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By Jo Nova
In Great Achievements of Government mismanagement, there is a $1 trillion dollar boom in LNG infrastructure around the world, and Australia is one of the top three exporters of LNG, far ahead of the rest, yet we’re about to run out of gas to keep the lights on. It’s so bad we probably have to import gas.
As if anyone needed another example of how small-minded-dictocrat-decrees can screw up a free market and achieve the exact opposite to what they tried to arrange, feast your eyes on Australia.
It takes real planning to start this far ahead and still bollix this up:
Australia was literally the worlds largest LNG exporter in 2020
One of our large energy companies APA Group says a vital Queensland gas pipeline was already running at capacity this winter, and things are so bad, gas power stations here may have to run off diesel, which is stupid on many levels at once. Not only does it lose triple points in Climate-Scrabble, being a dirty high emissions fuel, it’s one of the only fossil fuels we aren’t swimming in. We have 300 years in proven reserves of coal and if we’re lucky, just […]
By Jo Nova
The real cost of back up
Imagine building and maintaining a perfectly good gas plant and then having it sit around for five whole years “just in case”?
There’s been a wind drought in the last three months in Australia, which meant hydro power had been used more than expected to fill the gap. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s been dry spell for most of the last year in Tasmania too and the dams were getting low. So on June 6th, the Combined Cycle Gas plant at Tamar Valley was set up to run for the first time since 2019.
Back in 2016 the maintenance costs of the keeping the CCGT at Tamar Valley on “30 day” standby was $12 to $24 million a year, depending on who you asked. So the five year cost of gas backup is in the order of $100 million, but those costs will be slapped on the gas plant bill, when really they’re a weather dependent renewables cost. What we need is reliable energy, not random electricity. If energy companies were only paid for reliable dispatchable power, the wind and solar plants would have to build their own “back up […]
By Jo Nova
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia
For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.
If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?
The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
We are a fossil fueled world. Solar & wind power make up just 7.5% 6% of our energy needs.*
The world has set a new record for energy use in the last year. And even though renewables are being installed at the fastest rate they ever have been, it isn’t enough to keep up with the growing demand for energy let alone to “convert” the world to Net Zero.
Overall, despite our best efforts to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the world remains “stuck” getting 82% of its energy from them.
The Energy Institute has released the Statistical Review of World Energy, and it shows global energy use has not only recovered from the pandemic, it is now 3% higher than it was pre-Covid in 2019. The relentless human desire for energy continues. In 2022, humans used 1% more energy than they did the year before and 70% of that growth was from China.
To put the historic size of the “Renewable Energy Transition” into focus, here’s the last century of energy transformation. The Energy Institute did not seem to want to highlight the insignificance of renewable energy, so […]
Nordstream explosion. Twitter Forsvaret, Danish Defence.
By Jo Nova
It was an act of terrorism that revolved around energy, but it’s also about free speech and the media. It’s a red-pill moment, and it was released on a blog, not in “the news”. Journalism lives — but it has moved.
Seymour Hersh is the same writer that broke the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib scandal. The veteran reporter won a Pulitzer prize and has an insider source and many details on his new substack blog. He claims The United States deliberately blew up the Nordstream pipes with help from Norway. The explosives were planted by divers in June under the cover of tine BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise. They were triggered by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane on Sept 26th, last year.
The WhiteHouse has flatly denied it, calling it “utterly false”, but the US always had the means, the motive and the opportunity, and we all remember the day when Joe Biden made the open threat “: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. … We will bring an end to it.” It turns out behind […]
“It’s difficult to imagine it could be accidental”
The leaks are massive
Indeed “leak” does not seem like the right word.
@JavierBlas
The explosions are marked with stars.
The sites are 75 kilometers apart just outside official Danish territory.
Euronews –– Swedish national broadcaster SVT reported that national seismologists had registered “two clear explosions” around the area, first at 2:03 AM and then at 7:04 PM (CET) on Monday.
Hours after the explosions, coincidentally, Gazprom also warned that one of the two remaining major pipelines to Europe was at risk due to a legal dispute over fees. Gazprom was refusing to pay a transit fee that the Ukrainian energy firm said it was supposed to pay.
At this stage everyone is saying the leaks are sabotage, but no one is claiming to know anything for sure. The US government has said it is ‘ready to provide support’ to Europe.
So, below, this is quite an awkward flashback, to say the least. It’s from February when Joe Biden was trying to talk Russia out of invading Ukraine:
Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream […]
The Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline from Russia to a desperate Europe was supposed to re-open yesterday, instead, Russia announced that it will remain closed due to an oil leak, indefinitely. The announcement was made after markets closed. Germany has about 3 months of gas in storage.
Gas prices are expected to rise Monday.
Ukraine war: Russia to keep key gas pipeline to EU closed
By Robert Plummer & Oliver Slow BBC News
Faisal Islam, the BBC’s economics editor, described the indefinite closure of Nord Stream 1 as a very serious development, noting that Russia had kept supplies into Europe flowing even at the height of the Cold War.
The stand-off with Russia has forced countries to fill their own gas supplies, with Germany’s stores increasing from less than half in June to 84% full today.
Apparently this is the oil spill that shut down a billion dollar pipeline:
Just bad luck then?
Twitter commenters have some doubts:
@PolemicTMM –– Masterful trolling of the EU by Mr P.
@PrivatinvestN — Is this a Friday night joke or have they actually published this?
@JavierBlas — They did. […]
Another entirely unnecessary crisis. Everything about our energy system is running on the edge.
Despite sitting on a “lake of gas”, Victoria Australia is in danger of running out of usable gas midwinter. The AEMO is back in crisis mode (if it ever left). In Victoria gas supplies are so low, two gas power plants have been ordered to switch off to preserve some gas storage, and the AEMO is begging Queensland for extra gas supplies. There were even warnings yesterday that homes might run out of gas (though that doesn’t appear to have happened).
A bun-fight is breaking out between Australian states over gas supplies, with others grumpy that Victoria is buying their gas fired electricity, but is not exporting gas to make it. Notoriously, Victoria has also banned exploration for new gas wells, and most of its gas exports would come from offshore Commonwealth managed deposits, supposedly belonging to the whole nation, while Queensland and South Australia were digging up their own gas.
Homeowners are warned that if the gas storage underground (in a old reused gas field) falls too low, their home appliances might not work. Welcome to the first world!
When gas levels in […]
All it took was a War.
Policies based on fashion can be dead-set one day and gone the next. Until Saturday Germany was about to close its last nuclear power plants, gas production had been falling for 20 years and it planned to phase out coal plants by 2030.
Germany was the largest energy consumer in Europe, but was also determined to pursue Energiewende, the policy of transitioning from fossil fuels.
On Sunday all that changed:
Nuclear, coal, LNG: ‘no taboos’ in Germany’s energy about-face
By Christoph Steitz, Riham Alkousaa and Maria Sheahan, Reuters
In a landmark speech on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz spelled out a more radical path to ensure Germany will be able to meet rising energy supply and diversify away from Russian gas, which accounts for half of Germany’s energy needs.
“The events of the past few days have shown us that responsible, forward-looking energy policy is decisive not only for our economy and the environment. It is also decisive for our security,” Scholz told lawmakers in a special Bundestag session called to address the […]
Marc Morano is On Fire
The man from Climate Depot
…
Morano: ‘In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance’
MORANO: “We are already seeing – the first part of it is in California, $6 a gallon. Gas is already up a dollar. Estimates are seven, $8 a gallon possible with recession if Putin, who we’ve given all of this power to by literally shutting down U.S. domestic energy.
Just a little history lesson here. In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance. We were the world’s largest oil and gas producer. More energy exports and imports, more energy production than consumption and we hadn’t done that since Harry Truman was president. Joe Biden came in at he said the first thing he wanted to do was jail fossil fuel executives. Biden’s energy secretary had done a video singing about no more gasoline, The is world aflame due to global warming.
9.1 out of 10 based on 54 ratings […]
The COP 26 organizers must be quaking in their chardonnay. Just when they need all the usual hyped up wind powered record headlines, they’re getting headlines of record gas prices, rocketing inflation, and industries thinking about shutting down.
Welcome to the Green Revolution:
UK industry could face shutdowns as wholesale gas price hits record high
Rob Davies and Joanna Partridge, The Guardian
…
Wholesale gas prices hit new all-time highs on Wednesday, prompting warnings that factories could be forced to shut down over winter or switch to more polluting fuels just as the UK hosts the Cop26 climate conference next month.
Trade body UK Steel said it was now “uneconomic” to make steel at certain times in the UK, with British firms facing double the electricity prices paid by rivals in Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Don’t say “oil” say “polluting fuels that had been abandoned”:
Paul Pearcy, the federation coordinator at the trade body British Glass, said companies that make windows could be forced to revert to powering their furnaces with polluting fuels that had been abandoned.
British Glass makers are thinking of using fuel oil again because gas […]
Some great Green plans are starting to come undone and it’s not even winter yet
But it is just in time for a reality check on COP26.
Europe’s energy crunch is continuing, as gas storage volumes have shrunk to 10-year lows. In the UK 12 energy companies have collapsed this year leaving 2.2 million customers stranded without an electricity provider. Things are so bad the Dutch government is thinking of reopening the Groningen gas field, Europe’s largest onshore gas field. This is a big backward step for the transition to magical energy. “Until recently, the plan was that Groningen would be closed completely by 2023, ending the large-scale gas production and export by the Netherlands with a bang.”
There are even thoughts of switching back to coal. Drax is suddenly talking about keeping some coal plants running a bit longer, something that would have been blasphemy a few months ago.
Across Europe and Asia — the energy crisis runs amok
No one can blame Brexit for food shortages in Brussels:
https://twitter.com/hermannkelly/status/1442901773958582274
But people can blame Green policies for energy pain
Kate Andrews: Britain’s weak energy security puts net zero in doubt The Daily Telegraph, 29 […]
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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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