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How many Australian houses are covered in the trappings of slave labor? The EU has discovered some ethical rats inhabit their roofs.
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Tim Blair spots some turbo-powered hypocrisy among those that normally lecture the rest of us on ethical consumerism.
Solar: Slavery Sourced, Green Endorsed, Tax Subsidised
Ethically-sourced food, clothing, coffee and even magical healing crystals are a big draw to concerned green types, who profess to worry deeply about the origin of anything they buy.
But the same types aren’t too fussed over the origins of their holy solar panels.
Indeed. Awkward news came out last month that “Nearly every solar power panel sold in the European Union has its origins in China’s oppressed Xinjiang region.”
Fears over China’s Muslim forced labor loom over EU solar power
Politico
Panels include components produced in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where there are concerns about forced labor camps for Muslim minorities, including Uighurs.
The solar industry and Brussels lawmakers argue Europe’s renewable energy push should not come at a human cost amid long-standing international concern over reports China has detained 1 million people with Muslim backgrounds in camps […]
The latest academic voodoo doll tossed at Fossil Fuels is a study claiming that the industry gets $65 billion in “implicit” subsidies in the US.
The authors of the latest paper assume the broken climate models work, and then guesstimate what the cost of all that theoretical warming would be with economic models that aren’t much better. It’s a paywalled paper, but they don’t appear to account for all the net benefits of coal, oil and gas which include, keeping people alive and fertilizing forests and fields around the world for free. These aren’t guesstimates from the future but known good and great gifts from the last century or two.
Greening the Earth. Zaichun Zhu, (2016)
Send them the bill: the fossil fuel companies are subsidizing taxpayers
How much is a hundred years of free fertilizer worth?
If only academic institutions were more than Big Gov advertising agencies they might also have considered that fossil fuel companies are never paid for their part in boosting agricultural yields, nor in greening the forests. Some 18 million square kilometers of Earths surface has more biomass. Arid regions of the world are 11% greener, mostly thanks to CO2 and deserts are […]
Yesterdays free advertisement for the Renewables Industry comes from Peter Martin, ANU, and was swallowed whole by The Conversation, and then repeated by The ABC. (If only the ABC had three million dollars a day to spend on checking things before it published them, they might have warned the economist that he doesn’t understand much about the grid or even the energy market.) This kind of anti-coal PsyOps might work on teenagers: Electricity has become a jigsaw. Coal is unable to provide the missing pieces
March 16, 2021 1.46pm AEDT
Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, provides up to 20 per cent of Victoria’s power. It has been operating for 47 years. Since late 2017 at least one of its four units has broken down 50 times. Its workforce doubles for three to four months most years to deal with the breakdowns. It pumps out 3 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions.
And here’s Macarthur Wind Power plant, Victoria’s largest at 420-never-attained-MW. It breaks down nearly every single day:
Fig 1: Anero.id Macarthur Wind output
Martin goes on in a non-stop infomercial for wind and solar He must be aiming for 12 year old voters, or perhaps […]
There are lessons for conservatives from this eclectic election in the most isolated state on Earth. It was historic, epic, and “A complete and utter landslide“. And the message is “borders”. Remember “Build the Wall?” Conservatives all around the world seem to have forgotten the power and appeal of being able to control who and which viridae, come across the border. If the Democrats in the US fortified the wall, they might not have to fortify election results.
It’s a complete blitz. | The West Australian
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The election Saturday was a wipeout of legendary proportions among democracies anywhere. Only four years ago, the Liberals (conservatives, theoretically) were the ruling party in Western Australia. Today they hold but two, as in one plus one, seats in the lower house of the WA Parliament, out of 59. They may win 3. The Labor Party took 58% of the first preference votes (that’s almost unheard of). Labor will take the Upper House too. See: WA Election Results. Things are so extreme, the talk now is how the Parliament is not big enough to hold the Labor M.P.’s. The rooms are just not designed for one party having almost […]
Surprising no one: lumpy expensive electricity does not make for a High Tech Paradise
It’s another example of how more green jobs means less real ones. A German High Tech Chip maker driven to Singapore by renewable energy prices
Emden, Germany by Gritte
To understand the scale of just how green Germany is, ponder that it has the third largest wind power fleet in the world, with around 30,000 turbines. In 2020, wind power generated more than a quarter of German electricity and solar power another 10%. Despite all that *free* energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Germans are famous for their high tech engineering, but now they can’t afford to manufacture it at home. Siltronic is moving, and along with that presumably goes some of the intellectual property, brains, and security that comes with having that production locally.
h/t GWPF Chipmakers lament high taxes and levies on electricity in Germany 9.5 out of 10 based on 62 ratings […]
Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips
Texas toyed with cascading crises
The Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.
ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:
Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
— by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune
The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds […]
If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were?
Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.
Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac
Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine.
But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the […]
Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for months
A few hours ago, about one quarter of Texas still didn’t have power. After three or four days without power some houses are so cold the fishtanks have frozen over. Some people have been without power for 84 hours straight and ERCOT — the Texas Electricity management can’t say when it will be restored (though they have just announced it might be soon). It is still operating under the EEA 3 highest emergency level. Many people have had their power return for a couple of hours only to lose it again. And there is a burning anger at the unfairness of it all. People say they can see houses, shops and office buildings “lit up like Christmas trees” but have had no power themselves for days. Some are using their cars to warm themselves and charge phones but after three days they are running out of gas. There are restaurants that are offering free food.
It’s so cold in Texas homes that fish tanks are frozen. pic.twitter.com/IRuDjpG5Af
— Cleavon MD (@Cleavon_MD) February 18, 2021
Others are desperately using gas BBQ’s indoors even though it […]
Welcome to Woke World where states pretend to control the weather while the weather controls the state
An Arctic blast; an ice storm called Uri, has frozen up half the wind turbines in the hot southerly Big State of Texas.
Supplier Oncor is warning it may be hours before power is restored. People are livid, their pipes are freezing, some have had no electricity for 12 hours. Their website is down, their phone lines are out. People can’t even report outages.
UPDATE: NY Times is already blaming Climate Change for the frigid weather.
While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.
Anchorage, Alaska is warmer than parts of Texas.
At least five dead and 5 MILLION without power as winter storm Uri sweeps the nation, freezes wind turbines, plunges wind chills to -20 in Texas and causes tornadoes in the south west
Records will be broken in Texas
Daily Mail
Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without […]
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Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators.
López Obrador is called a populist, he talks of energy sovereignty, and speaks badly of predecessors who opened up the energy sector to foreign and private interests. He vowed to put ” at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.””
Mexico was once a climate leader – now it’s betting big on coal
David Agren in San Juan de Sabinas, The Guardian
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.
Not […]
Watch this space. The Western Australian election is four weeks off and the new young Liberal (“Conservative”) opposition leader has just made this a “climate change” election and launched himself to the left of the Labor Party by suggesting the state can close all government run coal plants by 2025.
Epic loss coming. The opposition leader may even lose his own seat (Dawesville, in Mandurah, held by only 0.8%). The National Party and minor conservative parties could do well from the aftermath.
Aiming for political correctness in a politically incorrect state?
WA political landscape turned on its head as Liberals outline renewable energy policy
[ABC News] One major party is making the case that renewables are the way of the future, the other is warning they will cripple jobs and send power prices skyrocketing. …it is politics as usual in Australia for the past decade. Except in this case, it is the WA Liberal Party calling for coal to be tossed aside and wind and solar to take its place, with Labor blasting the idea as “reckless”.
The Liberal Party were on a hiding to nothing before this announcement. The local Labor Premier hit 90% […]
Coal power is surging in the second largest economy even as China tells the rest of the world to “cut carbon”
If, hypothetically, China were to fund anti-coal groups in the countries it competes with — it would be a successful strategy to hurt them and advantage China. Which journalists would tell us if that were happening?
China’s new coal power plant capacity in 2020 more than three times rest of world’s: study
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.
The country won praise last year after President Xi Jinping pledged to make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060. But regulators have since come under fire for failing to properly control the coal power sector, a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas.
Including decommissions, China’s coal-fired fleet capacity rose by a net 29.8 GW in 2020, even as the rest of the world made cuts of 17.2 GW, according to research released on Wednesday by […]
Transport accounts for 15% of human emissions of CO2, or practically nothing.
Despite the lip service everyone pays to “climate change” when Leonardo asks them to buy a smaller car, they nod and buy an SUV. They are voting with their wallets.
SUV growth, graph. 2020
Rise of SUV’s Complicates efforts to rein in Auto Emissions
Scott Carpenter, Forbes
…SUVs are conquering the world. ….For the first time ever in the U.S. last year, sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) likely accounted for half or just over half of all vehicles sold, according to recent data from IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm. Others are rapidly catching up. Between 2010 and 2019, the share of SUVs in overall car sales in China jumped from 14% to 44%. In Europe the SUV share climbed from 10% to 36%.
Seas are rising, storms are coming, and heat waves are wiping out crops and ski seasons, but half of all new car buyers are buying SUV’s in the USA.
h/t GWPF
9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
It’s another hidden subsidy for “Green Power”.
Big-Bandaid: Unreliable generators need thousands of kilometers of extra transmission lines.
The totally non-essential new interconnector between NSW and SA will now cost nearly a billion more than was expected. It will add no new baseload generation but allow the random energy surges from South Australia to interfere with New South Wales supply. Surges of subsidized energy will break the balance sheets of cheap baseload infrastructure in NSW, making them less profitable, and driving them out of business unless they charge more for the fewer hours they operate. Both states will spend more on electricity but be less self sufficient, and more dependent on other states.
Why aren’t NSW generators complaining? Because they know prices will rise, not fall. Ask AGL — the more coal plants it can close, the more profits it can make from the gas and unreliable generators.
The extra interconnector won’t solve the real issues — it “probably” won’t change the massive high pressure weather systems that stop wind towers working in both states simultaneously. The magical transmission lines “probably” won’t stop the sun setting in Adelaide one hour after it sets in Sydney either. But it […]
All good environmentalists detest renewables and are appalled at the money wasted on the industrial renewables corporations.
All the rest are unwitting marketing agents who provide free advertising for banks and multinational conglomerate profits. In the process they hurt the poor and scorch the Earth.
In short: The world spent $3.6 trillion dollars over eight years, mostly trying to change the weather. Only a pitiful 5% of this was spent trying to adapt to the inevitable bad weather which is coming one way or another. Both solar and wind power are perversely useless at reducing CO2, which is their only reason for existing in large otherwise efficient grids. Wind farms raise the temperature of the local area around them which causes more CO2 to be released from the soil. Solar and wind farms waste 100 times the wilderness land area compared to fossil fuels, and need ten times as many minerals mined from the earth. Biomass razes forests, but protects underground coal deposits.
The role of large wind and solar power in national grids is to produce redundant surges of electricity at random or low-need times. They are surplus infrastructure designed in a religious quest to generate nicer weather. […]
Australians used to have an electricity grid that gave them the freedom to work from home
For years they told us to work at home to help the environment. But thanks to a decentralized unreliable grid, Australians are now being warned that it will be a “disaster” for the grid if they stay home and work with their air conditioner on in summer.
Now we better drive to work so the solar-windy-grid doesn’t fall over:
Why working from home could be a disaster for Australia’s electricity grid this summer
Emma Elsworthy, ABC
Air conditioners could send Australia’s power grid into meltdown this summer, as roughly one third of the workforce do their jobs from home, experts have warned.
According to research company Roy Morgan, more than 4.3 million Australians are working from home…
But warmer weather has come with a warning that increased use of air-conditioning in homes could lead to more blackouts and higher electricity bills.
“Air-conditioning is what drives our maximum demand in Australia,” said Peter Dobney, the former founding chairman of the Energy Users Association of Australia.
“We can expect higher prices, in fact, I […]
The Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a $10 billion bandaid to make up for Wind and Solar’s unreliability. Hydro storage is an anti-generator that destroys 20-30% of the electricity fed into it. It turns out it also destroys three quarters of the money fed into it, and some of the environment as well. What’s not to like?
by Steve Hunter. h/t StopTheseThings
Today a Who’s Who of Australian engineering are scathing about Snowy 2.0 in The Australian
The mammoth pumped Hydro scheme is a $10 billion dollar disaster that will never pay for itself, is already being superceded by battery technology, and will scar the land, infect pristine alpine lakes, risk critically endangered species, damage fishing grounds, and breach the Biosecurity Act in a National park. (Where are the environmentalists, Tim Flannery? Does anyone care?)
Pumped Hydro doesn’t even work on a small scale. Projects like it are being junked around the country before they get built and there has been only one other pumped hydro project “committed” in the last 20 years.
On the revenue side, the output of Snowy 2.0 from 2025 to 2042 is now forecast to be less than half the business case estimate, […]
President Xi will be delighted that so many industrial competitors are sabotaging their electrical grids with erratic, unreliable solar and wind power. Right now, The People’s Republic of China is the biggest platform in the world for the deployment of nuclear power technology. In twenty years, China has increased its fleet of nuclear power reactors from three to 48, with 11 more plants under construction. That means it will soon surpass France which has 57:
By the end of the twentieth century, France’s mature nuclear energy industry operated over fifty nuclear power reactors to supply about 80 percent of the electricity consumed by its population of 60 million people.1 By contrast, when China connects its fiftieth nuclear power reactor to the grid, which is expected in a few years, China’s nuclear power plants will contribute only about 5 percent of the electricity demanded by its population of 1.4 billion.2
Carnegie Endowment
At the moment the USA has the largest nuclear generation in the world, with more than double the production of the nearest competitor — France. But China began stockpiling uranium in 2007, and in the last five year plan released in 2016 — China aimed […]
The parasites take $1,300 per household each year in Australia
Australians could save $13 billion dollars a year if they weren’t forced to pay for pagan climate witchery.
If the bill collector knocked at the door and demanded $1,300 dollars each year to try to stop storms and floods a century from now, there would be riots in the streets. Instead the money is buried in complexity and taken in slices through unlabeled bills and receipts throughout the year. We list the GST. Imagine if we listed “the Climate Tax”?
Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation Senator has commissioned a study by Alan Moran to add up the cost. But why did he have to do that? Where was the Treasury, the Minister for Energy, the CSIRO, the ABC, the Labor Party, the State Premiers, and all our universities? All apparently, are out to lunch with the vested interests or running chicken, afraid of being called names.
Alan Moran adds up the state and federal subsidies, including the renewable schemes (like the SRET) that charge every electricity user for other people’s solar panels. He also includes the costs to businesses from higher electricity charges — which are invariably passed on to […]
South Australia has built unreliable generators on one third of all homes in the state. They are expensive, encased in glass, and all fail at the same time, usually for breakfast, and definitely for dinner. They randomly fail when clouds roll in, but consistently fail all night long. When they do work, they all work together, producing an excess of energy when no one need an excess. In order to pretend that this surge is useful, a billion dollars of working infrastructure has to switch off, scale down, spin its wheels, and toss money out the window.
A few weeks ago, the State Energy Minister of SA, Dan van Holst Pellekaan, warned that the state is only a few years away from reaching “net negative demand” which is a fancy-pants way of describing the moment that solar power makes more energy than the whole state can use. His reassuring comment was “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.”
With 250,000 unreliable generators in the state the midday excess is now so large it threatens to break things, drive up voltages, drive out reliable generators and generally muck up what was a finely […]
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