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Reality must be depressing for Green-believers. Here they are, after all this revolutionizing, they’ve installed more than a million megawatts of glorious solar and wind totems and it has barely made a dent. The world still stubbornly runs on fossil fuels.
The BBC laments:
Climate change: Green energy ‘stagnates’ as fossil fuels dominate
Matt McGrath, BBC
A new study says that the world is using more fossil fuels than ever as the transition to green energy stalls.
The Renewables 2022 Global Status Report says the share of wind and solar in the global energy mix has risen minimally in the last decade.
“The share of renewable energy has moved in the last decade from 10.6% to 11.7%, but fossil fuels, all coal and gas have moved from 80.1% to 79.6%. So, it’s stagnating,” said Rana Adib, the executive director of REN21. “And since the energy demand is rising, this actually means that we are consuming more fossil fuels than ever.” As the world rebounded from Covid-19 in 2021, there was a significant rise in overall energy use, most of which was met by fossil fuels.
Here is the […]
Click to enlarge | Paper
Just imagine that 17% of dementia cases could be prevented with a new drug that cost five cents, had a huge safety margin, and virtually no risk?
The study from the University of South Australia looked at data from 294,000 people in their 60s in the UK, and followed them for a median of 11 years or so. Researchers even controlled for time spent outdoors, types of physical activity, and the amount of oily fish they ate to try to cover for other benefits from these activities.
Seems to me, that if Ministers of Health were interested in actual health, they might be offering free Vitamin D tests, free supplement bottles, lessons in school and public awareness programs. They might even offer testing clinics in shopping centre car parks or free bottles at the RSL and Bowls clubs. Crazy idea right? In the world you thought you were living in, the treasurer might be chasing them down to forecast savings on public health spending ten years from now by keeping 1 in 6 out of nursing homes. Instead our Departments of Health are apparently keen to approve patented drugs with few clinical benefits […]
All the rules are breaking.
The price market broke on Sunday night and now the interconnectors rules are broken too. The whole Eastern five state “National” grid is flying seat of the pants — the reserves are so incredibly thin that there are LOR3 forecasts — meaning Lack Of Reserve Level 3 rolled out for all five states. It doesn’t mean blackouts will happen, but it means all the protective layers of this onion are gone. The system is running bare.
UPDATE: There were some blackouts in Sydney’s northern suburbs last night. “Millions of homes” were apparently told to conserve their power in Brisbane and Sydney. Welcome to RenewableWorld!
ht/ WattsUp, Eric Worrall, and RicDre
The price market broke on Sunday night when for the first time the AEMO imposed somewhat anachronistic price setting clauses it had never used. By fixing the wholesale price in Queensland, market bidding suddenly phase-changed into a twilight world where prices were set too low (at an obscenely high $300/MWh, but not high enough now), and generators didn’t want to bid. So offers to supply “Yo-Yo’d” and the AEMO had to run emergency orders of a different kind to […]
Sobering thought for the day: Uganda may get a nuclear power plant before Australia gets one nuclear submarine:
Uganda is set to build East Africa’s first nuclear power plant after acquiring land for the project, according to Bloomberg. The Minister of State for Energy Okasai Sidronius Opolot announced the plans in a statement, but did not reveal where the site will be located.
President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has said that Uganda and Africa are only interested in nuclear power for energy supplies like electricity, and not for nuclear weapons. “For us, we want that power for electricity, for agriculture and not for nuclear weapons,” he said. President Museveni was speaking at a meeting this week, with the delegation of International Atomic Energy Agency at State House Entebbe.
Would the world be a safer place if Uganda had a new high tech coal plant instead?
The West could make that happen.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has approved Uganda’s plan to build East Africa’s first nuclear power station.
He added that land had been acquired to build a 2GW facility, although he did not say where. The project would be part of Uganda’s […]
Starving for any attention, the carbon-haters need to find a reason to get into the inflation debate. CO2 keeps rising but crops are up, forests are greener, tropical islands are growing, mangroves are expanding, and the world is in more danger of being overrun with cheap soy and corn than by rising seas. Whatever. The disaster-bus will find a way to blame fossil fuels for everything that’s bad, as if through some miracle EV’s and windmills will make pork cheaper.
It’s a cult:
Climate crisis is ‘battering our economy’ and driving inflation, new book says
Edward Helmore, The Guardian
Forget Ukraine, coronavirus, corporate greed and “supply chain issues”, when it comes to inflation the climate crisis is the real, lasting, worry, according to a new book, and one that’s only likely to get worse. Climatenomics lays out how ‘supply chain disruptions’ has become a euphemism for the effects of climate change
“I don’t think people have realized that climate change is an economic issue now because it’s always been seen as an environmental, health or social issue,” says Keefe. “The fact of the matter is climate change is battering our economy.”
Any long term […]
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9 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
Year after year they told us it would get warmer, ski seasons would get shorter and children won’t know what snow is. Instead Thredbo in the Australian Alps has just had 125cm of snow, a full 4 feet in 7 days, which some are calling a 54 year record. Skiers in Australia are thrilled.
https://twitter.com/grand_solar/status/1534181676854788097
NSW snow season ‘best in 20 years’ as weather experts’ dire predictions fall flat
Daily Telegraph
In my many years living and working in Thredbo, I have never seen the Village so covered in snow ahead of the June long weekend,” Thredbo Resort general manager Stuart Diver said.
In the year 2000 the world’s top global warming experts at East Anglia University claimed “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” within a few years.
In 2003, a CSIRO report found that the total area covered by snow in Australian mountains could fall by up to 40 per cent.
“By 2020, the average annual duration of snow-cover decreases by between five and 48 days; maximum snow depths are reduced and tend to occur earlier in the year; and the total area covered […]
EnergyAustralia is 100% owned by China Light and Power (CLP Group) and owns a suite of generators that include coal, gas, wind farms and battery storage in Australia. It was sold by the NSW government for $1.4 billion in 2011. According to Wikipedia, the mothership company, CLP, owns “a number of power stations in Asia” and most are either coal-fired or fossil fuel power stations. It also owns Hong Kong Nuclear Investment Company.
Yallourn Power Plant, | Malcolm Paterson, CSIRO
A year ago the same company that announced it was speeding up the closure of Yallourn coal power plant to 2028 instead of 2032, now warns the transition “may not be smooth” and the governments plan to pay incentives to keep them open “may not be enough”. But back in March last year, when EnergyAustralia said it wanted to close Yallorn, it also said that it wanted to show that the transition is possible “without disruption”. In fact the Managing Director raved at the time “”We are determined to show Australia, that it is possible to move from the old to the new in a way that does not leave people behind.”. Blah Blah Blah, eh?
The […]
10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
And the bonfire continues
As cold fronts sweep across the south east of Australia electricity prices are setting records nobody wants to set. The wholesale prices for electricity –across a whole month — soared past $300 a megawatt hour in three states of Australia. In NSW the cumulative cost of wholesale electricity for May alone worked out at $2.4 billion dollars. It’s enough to build a power plant. Back in 2015, before Hazelwood old brown coal plant closed and Australia installed more renewable energy per capita than anywhere else on the planet, the average price in NSW was $35/MWh. Back then it cost $260 million for the whole month. (And Hazelwood wasn’t even in NSW. ) The point is not about one coal plant, but about how recently the system still worked and how fast it fell apart. Hazelwood coal plant in 2017 was 53 years old and still selling electricity at $30 per megawatt hour when it was shut down. Since then the whole grid has so much more capacity yet so much less ability. There’s no resilience left. A few speed bumps wiped out the whole road train.
Wholesale electricity prices are higher across the […]
In the year of collapsing athletes, we now have the coincidental rise of SADS
Naturally, its nothing to do with new large medical programs done for emergency use. We know that because of all the detailed human trial data that the FDA and company in question wanted to hide until 2096, and which we still haven’t seen in full.
But if you hear of someone young and healthy dying there’s a word for that now — “normal”, I mean SADS.
Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register
Daily Mail
People aged under 40 are being urged to have their hearts checked because they may potentially be at risk of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.The syndrome, known as SADS, has been fatal for all kinds of people regardless of whether they maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle. The term is used when a post-mortem cannot find an obvious cause of death.
The US-based SADS Foundation has said that over half of the 4,000 annual SADS deaths of children, teens or young adults have one of the top two warning […]
So a lady tried to drive an EV from New Orleans to Chigago and back in less than four days with a car that had a battery life of 310 miles on a trip that was 2,000 miles long. She saved $100 in fuel but the fast chargers weren’t fast, the waits were inconvenient, and then there was the stress and uncertainty of just not knowing, and of wandering around unknown streets on foot, waiting for the car to charge, and trying to make appointments that failed. It took 12 hours to drive a 7.5 hour trip on the way there. But on the return as the weather got worse, so did the battery mileage. Just when you need it, it isn’t there… they ended up getting only 4 hours sleep on the last night so they could allow long enough to fit in the charges on the last leg.
Remember, you’re suffering so your great-grandchildren won’t have too.
Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on a four-day road trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric vehicle (EV) that ended up as a disaster — one that left […]
Great Headlines in Science:
“Climate crisis could make humans shrink in size, says fossil expert”
Where science is just like a movie set
It’s another great moment in science leaving beleaguered teenagers wondering if their kids will be shorter than them. Perhaps if they can buy an EV, they wonder, Johnny will be as tall as his dad?
Or maybe the journalist could have said “in five million years” because that’s the kind of time-frame this scientist is talking in:
Nicola Davis, The Guardian
The climate crisis may lead the human race to shrink in size, as mammals with smaller frames appear better able to deal with rising global temperatures, a leading fossil expert has said.
Let’s make that “in five million years without air-conditioning”. Because the whole story applies to humans living au naturel, like Eocene Horsies did.
Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.
He likened the potential plight of people as similar to that […]
Ted Nordhous argues powerfully that Climate Change is simply not the main event anymore, and the climate punters are shellshocked. Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It
by Ted Nordhous, Foreign Policy
Tactical exercise with the withdrawal of the Topol mobile ground-based missile system in the Serpukhov branch of the Strategic Missile Forces Military Academy
Virtually overnight, the war in Ukraine has brought the post-Cold War era to a close, not just by ending Europe’s long era of peace, but by bringing basic questions of energy access back to the fore.
If recent months have demonstrated anything, it is that war, insecurity, and economic crisis are merciless teachers. Climate advocates and their political allies have often engaged in the policy equivalent of smoking one’s own supply: They have confused the subsidy-driven growth of renewable energy with evidence that the world is ready to rapidly transition off fossil fuels. Hence, they discouraged the production of oil and gas wherever they could and chronically underinvested in other sources of clean energy, such as nuclear power. But while there has been technological progress, the global economy is still very far […]
Shh. The Renewable Crash Test Dummy is at work
Another coal fired turbine blew this weekend and will be out for a month, adding to the problems facing the Australian grid, where gas was the main filler-of-gaps in the forced transition but gas now costs a fortune, and we don’t have much else to fall back on. If only we had vast reserves of brown coal that was close to power stations?
If only we looked after those power stations and treated them like our lifestyle depended on them instead of like they were evil Storm Machines Mogambo!
The warnings are growing louder — our aluminium smelters are already going on standby to save us from rolling blackouts and it’s only the first week of winter. Retailers are going broke, asking customers to leave. The market system rides on long term futures contracts which hold the monster prices at bay, and everyone prays a storm doesn’t break an interconnector…
Manufacturers in peril as energy crisis deepens
Perry Williams, The Australian
Delta Electricity, which operates NSW’s Vales Point station, said it was concerned by the precarious situation, with fuel costs rising and tight supplies of coal. […]
Australia has no shortage of hot rocks, but it turns out to be harder to capture than people expected:
Click to enlarge | ABC
Seven years ago everyone was excited in Winton Queensland. The new Geothermal project would only cost $3.5 million but it would save “$15 million” in electricity bills over the next twenty years and “should be operational by the end of 2016”.
Now in 2022:
Council launches legal action over $4m geothermal plant that’s never delivered power
The renewable energy project was set to be the only operating geothermal power plant in the country and was touted as the start of a geothermal windfall in the region. But more than two years since construction finished, it has never delivered power and is not operational.
“It’s bloody disappointing, to put it mildly, for such a great potential for the water that comes into town,” Winton Shire Council Mayor Gavin Baskett said.
What went wrong? “Technical issues”. The ABC doesn’t get to the bottom of this, but the water was just not close enough to boiling.
Martin Pujol, principal hydrogeologist at Rockwater, said at 86C, the Winton project would […]
Children won’t know what a cyclone is
Hurricane activity, after human emissions and CO2 levels reach highest ever recorded, is now close to lowest ever recorded.
Based on a trend starting in 2019 major hurricanes may disappear entirely by 2035. What if Net Zero means “no cyclones”?
h/t ClimateDepot and NotalotofPeopleKnowthat
Spot the effect of Chinese coal plants on global hurricane frequency.
@RogerPielkeJr
If the situation were flipped, try to imagine that the media would not write headlines like “Hurricanes near highest level ever recorded” and “Signs of Climate change seen in near record hurricane season”, or “Worst Cyclone season for thirty years!
Here’s The Guardian a year ago. But it could have been Forbes, The New York Times, the Washington Post. All of them..
The Guardian
It’s just one more Redpill moment to share with friends.
REFERENCES 2022 Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) Accumulated cyclone energy: Wikipedia 9.9 out of 10 based on 41 ratings […]
It’s a cult: Another Woke Dilemma
Should women in childbirth be warned that their anesthetic might heat the climate a hundred years from now? You know, toss it around, will I or won’t I? On the one hand, there’s hours of what some consider the worst pain they’ll ever feel, or there are other pain-killers which might not be as safe (but it’s only a baby right?). On the other hand, it’s possible that when their baby turns eighty the world might be 0.000 degrees cooler thanks to Mum? You Go Girl!
Frankly, if they wait to ask this in the labor ward – it’s far too late. Women need to hear this on the phone while booking their first appointment. That way they can run, don’t walk, run and find a real doctor — one that looks at data — not the ones scoring points in a science fashion contest.
Is nitrous oxide a climate risk?
Elios Visontay, The Guardian
A report in Australasian Anaesthesia notes that while nitrous oxide – known as laughing gas when used as an anaesthetic – is an effective method of pain relief during labour, the gas represents 7% […]
It’s a grid on the edge
Like a meteor-shower, the dinner time performance today may or may not be a spectator event. The fun may start at 4:30pm in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and Tasmania — a full quinfecta at $15,000 per MW/h. The first wave of winter cold is about to wash over the grid, and those solar panels will fail just as people plug in their heaters, ovens, dryers and kettles and there is a four hour spike at $15,000MWh forecast. The graph below is the forecast for NSW, but it is essentially the same tsunami shape and dimension in every single state of the National Energy Market. Right now I presume there are engineers in the control rooms sweating over alternatives and they may well pull it off. These wildly high spikes have a way of resolving at the last minute. But think for a moment what kind of stakes we’re playing with. Hypothetically, if there was a 12,000MW demand for 4 hours in NSW at $15,000, that’s $720 million dollars worth of electricity. A few days like that would pay for a new coal plant, but no one seems to be listening to that price signal…
[…]
Strategically, this seems like it matters.
The French nuclear power plants are the backbone of the EU grid, but this winter, just when Europe is trying to not-buy-Russian-Gas, the French might need to import power instead of export it.
France runs off 70% nuclear power — it’s highest proportion in the world, and the second largest fleet — after the USA. For some reason, known only to international bankers or Renewable Gods, Early in Macron’s reign, he decided to reduce the carbon-free reliable nukes to just 50% by 2035 and fill the gap with short-lived, unreliable generators that cost a lot, need storage, backup, rare metals from China and slave labor from the Congo. Perhaps he was afraid (or whoever it was that helped him get elected) that France would show up all the schmuck-countries going to renewables?
But then the gas crisis started in Europe last October, and like clockwork, in November President Macron muttered the words “energy independence” and belatedly announced that it wasn’t such a bad idea to build some new nuclear plants. As things got more serious, in late February the French nuclear safety authority decided to extend the life of the 32 oldest reactors for […]
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