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By Jo Nova
Let’s run an experiment on a whole nation that we can’t even do easily on a single home
Photo | Daily Sceptic,
Imaging scaling this up for a country?
The Daily Sceptic has the story of an Australian farmer in Victoria who has gone off-grid to try to be as self sufficient as he can, not out of ideology, but for pragmatic reasons. He has two 3 bedroom homes, with 30 solar panels and a 1kW wind turbine each. For storage they have about 30 German lead acid batteries which at current prices is about $15,000 of batteries each. But even so, each house still has bottled gas stoves, and a 6 kVA petrol generator. The generators are set to come on when the batteries get too low, which often happens in the evenings of autumn, winter and sometimes in spring. (He estimates about 60 – 100 hours each year). Even above all that equipment that needs gas, fuel and maintenance and cost about $160,000 in total to set up, they still have to grow, cut and collect, ouch, 100 kg of wood (220lbs) per week in winter for each house.
He warns that anyone […]
By Jo Nova
Does anyone care? 600 million Africans don’t have electricity
They burn wood for power. Forests are razed and no one even notices. As Geoff Hill says, they warm their homes and cook their food the only way they can — by chopping down forests and converting wood to charcoal, a fuel used by the Greeks and Romans. If they had coal fired power or gas plants they wouldn’t need to cut down 400 year old trees.
An area the size of Switzerland is being denuded every year, 70% of Africa’s forests are gone, but it’s as if the rest of the world barely registers it.
Solar panels don’t work under thick cloud, and can blow away in cyclones, hydro plants won’t work in droughts, but fossil fuel plants survive bad weather. Do the Greens really care about the environment, or the poor — does the ABC, CBC or the BBC?
His advice: don’t let them get away with propaganda that keeps people in poverty
When you see a newspaper article claiming that sandstorms and creeping desert are solely down to climate change, write a letter to the editor – even just a few lines […]
MingYang
By Jo Nova
In the race for “free” but random energy, or perhaps for bigger status symbols, China set a new record in July with a 16MW wind tower with a rotor diameter of an awesome 853 feet (260m). It’s a bird mincer one quarter of a kilometer across. But already plans are being drawn up for an even bigger one.
What could possibly go wrong? It’s typhoon proof…
Gargantuan 22-MW wind turbine will be among history’s largest machines
By Loz Blain, New Atlas
Imagine something as tall as New York’s Chrysler building, but spinning. China’s Mingyang Smart Energy has announced plans for a colossal 22-megawatt offshore wind turbine, and standing in its presence will be an unprecedented human experience.
The new turbine proposed for 2025 by MingYang, according to Bloomberg, will have a peak output of 22 MW, and a rotor diameter over 310 m (1,017 ft), corresponding to a swept area of at least 75,477 sq m (812,425 sq ft, 14.1 NFL football fields, 60 olympic swimming pools), minus hub.
The Eiffel Tower is 324m tall.
A few months ago Siemens got bad news on turbine maintenance that was […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
It’s just emblematic of your Clean Green Future
Complexity and false hope is eating the crown of Australia’s Net Zero transition — the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro scheme. Things have gone from “debacle” to Soviet Grade Industrial Fiasco. After Florence-the-tunnel-borer got stuck and created a sinkhole, workers spent seven months trying to shore up the ground, playing God against the mountain — pumping in grout, cement and polyurethane foam. But the foam made a gas so toxic the tunnel had to be evacuated. To make things worse the workers were originally told the gas was water vapor but it turned out to be isocyanate. At every point the Snowy Hydro team hid the bad news and issued propaganda, and it’s only taken the ABC a year to tell us the workers predicted the sinkhole, and three months to investigate the safety breach.
Still, that’s better than the NSW regulator who knows all the other safety breaches but won’t even share them, because it’s so bad ” it may affect the contractor’s reputation.” (Which it surely just did anyway.)
This is your low-carbon future. It was supposed to cost $2 billion but the bill […]
9.2 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
By Jo Nova
It’s a fantastic piece of engineering
Henry Gray (1918) Anatomy of the Human Body
Last week my EPL tendon went snafu. For no reason, my left thumb just stopped doing what it always has. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t work. It was rather disconcerting. I wondered if it was the first sign of some hideous degenerative nerve condition that would put me in a wheelchair. But after searching with the dreaded Dr Google, I figured out I’d just torn the EPL tendon. Who knew tendons can wear away painlessly and break? Who knew we can diagnose these things without an xray, just with an eyeball? So, I had surgery in hospital yesterday to fix it.
I looked at anatomy drawings and it dawned on me, we can see all the tendons on the back of our hands if we flex them the right way in the right light. And by golly, my right thumb had two tendons, but my left only had one. It was so obvious. Have a look at your own hand. We have two long tendons running down the back of your index finger and pickie* (though these look like […]
By Jo Nova
Sometimes we just need to pay attention to what adversaries are doing.
Why would China be so worried about foreign EV’s near airports and holiday resorts of VIPs?
Winston Sterzel spent 14 years in China and has some of the best insights and connections behind the propaganda wall.
….
I am unavoidably distracted by other things for the next two days. Sorry I will not be able to reply to emails or comments. Thanks to the moderators for keeping the ship running.
h/t John Connor, Furiously curious, Kim, and RexAlan
9.9 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
Luton airport carpark fire. From a Twitter video.
By Jo Nova
Geoff Buys Cars is a car nerd commentator who spent hours trying to find evidence that the Luton airport fire was caused by an EV. To recap — 1,200 cars died, the floor collapsed, the airport fielded 16,000 calls from people who needed help, answers, another flight, or their charred car. It was a big deal to a lot of people, and he argues, a turning point in the quest to get everyone driving an electric vehicle.
In the end officials say it was a diesel, and Geoff couldn’t definitively show it was or wasn’t an EV, but he said it doesn’t matter — everyone thought it was an EV anyway, and he argues — it will destroy electric car sales either way.
If everyone else thinks it’s an EV then there is no way people are walking into car dealerships this morning with that in the news and saying “you know what, I really fancy parking one of those lithium powered electric vehicles right outside my house. I think that’s exactly what I need to do to save the planet and look after my […]
By Jo Nova
Just view the BBC as the promotional wing of the Crony-Corporate Deep-State Cartel and it all makes sense
Andrew Montford lays bare the hypocrisy: The BBC won’t call Hamas “terrorists”, even though they kill babies and are legally classified as terrorists. Apparently it’s not accurate and impartial enough for them, and they say it’s a “barrier to understanding”. But the same BBC calls scientists and engineers climate deniers as if it’s the golden path to knowledge.
The BBC are expert namecallers, they know the power of labels and brands, and that’s exactly why they do it. Calling people “deniers” is a barrier to understanding. It stops the public from listening to the scientists the BBC don’t like. The BBC have essentially admitted it in their own words. They won’t use emotive terms like “terrorists” on Hamas because they want the public to hear every excuse those-who-murder-babies say, but they will use emotive, meaningless terms like Denier when it suits them.
The BBC don’t want the public to understand skeptical scientists. That is the point.
Their hypocrisy is deliberate
The science debate can’t even start until the namecalling ends:
…
Andrew Montford: The […]
By Jo Nova
Despite spending millions to tell Australians that Good People Vote Yes, Australians overwhelmingly voted No to treating people differently according to their skin color, their heritage, or something their ancestors did.
They voted no to giving a new group of bureaucrats power to slow down, interfere or hold to ransom any laws passed through the Australian Parliament. And in a sense they voted No to shallow relentless, vague advertising too.
Spontaneous No Signs were seen in nearly every state of Australia in 110km zones:
Seen in Western Australia | Photo from Stephen Neil.
The main benefit of the $365 million dollars the referendum cost is that now a lot of Australians feel more confident talking about race, while a lot of others found out that that calling people “racist” doesn’t persuade them. That may not have been what those in charge were aiming for. But hopefully we can have more productive conversations now instead of endless platitudes and meaningless pandering. The culture of victimhood is not helping anyone.
Significantly, the Referendum failed in every single state of Australia. Nationally it was 39.7% – Yes to 60.2% – No. The only Territory to vote […]
Image by Ulrich B. from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Just more junk science to spook those who want to be spooked
Did you sneeze today? It must be “Climate change”. Go forth and buy some solar panels…
Like a continuous propaganda machine, the government pays academics money to find a crisis, so they do, and then the media rephrase the story like a Pavlovian prompt. It’s a form of mass hypnosis. Everything is climate change and only the government can save you:
Is your hay fever getting worse? It could be climate change
by Laura Chung, The Sydney Morning Herald
Did your hay fever start earlier this spring? The coughing, the sneezing, those terrible itching eyes? You are not alone, and it might get worse in coming years as climate change extends the season, experts say.
About 15 per cent of Australians have hay fever, with those between 25 and 44 years old most likely to suffer during spring. Hay fever is an allergic response when substances including pollen from grasses and trees, dust mites or mould come into contact with the nose and eyes.
The only time a climate scientist […]
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Kathryn Porter in The Telegraph, has compiled quite the list of failures as offshore wind projects get frozen around the world. Decisions are being delayed, contracts abandoned, auctions left without bidders and almost no new projects started. The awful truth of inflation, the maintenance cost shocks and cable failures is all too much. Then there was the problem of needing a 100 years of copper, nickel and lithium production before Christmas.
It’s all been kept quiet. Who knew there were no offshore wind investments in the EU last year, apart from a few floating projects?
After years of subsidies, wind power was meant to get cheap enough to be profitable and competitive all by itself, instead, 25 years later, it just needs bigger subsidies. When the great oil and coal price crunch came, wind power was supposed to rise through the ashes, instead we discovered that wind turbine and battery factories needed cheap coal and oil like the rest of the economy.
Right now Australia has no offshore wind turbines and is about to jump onto a burning ship:
The myth of affordable green energy is over
October 13th, 2023 | Tags: Climate Money, ESG, Renewable Energy, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
All flights are currently suspended at Luton Airport, London after a major fire broke out last night at 9pm. No one at the BBC, apparently, can explain why it spread so fast (the mystery!). But everyone is grateful this was not an underground carpark below, say, a 20 story apartment building with babies sleeping upstairs, especially since part of the top floor of the carpark has collapsed.
The fire has, unfortunately demolished some dreams of carbon reduction.
UPDATE: Apparently the word is that it was a diesel car that started the fire. The question is then, if there were no EV’s on that floor, would it have spread just as fast, would the floor have collapsed, and would cars have exploded like popcorn in the microwave? Awaiting the BBC gurus…
UPDATE #2: Allegedly there were no sprinklers (which wouldn’t put out an EV battery fire anyway). Let’s try to imagine what kind of sprinkler system would contain those EV Fires — like drop-down glass-fibre spray that solidifies on contact or like jet sprayed asbestos?
UPDATE #3: As many as 1,500 cars were in the car park, it’s not clear how many […]
Image by Vicente Godoy from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
We can’t even run a cement factory all day anymore
Get your candles for summer! Unlike the last three years the Australian national grid won’t be rescued by another cooler La Nina this year. Fears of rolling blackouts are fraying nerves at The Australian Financial Review Energy & Climate Summit. The transition is described as stuttering, gridlocked, faltering, and the government as “desperate”.
Things are so bad, former CEO’s of major generators are warning that “the lights are going to go out” and accusing one Energy Minister of speaking “complete and utter horseshit” because they don’t think we need reliable peaking gas plants to replace coal power. Said Energy Minister has responded by refusing to even take his calls. That’s really going to work. Meanwhile Japan is getting nervous just watching us, afraid we have screwed things up so badly we can’t be relied on to keep sending them gas.
Not only is summer nerve-wracking, but things are already so bad, one of our largest cement producers is shutting down nearly every day because it can’t afford to pay for the peak electricity spikes even in springtime. Here in […]
Humans live in a 90 degree range from Marble Bar, Australia to Oymyakon, Siberia. | Photos: Marble Bar, Wilford Peloquin, Oymyakon (and more glorious ones) by Amos Chapple.
By Jo Nova
The “hottest ever” headline is misleading
While the UAH satellite measurements are the hottest by far of the 44 year satellite record, nothing about the “hottest ever” media frenzy makes sense — not for health, history, the long term, or human biology. It’s only the “hottest ever” if we ignore most of the last ten thousand years. It’s just another attempt to scare people out of their money.
The latest UAH satellite measurements may be affected by the water vapor launched into the atmosphere by the Hunga Tonga volcano. There don’t appear to be any clear details about that, but even if we accept this as is, it’s still nothing to spend a trillion dollars on:
From Roy Spencer, UAH
In the big scheme of human history, the world has been a lot hotter and a lot colder. Homo sapiens are 37 degree animals who retire to warm climates, not cold ones. Most people on Earth live in the warm tropics, not the cold poles. […]
by Jo Nova
When will the Green climate activists realize they are the minions of the Banksters, and communist governments?
In 2021 BlackRock used its shareholder influence to force Exxon to drop some gas fields under the guise of “climate activism”. BlackRock were the second largest shareholder with 6.6% of Exxon at the time. They bragged about getting three new activist board members elected to help Exxon in the “energy transition”. But they also happened to be major investors in PetroChina too with 7% of the Chinese oil and gas company and BlackRock didn’t seem to care too much about their ESG policy. Conveniently, PetroChina was “poised” to buy many of the fields that the giant US oil company was getting its arm twisted to sell.
Naturally the Stupid-Media wrote this up as a win for koalas and whales or something:
It’s like sabotage of national assets
While BlackRock pretend to care about the environment, they were potentially undermining a US company, their US shareholders, and own pension fund clients, all to get a better deal, perhaps, with “favours” of who-knows-what for a foreign company, which is a subsidiary of the Chinese State CNPC. We can only speculate, […]
They’re not much use without a lot of cabling. | Image by Norbert Pietsch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Thanks to Oldbrew at Tallblokes Talkshop
Who knew high voltage cables running for kilometers in a deep electrolytic moving body of water would be expensive?
The 245kV Wolfe Island Cable | Photo by Z22
Despite offshore windfarms dealing in a kind of mechanical hell of high speed salt water spray, big waves and volatile wind conditions, surprisingly 85% of the insurance claims are because the underwater cables are failing.* If the subsea cables can’t be insured, it’s another unexpected cost threatening the economics of offshore wind.
The underwater cables needed for offshore wind are apparently so costly to repair, and the losses from lack of generation so steep, they are in danger of becoming uninsurable.
Subsea cable failures pose global threat to offshore wind
Energy News Live
The race to harness offshore wind energy has hit a significant roadblock, with the reliability of subsea cables emerging as a critical concern.
Global Underwater Hub (GUH) has raised alarm bells about the escalating issue of subsea cable failures.
October 6th, 2023 | Tags: Basslink, Subsea Cables, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable, Wind Power | Print This Post | |
MG ZS EV X | | Photo by Chanokchon
By Jo Nova
And you thought your last software crash was bad
Brian Morrison ended up a prisoner in his own new MG electric car that wouldn’t stop. He could steer, but the brakes didn’t work, and he couldn’t turn it off. At one point he threw the car keys into the police van driving beside him, which had come to help, but even that didn’t stop the motor. This was not meant to be a self-driving car.
Tragedy was averted this time because it was 10:30 at night, the road was empty and the police had time to stop it. But what if this fault occurred in normal traffic and the EV drove through a red light, or a pedestrian?
By Rory Tingle at The Daily Mail:
I was kidnapped by my runaway electric car
Terrified motorist, 53, reveals his new £30,000 MG ZS EV ‘began driving itself’ after suffering ‘catastrophic malfunction’ – forcing him to dial 999 and crash it into a police van to get it to stop
Brian Morrison, 53, claims he was heading home from work at around 10pm on […]
Shuets Udono
By Jo Nova
Remember how we predicted insurance costs would rise when people realized that almost brand spanking new EV’s were being written off for scratches, because no one could test their battery and be sure it would not ignite? And then there was the news that after an accident, electric cars need to social distance, taking up as much as 50 times as much parking space, in case they blow other cars up? Well, insurance companies have realized this too. One underwriter has paused offering EV’s insurance entirely, while other companies are ramping up the rates by 60 – 900%. What a shock:
‘The quotes were £5,000 or more’: electric vehicle owners face soaring insurance costs
Zoe Wood, The Guardian
In the Facebook group, members share stories of horror renewal quotes, with increases ranging from 60% (up to £1,100) to a staggering 940% (a jump from £447 to £4,661, according to a screengrab shared by one driver).
“I spent weeks on every comparison site as well as trying individual insurers and specialist brokers, but either they wouldn’t cover the car or the quotes were £5,000 or […]
Image by Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Three labs confirm fragments of DNA from manufacturing are left in the mRNA vaccines
We injected 70% of the world’s population with a barely tested admixture that included random lengths of DNA. We don’t know for sure if that DNA has been inserted into our nuclear DNA, but we’re not really looking either. The government just says mRNA can’t change your DNA. But could contaminated mRNA which is packaged in lipid nanoparticles, with gene therapy vectors and enhancers do that? Maybe, but whatever you do, don’t run those tests, right?
Are we changing germline genetics of the human race — getting into sperm or egg cells? We don’t know. These are just the games we play these days. We could easily have run those tests on sperm at least, before we approved anything in young fertile adults and children, but we didn’t. A Chinese scientist that did that once in a different experiment ended up in jail. Some researchers are quite concerned to put it mildly. The odds may be low, but the numbers are astronomical. After a few billion hands of poker everyone has a Royal Flush.
In […]
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