The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did ask for “the equivalent” of 30 new nuclear plants. But it will be big and fast.
Texas has 31 million people. Australia has 26 million (plus a million foreign uni students). We’re performing a national pantomime over whether it’s realistic to build a few nuclear plants and a couple of SMR’s, as if we’re plotting to build the first colony on Venus. Meanwhile Texas is leading the revolution.
“We’ve never existed in a place where large industrial loads can really impact the reliability of the grid, and now we are stepping into that world.”
[Bloomberg]— Demand on the Texas power grid is expected to expand so immensely that it would take the equivalent of adding 30 nuclear plants’ worth of electricity by 2030 to meet the needs.
That’s according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid. The forecast is based on the addition of new data centers needed to power artificial intelligence. And it’s raising concerns about whether infrastructure in the state will be able to expand fast enough — and at what cost.
Individual projects are already starting to request 1 gigawatt of power and they pose new risks to maintaining a stable grid, said Agee Springer, Ercot’s senior manager of grid interconnections. A gigawatt is typically enough to power 250,000 homes in Texas.
Ercot said it’s gotten requests equal to 99 gigawatts for new connections to the grid from big power users, including data centers, bitcoin miners and hydrogen producers, according to an internal grid presentation Thursday. That’s up from 40.8 gigawatts last March.
There’s a big question as to whether infrastructure can be built fast enough because of supply chain issues, resulting in long wait times for things like big turbines to produce electricity and other key equipment such as transformers. Another critical issues is who is going to pay for all of this build out.
None of the AI teams are begging for wind or solar power. If Australia were to build new coal plants, or new nuclear plants with spare capacity, Big AI would be here in a flash. The La Trobe Valley could become a world leading AI centre if the government was willing to keep using the 300 years of cheap brown coal there. At 3 cents a kilowatt hour wholesale, it’s still the cheapest electricity on the planet.
Do we want to be the coal and iron mine at the edge of the world, or would we like to ride the revolution?
It’s a slow moving category 2 storm, that won’t set any wind speed records, but will cross paths with 3 or 4 million people. Current wind speeds at 20 locations are available here. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain for too long. The latest BOM report says sustained winds are 95km / hour with gusts to 130 km/hr. (Roughly 60 to 80 mph).
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml
If “Climate Change” has any effect on Australian cyclones, it’s to reduce them:
With the usual logic and reason of top climate experts, this suggests that car engines, burgers, cows and coal can prevent cyclones. Anyone driving an EV, or eating vegeburgers clearly doesn’t care about koalas (or delicate solar panels):
Without forced theft from the poor, Sunnova (and others in the solar industry) might disappear
Bloomberg writers call it “chaos” and Barrons blames Trump for “uncertainty”, but the truth is the value of solar was always a false bubble held up by forced payments, fantasy, or vicarious political whimsy that spread the costs onto other people. Trump has merely restored the certainty of real value in the free market. He hasn’t banned a single person from buying solar panels, it’s just that not many people want to spend their money on glass panels that make green expensive electrons. They don’t want to spend money on “cheap electricity” that only comes at lunchtime either.
The 70% fall in the stock price is just the last few days since Sunnova officially warned it might not be a “going concern”. The longer term figures are much worse.
On November 4th, when some investors though the word-salad-woman might win, the share price briefly spiked to $7. Right now it is 58 cents, meaning it has lost 92 percent of its value since Trump won the election. The entire $12 mini-boom peak in September last year, arguably, was a bet that Kamala-grift would be worth something.
Sunnova has $3 billion in assets (allegedly), and employs 1,200 people according to Wiki. (Or it did).
Sunnova Energy International Inc. shares plunged 71% as the company warned there’s substantial doubt it will remain in business. That came less than a week after First Solar Inc., the biggest US solar manufacturer, said it was seeing increasing customer delays. And it was also on the heels of Sunrun Inc., the biggest US residential solar company, saying it expects installation volumes to be flat this year.
The US solar industry is in the midst of the biggest reckoning it’s faced since going mainstream more than a decade ago.
Solar had been viewed as a crucial answer for dealing with rising electric demand while capping global emissions…
Analysts have been lowering their home solar installation projections in 2025 after installs fell by nearly 20% in 2024. And meanwhile, the Trump administration and Congress are considering moving to cut the tax credits that Sunnova and others have counted on to generate cash. That’s on top of a federal freeze of loans and grants that were aided by Biden’s signature climate law.
It’s all the fault of the “uncertain regulatory policies” — even though Trump is dead set certain he will not subsidize these things.
What they mean to say is Donald Trump has turned off the tap, and the solar panels weren’t worth buying if other people didn’t pay:
The rooftop solar industry has struggled lately, because fewer people are installing solar panels due to high interest rates and unfavorable or uncertain regulatory policies. As of December, energy-data firm Wood Mackenzie said 2024 U.S. installations were on track to fall 26% from the year before. The Trump administration’s policies have only added more uncertainty.
“The overall environment is terrible,” said Sunnova CEO John Berger on a conference call with analysts. “I mean, it’s the political environment, the capital markets—look at the equity trading off. And so, that just gets everybody in a very bad mood, candidly.”
Yahoo Finance blames high interest rates as if the long artificially low interest rates, set by a government appointed politburo-style-committee, weren’t just another sort of subsidy.
Much of the industry’s turbulence can be traced to high interest rates and uncertainty about the future of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Solar installers have benefited in the past from low interest rates, which make solar loans and leasing attractive to consumers. By spreading the cost of rooftop solar over many years, consumers don’t have to pay up front and often save relative to their monthly utility bills. But as rates have risen, it can take longer for consumers to benefit financially.
On the policy front, the Inflation Reduction Act extended tax credits that were set to expire at the end of last year. The new credits run through 2032, though the Trump administration has vowed to unravel the law.
It’s one of the best kept secrets of modern civilization, that low interest rates steal from long term savers and subsidize speculators and borrowers (rich people). The central bankers force institutions to charge low rates, lots of people borrow money, which increases the money supply hunting for things in the same limited pool of goods. In turn, that creates inflation and steals the purchasing power from every dollar — from children and grandparents alike.
Bloomberg writers think Trump creates chaos, but the truth is that the whole fake market in solar has been one gigantic bubble. At one point in early 2021, Sunnova shares were selling for $53.
There’s nothing like a few belligerent trade spats, and miscreant dragged anchors to ruin a brand’s reputation
After six separate incidents of underwater cables being sabotaged in the Baltic Sea, the German Defense Ministry is wondering if it is wise to buy Chinese wind turbines with all their electronic parts. A new report commissioned for the department not only suggests the government should restrict new turbines, it advises them to call a halt to an existing project.
Hypothetically, China might remotely shut down wind turbines at a key moment, creating crazy price spikes, and industrial havoc (although wind turbines seem quite good at that on their own). But seriously, if wind turbines got a bit more random, or a bit less efficient, would anyone know for sure? And if a market player had that information in advance, they could make out like a bandit — bidding at the right moment, and collecting on all the price spikes. It would be just another way to bleed a country, raise electricity prices, and reduce it’s competitiveness. (But good for business back home, eh? )
Oddly, the Defense analysts seem to worry more that China might delay projects on purpose, which sounds like an act of kindness to me. But if the electricity managers had already blown up the coal plants, then it might leave a vulnerable gigawatt gap.
Some thing has to charge the big batteries and pumped hydro, after all or they won’t be there for the dinner time peak. Likewise with the EVs.
The report, which the German defense ministry commissioned, argues Beijing could purposefully delay projects, harvest sensitive data and remotely shut down turbines if given access to wind farms. It also advises the country to stop an existing wind project using Chinese turbines from going ahead.
“When using systems or components from Chinese manufacturers … given the political situation, it can even be assumed that such a slowdown or even disruption would be deliberately used by China as a means of political pressure or even as an instrument of economic warfare,” reads the report, prepared last month by the German Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies think tank.
“A destabilization of both the political system, the business model of German industry and social cohesion cannot therefore be ruled out due to a lack of or insufficient planning security in the energy sector,” it adds.
But they were also concerned China could harvest data from hundreds of radars, and be able to spy on military training sites.
Part of the danger also comes from the access that manufacturers get to turbines, according to the study. Beijing’s suppliers would have access to computer programs that control active turbines and collect data from hundreds of radars built into farms, it states — a significant issue given that wind produced a third of Germany’s electricity last year and a fifth of the EU’s power.
In sum, the report argues, that would hand China “considerable blackmail potential in the future.”
The report warns that the “first time use of Chinese wind turbines must be prevented” on “public safety” grounds, since it risks creating a reliance on Beijing’s expertise and giving it access to “essential elements of German critical infrastructure” near militarily relevant training areas.
The Defence team also suspect the Chinese projects are being subsidized by China to beat out European competitors. It’s almost a case of China-would-be-crazy if they weren’t. The more renewables they supply, the more incapacitated and deindustrialized Europe gets, and the easier it is for the rest of China’s factories to drive competitors out of business.
Think of renewables as loss-leaders for a whole civilization.
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure. Despite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80% of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute. Coal, oil and natural gas production are at record highs. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise inexorably. The financial markets were already losing confidence in the energy transition before Donald Trump returned to the White House. A more realistic approach to climate policy is urgently needed.
What they don’t say is that all this was unmistakably obvious for a decade or more, that thousands of engineers and scientists have been telling the world this would happen, and that Reuters wouldn’t report them, not even when they had a Nobel prize.
Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.
Why now? Because reality is making Reuters look stupid — it’s not the reality of high costs or blackouts, but the reality that Trump won, and set fire to the “transition” fantasy by dumping Paris, dropping subsidies, opening gas fields, and installing a corporate energy CEO as the US Energy Secretary. Chris Wright and JD Vance are dropping truth bombs in speeches that can’t be ignored. Word is spreading fast, and if Reuters don’t report this, they risk being turned into the same irrelevant wreckage the US mainstream media channels already are. As the US economy ramps up, other countries will have to let go of their green delusions in order to keep up. The game changed. There’s no point upping the ante in the UN-poker game if the main player has played a Royal Flush.
Even the graph! An actual graph!
Source Reuters and Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2024
Two graphs!
Presumably the owners of Reuters have sold out of their renewable stocks. (Readers here read about this trend in October 2023.)
Source: Reuters, and S&P | P.Thal Larsen.
So this is arse-covering, forgive the language, but this is also an escape clause for allies and believers
The owners of Reuters (whoever they are) — are presumably part of The Blob, since they have covered up its failures for decades, and gave millions to Hillary. This article is also an escape clause for allies and a warning to jump ship. It’s full of excuses — we were misled by an era of low interest rates; we had good intentions; we didn’t realize China made all our stuff with coal, you know, and Energy transitions take a very long time. What a shock!
The way Edward Chancellor writes, anyone could have got this wrong. Even the oil giants made mistakes, you know, and are now looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business. Never is there any question that say, National Energy Managers ought to have done their homework, or that Energy Ministers should have done due diligence before recklessly trying to transform electricity grids based on what Al Gore and a teenage girl told them to do:
Not long ago, investors worried that traditional energy companies would be left with “stranded assets” – oil and gas fields abandoned as demand for fossil fuels dried up. Yet earlier this month Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab announced a near-$1 billion writedown for its investment in a wind project off the New Jersey coast. BP (BP.L), opens new tab is scrapping targets for increasing generation of renewable energy and cutting oil and gas production. As Lees writes, “across the sector, oil majors that shifted their portfolios to green energy are now realising their mistake and are looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business.”
The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels.The energy expert Vaclav Smil has likened the costs of the planned energy transition to those incurred by a nation fighting total war for decades on end. The era of zero interest rates created a sense that the supply of capital was infinite and its cost negligible. Rising interest rates dispelled that illusion. The economics of wind and solar power, with their large upfront investment costs and relatively low operating expenses, have been upended. Wood Mackenzie calculates that every 2 percentage point increase in the risk-free rate raises the levelised cost of renewable electricity by around 20%.
I’ve always said there will come a day when everyone says “I was always a skeptic”
This is the start of that normalization. It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning of the end in the energy battle.
But it’s not even the start of the science battle. They’re still “believers” of big-gov bad-science. The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels….
What the world still urgently needs are real journalists and honest media. It needs accountable Ministers, and bureaucrats that get sacked. If we don’t learn from the last mistakes, the next episode of parasitic loot-and-pillage is just around the corner.
People with a good education are hard to fool, which is why the curriculum buries the good stuff until it disappears under a kiloton of culture, engagement and sustainability blah. Then the media (with US government Blob funding) repeats the hypnotic trance line “seas are rising due to climate change” until anyone who was accidentally taught real science, forgets it.
How many children (how many adults) think that sea levels have been the same for a million years? The travesty of 12 years of education is that 99% of people know nothing about 99% of history, and even less about prehistory. Every one of these defenseless souls is so easily fooled into panic attacks about seas rising a millimeter a year. “Unprecedented” they say! Don’t use the hair-dryer!
Willie Soon has some fun in his time machine zipping through ancient Greece and Roman history, where ports were built 6 crazy kilometers from the sea…
And after two world wars, 1.5 billion cars and 35 million planes a year, the rate of sea level rise is pretty much the same as it was in 1860 or so. It’s like we are irrelevant…
[Graphed by Joanne Nova based on data from Jevrejura et al located at this site PMSML]
If CO2 isn’t endangering lives, legally, there’s no reason to outlaw oil and gas
Marc Morano of ClimateDepot calls this the “holy grail” of the climate agenda. Most of the climate policies of the United States depend on “the Endangerment Finding”– so President Trump asked the new EPA head to look closely at it. This is the “finding” in 2009 that CO2 endangers the public, and that in turn means the EPA must regulate this “pollutant”. Thereby becoming the perfect excuse to allow the bureaucrats to regulate cars, trucks, planes, gas stoves and anything from hair dryers to home insulation.
The new EPA head just finished his 30 day consideration and recommends the Whitehouse rewrite the past conclusion entirely.
Ann Carlson of LegalPlanet says undoing the Endangerment Finding …”would mean full-blown warfare against all things climate.” She describes how the entire bureaucratic edifice crumbles if CO2 is not a pollutant:
If the Administration were to reverse the endangerment finding, greenhouse gases would no longer need to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Presumably, EPA would then simply move to revoke all of Biden’s major climate rules regulating cars, trucks, power plants, and oil and gas operations. As Joe Goffman, former Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation under President Biden, told Politico, recently, “taking away the 2009 endangerment finding would really make it almost a virtual formality to take down all the greenhouse rules for CO2 and methane,”
This great news, of course, blows some minds
From Bloomberg
“There is a lot of shocking stuff happening now, but to completely deny climate change and any federal obligation to control the pollution that’s driving it would be shocking and irresponsible,” said David Doniger, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Environmental advocates contend it also would be illegal. “Climate pollution is air pollution, and it is fueling a crisis,” said Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign. “There is no scientific basis – none – to claim otherwise.
Ann Carlson of LegalPlanet explains, bless her, that the EPA did all “the Science” and public consultation (after twenty years of indoctrination) to get this endangerment “finding” through in the first places so if Trump doesn’t follow the same process, they’ll get sued. She’s sure Trump would lose “because the science is… overwhelming”. Clearly, she has no idea ten times as many people die of the cold, (or even twenty times as many) or that the entire causal “evidence” for the dangers of CO2 depends on models that pretend the Sun is just a big light-globe. These models ignore the solar-electric field, the magnetic field, UV changes and the solar wind, and then, surprise, get nearly every prediction wrong.
Believers are telling themselves all kinds of lies at the moment just to cope with the shock. They’re hoping that individual states will still be able to make self defeating climate rules, they’re warning it could take years for the EPA to get through the proper rule-making process. They’re comforting themselves that other legal doors will open if this one closes: even though teenagers might not be able to sue essential corporations for doing their jobs, “it could revive public nuisance laws” against oil producers. Praise the Lord!
Trump should not only set up a scientific group to investigate whether CO2 causes any harm, he should follow the evidence all the way. If the scientists consider the total cost-benefits of CO2, they’d easily show CO2 is an asset that feeds the poor, restores the forests, and improves life on Earth. Obviously, those companies and countries emitting CO2 are doing the world a favor. Coal, oil and gas plants should get tax deductions for their contributions.
Does this look like a country that cares about carbon emissions?
President Xi said he would “strictly control” coal power from 2021 to 2025, and he has strictly controlled… a huge increase in coal power.
President Xi: — Reuters (April 2021) –“We will strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase it down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030),” he said.
SINGAPORE, Feb 13 (Reuters) – China started construction on 94.5 gigawatts of coal-fired power in 2024, the highest volume of new builds since 2015, hampering the country’s transition away from fossil fuels, researchers said…
The surge came despite a record-breaking increase in renewable capacity last year and could make it harder to connect clean power to the grid, said the report, published by CREA and the Global Energy Monitor (GEM) think tank.
China also promised its emissions will peak in 2030, right when a whole squadron of these new plants will have barely started operation. But it’s OK because the new coal plants are only a “back up for renewable power”:
China has retired more than 100 GW of obsolete coal-fired power in the last decade, according to its energy regulator, and new projects can only be built to provide back-up for renewable energy bases.
So each year China is started building ten times as much coal power as it is retiring.
And all this coal power is needed despite the fact that President Xi China added a phenomenal 356 GW of wind and solar capacity in 2024 alone.
Where was all that wind and solar power when China needed electricity? — it was providing an excuse for all the extra coal plants China wanted to build.
Spot the strict limit on coal development in China…
These graphs cover Comissioning, Contruction, “Permitted”, New Project” and Retired coal plants in the last ten years.
We can all see for ourselves just how much work China has put in to stop “Climate change”.
The iconic 120 year old company shares fall as rumors of a takeover spread
BP has lost a quarter of its share value in the last two weeks. The fall started when company profits turned out to be just $9 billion, down from $14b a year ago and $28b in 2022. As The Telegraph reports, “BP’s shareholders had realized that the green spending they supported in 2020 had halved their dividends.” But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon — the other oil giants — they were all doing much better.
Twenty years ago BP changed its branding to “Beyond Petroleum”*. By 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. Suicidally, the oil company pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, (which did nothing except help all their competitors) and promised to pivot into renewable power. BP set itself a target to increase renewables generation by a factor of twenty this decade. The media gushed — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico. BP supposedly shone a light on “stranded oil and gas”!
Thus and verily, in mid 2020, with exquisite timing, BP management leapt headlong in the magical energy pit. They were sure that after the pandemic the world would ‘build back better’ with renewables “so their economies would be more resilient”... CEO Bernard Looney actually said that (probably while reading from the WEF handbook of “What to Wear for Billionaires”).
So BP flagged a write-down of $18 billion dollars in fossil fuel assets and talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then everything went wrong. Just after BP bet the house on renewables, the Ukraine war broke out and everyone needed oil and gas and no one needed another wind farm. There was a bonanza selling fossil fuels as prices lifted off (seen in the BP income in 2022) but suddenly no one could afford to buy real energy to make solar panels and turbines, and no one had much cash left to buy randomly-failing generators either. It’s been all downhill in renewables ever since.
Prior to this, BP operated Australia’s largest oil refinery for 66 years in Kwinana, Western Australia until it closed in 2021. Until a few weeks ago, BP was planning to launch a $600 million biofuel project on the same site, and the Australian government was thinking of tossing $1 billion dollars at a hydrogen project there too. They were supposed to turn cooking oil into av-gas and renewable diesel, and be a hub for hydrogen. It’s sadly pathetic and unravelling at warp speed.
The energy giant has vowed a ‘fundamental reset’ after its costly foray into net zero
Johnathon Leake and Ben Marlow, The Telegraph
Five years on from that speech in February 2020, the company is beleaguered by a ruthless activist investor, under pressure to boost its flatlining share price and considering a return to the oil and gas exploration that made it so successful to begin with.
The abrupt turn follows decades of crisis at one of Britain’s most venerable institutions. Today, its future is more uncertain than ever.
To win round doubters, he is expected to announce a major break with the last five years – shifting away from net zero and back towards its oil and gas heritage.
Pushed by analysts, Auchincloss, Looney’s replacement, confirmed a halt to all investment in wind and solar. “We have completely decapitalised renewables,” he said.
We can blame management, who had been on the fruity green path since 1997, and screwed up majorly, but oddly, 88% of BP shareholders also voted in favor of cutting oil and growing renewables which doesn’t make much sense. Not unless the rank and file votes were unknowingly cast-by-proxy through their hedge funds and pension accounts. Were 88% of British Petroleum investors really fooled into thinking oil was “bad” — or was BP quietly undermined by the big banker blob cartel who may have bossed all the pension funds into voting for Hari Kari? Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, pumped up the whole renewables bubble in 2020, and the bankers were known to boss around whole countries with threats of high interest rates if they didn’t behave.
Hypothetically if the Big Bankers were heavily invested in renewable stocks (which they were), then during a bubble, it would work out well for them if one of the largest oil and gas companies performed a large public flip to renewables. And as a bonus, if BP shareholders were stiffed in the process, the wreckage of a great company could be picked up cheaply a few years later…
So management were crazy, but they probably had help from The Blob Bankers and the Blob Media to really screw things up.
*Correction: “name” changed to” brand”. Technically BP just “rebranded” itself “Beyond Petroleum”. h/t Robert Swan.
By Jo Nova
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