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This is Fall of Rome type stuff — everything is coming undone
National rolling blackouts have been occurring for days in South Africa and are forecast to continue for another week at least. One engineer warns they are just a step away from a total blackout and says it will be very difficult to reawaken the entire system. Traffic lights are failing, trains are stopping, and mobiles phones, ATMs and fuel pumps may not work. With unemployment at a shocking 35% already, the million dollar losses from blackouts make for a dark feedback loop.
The immediate cause is strikes for wage claims and terrible maintenance leading to major power outages lasting as long as nine hours. But Green targets and activism only makes it worse because there’s no interest in maintaining plants properly which are planned for closure. South Africa runs mostly on old coal plants, and one of the largest plants is closing (supposedly) as soon as September. And the wind and solar power they have often isn’t helping with the peak loads either.
There is vandalism from every direction. At the bottom end, apparently up to half the people in Soweto are not even paying for electricity […]
While Western cultural warriors are bravely destroying statues of dead colonialists, one kind of modern colonialist gets a free pass.
China gets away with nearly everything: climate crimes, bioweapons accidents, IP theft, and slave labor camps. Maybe spending $100,000 a month on New York Times ads is all it takes to bury unfavourable stories in Western media outlets. But then there are also friends like Mitch McConnell in the US Senate, two million communist party members spread throughout the West, all the universities dependent on Chinese students, and Western academics with jobs for China on-the-side. The West might be quite cheap to buy off really.
Bolsonaro from Brazil warns that China has re-colonized nearly all of Africa
Tucker Carlson:
Here in the United States, we’ve been so deeply engrossed in our own debates over whether men should be allowed to compete on girls swim teams or whether it’s immoral to carry our groceries in plastic bags that we’ve missed the fact that the government of China has been busy with its own agenda — taking over the world.
In the space of just 15 years, for example, the Chinese have succeeded in re-colonizing the entire continent of Africa. Didn’t […]
Winning: The new Supreme Court decision is much bigger than the climate wars
Over the last 50 years the Deep State Bureaucrats had become Rulers-defacto and finally the Supreme Court has put the hand-brake on. Instead of unelected agencies deciding national policy, the Supreme Court said, rather radically, that Congress should make decisions of great political significance. Sounds awfully like “Democracy”.
But as far as the Environmental Protection Agency sees it, if the voters are too stupid to elect the correct people, then Congress can’t make the right laws, so it’s up to the EPA to save the people anyway.
It’s what you do when you are Omniscient.
Or as another Ian says: they are only doing “what God would have done if he had truly understood the situation”.
The Supreme Court Restores a Constitutional Climate
The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
This has been an historic Supreme Court term, and the Justices kept it going to the end with a major 6-3 decision Thursday (West Virginia v. EPA) reining in the administrative state. The subject was climate regulation but the message should echo across the federal bureaucracy.
The question was whether the Environmental […]
Marcus Wong Wongm
Effectively — the AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) is the taxpayer funded advertising agency for the Renewables Industry. The point of the latest AEMO super-report, apparently, is to get Australian taxpayers or consumers to foot the bill for the high voltage lines that the unreliable industry desperately needs but can’t pay for itself.
The AEMO has declared we need to rush to cough up $12.7 billion to build new interconnectors in Australia. That’s $500 from every man woman and child and let’s call it what it is, a Gift Card for the Renewables Industry. The net benefit of all that money will be to allow wind and solar industrial plants to connect their unreliable product to the grid we already have, and to the storage products that we still have to pay for, and all so that their green electrons will make the weather 0.0 degrees cooler in a hundred years. Australians alive today will pay now and basically get nothing but views of more criss-crossy-steel-wires and spires, and more wind towers too. Sing Hallelujah.
The 104 page Blueprint imagines all kinds of scenarios except for an actual free market, true competition, consumer […]
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Given the dire shortage of cheap energy, another plan is to pay British households up to £6 for each kilowatt-hour they don’t use at peak time. While a normal kilowatt-hour would cost 28p, the blistering premium price shows how desperate the National Grid planners must be. The last thing they want is everyone to come home, turn on the oven and washing machine and plug in their scooters and EV’s at 6pm.
So now possibly in a grand experiment, as well as trying to control the weather with windmills, millions of families may try to reschedule body clocks somehow, eating later, doing laundry later, watching the melatonin-destroying blue-screens-of-insomnia after 10pm and running the drier while they sleep. Maybe it won’t be so bad, or maybe people will be more sleep deprived and less productive, fatter, or crash their cars on […]
Tell the children: Energy is Power
And show them this graph. For twenty years the West has been giving up power.
OWID Click to enlarge
A warning from John Constable and Debra Lieberman, Special to Financial Post
The energy of nations and the creation of wealth
Countries where energy consumption is plummeting don’t feel much pain … yet. And there is a good reason for that. One country is increasing its energy use, propping up Western consumption with exports and giving us a false sense of well-being. That country is, of course, China.
Since the West began its energy starvation diet, Chinese energy consumption has increased by over 50 per cent and its electricity consumption has increased by 200 per cent, overtaking the U.S. by a large margin. China, unlike the EU, U.K. and U.S., is still 90 per cent reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear. What’s more, only some of the immense wealth these fuels are generating is being exported. What is China doing with the rest? Time will tell.
But right now, as a matter of urgency, we must reverse the decline in Western energy quality and consumption […]
h/t GWPF NetZeroWatch
The Greens must be having apoplexy. In Glasgow last year everyone was signing climate agreements with no idea that by June they would be signing 15 year new deals for gas with the U.S., the Middle East and Africa. Germany is pouring $3b into floating LNG import platforms. The Germans are also suggesting that the G7 now allow funding for fossil fuel projects, presumably to allow new gas or even coal projects to solve the energy crisis. Meanwhile Boris Johnson is cutting net-zero targets and suggests maybe in the face of food shortages we should feed food to people instead of cars. Starving people to save the world was never going to sell well. Especially when the UK was getting 20% of the ethanol for the biofuel program from Ukraine.
The squeeze is everywhere. Hydrogen targets are being reconsidered or adjusted down, while still other commitments may become “voluntary”, and some start dates are being pushed back by a year. It was only March when Germany agreed to phase out the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2035. Now in June, Germany has rejected the EU ban because suddenly there are niches where combustion engines are […]
Leonhard Lenz
Suddenly the warning lights flashing in Germany. The message is to go easy on the gas, but ultimately even if the national storage tanks were completely full, the largest economy in the EU would only have ten weeks of gas without supplies from Russia. It’s summer and they’ve already hit stage 2 of the 3 stage emergency plan.
It was all totally avoidable. A wholly Green-made crisis. They could have gone nuclear, kept using coal, and explored for more gas and then they could have laughed at GazProm. Instead talk of rationing has already started, and the event horizon now includes the possibility of mass industrial shutdowns and recession.
Germany has been so suddenly crippled it’s almost as if an enemy force had infiltrated the activist soul and culture of the nation and duped it with a magic spell.
As long ago as 2014 a former NATO Secretary General was warning that Russia was funding the anti-frakking mobs. It later came out Russia was also sending money through shell companies to Green protestors in Eastern Europe, and in the US too. Putin could hardly have believed how easy it was to turn young schmucks against […]
Tucker Carlson savages the UniParty and talks about the disarray in voters, the sea change sweeping parts of the US in political alliances. The Great Replacement and influx of new democrat voters has run out of steam.
The old coalitions are crumbling before our eyes. Suddenly we’re seeing Hispanic voters, African and Middle Eastern immigrants, as well as huge numbers of American-born young men, all running at remarkable speed from Joe Biden and the anti-human corporate neoliberalism he represents. …
Joe Biden’s support among Hispanics has dropped to a stunning 24%. That’s the lowest among any ethnic group in America. …
…
At the very moment that Joe Biden is at his weakest, months before a pivotal midterm election, Republicans are propping him up. They are saving Biden from himself.
Since the day Biden was elected, Republicans in Washington have taken Biden’s side on virtually every significant item in his policy agenda. That would include: COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates, transgender ideology in school, sanctions against China, the January 6 charade, free speech, civil liberties, spying by the Intel agencies, preserving the big tech monopolies, the anti-White race politics of […]
A new study shows natural protection still good at 50% after ten months, while vaccination protection waned after 4 months
The utter scandal here is that all those people who had natural protection were being forced to take vaccines to protect them from Omicron, when the vaccines were providing only a fairly limited benefit or no advantage at all.
A new study was based on the whole population of Qatar. It shows that people who caught the original older variants had about 50% immunity to catching Omicron — even ten months later. Those who were double vaccinated had so little protection six months later, it was effectively zero. Indeed, if they had Pfizer their effectiveness was minus 3.4% meaning they were ever so slightly more likely to catch Omicron that if they hadn’t had any vaccines. For moderna it was minus 10% at the six month mark, which sounds, well, not good.
Ten months later, those who had caught earlier variants of Covid still had 50% protection against Omicron:
Vaccination Increases Risk of COVID-19 Infection, But Infection Without Vaccination Gives Immunity: Study
Marina Zhang, Epoch Times
The authors of the study found that those who […]
ENSO is playing games with climate scientists — mocking their ability to predict the single greatest natural short term climate swing factor. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation drives floods, droughts, bushfires, and essentially pushes the planetary temperatures up and down on a year by year basis. Nothing determines the year’s climate headlines more than this one thing, yet climate scientists haven’t the faintest idea what drives it.
Imagine what it would look like if they could? They’d be able to say … blah… solar wind changes driven by, say, solar barycentric dynamics will lead to El Ninos in 2023, and ’25, a weak one in 2026. Farmers could plan ahead. Dam managers would know when water would be scarce. The UN would know which years to ask for even more money.
Instead we get this vague post hoc prophesy:
Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely — what does the future hold?
Nature
Meteorologists are forecasting a third consecutive year of La Niña. Some researchers say similar conditions could become more common as the planet warms.
On ongoing La Niña event that has contributed to flooding in eastern Australia and exacerbated droughts in the […]
Cunning Plan: New Australian PM to set up an Office of Climate Change Threats, but not an Office to study the Threats of Climate Action
Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees.
Admiral Chris Barrie will be paid to worry about how seas rising by 1mm a year might affect our supply chains, but not about how making electricity ten times more expensive might destroy manufacturing in Australia.
If we had to actually build our own nuclear submarines will China still be happy to sell us the steel? Will we have an aluminum smelter left in the nation, and how long can we run that on solar panels and batteries? Are 2,000 kilometer long high voltage lines an easy target for hostile forces? Will electric vehicles be easier targets for cyber hackers or EMF weapons? Could dust bombs sabotage 2GW of solar panels? Would paint bombs be worse?
If we managed to build one nuclear submarine by 2040, will it be the most reliable baseload generator left in the national energy market and should we plug it back into the grid so we can build another sub?
So many questions…
Anthony Albanese to order intelligence chief to examine […]
In an emergency everyone wants coal
Just like that — Europe is hitting the panic button. Thank the Russians for demanding rubles for their gas and threatening supply. Not only has Germany decided to rescue old coal plants, but so has Austria, which had gone blissfully “coal free” two years ago. How long did that fairytale last? In the Netherlands coal power plants were forced for years to run at only 35% capacity by government ruling, but now, suddenly, full tilt is fine. Sweden and Denmark have both issued an “early warning” to flag potential energy shortages.
In Poland, energy prices are so expensive that three weeks ago the government told people to go and collect wood from forests to keep their homes warm. Last week they the government said it would pay a large part of the cost of buying three tons of coal for each household. It’s that bad.
Much of the EU rely on Russian gas for about 40% of their supplies. The Austrians have storage sites for gas so large they can hold an entire years worth, but they are only 39% full and they want to double that before November.
Germany is now calling this […]
Would you like blackouts or floods with your Green Burger?
Tumut Generation Station No. 3 Snowy scheme | Joe “velojo” A
Here in Weather-Dependent Renewable World the chief crash test dummy is struggling because of yet another bit of terrible luck. We desperately need the only reliable renewable energy we have to generate while reliable but-badly-maintained-coal is breaking — and our national grid sits on the edge of blackouts. But Lordy No! Oh the schadenfreude — the dams are all full. Seems we have too much water thanks to the La Nina we didn’t predict, and the excess rainfall that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the dams that weren’t supposed to fill. Now if Snowy Hydro releases too much water to make electricity they may flood lower areas.
You can’t make this stuff up. Hydroelectric dams serve two purposes and sometimes they conflict. If we are lucky, we might avoid both blackouts and floods, but we won’t avoid the bonfire of electricity bills that are coming.
Ponder the impossible quandry of the Green religion. Like the Escher puzzle of Energy — It’s always the weather’s fault. If only we could use enough renewables to get perfect weather we […]
Amazing how fast the Sacred Cows get pushed aside. Until a few months ago, Germany had been planning to close its last nuclear plants and gas production had been falling for 20 years. But the Russians are cutting back the gas feed and even the German Greens understand what will happen by winter if they don’t have enough energy. Though on twitter, a lot of commentators are wondering why they don’t reopen the nuclear plants they just closed first and why they still plan to shut the last three later this year?
It was never about CO2 was it?
Germany to fire up coal plants as Russia turns down the gas
DW
As Russia reduces its supply of natural gas, Economy Minister Robert Habeck has said Germany must curb its usage. Otherwise, things “could get tight in winter,” he said. Germany must limit its use of gas for electricity production and prioritize the filling of storage facilities to compensate for a drop in supply from Russia, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday.
In a move that goes against the principles of his environmentally-friendly Green Party, the country will also have to increase the […]
Was the data Pfizer sent, really this bad?
If it wasn’t, it should be easy for the FDA and or Pfizer to reply. If it was this extraordinarily rigged to “find” some infinitesimally tiny benefit among the acres of null and even bad results, we have to ask, does anyone care about babies anymore? If the data Pfizer sent is this awful, no one is even trying to hide the corruption. Does the FDA care about its own reputation?
According to Dr Clare Craig (in the video below) — the evidence that Pfizer sent to the FDA is dubious in the extreme: As she tells it — the trial recruited 4,526 children aged from 6 months to 4 years, but as many as 3,000 did not finish the trial. On that basis alone, she says, “the trial should be deemed null and void.” This trial data is so they can get EUA – Emergency Use Authorisation, but they defined severe covid as a raised heartrate and an increased breathing rate — which hardly sounds like an emergency, or something severe. In the end there were only six children age 2 – 4 that had “severe covid” and who were vaccinated […]
If it involves destroying trees, we know it’s a Green trying to save them:
Government’s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on BURNING the equivalent of 120 million trees a year just to ‘balance the books’, report claims
DailyMail
The UK government‘s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on burning the equivalent of almost 120 million trees a year, a new report claims.
The government’s Net Zero Strategy, released in October 2021, aims to capture up to 58 million tonnes of CO2 from the burning of biomass and piping it under the North Sea.
But to create this much carbon, a whopping 32,534,939 tonnes of wood pellets would need to be burned every year, according to a report by The Telegraph — the equivalent of 119,834,572 trees.
The UK plan assumes trees are carbon neutral, though some of these forests are shipped from America, and probably not via sailing ships. Who can forget how in 2015 Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies for burning biomass, which was […]
In France the government is banning events “because of a heatwave” of 40 degrees C (104F) — as if adult mammals cannot figure out whether the temperature is too hot for their own health. Ancestors of mice and rats worked out their own temperature sensors and behaviour changes 200 million years ago. It’s a Big Government attempt to infantalize and gaslight the whole population. Will they obey?
It’s only the region around Bordeaux but will French teenagers accept being told to stay home in forty degree heat, something that millions of humans live with all over the world every summer?
The Counter Signal: Heatwave lockdowns: Region in France bans outdoor gatherings
“Everyone now faces a health risk,” official Fabienne Buccio told France Bleu radio, after announcing the regional restrictions around Bordeaux. Outdoor events – including, ironically, annual ‘Resistance’ celebrations – are banned until the officials declare the heatwave is over. They’re even restricting some indoor events that don’t have air conditioning.
BBC: Outdoor public events have been banned in an area of France as a record breaking heatwave sweeps across Europe.
Concerts and large public gatherings have been called off in the Gironde department around Bordeaux. […]
Renewable Crash Test Dummy: Friday edition
For energy-nerds following the Australian experiment, today is a big day. On the up-side, three coal turbines have rebooted adding another 1200MW to the grid. On the down-side, the wind has slowed and 3000MW has disappeared. On the hope-side, another 4 coal turbines may possibly get back in gear by Sunday, and you never know, the wind might pick up. Though it doesn’t look good.
Wind generation. June 16, 2022, Australian NEM. | Anero.id
It doesn’t matter how many wind farms we build when one High Pressure cell arrives to sit on them all
And here is the cell that stops a million dishwashers.
One high cell to stop them all | BOM
This is where all 76 Australia NEM grid wind farms are which could, in theory be generating as much as 9.8GW but are turning out 10% of that now.
Map of Wind generation Australia
Ninety percent of Australians are being asked to be careful with their electricity today while we wait for the wind to start blowing again or the weather to warm up. And millions of dollars is being burned in electricity bills (assuming […]
Someone needs to tell the Australian Energy Minister the bad news about batteries
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says we just need more renewables and more storage:
Bowen says we can store water, we should be able to store power
“You can say the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Well, the rain doesn’t always fall either but we managed to store the water,” Bowen said.
Chris Bowen isn’t having any of Uhlmann’s ‘wind doesn’t always blow’ rhetoric.
“the rain doesn’t always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment”#auspol pic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy
— Squizz (@SquizzSTK) June 16, 2022
Is this Chris Bowen’s Zuma-numbers moment with electricity?
He doesn’t seem to realize that electrons won’t politely sit in a shoe box waiting for the day they run your toaster. When South Australia got the worlds biggest battery in 2017 everyone got excited but few realized it would only power the state for two whole minutes before it ran out. South Australia is just 6% of the total National Energy Market, but if we were trying […]
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