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By Jo Nova
Going Green with Diesel
Back in February, South Australia was the Renewables Wonderland basking in the thrill of driving two diesel plants out of business. The remarkable transition had claimed two new fossil fuel scalps. But the farce of last week’s near blackout in Sydney must have scared the management in South Australia. Suddenly this week, the government announced it wants to change the rules and force those mothballed diesel plants back into action.
The Frankenstein economy fails (again)
The government created a monster — an artificial market that favoured random energy and drove dependable power out of business. So, not surprisingly, now they have to do emergency market surgery and spend even more money, to force Engie to reopen these uneconomic plants.
The fact that essential plants are “uneconomic” only shows what a Quasimodo market this is. If the rules favored the cheap reliable electricity (that customers want) instead of hobgoblin-electrons that change the future weather (maybe), no one would have to order Engie to restart the plants. They wouldn’t have gone out of business. Instead, a bunch of unreliable wind farms and fields of glass would never have been created. No one could afford […]
Image: Keppel Prince
By Jo Nova
More proof that wind power can’t be used to make wind turbines
The one and only Australian manufacturer of wind turbine towers is going out of business, despite Australian electricity reaching 35% glorious renewable, and the Prime Ministers big plan to have the $22 billion dollar Future Made in Australia, as well as our galloping Net Zero fantasy to reach 82% renewable by 2030. We are, in theory, supposed to install 40 new wind towers a month somewhere in Australia, but none of the towers, it turns out, will be Australian made.
Imagine what we could do if Australia were the largest exporter of iron ore and coal in the world? The government could still screw it up.
Right now, we ship the iron and coal 7,000 kilometers away with heavy fuel oil, to be made into windmills to save the world, only to ship them right back, rather than make them here.
Renewables are the cheapest source of electricity on Earth, they say, and Australia has twice as much as China (proportionately). But China makes 65% of all wind turbines globally, and soon Australia will make 0%.
OWID
[…]
Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.
The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.
Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’
By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian
Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without […]
By Jo Nova
Soon every tech billionaire will have their own nuclear power plant
Two weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.
Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it’s against the religion).
The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber rich get that kind of luck.
Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser […]
ENI Katherine — might as well be a pagan temple to the Sun.
By Jo Nova
The Northern Territory is a test case for renewable energy and it’s a bonfire
In 2016, the new Labor Government waved a magic wand and commanded they would be 50% renewable by 2030. The experts said it was doable and would save $30 million a year. They gave out the permits for large solar installations, which began construction in 2019, but then suddenly changed the rules in 2020, and wouldn’t let the solar plants connect to the main Darwin-Katherine grid. Unbelievably, 64 megawatts of solar panels that cost $40 million dollars have sat, doing nothing, for four long years.
“It’s just reflecting back into space, not being used to power the grid and to substitute for diesel and gas turbine production,” said local vet Peter Trembath, who leased his land to energy company Eni Australia for the solar project.
“It’ll be some technical issue, but you’d reckon they would have sorted that out before Eni spent $40 million to erect it.” — Max Rowley, ABC News June 2022
It’s always the Grids fault…
The reason they […]
By Jo Nova
Hiding the costs of renewables until after the next election
The largest coal plant in Australia was supposed to close in August next year, but the NSW government decided to buy a two year extension until a few months after the next state election. Now the modeling comes out showing that they decided to keep the Eraring coal plant running to prevent the shocking price spikes from disturbing the voters. Keeping the coal plant will reduce wholesale electricity bills by a few billion dollars. (Why don’t we keep it open for ten years?)
Presumably his reelection chances would be worse if “saved the planet”, and shut the coal plant a few months before the election instead.
They know the voters don’t want the transition. They know it will cost more. And yet they do it anyway…
Bizarrely, this news comes from the renewable industry site Reneweconomy, where Giles Parkinson doesn’t seem to notice this shows coal power is cheap and renewables are hideous. Apparently he doesn’t mind inflicting costs on hapless homeowners, he is just bummed that they couldn’t force more unreliable energy and battery packs on the grid even sooner:
NSW confirms Eraring closure delay […]
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
How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.
Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.
With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.
We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.
Anero.id
Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.
It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our […]
By Jo Nova
There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste
Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.
The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).
Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.
The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.
Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re […]
By Jo Nova
Games with levelized guesses don’t take all the hidden costs into account
Prize of the day for national policy research goes to Nick Cater, who managed to ridicule our billion dollar national science agency, the CSIRO, with a newspaper column.
The CSIRO put out a report proclaiming that nuclear power would be impossible before 2040 and cost “twice as much” as renewables. But Nick Cater just compared electricity in New South Wales to Finland to prove their 129 pages of modeled costs were wrong:
Finland’s clean, Green nuclear power a lesson for Labor
On Saturday…. Electricity generation in NSW was releasing 750g of carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of electricity. In Finland, it was 35g.
If the CSIRO’s GenCost report is to be believed, Finnish electricity prices should have gone through the roof a year ago when its newest reactor was turned on. They did not. The retail price of electricity in Finland, which is indexed to the spot market, came down almost immediately.
Were Energy Minister Chris Bowen to spend a few days in Finland, he might realise almost everything he says about nuclear is complete […]
By Jo Nova
The sore losers of the renewable-fantasy hope you don’t expect them to apologize
We are at the beginning of the big-flip. The activist pundits are suddenly realizing that renewables aren’t cheap and worse, that the public know it. Without blinking, they’re switching from telling us how cheap renewables are to saying of course, it’s going to be difficult, like everyone knows this and they haven’t been completely wrong for twenty years and wasted trillions of dollars.
They hope of course to erase the past, skip the apology, and slide the public straight into acceptance — that the transition will cost more, of course.
Take Peter Lewis, of Essential Polling. He writes snidely in The Guardian:
Here’s the truth: energy transition is hard. Not everyone gets a pony
The climate crisis has long been defined by its lies: From the original sin of science denial, to Tony Abbott’s confected carbon tax panic, to the latest yellowcake straw man. But the most damaging porky of all might be that the transition to renewable energy will be easy.
Did you see what he did there? He blamed and named conservatives and then pretends they were the ones […]
By Jo Nova
This tells us everything we need to know about modern Western civilization. A blimp with wings.
These pufferfish of the sky could be the ugliest, most absurd planes to take to the troposphere.
They are emblematic of the era we live in. Wind turbines destined to rot in the ocean are so big now they can’t even fit on a truck, so someone is planning a plane specially for them. It will be 100 feet longer than a Jumbo jet but carry no tourists, except the fibreglass kind that torment whales, deafen porpoises and vandalize fine electricity grids. The whole point of these machines is a quest to appease the weather Gods one hundred years from now.
Presumably these will run on fairy dust or fermented tofu.
The Flying white elephants could “hit the sky” in four years
To be clear, all that was announced two weeks ago was that Radia has “plans” to make these aircraft and wants $300 million dollars. Presumably the photos here were made by ChatGPT or equivalent.
Radia’s WindRunner to be the world’s largest aircraft ever built
by Rizwan Choudry, Interesting Engineering
The WindRunner’s colossal dimensions dwarf […]
Paul Englher | ABC News
By Jo Nova
Just how wise is it to have a grid dependent on all this fragile infrastructure?
Nature seems to be telling us something about adding another 10,000 kilometers of vulnerable transmission lines.
Yesterday six high voltage transmission lines collapsed in Victoria leaving half a million people without electricity for hours. But only a few weeks ago five towers collapsed in Western Australia putting 30,000 in the dark. And out in Kalgoorlie, when the gas backup plants failed, thousands of people went for days without power in 40 degree heat. Some people were unable to call triple zero, freezers full of food were spoilt and nearly everything left to buy had to be paid for in cash.
In Victoria the towers fell at 1:10pm during a storm. Their loss triggered the shut down of 4 large coal power units at Loy B Yang taking out 2 GW of generation. It took three hours to get one turbine back on line, and eight hours to restore the second. Everyone is talking about “the coal fired outage” but about half the wind power running at the time was also lost, and over the […]
By Jo Nova
This week the agitprop-media was full of contrived good news about electricity prices in Australia, associated suggestively, in the loosest, most meaningless way with the word “renewables”. Not one of them said that long term prices were still higher than when we started trying to force unreliable wind and solar power on the grid, and not one of them said prices would be one half of the price now if the country was lucky enough to run off brown coal.
These misleading stories were disguised adverts for renewable energy pretending to be “news”. They were on display at The Guardian, The ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald, and every other paper across Australia. Not one journalist apparently had the wit to ask the AEMO how this compared to long term prices. But all of them obediently repeated that prices this December were 48% cheaper than the December before that, as if Australians like to discuss that sort of thing across the BBQ. Were monthly average wholesale prices good for you Jim?
Australia’s wholesale power prices fall by almost half as carbon emissions drop
Wholesale power prices across Australia’s main electricity market almost halved at […]
By Jo Nova
Word is spreading openly of the awful third quarter results in wind and solar power, and in EV’s. Morningstar noted some $14 billion dollars moved out of sustainability funds in the last quarter even before the dismal results were announced. This is only a small part of the $300 billion total, but it’s a big bad shift in momentum in a sector that is supposed to be going exponential and theoretically “the next big thing”.
Two years ago funds were tagging anything they could with Sustainability. But the term has become a dirty word, and so has ESG. Funds that were enthusiastically adding these green terms to their titles are now dropping them and backing away slowly…
With major daily business newspapers now reporting the bad news it’s hard to see what will stop the slide — only massive subsidies would do that (temporarily), but the US has already done that with the bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act.
But make no mistake, there is a $300 billion industry begging for help and a lot of politicians who don’t want to admit their renewables push was an economic disaster. The German government has bailed out Siemens, and the […]
By Jo Nova
Let’s run an experiment on a whole nation that we can’t even do easily on a single home
Photo | Daily Sceptic,
Imaging scaling this up for a country?
The Daily Sceptic has the story of an Australian farmer in Victoria who has gone off-grid to try to be as self sufficient as he can, not out of ideology, but for pragmatic reasons. He has two 3 bedroom homes, with 30 solar panels and a 1kW wind turbine each. For storage they have about 30 German lead acid batteries which at current prices is about $15,000 of batteries each. But even so, each house still has bottled gas stoves, and a 6 kVA petrol generator. The generators are set to come on when the batteries get too low, which often happens in the evenings of autumn, winter and sometimes in spring. (He estimates about 60 – 100 hours each year). Even above all that equipment that needs gas, fuel and maintenance and cost about $160,000 in total to set up, they still have to grow, cut and collect, ouch, 100 kg of wood (220lbs) per week in winter for each house.
He warns that anyone […]
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Kathryn Porter in The Telegraph, has compiled quite the list of failures as offshore wind projects get frozen around the world. Decisions are being delayed, contracts abandoned, auctions left without bidders and almost no new projects started. The awful truth of inflation, the maintenance cost shocks and cable failures is all too much. Then there was the problem of needing a 100 years of copper, nickel and lithium production before Christmas.
It’s all been kept quiet. Who knew there were no offshore wind investments in the EU last year, apart from a few floating projects?
After years of subsidies, wind power was meant to get cheap enough to be profitable and competitive all by itself, instead, 25 years later, it just needs bigger subsidies. When the great oil and coal price crunch came, wind power was supposed to rise through the ashes, instead we discovered that wind turbine and battery factories needed cheap coal and oil like the rest of the economy.
Right now Australia has no offshore wind turbines and is about to jump onto a burning ship:
The myth of affordable green energy is over
October 13th, 2023 | Tags: Climate Money, ESG, Renewable Energy, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid
The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.
Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the chart. And they’re not projecting troubles fifty years from now. Those cropped peaks of invisible pain hit from 2027.
And even the pain we can see is apparently quite bad. Two states are already likely to breach “the interim reliability measure” in this coming summer. Ominously, just one day after releasing the report, the AEMO is calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” in South Australia and Victoria. Apparently, they want offers of industries ready to shut down who aren’t already on the list, and they want spare generation too — get this — even asking […]
By Jo Nova
The current state of the Renewable Crash Test Dummy Transition
Everyone who can add up in Australia knows it can’t work, but the climate of fear stops them saying so. Last month a senior energy industry executive told the Australian Financial Review quietly that everyone believes [the 2030 target] will be missed, but nobody wants to say it. Apparently, even executives are being coerced into silence for fear of retribution. The insider referred to the “discretion” Ministers have on project approvals. It’s like a national mafia racket: “Nice business you have there — shame if you couldn’t get the permit”. So the Labor Party sets itself up to fail by silencing the people it could be listening to — as if the electricity will still be there when the turbines stop turning.
To put the size of the moonshot in perspective, even Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen himself said the nation must “install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years along with 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines every month”. In toto, we are supposed to build 44GW of “renewables” by 2030.
Instead of this frenetic pace, renewable energy investment ground to […]
By Jo Nova
How to hide $100b storage, transmission lines, battery costs in a dodgy accounting trick
The cost for our whole national $100 billion dollar energy transition apparently rests on a CSIRO report that assumes we’ve already spent the infrastructure money “therefore” future costs after 2030 are almost nothing. It’s like a Nigerian email scam… except that it has fooled our Minister for Energy.
You have been selected to win a new national electricity grid, just give us your economy…
Chris Bowen, said Minister, thinks wind and solar will reduce the cost of electricity, despite them doing the opposite so far.
The CSIRO GenCost report says that renewables are cheap if we pretend we have already spent the money on the transmissions lines, the pumped storage, the “firming” of the grid. It’s like a used car salesman that says the second hand electric car will be cheap to run while hiding the twenty grand you have to spend on a new battery before it can move out the door…
There is a circular reasoning here that says we assume it’s worth spending bezillions now because renewables will be cheap after we have spent bezillions. […]
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