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Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.
The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.
Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’
By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian
Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without […]
By Jo Nova Banker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…
It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?
Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned.
It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it […]
By Jo Nova
The whole world is waiting to see who wins the US Election
The annual UN junket-fest for climate troughers — called COP 29 — starts the week after the US election. But this year things are running behind schedule as countries sit on their hands.
The oceans are boiling, the clock of doom is five seconds from midnight, and “renewables are cheap”, but if the largest economy in the world loses enthusiasm, so does everyone else. For some reason, the same cannot be said about the second, fourth and fifth largest economies.
No wonder they are so afraid of him.
Trump stalks global climate talks as COP29 draws near
By Nick Perry, The Japan Times
Paris – The prospect of Donald Trump returning as president is hanging over crucial U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations, with countries “holding back” their positions until they know who sits in the White House.
This year’s negotiations hope to increase money for poorer countries to handle climate change, but some governments have not proposed a concrete dollar figure, wary of committing too soon.
“Everybody is holding back until they know who gets elected,” said Mohamed […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day of profligate waste in Renewable World
It’s barely spring in Australia and already we’re reaching the point where there’s too much solar. There’s such an excess of useless energy, prices are negative, meaning the hapless generators have to pay people to take the poison power away. And on Sunday, at a time when investors ought be making their peak profit for the day, they were rushing to turn 80% of their panels off.
Feel the pain — the stunted curve of the solar plants (below) is supposed to be the same shape as the rooftop PV.
In reality, this is how we make the parabolic curve of orbital solar physics fit a rectangular box — by building five times as much as we need and wasting most of it.
Anero.id
Bear in mind, this is just the start of a the lumpy road to nowhere. Even though we already have more solar panels than we can use, we’re supposed to be installing 22,000 more panels every day in Australia to reach our mystical NetZero target.
Paul McArdle of WattClarity noticed the dire situation. As he says “rooftop PV is killing […]
By Jo Nova
In Great Achievements of Government mismanagement, there is a $1 trillion dollar boom in LNG infrastructure around the world, and Australia is one of the top three exporters of LNG, far ahead of the rest, yet we’re about to run out of gas to keep the lights on. It’s so bad we probably have to import gas.
As if anyone needed another example of how small-minded-dictocrat-decrees can screw up a free market and achieve the exact opposite to what they tried to arrange, feast your eyes on Australia.
It takes real planning to start this far ahead and still bollix this up:
Australia was literally the worlds largest LNG exporter in 2020
One of our large energy companies APA Group says a vital Queensland gas pipeline was already running at capacity this winter, and things are so bad, gas power stations here may have to run off diesel, which is stupid on many levels at once. Not only does it lose triple points in Climate-Scrabble, being a dirty high emissions fuel, it’s one of the only fossil fuels we aren’t swimming in. We have 300 years in proven reserves of coal and if we’re lucky, just […]
The clean green future doesn’t have much room for wilderness
By Jo Nova
John Constable puts some numbers on The terrifying scale of the green revolution in The Spectator this week.
Ponder just the scale of the Sophia Offshore industrial wind plant being built off the UK. The wind is free, but to collect enough of it to power 2% of the country, the UK will have to build 100 wind turbines, some 200 kilometers out in the North Sea. Each blade is 108m long and weighs 65 tons, or about as much as a semi-trailer. When the wind blows hard enough, about 200 tons of matter will rotate above the ocean. The box holding all the spinning parts together weighs another 500 tons and needs to be suspended 140 meters up in the air over the waves and during storms.
Each of the 100 turbines will reach 250 meters high, which is “only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building”. So much effort and so little to show for it.
To make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall in the drink with the first stiff breeze, the turbines need to be weighed down with more than a thousand […]
By Jo Nova
If anyone made a game shooting lasers at parasitic flying climate believers they would be arrested for hate-speech. But if a government agency promotes a game that dehumanizes, mocks and kills critics of the government “Green program”, they’ll probably get another grant.
A bit like the 10:10 “blow up deniers children” video, this game accidentally reveals the intellectual and moral vacuum that Big-Government funding inevitably flows to, unless there is a true Free Media to embarrass and mock it. And unfunded blogs like this are that free media.
The State pays these Groomers of Hate:
German state media broadcaster develops virtual reality game in which players shoot lasers at flying climate denialists, in perhaps the most eccentric effort to propagandise teenagers known to man
By Eugyppius
Climatists at the German state media broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR) have used the mandatory license fees they collect from all German households to produce an astounding virtual reality video game called GreenGuardiansVR. In this game, players shoot lasers at flying climate denialists to defeat disinformation and save the planet (h/t RatSays). This is literally true, this thing really exists. It will be released to the public sometime in […]
By Jo Nova
Mark the turning point: Climate activists know they have to hide “the climate” to win the election
Now that Trump is ready to make climate change an issue, the last thing the Democrats want is to put this debate out on the table. So their strategy is to say nothing about it, in case they offend the voters in the middle. As Marc Morano says “‘No one is buying their ‘climate emergency’ claptrap anymore’“.
In an extraordinary headline the New York Times is letting everyone know that the new “green” thing to do is to sit back quietly and wait for her to win. They don’t want activists to complain she’s gone soft on climate change and accidentally trick her into making public commitments which Donald Trump will use against her.
We’re at the point where the Climate die-hards openly admit that it will cost them votes if she talks about the climate. They know the voters don’t want it, and the only way keep the Green Gravy flowing is to hide it.
And these are the same people saying Trump is destroying democracy. They don’t want a mandate for action anymore, they just want to win. […]
ENI Katherine — might as well be a pagan temple to the Sun.
By Jo Nova
The Northern Territory is a test case for renewable energy and it’s a bonfire
In 2016, the new Labor Government waved a magic wand and commanded they would be 50% renewable by 2030. The experts said it was doable and would save $30 million a year. They gave out the permits for large solar installations, which began construction in 2019, but then suddenly changed the rules in 2020, and wouldn’t let the solar plants connect to the main Darwin-Katherine grid. Unbelievably, 64 megawatts of solar panels that cost $40 million dollars have sat, doing nothing, for four long years.
“It’s just reflecting back into space, not being used to power the grid and to substitute for diesel and gas turbine production,” said local vet Peter Trembath, who leased his land to energy company Eni Australia for the solar project.
“It’ll be some technical issue, but you’d reckon they would have sorted that out before Eni spent $40 million to erect it.” — Max Rowley, ABC News June 2022
It’s always the Grids fault…
The reason they […]
By Jo Nova
What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?
Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?
Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:
“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”
It’s only a week without electricity…
Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)
Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]
By Jo Nova
It’s something to be proud of: Russia, Australia and USA have the biggest Greenhouse Gas Export footprint on Earth. It’s a bizarrely contrived title though, where we have to ignore domestic emissions and blame countries instead for the fuels they dig up which someone else uses. (You know they want to).
We could play this game in so many ways. If China uses Australian coal to make a fridge, do those emissions belong to Australia, or China or to the Norwegian who bought the fridge? Correct answer: “all three”. The game of emissions mobile-blame means the shame can be applied to whichever patsy is the most useful. Double counting is not a mistake, it’s a marketing tool.
In a normal world, no one is responsible for what someone does with goods they sold, but in green economics, comrade, it all belongs to the Party.
You are supposed to badger and harass the people you sold the goods to, to ask them not to use it:
[Dr Gillian Moon] said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies […]
By Jo Nova
A group of arty psychologists has accidentally shown how much skeptics can achieve if they just speak up.
The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.
Their big “discovery” was that hearing something skeptical a second time gave it a significant boost in believability, even when the audience were 90% believers. Their big conclusion was the advice to essentially never utter a skeptical word, just repeat the propaganda:
“Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”
They appear to be oblivious that their advice essentially kills the idea of open public debate. They don’t mention public debate or free speech. Possibly, since they are at an Australian university, they’ve never come across it.
But the core message comes through at The Guardian — they are scared skeptics […]
By Jo Nova
The Crash Test Dummy Nation wins a Gold Medal in Electricity Prices
And you thought last week was bad. While the single spike at $17,000 a megawatt hour in five states simultaneously was a record, just a week later we have the double spike bonfire — peaking at breakfast and dinner on the same day in our two largest states. That’s a high degree-of-difficulty (to pay the bill). This was not just a 5-minute bid rocket — it was 90 full minutes of blitzkreig twice in a day for both NSW and Victoria. With admirable supporting efforts in burning money in Tasmania and South Australia for breakfast, and then in Queensland, which joined the financial bonfire for dinner.
The average price for the whole 24 hour period of August 5th was eye-watering. Last week the spike flattened out to about $300 per megawatt hour across the day. But yesterday in NSW and Victoria, the average price was $2,150 across both states for 24 hours in a row.
It’s possible the AEMO will have to take over the market again in some states to put the fire out.
Welcome to renewable hell
At both peaks Victoria was burning […]
By Jo Nova
And the flavor of the month is “failure”
Air New Zealand announced this week that it would not be able to cut its carbon emissions by 29% by 2030. The levers were “outside their control”, they lamented, which was the polite way of saying there isn’t enough sustainable jet fuel in the world, electric planes die after a few weeks, and no one has invented a low emissions plane yet. At the moment the only kind of Net-Zero-flying is not to fly at all.
Current supplies of sacred sustainable fuel are rapidly growing but barely 0.5% of total requirements. Even though production is expected to triple this year to 1.5 Mt of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, the industry needs 200 times what is currently available.
If someone could just invent an anti-gravity machine, or a nuclear jet…
Air New Zealand pulls the plug on 2030 climate targets
By Charlotte Graham-McLay, Associated Press
Air New Zealand has pulled the plug on its climate targets saying the resources needed to meet them are unaffordable and unavailable.
In a statement the airline said it was removing its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and will […]
By Jo Nova
Like a sabre:
This is amazing 😂 pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024
“I am the ultimate diversity hire, I’m both a woman and a person of color, so if you criticize anything I say, you’re both a sexist and a racist”
AI will destroy jobs… (hopefully one in particular).
But both sides can use this tool — to construct a narrative, as well as to destroy it.
Reality may become very hard to find with unmarked Deepfake voices “on the loose” — especially if there is no shared public forum to hammer out the truth. That seems like a brilliant but dangerous game. The thing about great satire, as opposed to deepfake lies, is that when it’s done well, and it speaks the truth (in a fake voice), the target wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by denying they said it.
But perhaps we need an AI watermark…
h/t Stephen Neil
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Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built
There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:
The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip […]
By Jo Nova
Climate fatigue is upon us
Yet another survey shows most people know what to say when asked banal questions of climate dogma — “Yes they are “very worried”. But more than half the population don’t believe climate change is going to harm them and they have “no intention” of giving up meat, or their cars or their pets. And for people who only fly once a year, the idea of flying less was very unappealing. Worse, the under 35s like taking a series of flights each year is so normal now it’s “part of their identity”.
After years of this tedious preachy non-debate the report authors even had to acknowledge that “virtue signaling” was a thing, and it was turning off middle and lower class people. Rather than being seen as heroes, those who did a lot to prevent climate change were seen as boring and earnest, and either miserable martyrs or people who are “intentionally vocal” about their actions, partly as a way to show off. The working poor didn’t like being talked down to, and it reinforced the idea that “climate action” was something for people who could afford it. It’s a rich girls […]
By Jo Nova
There’s a revolt in British politics
Conservatives-in-name-only have suffered the biggest wipe-out in 200 years. Reform UK has won four seats so far, with only about 11 seats not finalized. They’ve done this in a mere matter of weeks, with no funding, no branch structure and in a snap election. From nowhere they won 60% as many votes as the Conservative Party that was the UK government. That is really extraordinary. They are running second in “hundreds of seats” which means that in a first-past-the-post system, they could pick up as many as 6 million votes but only convert that into a small number of seats. But by polling so well across the UK, they represent a large political force. Both older establishment parties will be wary of losing more voters. As the third biggest force in British politics they will change the behaviour of the two major parties in a way that is not reflected in the seat tally.
Ponder that Reform UK won more votes than the Lib-Dems, but at the moment the Lib-Dems look like winning 70 seats, compared to the Reform tally of 4 seats. There is a huge unmet desire in British […]
Coal trains in Bihar, India November 2023. by Salil Kumar Mukherjee
By Jo Nova
India is going gangbusters building coal
The need for energy in India is so dire, the Modi government just leaned on the power companies to get their act together. Instead of adding the usual 1 – 2 gigawatts of new coal power, which they have for a lot of the last decade, last year they ordered enough gear to build 10 gigawatts. And this year Modi wants them to aim for 31 gigawatts. Which is about the same capacity as the entire coal generation of the Australian National Grid (and our gas plants too).
Somewhat miraculously, they are talking of building them “in the next 5 or 6 years”:
India ‘Asks Utilities to Order $33bn in Gear to Lift Coal Output’ Rush to add more coal plants
India is rushing to add fresh coal-fired plants as it is barely able to meet power demand with the existing fleet in non-solar hours.
Post pandemic, the country’s power demand scaled new records on the back of the fastest rate of economic growth among major economies and increased instances of heatwaves.
July 5th, 2024 | Tags: Coal, Fossil Fuel, India | Category: Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, India, Uncategorized |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
The Democrats needed a reason to dump their placeholder candidate for 2024, and that convention is coming soon. Obviously they want to drop in a new candidate at the last minute with just enough time to ride home on the honeymoon glow. Debates are not usually held before the conventions.
They were always going to throw Biden under the bus, but this way they stop him being the lame duck for as long as possible while they protect their real candidate from scrutiny. Republicans counting chickens at this point are far too relaxed.
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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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