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“No bias here” says Aust Energy Market chief while planning 100% for unnecessary, pointless renewables transition

Pull the other one.

Audrey Zibelman, photo.

No Bias — Audrey Zibelman,

Audrey Zibelman, the improbable green-lawyer manager of our National Energy Market claims her advice is not biased towards renewables. This is the same Zibelman who tells us that “resisting the energy transition is like trying to resist the internet.” As if governments had to legislate “An Internet Target” and mandate we do 16% of our shopping online. The same Zibelman believes  “we’re the last generation on earth who can really do something about climate change.” She thinks she’s changing global weather with our power grid. By 2100 historians will have people rolling in the aisles with that one. What were they thinking?*

Her bias is so all encompassing she can’t imagine a world twenty years hence which still runs on coal and gas and views the temporary experiment with unreliables as a disastrous, predictable mistake, a historic dead-end. Renewables are the B-size-batteries, the hydrogen-filled-air-ships and the X-rays for shoe shops that didn’t take over the world. She assumes that the forced “transition” to renewables is inevitable, natural and necessary. What if it’s an artificial, uneconomic, unnecessary accident of profit hungry industry rent-seekers and  fatuous virtue signaling fools?

Hands up who thinks that solar panels and windmills will stop storms and lower the tide!

Hands up who thinks techononogy will save the day and is 100% guaranteed to convert high maintenance, low efficiency energy collectors into something reliable and cheap, and in our lifetimes? What if our solar panels are a hundred years too soon? Say hello to the modern cargo cult, and who put a clan chieftain in charge of 50,000 gigawatts?

Who indeed… Malcolm Turnbull knew exactly what she was when he rescued Zibelman from the collapsing Clinton empire last year. She is hopelessly, intractably, biased, and that’s just what Turnbull wants. If he wanted cheap electricity, he would have appointed someone else.

The government should auto-bin every AEMO report until someone else runs it, or Zibelman admits that we don’t have to have one single windmill or solar panel operating in Australia. There are no laws of physics, nor economic, free market arguments or even one national example that suggest that intermittent, unreliable power generators should be driving our grid. The only thing they have are computer models based on simplistic assumptions that no one has audited and which fail every test. And there is no country on Earth that has lots of wind and solar and also has cheap electricity.

If Zibelman wanted cheap electricity the AEMO would consider all options, including the one where we just do what all our competitors are doing, and what we used to do, and stop subsidizing a failed, immature technology, start building the 1601st new coal plant around the world, start talking about nuclear energy, and stop destroying what was a perfectly good and efficient national grid and market.

AEMO chief rejects claims of renewables bias in energy model

Perry Williams, The Australian

“There’s no bias in the model,” Ms Zibelman said yesterday. “It’s a cost-base engineering optimisation model. The implication that somehow the modelling is biased one way or the other is simply not true.’’

A few sane men:

Government backbenchers Tony Pasin, John Williams, Ken O’Dowd, Craig Kelly and George Christensen criticised a report ­released last month by the AEMO into the electricity sector, saying it did not focus on lowering ­prices.

Spot the bias?

The report warned Australia would need to spend up to $27 billion replacing retiring coal plants in the next two decades with fossil fuels set to be ousted from the country’s national electricity market. In its place would be a mix of solar, wind, storage and gas along with new ­investment in electricity transmission.

Who says?

The problem is not so much that there is bias in the model. The disaster starts with the bias mandated in the legislation that says we have to force this transition, we have to pick technologies, we have to mess with the market, and we need to pick supernatural weather controlling cult clanswomen to run our grid.

Is this the AEMO Report they refer too: Integrated System Plan, July 2018? This unbiased document refers to REZs 244 times. What’s a REZ? It’s not defined, but a REZs (how awkward) means “Renewable energy zones”. For some reason, the unbiased, technology neutral AEMO has spent money and time identifying REZs so that supposedly profitable competitive suppliers don’t have too?

This is the How to Save Money Report that Vestas would write.

Here’s more bias buried in vague blah:

Due to the changes in technology, the transformation requires the adoption of new technologies and approaches to provide services needed to operate the power system that are currently provided predominantly by thermal generation.

Nobody mention that thermal generation is and will be the mainstay of almost every country on Earth:

When existing thermal generation reaches the end of its technical life and retires, the most cost-effective replacement of its energy production, based on current cost projections, is a portfolio of utility-scale renewable generation, energy storage, distributed energy resources (DER), flexible thermal capacity including gas-powered generation (GPG), and transmission.

Why do we need more “storage?”:

• There is a growing need for energy storage over the next 20 years to increase the flexibility and reliability of supply.

The Australian grid didn’t need storage for the last hundred years. An unbiased report would mention that. It also didn’t need more billion dollar interconnectors. Each state used to be able to power itself.

The invisible elephant in this room is the option of Not Subsidizing Renewables, or Not Mandating we have to have green electrons.

At no point does the AEMO model compare costs of the renewable cult to costs of Australia’s renewable-free history. All the savings and improvements are compared to strawmen mismanaged-half-bodged expensive grids:

AEMO estimates that the additional transmission investment proposed in the ISP would conservatively deliver savings of around $1.2 billion on a net present value (NPV) 3 basis, compared to the case where no new transmission is built to increase network capabilities between regions (in the modelled Neutral case).

The value of the identified transmission investment can be quantified by comparing total costs of supply against a ‘no new interconnection’ option…

It’s like a hundred years of grid efficiency and history has been made invisible. It’s beyond bias — the AEMO has become a marketing and advertising tool for the Renewables Industry. This is the How to Save Money Report that Vestas would write.

Lest We forget how bad those climate models are:

The models not only fail on global decadal scales, but on regional, local, short term[1] [2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4][5] too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7]drought [8] and they fail on clouds [9]. The hot spot is missing, the major feedbacks are not amplifying the effect of CO2 as assumed.

See the refs here.

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*A great title for a book, eh? Look out for the launch of the marvellous John Spooner’s work any day now. today!

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