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Viv Forbes reminds us of how quickly peace can turn to war and how important energy and industrial strength suddenly was.
At this point Australia has lost half the refining capacity it once had and has only about one month of diesel and petrol. In the event of something hostile stopping the supply of foreign oil, Australian planes would be grounded in a couple of weeks. After Singapore fell, fuel was in such short supply, that cars and trucks were run on charcoal burners. When copper was needed for the war effort, one smelter was repurposed with parts cobbled together in a rush from many other smelters. But Australia has closed 6 smelters in the last 20 years. Where are the spare parts and spare expertise to reindustrialize if and when we need it?
Instead we ship off ore and hope the nice people at the other end send up back the things we need, while we build unreliable generators like talismans to weather Gods in the hope the world, apparently, won’t see as a climate pariah. The patsies quake at the thought of being “left behind” in a race to nowhere, while another nation burns half the coal in […]
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 […]
Add another billion to the cost of the Renewable Energy Target?
In the last few days Bluescope Steel (formerly BHP) has confirmed it will spend US$700m (AU$1b) to expand it’s North Star steel mill in Ohio. So there are multiple headlines. But back in February CEO Mark Vassella explained exactly why they were thinking of it, and his first reason was “energy prices”. Last week, high energy prices were even “a tragedy” for Australian manufacturing. This week however, he’s clarified his position by muddying it up. Now there other reasons and the solution is to fix our gas prices. He’s backpedaling and tossing quotes that happen to help the renewables industry.
Perhaps he’s been heavied by his PR and strategy team? Now he’s saying that energy costs matter, but labor costs do too and “we weren’t ever going to put another steel mill in Australia”. He’s even saying energy costs “did not play a role” — the complete opposite. These will become the quotes the renewable energy fans rely on. Apparently, now what he really wants is cheaper gas — which requires a socialist government-driven solution to fix gas prices, and it’s safe for anyone to mention anything that requires […]
Welcome to a clean green Australia where we gave up coal to move to diesel.
Back to the future. Diesel’s prototype engine circa 1892.
Channel Ten news tonight discusses the sudden surge in demand for diesel generators
Homes and businesses are so afraid of blackouts in Australia that some retailers are selling four times as many generators as normal. Mygenerator.com.au reports a 425% increase year on year. The strongest growth has been in South Australia, Victoria and western Sydney.
According to Channel Ten, Energy companies across Australia have sent letters to their customers to warn customers to be prepared in case there is a blackout. But one company says it’s just a precaution they are required to do every year. (Does anyone ever remember getting a letter like that?)
Once, the renewables industry just wanted “certainty” for business (as in certainty of taxpayer funded subsidies). Now “certainty” means a diesel generator.
h/t Dave B
9.8 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
Good afternoon Prime Minister and Premier,
Before we move on to your new partnership, let us think about Scott Morrison’s words:
“Governments must do no harm”.
As a political thinker he is “out there”, our Scotty isn’t he Gentlemen?
Perhaps we need him on the home team in the energy market do you think?
National Electricity Market Grid 4th April 2017 (Click to enlarge)
The solid basis on which the Turnbull/Andrews partnership needs to be formed has to originate with the achievements you have both made so far. Let’s list them:
Through your deliberate actions (and failure to act) of shutting Hazelwood, you have reduced mankind’s contribution of CO2 by a factor of 0.0002. That reduction, when compared with the CO2 produced by animals consuming vegetation and microbes consuming vegetation is a ratio of 0.000025. Hmmmm…….. You have just put at least 1,000 people out of work in the Latrobe Valley. You will bankrupt many businesses in the Latrobe Valley and devastate a whole slab of the Nation’s economy. You have placed the viability of every single manufacturing business in Eastern and South Australia under threat – with the certainty of unemployment for hundreds of thousands of […]
Here’s a graph showing something about Australian, Chinese and Indian emissions (thanks to Tom Quirk). At a glance you might think we are up there with the best of them (doing our bit to fertilize the flora of the planet, and to regreen the deserts). Alas, the Australian tally (the green triangles) represents the total emissions of Australia. The lines depicting Chinese and Indian emissions just show their annual increases.
Chinese annual increases in emissions are larger than the entire Australian output. India is not too far behind.
UPDATE: TonyfromOz points out the Y-axis scale is missing three zero’s. Data source: CDIAC (Thanks Anton).
It appears the new coal fired power stations and cars coming on line in the breakneck-evolution-of-China produced twice the emissions of the entire continent of Australia.
Remember our aim to reduce our national output by 5% or so by 2020. Thanks to the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Fund, the Remote Indigenous Energy Program, the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program, the Living Greener program, the Regional Natural Resource Management Planning, the Light Vehicle CO2 Emissions Standards, the Household Assistance Package, and not to mention another 36 programs I could have listed as […]
Australia (orange line second from the bottom) has a lower energy intensity of use than many countries (see below for more information). On this graph. Japan is the lowest. The world average is the dark purple line. China is so high it is off the scale.
It’s part of the spin game that almost every statistic is spun-into-oblivion, and here, thanks to Mike Wilson, is the analysis of why “per capita” statistics are meaningless.
Ross Garnaut (and dozens of others) claim Australia has a high emissions intensity of energy use. Yet Mike Wilson shows below that Australia’s energy intensity is not just declining, it’s below the world average, and below Canada, South Africa, China and the US.
The Garnaut Review:
“Relative to other OECD countries, Australia’s high emissions are mainly the result of the high emissions intensity of energy use, rather than the high energy intensity of the economy or exceptionally high per capita income. Transport emissions are not dissimilar to those of other developed countries. Australia’s per capita agricultural emissions are among the highest in the world, especially because of the large numbers of sheep and cattle.
The high emissions intensity of energy […]
Roger Pielke, Jr. has looked closely at Australia’s ETS targets and helpfully put some numbers into the hypotheticals.
With all their subsidies, goodwill and fervent wishes, solar, wind, and geothermal produce just 3% of our energy needs. Fossil fuels produce a whopper 94%. And “energy” on these grand continental scales is measured in quadrillion BTUs which is known as “one quad”. Australians use about 5 quads / year, and to make that we pump out about 400 Mt of carbon dioxide per year. (These kind of big-picture numbers are often hard to find, so I wanted to capture that to keep things in perspective.)
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Population growth is a big factor in Australia 8 out of 10 based on 5 ratings […]
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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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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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