous ongoing battery replacement costs. The fact that the new RE grid is not designed to be fit for purpose and forces people to either turn off the power to avoid bankruptcy or provide their own solar battery supply at enormous cost is a preposterous concept, but that’s what we’re been sold in the fine print of Bowen’s energy transition. Is there a more absurd proposition that needing to subsidise users to fund their own alternate energy supply rather than use energy from your new RE grid that will cost upwards of a trillion dollars, because it can’t deliver any significant power when the wind stops after dark?
If there is a public awakening to this looming disaster, it’s starting to show with the sudden realisation by the masses that energy is no longer an affordable commodity and you can already smell the roots of a public revolt. Dutton’s sudden shift to nuclear is his political solution to this revolt and I’m sure it will be a vote winner as we slide further into the energy abyss, but this is all too late. Our remaining coal plants are being forced out by the absurd market rules, where RE always gets priority. The RE solutions can’t deliver reliable supply and in a few years we’ll likely be an economic basket case with a collapsed grid, collapsed economy and no monetary means or time to revert back to FF or shift to nuclear. It might be possible to fast track gas, but the loony left won’t allow new gas exploration and the courts are already being weaponised by the left to block future FF energy. A huge disaster is unfolding right now and IMO we’re well past the point of no return.
90
why not mount wind turbines on solar powered vehicles and keep moving them to where the wind is best?
I cannot even begin to imagine my electricity bill with this doubly free power.
80
Green Billionaires are the masters of our future We are subsidising our own demise!
https://principia-scientific.com/new-report-reveals-massive-scale-of-green-billionaire-funding-of-climate-emergency-reporting-in-mainstream-media/
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[…] From JoNova […]
10
This is in response to “cohenite” at #1.3 above:
Hi cohenite,
That paper is, I believe, still available at the same publisher’s website as mine, although perhaps behind a paywall.
If it helps, my paper, still freely available, can be regarded as an extended version of that earlier paper. Part of the motivation for writing mine was to refute scurrilous remarks in some quarters that Dr Tom had cherry-picked the data.
If it is any help, Figure 6 in my paper is a graphical summary of the quote above from the Miskelly/Quirk paper, with the modification that, by then, having examined wind farm data over a much longer time period, we found that the reliability figure had dropped to 4 percent or less. So, even worse!
Yes, Dr Tom contributed a great deal to my paper, as you will see in the acknowledgments, but declined to have his name on it as co-author.
I hope this is of some help.
Cheers,
Paul Miskelly
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That excellent chart is all we need to see.
10
[…] out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators. (Read more) […]
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