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Image by David Mark from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
We are a fossil fueled world. Solar & wind power make up just 7.5% 6% of our energy needs.*
The world has set a new record for energy use in the last year. And even though renewables are being installed at the fastest rate they ever have been, it isn’t enough to keep up with the growing demand for energy let alone to “convert” the world to Net Zero.
Overall, despite our best efforts to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the world remains “stuck” getting 82% of its energy from them.
The Energy Institute has released the Statistical Review of World Energy, and it shows global energy use has not only recovered from the pandemic, it is now 3% higher than it was pre-Covid in 2019. The relentless human desire for energy continues. In 2022, humans used 1% more energy than they did the year before and 70% of that growth was from China.
To put the historic size of the “Renewable Energy Transition” into focus, here’s the last century of energy transformation. The Energy Institute did not seem to want to highlight the insignificance of renewable energy, so […]
The new onshore models have rotors 170 meters long | Siemens Gamesa
By Jo Nova
It’s a bloodbath in the wind industry.
Despite the wind being free, collecting it appears to cost a fortune. Siemens Energy lost a third of its stock price on Friday. Just like that, seven billion dollars in market value disappeared.
Only a month ago they were expecting to break even, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the executives appear to have been blindsided by the rapidly escalating maintenance costs. The problem is so bad, and perhaps fundamental, that shareholders in other turbine manufacturers are selling out. Vestas Wind fell 7% Friday.
Siemens Energy Share Price, Yahoo Finance
The promise was that wind turbines would keep getting cheaper as they got bigger and better. Instead, issues are appearing now even in new installations, and people are starting to wonder if they’ve made the turbines too big too fast. The bearings and blades are wearing out, and the costs to fix them are crippling.
Clean Energy’s Latest Problem Is Creaky Wind Turbines
Carol Ryan, Wall Street Journal
Shares in Siemens Energy plunged by a third after it said turbine […]
By Jo Nova
…
Sweden has thrown away the sacred renewables talisman and opened the escape valve from the Temple of WindySolar-Inc. They’ve done the obvious thing anyone who was worried about CO2 would have done in 1992 — aimed for nuclear.
They have switched their 100% “renewables” target by 2045 to a 100% fossil-free target. It’s still a pagan antipathy of the sixth element of the periodic table. But at least it’s a more pragmatic version.
Sweden topped the EU list for renewables share of energy in the last tally — albeit with mostly biomass and hydropower. It was a star of the renewables set — number 1 on the Climate Council list of the “11 countries leading the way“. Yet here they are effectively giving up on the unreliable generators. Surely this must hurt?
The team at NetZeroWatch applaud the Swedish shift, and suggest the UK follow.
Sweden adopts new fossil-free target, making way for nuclear
Florence Jones, Power Technology
Sweden’s parliament adopted a change to its energy targets on Tuesday, which will see it become 100% fossil fuel-free by 2045.
The change means that nuclear generation can count towards […]
By Jo Nova
Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
The P-Volt made by Tecnam
Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights
Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we […]
By Jo Nova
The land that is the Renewable Crash Test Dummy is holding its breath
This time last year, the Australian energy market turned into a kind of Hunger Games spectacle with daily feeding-fest at dinner time where prices were so burning hot that unhedged smaller retailers begged their own customers to leave them and then the whole market was suspended. The bonfire was so big we’re still paying for it, and retail electricity prices are set to rise another 25% in a few weeks.
So it’s no surprise that as the cold weather arrives downunder, everyone involved in energy is “on edge”. Suddenly Australian corporate leaders are telling it like it is — the Alinta Gas chief says there is just no way we can build enough renewables in time — he can’t even “see a way” of building enough renewables to compensate for the coal units that are being closed.
The man who used to run the Snowy Hydro Scheme agrees (and then some) — saying we need to build a “Snowy” every year, and we are being lied to (his words) and it will take not 8 years, but 80 years to get there. The […]
By Jo Nova
Just another day of Wind turbine failure — 6GW in 16 hours
There was no cyclone, no storm, no national disaster, but our national infrastructure collapsed just the same. Blame a high pressure cell.
Last week TonyFromOz noticed that the output from all 79 industrial wind plants in Australia disappeared overnight from 6GW to just 0.4GW. Imagine if an entire state of coal plants failed in the space of 16 hours and nobody cared?
Wind plants fail all the time and wreak havoc on the grid. It’s just “business as usual” or rather “subsidies as usual”. The rainbow list of acronyms below the graph shows every single wind plant in five states of Australia was accounted for in this dismal tally.
Wind turbine failure: TonyFromOZ
Billions of dollars rests on whether we can stop high pressure cells forming near Adelaide…
As Tony points out, the more wind towers we build, the worse this mayhem will be. Weather comes and weather goes but when the doldrums hit, it wipes out all 79 industrial plants together. Only wind plants built outside the high pressure cell could smooth out this failure. Offshore wind farms would have failed at […]
By Jo Nova
Let it be known that the skeptics are, and always have been, the environment’s best friend. The Greens, sadly are the wilderness wrecking, naive minions of the Establishment Powers who will sacrifice whales in a quest to impress their industrial banker overlords. They tell themselves they are saving whales 100 years from now with the same windmills that kill the whales today.
Our good friends at Heartland and CFACT are working to stop the insanity in a guerilla campaign.
“SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG”.
@ClimateDepot
Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts
Josh Christenson, NY Post
“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally okay with this agenda.”
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”
Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the […]
By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
The new hole in the ground in the Snowy 2.0 scheme.
By Jo Nova
Complexity has a price, and a renewables grid is a bit like a 240 volt moving Rubiks cube. Here we see an unnecessary project hit by a random factor that in turn will affect all the others, blowing out other costs and schedules.
Australia’s breakneck energy transition, driven like a crash test dummy by government subsidies, depends on finishing the massive pumped hydro scheme called Snowy 2.0. However it has hit another delay no one apparently saw coming.
“Australia’s biggest renewable energy project” is the $6 – 10 billion plan to pump water uphill so it can run back down again to generate electricity every time the windmills and solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure, which is nearly every day. The entire project is superfluous in a grid with coal power — as we know from the last fifty years when we didn’t need it.
Unfortunately a 2,400 ton Tunnel Boring Machine called Florence is quite stuck under a cave-in. According to the ABC she started ten months ago, and is supposed to be digging her way through 15 kilometres (10 miles) of mountain. […]
By Jo Nova
Arecleoch Wind Farm | Mary and Angus Hogg.
While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?
If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.
The wind turbine industry today […]
Floating humpback whale offshore of Delaware. Photo: Marine Education, Research & Rehabilitation Institute.
By Jo Nova
There have been a lot of dead whales on the East Coast of the US lately. David Wojik noticed that NOAA was investigating 178 dead whales in something called an Unusual Mortality Event, or a UME — it’s like an episode of X-Files.
NOAA says this wave of strandings mysteriously started in 2016 which was before the offshore wind factory industry got going — but Wojik points out the timing matches very well. Offshore lease sales for the wind industry ramped up 2015-16. There were nine big sales, he says, off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. And not so coincidentally, apparently 2016 was also the year that NOAA started giving permission slips for whale hunts, sorry whale harrassments for “geotechnical and site characterization surveys“.
In bureaucrat-valium-lingo, the license to cause incidental dead whales is called an IHA — or an Incidental Harassment Authorization. This appears to have fooled Greenpeace.
Although since wind turbines are a sacred totem, NOAA could have called them a 007 License to Kill Humpbacks and they might not have cared either. The whales are dying for […]
By Jo Nova The amount of storage America needs for a grid run on erratic wind and solar power is so galactically vast the numbers don’t matter. Because every which way they are calculated, every estimate, the highest one, the lowest one, it doesn’t make any difference. They are all unaffordable.
And they’re not just unaffordable in the sense that it hurts. They’re unaffordable in the sense that there is no economy left.
Basically America would need 12,500 times as many batteries as it has now. At current prices this would cost about $175 trillion dollars, which is eight times the entire GDP of the United States.
Some researchers predict costs will fall, but even at fantasy low ball estimates that are one tenth of current prices, the cost of those batteries is still nearly $20 trillion.
Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
David Wojick, CFACT
We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it […]
By Jo Nova
The government of Italy is planning to build new nuclear power plants. And if it happens, it marks an astonishing turnaround.
This was the Garigliano Nuclear Power plant in Italy in 1970. They already had the solution to it all, energy wars, Vladimir Putin, and fantasy “climate control” fifty years ago.
How much have we lost? Photo: Demaag
But Italy abandoned nuclear energy thirty years ago. It’s the only major European country to have stopped using nuclear power. (Though Germany is trying to).
Italy had four nuclear plants in the early 1980s but after the Chernobyl accident, they held a referendum on nuclear power, and the voters didn’t want it anymore, so they closed the last two reactors by 1990, (back in the days when voting made a difference). Furthermore, Italy held another referendum in 2011, and 94% of the voters rejected it again, which shows how desperate the situation must be now if an opinion poll like that has shifted so far in 11 years?
The thing is, Italy only makes 25% of its energy itself, and so it is suddenly very attuned to “geopolitical risk”.
Pierre Goselin at NoTricksZone found a news piece […]
By Jo Nova
It’s one big backside-covering Psy-Op trying to bury the bad news
Minister Klaudia Tanner, back in 2020 when she looked decidedly more chirpy.
Klaudia Tanner, the Austrian Defence Minister, dropped the extraordinary bombshell that a long blackout is coming. She hopes you don’t notice that is a dramatically bad and new threat. It’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault, she says (not the government that burned energy security on a Green bonfire in a fantasy quest for nicer weather). And when it happens, if you suffer and run out of supplies, or die in the cold, that’s your fault.
Who knew it was your job to maintain wood, oil or gas and food and water to tide you over a week long total blackout? Well, now you do.
So the announcement of the shocking state of the Austrian grid is buried under the excuses:
Austrian Defense Minister Warns Europeans Are Unprepared For Days-Long Blackouts
Paul Joseph Watson, Summit News
“The question is not whether it (the blackout) will come, but when it will come,” said Tanner, blaming the war in Ukraine.
“For Putin, hacking attacks on Western power supplies are a […]
By Jo Nova
Hands up who wants to lose money?
These numbers that Rupert Darwall has put together in Real Clear Energy are extraordinary:
2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth
The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.
Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.
Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.
Not only did demand […]
By Jo Nova
Green Europe is running out of electrons
Last Monday in Great Britain the entire steel industry shut down because the wind stopped and wholesale prices reached £2,586 a megawatt-hour. As winter cranks up, British factories are getting ready to shutdown, as the threat of small, medium and blockbuster blackouts loom. In the fifth largest economy in the world, thousands of people are using communal warm spaces because they can’t afford electricity any longer, and the largest North Sea gas producer has decided not to drill for more gas just when the country needs it. The government has slapped a new tax on it, thus achieving the exact opposite of what the government aimed for.
Meanwhile over in Germany one eighth of the entire national economy is now consumed with paying for the energy crisis of 2022. They tried to hold back the seas in 2100 but forgot to secure their own electricity a year in advance.
These are very expensive experiments They aren’t telling you this but UK is close to nationwide blackouts
by David Maddox , Daily Express
But the one nobody is discussing is the real possibility the lights could […]
By Jo Nova
When does it make sense to build 122 giant industrial turbines that can’t operate for nearly half a year?
The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.
Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.
This is infrastructure that only works about 30% of the time anyhow, and now will be reduced to something like 17%. The theoretical capacity will be 340MW in the first stage, supposedly growing to 900MW if they can somehow build the extra 170km transmission lines and perhaps get the taxpayer to help build another undersea cable across the Bass Strait. (If the company was going to pay, why was the Tasmanian government spending $20m on the “business case”?)
It will be one of the largest wind factories in the Southern Hemisphere (the biggest being West of Melbourne), but as Tom Quirk showed years ago, when […]
By Jo Nova
The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero
The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.
The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)
Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.
How fast those balance sheets change…
Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.
‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]
By Jo Nova
South Australia survived the big scary sunny day yesterday, but had to shut off solar power and throw all those sacred green electrons into a thousand open circuits.
Yet again, another spooky voltage spike appeared, suddenly leaping from 245 to 257 volts in less than three minutes and shaking down any impertinent solar panels. That was at 10am. From then on, despite the growing sunlight, the combined solar output of South Australia stayed flat at around 1.2GW. Compare this to last week — before the safety cord to Victoria broke — then, solar generation was peaking at 2.1 GW. So the great renewable wonderland is managing to keep the lights on, but nearly a billion watts of solar power is sitting uselessly on rooftops and in fields every sunny day at lunch time.
This is not the cheap and efficient golden path to the future, but the Bolshevik elephant that eats your retirement plans. Despite the oversupply of unreliable generation, yesterday the state was using fossil fuels to supply between 20% and 80% of their electricity.
Mark Jessop recorded the voltage and commented: “Lovely sunny day here in islanded SA, which of course means @SAPowerNetworks has bumped […]
By Jo Nova
The biggest blackout has hit South Australia since the statewide crash of 2016. It’s due to a weather calamity, but the renewables state is struggling to keep the frequency stable for a whole week without the rest of the national grid to lean on. This time they have the back up generation, but they’re going to great lengths now to stop the surges from solar and wind — there’s no where to dispose of excess electricity…
On Saturday afternoon a storm system blitzed out 423,000 lightning strikes and brought down some 500 lines, including the Heywood interconnector that joins South Australia (SA) to Victoria. That is out of action until Friday, so for a whole week the Star Renewables State of South Australia is on its own — Islanded from the national grid. The test is here, and right now at 6am they’re running on 80% fossil fuels and 18% wind, plus millions of dollars has been spent on frequency control, and they’re trying to turn off the solar panels.
The storm caused blackouts affecting 163,000 customers or roughly 18% of the state. Power was restored for most within hours, but there were still 35,000 properties without […]
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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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