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By Jo Nova
Europe’s solar manufacturers are in a crisis
Forty year old German solar panel producers are closing factories they only opened three years ago.
The world now has the capacity to make 1,600 GW of solar panels annually, but demand has unexpectedly flat-lined — staying at barely 500GW. In a world awash with solar panels that no one needs, prices have fallen dramatically, but that hasn’t solved the glut which is so bad, people are using solar panels for fencing in Europe.
The CCP has bet big that the exponential growth curve in solar customers was going to keep being exponential. Instead, demand flattened off suddenly. Currently, 80% of the world’s solar panels are pouring out of China.
With impeccable timing, just weeks ago the Australian Government threw a billion dollars at a program to help Australia become a solar panel superfactory just at the moment when China is practically giving them away.
Can the solar industry keep the lights on?
Rachel Millard and Amanda Chu, Financial Times
“There is overcapacity in every segment, starting with polysilicon and finishing with the module,” said Yana Hryshko, head of global solar supply chain research at […]
If you are in Perth this weekend, I’ll be speaking about vandals and witchcraft in the National Energy Market for the Council for the National Interest (CNI)
Sunday 21st July 2024, 2.30pm to 4.30pm (Socialising from 1.30pm to 6.00pm) at the APIWA Clubroom, Rear No.10 Mallard Way Cannington 6107.
Readers here are welcome tomorrow. There is no charge but please RSVP to apimail AT apiwa.com.au
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By Jo Nova
Brown coal is the best kept secret in Australia
Imagine, in this cost-of-living crisis, if the nation discovered a 430 billion ton deposit that could produce electricity at a tenth the cost of gas and hydroelectricity? What a bonanza — the people could live like kings with heated pools, large homes, indoor spas and businesses would flock to the state to set up production lines. The state would become a trade giant and a mecca for tech.
Then imagine they let themselves be spooked into not using it for fear it would cause bad storms in a hundred years? Like the country is run by teenage girls…
Source: AER
Despite the costs of everything rising in 2024, the brown coal plants in Victoria are still offering to supply wholesale electricity at $8 per megawatt hour (which is 0.8c per kilowatt hour). That’s the average winning bid from brown coal plants across Quarter 1, 2024.
In the chart below of the last five years of quarterly prices, we can see that every single quarter brown coal power is the cheapest source of electricity there is bar none. (Wind and solar power, with their crazy negative […]
By Jo Nova
The irony! The only generator that can make affordable hydrogen is brown coal
The Great Green Hydrogen dream was killed by the dual impossibility paradox, it has no customers prepared to pay the Gucci level rates, and it can’t be made cheaper without using brown coal to which would mean it isn’t “green”.
The irony is practically radioactive — analysts admit Green Hydrogen is only economic if a company can get electricity at $30 to $40 per megawatt hour, which Australia had for decades, but blew away by adding “renewables”. Like every other nation on Earth, the more unreliable wind and solar we added, the more expensive our electricity got. These days the only generator that still make electricity at that price now is old brown coal.
For years Australian average wholesale electricity prices were $30/MWh
Sure, for five minute bids, and with generous subsidies stolen from taxpayers, wind and solar can pretend to be cheaper, but it turns out that the hydrogen factories, like every other factory, aren’t efficient if they stop and start every time a cloud rolls over, or […]
By Jo Nova
Is there nothing fossil fuels can’t do?
Climate change makes the Earth wobble on its axis. Now, if you shower too long, and enjoy that beefsteak too much, you could affect the tilt Earths axis. Are you feeling guilty yet, or just fed up that modern science is indistinguishable from the prophesies of Neolithic shamen?
Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame
By Harry Baker
New studies, which utilized AI to monitor the effects of climate change on Earth’s spin, have shown that our days are getting increasingly longer and that our planet will get more wobbly in the future. These changes could have major implications for humanity’s future.
We’re talking of fractions of a millisecond:
Initially, these changes will be imperceptible to us, but they could have serious knock-on effects, including forcing us to introduce negative leap seconds, interfering with space travel and altering our planet’s inner core, researchers warn.
So it’s probably your air-conditioner in Power Mode, but it could be due to crustal plates shifting:
A day on Earth lasts about 86,400 seconds. But the exact time it takes […]
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By Jo Nova
Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work
And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know. It’s not their fault. It’s not the Ministers fault. It’s not the fault of the solar power glut, or the wind drought, or the lack of spinning inertia, the dearth of despatchable power, or the byzantine complexity of managing a grid full of unreliable generators being randomly unreliable. The grid is not more fragile because we built 100,000 kilometers of long delicate high-voltage-interconnectors, swaying in the wind, and made of cheap imported steel because we can’t afford to make proper steel ourselves. No!
It’s your fault the blackouts are coming. You didn’t ride your bike, you didn’t eat tofu and crickets, you didn’t buy enough solar panels and you drove your car to work, you planet-monster. What did you expect?
Climate Change is coming for your electricity grid.
It took four writers, five advisors, several editors and probably buckets of money to write an obsequious article radiating nonsense. It’s like […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a lever point in history. Millions of people want answers. Such is the demand for news on one of the last free platforms, Elon Musk reports that X usage hit another all time high yesterday. In the US, traffic was 23% higher than it had ever been on any single day ever.
Meanwhile all the people who know that Donald Trump is the Single Biggest Threat to Democracy, must be wondering why Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are so pleased that the Threat survived.
As Douglas Wilson says:
If Trump really is a “threat to democracy,” if he really is Hitler redivivus (as the New Republic cover currently has it), if he is going to usher in a Mordor-like totalitarian regime, then what could possibly be wrong with an assassination to save democracy? We lionize Bonhoeffer because of his willingness to be part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Ehud did the Israelites a great service when he took out Eglon (Judg. 3:15).
What kind of sense does it make for Biden to call Trump up to congratulate him on his survival if Trump really is a threat to democracy? The call […]
By Jo Nova
We knew this was coming
Donald Trump barely survived an assassination attempt while on stage in Pennsylvania. The bullet hit his ear. Other bullets killed someone behind him, and critically injured two others. The assassin was on a rooftop just 130 yards away, and was shot dead. (How convenient). He has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, aged just 20. He probably had no idea how expendable he was.
Someone on twitter — “This will be the most iconic photo in the history of this country”.
ZeroHedge reports that the BBC interviewed a witness who says he saw the assassin on the roof before the shots were fired and warned the secret service, but they didn’t prevent this. He wonders why they didn’t have their own guys on every roof.
The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign https://t.co/ihlEC5NP1w
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2024
Joe Biden a week ago:
“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to […]
By Jo Nova
We know what secrets they fear the most, by how they overreact
In France, the second largest news network let an economist go on air and declare he thought global warming was a lie and a scam used to justify State intervention. He even went on to say it is a form of totalitarianism. Shockingly (to the regulators Arcom), the CNEWS TV hosts did not contest this, and nor did anyone else in the studio. For this, 11 months later, the TV channel is being fined €20,000.
Too close to the truth then?
A popular French rolling news channel has been fined for broadcasting climate scepticism unchallenged
By Saskia O’Donoghue, EuroNews
During the programme, prominent economist Philippe Herlin shared personal climate scepticism – but was not contradicted by anybody else in the TV studio, including the hosts.
“Anthropogenic global warming is a lie, a scam… Explaining to us that it is because of Man, no, that is a conspiracy, and why does that have so much weight?”, Herlin said. “Because it justifies the intervention of the State in our lives, and it absolves the State from having to reduce its […]
https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-mammoth-construction-update-dec22
In a world of turmoil, trust the Sydney Morning Herald to ask the key question of the day: Should Australia house a giant vacuum cleaner to suck carbon from the sky?
In May this year, on the flat plains of an Icelandic geothermal reserve, a gigantic vacuum cleaner designed to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the sky was switched on.
The machine, called Mammoth, would not be entirely out of place on a Mad Max set….
The big machine in Iceland and will soon start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year and turning it into calcium carbonate rock underground.
In a world where humans make 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually the project will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 each year, which is approximately one millionth of human annual emissions.
Cost estimates are said to be “closer to $1,000 a ton” to remove the CO2. Effectively, we’re spending 36 million dollars US to convert one millionth of human annual emissions of a fertilizing gas into limestone rock we don’t need.
Flagrant Big Government wastage doesn’t get much more pointless than this.
File this away for […]
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
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on yet another paper that shows things were much hotter back in the early Holocene when there were hardly any coal fired power plants, and cars were just molecules spread across hematite deposits, emitting nothing.
Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.
In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.
One particular oyster shell was especially hard to ignore because it was a 42cm across. When it was carbon-14 dated, it clocked in as 7,500 years old. This particular kind of oyster is not found around Taipei any more (even in the ocean), but is found in colder waters around Japan and Korea. So the researchers wondered if this meant the oceans were somehow improbably higher but cooler at the time. They also wanted to find out if these oysters […]
By Jo Nova
Even though India now consumes more than Europe and the US combined, there is really only one coal consumer. Just to update those figures…
Remember you are a planet-wrecker, but China just has growing pains
China burns four times as much coal as the second largest coal burner in the world. Everyone else is an also-ran in the coal stakes. For every ton the US consumes, China fries 12 times as much. And poor patsy Australia, for every ton we apologetically ignite, China burns 50. More coal was burned on Earth in 2023 than ever before in human history, and more than half of it was burned in China. Moreover, despite all the Sino nodding to sacred targets, China shows no intention of putting the brakes on the coal train. Around the world, 95% of all new coal power plants built in 2023 were built in China.
Where is the apoplexy?
The UN has met every year for twenty-eight years to badger everyone to stop using coal to appease the Goddess of Trace Gases and Weird Weather — all while China became the coal furnace of the world.
Or perhaps The UN met every year, […]
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 […]
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 World must act, The Science is clear say Google, but Armageddon will have to wait while they make money from AI
Saint Google’s climate piousness vanished the moment they had to give up something they cared about. The unwashed masses need to take cold showers, eat bugs and fly less often, but if those same people want artificial intelligence, who cares about the heat waves or the hurricanes? Do carbon emissions matter, or don’t they?
For three decades Saint Google strove to save the world from CO2 (and from skeptical opinions). Google were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007, the first to commit to operating 24/7 on carbon-free energy. They boast they’re helping 550 cities to reduce a gigaton of carbon emissions. Then opportunity knocked and set fire to those plans.
In 2020 they boldly set the goal of being 100% carbon-free by 2030, now three years later, their emissions are up 50% on what they were in 2019.
In September 2020, it was Google’s “Most Ambitious Decade” because the fires of climate change were already upon them:
Google announces it will run on carbon-free energy by 2030
“We […]
By Jo Nova
The real cost of back up
Imagine building and maintaining a perfectly good gas plant and then having it sit around for five whole years “just in case”?
There’s been a wind drought in the last three months in Australia, which meant hydro power had been used more than expected to fill the gap. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s been dry spell for most of the last year in Tasmania too and the dams were getting low. So on June 6th, the Combined Cycle Gas plant at Tamar Valley was set up to run for the first time since 2019.
Back in 2016 the maintenance costs of the keeping the CCGT at Tamar Valley on “30 day” standby was $12 to $24 million a year, depending on who you asked. So the five year cost of gas backup is in the order of $100 million, but those costs will be slapped on the gas plant bill, when really they’re a weather dependent renewables cost. What we need is reliable energy, not random electricity. If energy companies were only paid for reliable dispatchable power, the wind and solar plants would have to build their own “back up […]
By Jo Nova
Le Pen has weaponized ‘punitive’ environmental policies, and voters seem to like that
In the largest turnout since 1981, French voters chose the “Far Right” National Rally party in a record vote of 33 per cent. It is the first round of voting with the second on July 7th, but The Washington Post is already comparing the potentially “shocking” French election result with the 2016 Brexit win in the UK. The Guardian said the unthinkable has become plausible.
French elections: Why is the rejection of environmentalism a driving force behind France’s far-right vote?
By Matthieu Goar, Le Monde
After long neglecting environmental issues, the far-right party has made the denunciation of allegedly ‘punitive’ environmental policies into its new electoral weapon.
The former presidential candidate railed against “Brussels,” which “forces you, almost overnight, to change your boiler for €15,000,” against the “authoritarian reductions to agricultural land” and against the “heartless European Commission.”
“Don’t they have as their objective the reduction of human activity as a whole?” she asked, before connecting the issue to her obsession with French people’s daily lives, a strategy that […]
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.
Flag: Clément Bardot
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By Jo Nova
Sixty percent of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted since 1985 but today the corals are healthier than ever
In 1985 humans were emitting only 19.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, and now we emit 37 billion tons. In the meantime AIMS have been dragging divers thousands of kilometers over the reefs to inspect the coral cover. These are the most detailed underwater surveys on the largest reef system in the world, and they show that far from being bleached to hell, the corals are more abundant than we have ever seen them.
As Peter Ridd points out, when the reef was doing badly, AIMS was happy to combine the data on the whole reef, so we could lament its demise. But lately AIMS splits it into separate sections and if Peter Ridd didn’t check the numbers, who would know it was a record across the full 2,300 kilometer length of the reef? And that may be exactly the point. As Ridd reminds us, in 2012 the AIMS team predicted the coral cover in the central and southern regions would decline to 5 – 10 percent cover by 2022. Instead the whole reef is […]
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