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By Jo Nova
The Crash Test Dummy Nation wins a Gold Medal in Electricity Prices
And you thought last week was bad. While the single spike at $17,000 a megawatt hour in five states simultaneously was a record, just a week later we have the double spike bonfire — peaking at breakfast and dinner on the same day in our two largest states. That’s a high degree-of-difficulty (to pay the bill). This was not just a 5-minute bid rocket — it was 90 full minutes of blitzkreig twice in a day for both NSW and Victoria. With admirable supporting efforts in burning money in Tasmania and South Australia for breakfast, and then in Queensland, which joined the financial bonfire for dinner.
The average price for the whole 24 hour period of August 5th was eye-watering. Last week the spike flattened out to about $300 per megawatt hour across the day. But yesterday in NSW and Victoria, the average price was $2,150 across both states for 24 hours in a row.
It’s possible the AEMO will have to take over the market again in some states to put the fire out.
Welcome to renewable hell
At both peaks Victoria was burning […]
Should we cool the whole Earth first or just homes and offices?
By Jo Nova
It’s as if they’re trying to guilt trip people into installing some solar panels and catching the bus.
Climate Change, it seems, is linked to brain damage in children. Specifically poor children. It leaves them with lasting effects on brain development and particularly “white matter”. (And what kind of evil sod are you if you won’t buy an EV to save the brain of a kid in Barking & Dagenham? “Do it for the children!”)
The editors of the British Medical Journal review many recent papers talking about the dire situation:
Climate change has serious implications for children’s brain health
British Medical Journal
Emerging evidence suggests that factors related to climate change, such as ambient heat exposure, can affect the brain.5 Heat stress has been linked to disruptions in neurodevelopment, slow cognitive and emotional functioning, long term learning loss and memory deficits, worsening of neurological and mental disorders, and increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier.6 Early exposure to extreme weather events, including antenatal exposure, has also been associated with an increased risk of anxiety, depression, attention deficit-hyperactivity […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a 6pm bonfire on the Australian grid
Over at WattClarity on Monday when every state had prices over $3,000 per MWh simultaneously, Dan Lee noted that this was extremely rare. Since 2008, there have only been 32 intervals when prices were above $1,000 in all five states at once and nine of the 32 occurred on Monday.
Then Tuesday was so much worse:
Record high electricity prices across the NEM. July 2024
Naturally the Sydney Morning Herald is blaming “aging coal plants”
Because we can’t get rid of coal fast enough, right? Somehow it’s a “harbinger of the price hikes” we’re facing “if aging fossil fuel generators are forced to stay open longer”. So geniuses, if prices hit $17,000 a megawatt-hour when some coal power is down for a day, what happens when we get rid of coal entirely? Is that when Tinkerbell saves the day by turning Sydney Harbor into a giant battery, or when $17,000 prices become the “new norm”?
Somehow the unplanned outages of reliable coal plants create sky high prices, whereas the unplanned outages of wind and solar power create Utopia.
Not so coincidentally, the price spikes on July […]
By Jo Nova
And the flavor of the month is “failure”
Air New Zealand announced this week that it would not be able to cut its carbon emissions by 29% by 2030. The levers were “outside their control”, they lamented, which was the polite way of saying there isn’t enough sustainable jet fuel in the world, electric planes die after a few weeks, and no one has invented a low emissions plane yet. At the moment the only kind of Net-Zero-flying is not to fly at all.
Current supplies of sacred sustainable fuel are rapidly growing but barely 0.5% of total requirements. Even though production is expected to triple this year to 1.5 Mt of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, the industry needs 200 times what is currently available.
If someone could just invent an anti-gravity machine, or a nuclear jet…
Air New Zealand pulls the plug on 2030 climate targets
By Charlotte Graham-McLay, Associated Press
Air New Zealand has pulled the plug on its climate targets saying the resources needed to meet them are unaffordable and unavailable.
In a statement the airline said it was removing its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and will […]
By Jo Nova
There is hope: Despite the censorship, and the partisan bias in the media, more than half the country has shaken off the propaganda.
All our institutions and experts have been telling us “renewables are cheaper” for twenty years, yet two out of three people don’t believe them. In a similar vein 58% of people could believe electric cars were just as bad for the environment as petrol cars. 50% believe renewable energy leads to blackouts, causes harm to whales and takes away our best farmland. And half the country agrees there is no consensus among the experts either.
We haven’t had a strong election battle on the renewables transition, but statistics like these suggest that if the Opposition picked up on this fear, they would be pushing on an open door.
The IPSOS survey (n=1,000)
And despite higher prices being exactly what happens in every country on Earth, IPSOS arrogantly labels this belief as “Misinformation”.
(Click to enlarge).
They also asked people whether they had “seen or heard anything in the social media about this?” But only 39% said they had seen something on this in the mainstream media. So most of the population hadn’t […]
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By Jo Nova
It’s hard to keep up with the great EV unravelling
The best news for the EV industry this month is that Ford is only losing $50,000 a car now on its electric vehicles. That’s so much better than the $132,000 it was losing last quarter. But the true economic carnage is deep and widespread. The one sure bet in the world of electric vehicles was Tesla where sales rose two percent in the last quarter but their profits plummeted 45%. The fire-sale shifted cars but it burned the bottom line. Similarly Mercedes Benz profits were down 21%, mostly thanks to EVs. And Ford’s were down 35% (not surprisingly).
We knew things were bad when the new invention has a small market share but already half of the owners wanted to go back to the old style.
There is trouble even in China where shares in Evergrande New Energy Vehicle are down almost 40% so far this year. Apparently some creditors are coming after Evergrande seeking bankruptcy proceedings for two of its EV arms.
Nearly every major manufacturer is delaying new models or rewriting their targets. Ford is delaying several models, and is redesigning […]
By Jo Nova
The government has this hope that homeowners can be tricked into paying for the batteries (in the form of EVs) that the wind and solar industry need to make their useless random energy into something reliable. Now comes the news that not only are batteries hazardous fire risks and expensive themselves, but to connect to our grid in a two way arrangement we need to spend $3,000 dollars per household (or maybe $10,000) to buy the bit of equipment that makes this work. Not to mention adding another million gigawatts of generation so the cars can be charged in the first place.
Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.
How many nice weather days will I get in 2100AD for that $3,000 inverter?
Household EV infrastructure could cost as much as $10bn, inquiry told
By Natasha Schmidt, The Australian
Interim Director of Monash Energy Institute, Roger Dargaville, said powering EVs in just one million households could cost as much as $10bn in power inverters.
Professor Dargaville […]
By Jo Nova
If Australia gets any more free cheap energy we’ll go broke
The Australian Energy Regulator has the data on electricity pricing and possibly a budget $20 million a year but hasn’t yet updated with the last quarter, so I thought I’d help them out. Because surely this is a graph that all Australians need to see?
This is every state in the National Energy Market, and even though some have more renewables than others, the long term trends are the same. Unreliable generators in one state can vandalize the whole market:
(Click to expand).
Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel, but need thousands of kilometers of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated back up grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
And we wondered why electricity got more expensive:
And again with labels.
The market never did recover from […]
By Jo Nova
It’s another outbreak of the Hottest-ever-Day Fever , where buses catch fire, and the worlds top journalists forget to ask anyone anything useful about the last 500 million years.
Sunday was the Worlds Hottest Day says the Guardian
The Copernicus data might be fine and dandy but it only goes back as far as 1979. The warm weather we are having now is just a welcome break in a cooling trend that started 7,000 years ago. It not only isn’t a record that means anything, it’s almost certainly a net benefit to warm blooded mammals.
The collective amnesia about the Holocene and most of the history of human civilization is complete. Apparently the world is in uncharted territory, except for thousands of rocks, stones, spears, shells, bits of wood, pollen, diatoms, fossilized plant leaves, and all the ice cores we’ve ever dug up. 4,000 stone-age spears and whatnot that melted out of the Norwegian glaciers in the last few years, must have frozen into them sometime in the last 5,000 years. And all the bones of dogs, rabbits, geese and frogs found inside the Arctic circle suggest our world is too brutally cold now. Likewise […]
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
9.9 out of 10 based on 54 ratings
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 […]
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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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