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By Jo Nova What were they thinking?Despite 30 years of wall-to-wall propaganda most adults seem to feel that Climate Change is not an emergency. For some reason, they’d rather cut their electricity bill now, than cool the world by a thousandth of a degree in a hundred years time. It’s taken billions of dollars worth of prime time news, school doom projects, clean-green advertising, and hot-weather-girl hyperbole to keep the fantasy levitating. Not to mention the weeping lectures from 97% of experts — yet somehow, improbably, most people are not buying it. Imagine if we had a free press, and the Nobel Prize winners who disagreed were interviewed by the 7:30 Report or 60 minutes? Imagine if they talked to electrical engineers and geologists on the news? It wouldn’t be 60% of voters who were skeptical, it would be 100%. He who controls the media, can confuse 40% of the people. Thanks to Will Jones at the Daily Sceptic. Nigel Farage speaks for voters on net zero. Here’s how we knowMichael Deacon, Telegraph, UKThis week, a new polling firm called Merlin Strategy asked voters for their views on tackling climate change. But here’s the crucial thing, it didn’t merely ask them: “Do you support net zero?” Instead, it asked them which was more important: action to achieve net zero, or cutting the cost of living. And guess what they said? Almost 60 per cent chose cutting the cost of living, while a mere 13 per cent chose net zero. So 13% were wealthy enough, or obsessed enough, that they were willing to say they wanted to pay more to “put environmental aims first”. (Or maybe they worked in the industry). Cutting cost of living MUST come before expensive Net Zero driveJack Elsom, The Sun A Merlin Strategy poll of 3,000 people found 59 per cent of Brits agreed that “action to reduce the cost of living has to come first over sustainability and being eco-friendly”. Just 13 per cent of people thought ministers should put environmental aims first. The verdict was returned by supporters of all parties. For Labour voters, 61 per cent agreed and 12 per cent disagreed, for Tories it was 70 per cent and eight per cent, and for Reform it was 65 per cent and 15 per cent. Clearly most polls ask loaded silly questions so they get loaded silly answers. They ask open apple-pie questions “Would you like the government to spend other people’s money making storms nicer?” But it isn’t exactly hard to write surveys that ask people to rank choices, or to quiz them about what they would be willing to pay, yet pollsters rarely do that. The point of most polls is not to tell the Blob what the people want, it’s to tell the people what The Blob wants. Think about what polls like this say about our democracies. In theory, after surveys like this come out (and they have many times) if political parties were trying to serve the people, they would quietly drop the Net Zero plans so they could win over more voters. Instead, the two major parties push on year after year, almost as if they serve something else. This result is nearly identical to one two years ago in the UK that found 62% said reducing electricity bills was more important than climate targets. Yet the Tories self-immolated, and Labour got elected but dug themselves a hole they didn’t need to dig. Why? ________________________ PS: The New Pope has been picked –– a man of the times, American cardinal Robert Prevost, originally of Chicago – who is a described as a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and gender studies. He opposed a plan in Peru to add gender studies instruction in classrooms, saying “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.” I don’t think the Left will be happy with Pope Leo XIV. The ABC were clearly hoping for the more progressive candidates from Asia and Africa.
May 9th, 2025 | Tags: Polls, Survey, UK | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | Comments (83)By Jo Nova A candidate for this years Cult Science Oscar:
The Coal Plant God is at it again — causing the oceans to swallow South Africa on the one hand and lifting up the land by 2mm a year with the other. (A lucky coincidence that disguises the horrors of rising seas, eh?). Apparently we used to think the land was rising due to hot plumes of magma far below, but now researchers say its because a drought has made the crustal plate lighter. Even though no model can predict rainfall, everyone reading the tea-leaves, and editing newspapers, can see that climate change caused the drought. Satellite data reveals climate change is lifting South Africa out of the oceanJoshua Shavit, BrighterSide Instead of heat from below, the Earth’s crust in parts of South Africa appears to be lifting due to water loss above. When surface and underground water vanish, the weight on the land decreases. That loss of pressure lets the land subtly spring upward, like a sponge expanding after being squeezed. The precambrian crust under South Africa is some of the oldest in the world, and the research team proudly tells us they “analyzed satellite and climate data spanning nearly a decade.” That much? This groundbreaking conclusion comes from researchers at the University of Bonn… The researchers used GPS measurements, satellite data, and hydrological models to study the correlation between areas experiencing severe droughts and significant land uplift. Not to knock the detailed and creative work of said researchers but this is typical of Big Government strangled science. It must have cost a lot of money, involved many salaries and much high-tech equipment, but in the end all conclusions are tortured to blame “climate change”. The paper itself only mentions anthropogenic climate change once, but the press release and news stories turn it into a horror show, and none of the experts at universities around the world will be able to say a damn thing about how absurd that is. And none of the government funded science journalists at the ABC-BBC-CBC science units will think to ask if solar cycles affect rainfall in South Africa instead. Even though we know solar activity affects Central European floods, Australian-Asian monsoons, and groundwater levels in China. All science serves The Blob, and The Science can never be wrong. If the ocean does or doesn’t swallow Cape Town, it’s because of climate change. REFERENCEMielke et al (2025) GNSS Observations of the Land Uplift in South Africa: Implications for Water Mass Loss, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 09 April 2025 https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB030350
May 8th, 2025 | Tags: Hyperbole, Sea Level, South Africa | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (50)
Jo NovaProgramming and “pre-bunking” our children to vote Green — Boosting profits for years to come!And you thought school textbooks were non-political… Imagine the uproar if a coal company spent thousands of dollars to put lesson plans in schools to teach our children how to run activist lobby groups to get better subsidies and tax breaks for coal miners? Imagine these lessons even include instruction on how to fundraise, and ways to counter the anti-coal “misinformation and disinformation” ? Indeed the ACCC banned the Commonwealth Bank’s Dollarmites program from Queensland schools because it contained “sophisticated marketing tactics”. But it wasn’t teaching children to write activist campaigns to lobby for tax breaks and subsidies for bankers. Instead Mike Cannon Brookes, Mr $30 billion, has set up the Boundless Earth charity with a $15 to $30 million budget which generously sponsors a group called Cool org. They write “scripts for teachers” and tell the kiddies to walk to school or ride their bike while (as Tony Thomas reminds us) Mr Cannon-Brookes travels in his Bombardier Twin-jet. It’s no tinker-toy project, already reaching 2.5 million Australian kids each year and 200,000 teachers. It’s a full on indoctrination unit. This is the reason conservatives get wiped out in elections. One side have a multilevel war machine propaganda unit, staffed and funded with millions of dollars and the other side send their kids to those schools (and then pay for the schools with their taxes). Part I –A Jet Jockey’s Little Green SchoolkidsBy Tony Thomas, Quadrant The Cool.org charity, drafts the scripts for teachers. Cool CEO Thea Stinear claims that Cool “helps young people cut through the BS. It helps them spot what’s real. What could be more important in this day and age?” Jason Kimberley of the multi-millionaire Just Jeans family set up Cool in 2008, catering to pre-school, primary, secondary, private and public schools with endorsement by departmental and school authorities.[3] Cool, in fact, runs a parallel universe within the school system. Well over 17 million kids to date have imbibed at least one Cool lesson, delivered by the nearly 200,000 teachers who have signed on to Cool. Believe it or not, 92% of Australian schools have delivered Cool materials to kids. I’ve been recording this Cool educational empire for years, here, here, here and here. Their skill building includes seven units of learning on misinformation or disinformation. In Science Over Skepticism they investigate things that “influence the adoption of scientific knowledge” — like presumably learning that “The ScienceTM” is done by consensus… Tony Thomas writes: Cool douses kids from pre-school upwards in a waterfall of green-left woke-ism and renewables advocacy, purportedly “building a sustainable and just world for all.” As a Cool member, I see exactly what Cool offers teachers and kids, but much of the Cool materials are paywalled to outsiders. Education was captured by the left decades ago, and school and department authorities have no qualms about kids imbibing green activism from third-party providers.[5] But frankly, I’m near-traumatised at how completely and ruthlessly such third parties are drafting schoolkids to the green crusade… Australian teachers are overwhelmed with bureaucratic paperwork, and administrative tasks, so they’re relieved when a professional team offers to do up the lesson plan for them, and fits it all to the bureaucratized spaghetti mess that is the curriculum. It even shows how it meets UN Paris convention goals. Cannon Brookes uses the kids to get to the parents too. Part II — A Green Kid is a Programmed KidCool doesn’t just feed kids its climate factoids, it wants kids to preach the green gospel to schoolmates, parents and the community. One lesson for 10- to 11-year-old’s is headed, Designing a Media Campaign to Promote Clean Energy Facts. Teachers’ job: “Share some of the following examples of accurate clean energy campaigns with your class. Where possible, encourage students to assess how their campaign could counter misinformation in the clean energy sector.” Other kids are activated to do a “myth-busting” campaign against “deniers”. Another program teaches children how to fundraise — though Tony Thomas wonders if they should be teaching stranger danger, cash receipts and accounting as well. This is “cash raising” he says. Kids are instructed to hassle I mean, talk to shop owners, and car owners, or people on the local council…. By Year 9 and 10 the kids have graduated to designing advocacy campaigns to improve “clean energy policy” and presumably Mike’s profit margins. Tony Thomas has been in under the membership hood and says the authors seem terrified that the kids might hear skeptical viewpoints, and so they “steered them away from the best sceptic websites like joannenova.com.au and WUWT, which Cool labels as not credible” (I think Thomas means they issue a generic warning against “blogs” rather than name us, but I shall have to clarify). It’s full “Climate Denialist” reprogrammingThe Cool Org education system teaches children to call people petty names, use ad hom reasoning, and run political campaigns! “Climate Change Denial is on the Rise among teenagers”Hence Cool gives kids entire lessons excoriating “Climate Denial” – Cool is either oblivious or supportive of the echo to Holocaust Denial.[2] It defines “Denial” as rejecting the notions that climate change exists (a straw man, given sceptics’ affection for geology) and that “Humans are causing the climate to change” despite alleged overwhelming scientific evidence (sceptics dispute only the severity, as in purported “catastrophic” warming, and emphasise the benefits such as CO2 having greened the plant). The Cool lesson for Year 10 continues, In some cases, climate deniers actively spread disinformation about climate change to suit a personal or political agenda. This can have profound effects on how we address the challenges posed by climate change. In the “Climate Literacy: Climate Change Denial And Disinformation” lesson, Students explore climate denialism and the myths often presented about climate change. They explore the facts that bust these myths, look at the implications of climate denialism on meeting the challenges of climate change, and create a communication piece to address climate disinformation. The program does specifically mention John Clauser, the Nobel prize winning skeptics who they say “spreads misinformation”. What Tony Thomas hasn’t found yet, is any mention that Chinese and Indian emissions are at record highs and are still growing. Boy are those kids going to feel used and abused when they find out the truth. Now I’m a free speech girl, I would not mind kids being exposed to all their arguments, as long as skeptics get equal access. The truth always wins (and it’s funnier… ) our job would be easy. Tony Thomas has done a long investigation and two articles already on Quadrant with a third to come. Read it all there. Tony’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95
May 7th, 2025 | Tags: Education, Propaganda | Category: Australia, Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (89)
By Jo Nova The problem with aiming to be a less-bad version of Labor is that it’s still badThe Liberals* dropped the wildly ambitious fantasy of 2030 renewable targets of the Labor Party, but they were still aiming for the slow suicide of Net Zero by 2050. It probably seemed like a sensible compromise, but half crazy is still crazy. We’re still talking about plans for Global Weather Control. It meant the Liberals have to sell something they don’t believe in, and they can’t mock the stupid core of a Labor policy if it’s their own. So they come across as inauthentic, they don’t have any fun, and have to throw away all their best lines. The Liberals could hardly say Labor’s Net Zero targets were like pagan witchcraft when their own policy was late-pagan-weather-control. Effectively, both sides of the Uniparty want to turn our electricity network into a global air-conditioner. I wish I could say they were just debating whether solar panels will cool the world better than nuclear plants, but the debate was not that advanced. No one was discussing the degrees-shifted-per-trillion dollars, because all the answers are insane. So here we are living in the furthest corner of the Earth with the biggest distances and the lowest population density on the planet apart from Antarctica — and at times we’re the world’s largest coal and largest LNG exporter, and we, WE, of all people, want to lead the war on fossil fuels? Do we need more barbed wire in our hair shirt? Where was the free-market, free-speech small-government party?Where was the Liberal Party? No one asked if the government should be in charge of the weather? No one questioned whether an unaccountable, unelected global cartel run by President Xi should be in charge of it either. Aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves? Is it the governments fault if the surf’s bad, or the frosts are late? What if we fix the weather in NSW, but it mucks things up in Queensland? That’s going to need a whole new regulatory agency, a new weather justice assessor and climate courts. This whole escapade is the ultimate Big Government wet dream and the Liberals are just cheering it on. And where is the Liberal Party when we need a free market in science? Let’s hear from both sides. (Let’s fund both sides too — no picking winners in scientific research). The Left just say “trust us” there’s a consensus and you’re a denier. They bought the experts, sacked the heretics and hoped we wouldn’t audit them, so we didn’t? There is no free speech in climate science. Just ask Peter Ridd. The Liberals were in government for all of that time, but they kept funding the universities that silenced whistleblowers. Then they wonder why they get stuck in stupid science traps and embarrassed in election debates. There are no working professors of science in Australia that can speak up to advise or defend them. No one paid to audit the IPCC. No one paid to find out the solar role in our climate. The Left own The Science TM because the Right gave it away.
__________________ *For foreign readers, Liberals are the Australian major conservative party (in theory). Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay May 6th, 2025 | Tags: Big-Government, Elections, Free Markets, Free Speech | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (104)
By Jo Nova It gives us hopeThe Australian conservative side of politics was savaged this weekend, but Nigel Farage’s party just won a spectacular 30% of the vote in the Council elections of the UK, and won a byelection and two mayoral races. From out of nowhere, Reform UK outpolled Labour’s dismal 20% result and got twice the votes of the Tories. As Farage says it’s “the end of two-party politics”. Farage claimed on Saturday: “In post-war Britain, no one has ever beaten both Labour and the Tories in a local election before.” The UK experience shows that even when the Blob wins big, if the voters are offered a real alternative, a much better one, they will jump to embrace it (assuming they can break the media embargo). The rise of Reform UK will limit the damage that Kier Starmer and the Labour Party can do in the country. Even from opposition, the Reform Party have soft power that comes from surging polls. The presence of Reform UK means the Tories have dropped Net Zero, and now even former Labor leaders like Tony Blair are throwing a few sacred cows overboard to save the ship. It shows that something good could still arise from the ashes, and that even those who win big in politics still care about some polls, even when their next election is four years away. Ponder that Australia will have another election before the UK does. As many as 40% of Australian voters were said to be still undecided in the days before the election. Just like the UK election, the vote for the major parties is falling. First preference votes for Labor were only 34% this weekend. The good side of a shellacking is that the results were so bad, the Liberal party* might get the message that they need to stand for something. The bad side is that the Labor Party will be smugly unbearable. One good note is that the Greens might lose a few lower house seats, including possibly their leader, the insufferable Adam Bandt, who is on a knife edge. The losses come probably because they copied Greta and jumped off the environmental agenda and onto the Gaza one. The “Greenslide” in the last election where they won three seats in Brisbane just meant the Greens got too overconfident. But in the Senate, the Greens may hold 11 seats. That can’t be good. _________________ *For foreign readers, in Australian the Liberals mean the conservatives (in theory anyway). The original meaning of Liberal was wanting more freedom from Big Government laws. In most places lefty wordsmiths stole it from the Right and the Right let them do it. Photo by Orwain Davies
Don’t forget to vote…
By Jo Nova
We are in an information war, and by definition, the best candidates in the Australian election are the ones the media ignores and sometimes they’re also the people the Liberal party has thrown out. (We know they oppose The Blob — think of Craig Kelly -NSW and Gerard Rennick – QLD. ) Its worth knowing that Gerard Rennick People First and The Libertarians, have combined with the Heart Party to form the Australia First Alliance (AFA) — and in NSW, ACT, Vic and QLD they will appear together on the Group Ticket.
Every vote in the Australian election is worth $3.38 as a first preference to any party winning more than 4% of the vote. That money means a lot to the small parties. Pick your number 1 with care. Then list all the freedom loving minor parties, and finally, sigh, one “big” party. Do you want your Senate Vote to Extinguish? If you don’t put a number next to the Liberals (7, 8 or 9 say) and one of your first six choices isn’t elected, your vote may vanish into the ether. It may feel like a worthy protest (the Liberals did endorse the ghastly Under-16 Social Media ban), but The Greens, Teals and Labor will thank you. The Blob hopes die-hard conservatives neutralize themselves. And small parties get soft power from sending preferences. For West Australians: in the Senate — Ky Cao is running as an independent and comes highly recommended by David Archibald, a long time skeptic and defense analyst.
Turning Point Australia has put together a table of party policies below. Parties listed: One Nation / Gerard Rennick People First | Libertarian Party | Trumpet of Patriots | Family First | Great Australia Party | Liberals | Labor | Greens | Teals.  Click to enlarge! *Liberals (for foreign readers) means theoretically conservative. Supposedly for free speech and smaller government. Topher explains the voting strategy with marbles. It makes so much sense…And obviously, this post is authorized by me, and are entirely my own opinions. Do I need to say that? By Jo Nova What a bomb to drop in the last days before the Australian election Tony Blair, Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Web Summit via Sportsfile The aggressive climate action of the Australian Labor Party is suddenly wildly far out on a branch. There are council elections in the UK, and Nigel Farage’s party is “expected to make large gains”. So as Ed Cummings in The Telegraph describes it, Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, “chose this moment to lob a large grenade”. Blair is possibly the first person within the Blob to say what skeptics have been saying for years, as if he thought of it all by himself. He’s pulling the pin on the idea that “Net Zero” is sensible, possible, and essential, but this is no mea culpa — more like an escape plan. The populist parties are rising across Europe, grids are falling, and the failures of the Left are becoming too obvious. Watch the pea — on the one hand, it’s good that an influential figure on the Left is saying that Net Zero is “riven with irrationality” and “unworkable” and “doomed to fail” but he’s tacitly pretending the left have figured this out by themselves and are victims of the namecalling they started. The namecalling that has been their greatest weapon, and his remarks have made it to the Sydney Morning Herald today: A political tide is turning across Europe, and at its centre is a hard truth— by Rob Harris, The Sydney Morning Herald In Britain, Sir Tony Blair’s sharp critique of the government’s net zero strategy this week marks a watershed moment for green policy debate. The former Labour prime minister, who has been quietly advising Downing Street, accused politicians of pushing unrealistic and politically unsustainable climate agendas. “People are being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal,” Blair said in a foreword to a new report from his think tank released on Tuesday. This is a remarkable admission. The Blob have ostracized and ruthlessly punished anyone who stepped outside the line. It’s been their substitute for rational argument for thirty years: According to Blair, the political elite is paralysed by a climate discourse he described as “riven with irrationality”. He argued that many leaders know the current approach is unworkable but are “terrified” of voicing that view for fear of being labelled climate change deniers. “The movement now needs a public mandate, attainable only through a shift from protest to pragmatic policy,” he said. This big shift has been forced upon them by Donald Trump, by Nigel Farage, and belatedly the UK Conservative party. Above all, it’s been forced upon them by reality. The shocking price rises, the blackouts, the crippling loss of industrial power — and now finally, the rise of powerful political opposition in the UK. But this is not a reconciliation with reality, there is no acknowledgement the Left got anything wrong, or the “deniers” were right all along. There are no lessons being learned here. It is their escape hatch. In The Foreward, he says people are turning away from politics (meaning Labour politics). People know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality. As a result, though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy. So, in developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal. It’s about The BacklashThe Paris agreement failed because of Covid and the War in Ukraine, you know: Therefore, there has been a period where climate-change action and global agreements, notably the Paris Agreement in 2015, seemed to herald a new era; but that momentum has been followed – exacerbated by external shocks like Covid and the Ukraine war – by a backlash against such action, which threatens to derail the whole agenda. However, because of the levels of growth and development, present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable. And though action by the developed world is still vital, by 2030 almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India and South-East Asia. Yet the global financial flows for renewable energy in the developing world have fallen and not risen in the past few years. It’s not the end of coal and oil: These are the inconvenient facts, which mean that any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail. But this is not good news for Wind and Solar power. They may have just been thrown under the bus.  The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change, by Tony Blair (Click to download the report). This is a Big Blob documentBut make no mistake, in the conclusions he’s still calling for the ultimate Blob wet dream — he wants weather control with geoengineering and that will need global governance: Actions to address the climate-change challenge must include:
In the most extreme case, in which we fail to make significant progress on decarbonisation, the world may need to seriously consider solar radiation management (SRM), a technology generally considered a last resort for addressing global warming. One of the most radical and controversial forms of disruption, SRM involves the direct manipulation of the Earth’s climate system to counteract global warming through techniques aiming to reflect sunlight away or limit the radiation that reaches the Earth. While highly controversial, such technologies may become necessary if mitigation efforts fail to prevent catastrophic climate shifts. … Because the impacts of SRM are likely to be global and unequally felt, the world needs a robust governance framework to ensure its equitable and ethical use. This framework could mirror past efforts at limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There is currently significant risk that a single country could move ahead unilaterally with this technology at scale, resulting in extreme weather effects that transcend national borders. As such, political leaders globally should progress with urgency a governance framework. The potential for unintended consequences such as regional climate disruptions or unforeseen ecological impacts, including risks from sudden temperature rise on the ceasing of SRM activities, underscores the importance of international cooperation and oversight, and makes this intervention the most disruptive of technological options. Finally — In Part 7. “Rethinking the Role of Finance, Including Philanthropy”, free men and women of the world will want to know Tony Blair wants to harness the power of philanthropic funding, and one of the successes he mentions is this: One good example of the power of philanthropic investment is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investment in mRNA vaccine technology – years before the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s just in case you were wondering if Tony Blair was still an active part of the Global Blob — The Billionaires, the United Nations Bureaucrats, the Davos Ski Club, and the largest corporate leaders in the world. He is. The Labour Party are facing a fire. Think of Blair’s work as “backburning”. He can burn off Net Zero Targets, wind and solar, and Ed Milliband, but he still gets the UN global Power Structure, and he might dig the Labour party out of a big hole (while digging a different hole). h/t TdeF and OldOzzie, GWPF
May 1st, 2025 | Tags: The Blob, UK | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (79)
By Jo Nova The latest news is that power has been restored in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, but the economic loss of a blackout that affected up to 55 million people for half a day is estimated at 2-4 billion Euro. Even Red Electrica, the Spanish Grid manager now says the initial event was a sudden power loss that was “likely solar”. And to top it off, the group that own the Spanish grid manager warned in February that with so many “renewables” the grid faced the risk of disconnections.
We are three days from an election and the ABC are running cover for the Labor-Greens party, and hiding from Australians that too many renewables and a lack of stable thermal or nuclear power plants were a front running cause. Even yesterday we knew that solar was supplying 60% of the Spanish grid, and that there was almost no spinning inertia on the Iberian Peninsula. If Spain had hosted the Olympics this week, the ABC-BBC-CBC agitprop units would have raved about it being “78% renewable”. But when it’s an Olympic-size blackout, crickets. The ABC has a whole “science unit” but one blogger with no government funding is two days ahead of them. Will they catch up tomorrow, or will they continue to put their own personal voting preferences and juicy career prospects ahead of Australian voters?
A renewables-dominant grid has many points of failure and very few points of stabilityIt sounds similar to the South Australian blackout of 2016. Once a few wind or solar generators trip out for some reason, the voltage or frequency shocks in the system cause other generators to drop out and interconnectors to disconnect. There is no inherent stability in the system because they lack the heavy spinning turbines. Our entire national grids were designed around heavy 500 ton turbines which spin at 3,000 revolutions per minute (or 3,600 RPM in the USA). That’s an awesome amount of inertia, and all that stability was “free” — it was just part of the grid. But the subsidized market, and the pagan fixation on “renewables”, because they supposedly stop storms next century, guarantees that reliable turbines get pushed out of the market. The crazy-balloon has filled the room. Spain, Portugal switch back on, seek answers after biggest ever blackoutReuters Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government had not ruled out any hypothesis. “We must not rush to (conclusions) and (commit) errors through haste,” Sanchez said on Tuesday. “We will find out what happened in those five seconds.”REE said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
Redeia, which owns Red Electrica, warned in February in its annual report that it faced a risk of “disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables without the technical capacities necessary for an adequate response in the face of disturbances”. Investment bank RBC said the economic cost of the blackout could range between 2.25 billion and 4.5 billion euros, blaming the Spanish government for being too complacent about infrastructure in a system dependent on solar power with little battery storage. SEAT said power returned to its Barcelona car plant at 1 a.m. on Tuesday but that it still wasn’t at full production.
Volkswagen said its plant in Navarra lost a day of production – equivalent to 1,400 cars – as it was not able to restart until 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
Will the real cost of solar and wind power please stand up?The 2-4 billion Euro bill plus the expenses for Big-backup-Batteries and extra interconnectors must now be added to the electricity bill estimates of solar and wind power. All the past costs per kilowatt of magical Spanish solar power were all obviously fantasy underestimates. People thought solar was cheap, but it was all an illusion. Negative prices are not a free lunch. The toxic prices due to the solar glut at lunchtime, means that reliable power flees the grid, lest it get shafted with a big bill. An excess of solar output could have contributed to the incident. Spain has reported an unprecedented number of hours with negative power prices in recent months as more solar and wind power gets injected into the grid. Still, the oversupply of power hasn’t previously caused blackouts in the country. The speeding car hadn’t crashed til it crashed, officer. How were we to know? This was a system on the brinkIn El Confidential, in Spanish we hear that excess solar pushed out the nuclear power and things were so unstable there were fluctuations on the grid in the hour leading up to the crash. Red Eléctrica rules out a cyberattack, and everything points to overconfidence in solar energy.Something that has already caused problems recently. The Repsol oil company’s refinery in Cartagena, one of Europe’s largest diesel producers, had to shut down a few weeks ago due to power problems. The blackout occurred at 12:32 p.m., but the system began to fail at 11:30 a.m. With the sun shining, operators began to notice fluctuations in the grid with photovoltaic production at full blast. This excess sunlight caused the gas-fired combined cycle plants to reduce their production to make way for photovoltaic power. In that sense, nuclear power didn’t enter the market to avoid losing money, and there was no need to rely on hydroelectric plants to avoid water loss. Without firmness technologies, the voltage became more fluctuating and vulnerable than ever. And then the incident happened. The 5-second voltage drop is an eternity in the electrical system and tripped the “system differentials,” shutting down everything at once: the photovoltaic, the cycles, the four remaining nuclear plants. The industry insists we were lucky because the transformers didn’t burn out, which would have caused a blackout lasting more than 24 hours. ” Red Eléctrica miscalculated the risks and allowed the closure of three nuclear power plants that would have provided stability (voltage) to the system ,” the industry claims. So there were plenty of warnings that things were going wrong. If only the media in Europe had mentioned the 2016 SA Electricity crisis, people in Spain would have known:People saw The South Australian (SA) black out coming. There were warnings that the dominance of renewables made it vulnerable. Then when it came, it all fell over in an instant — Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster. Ultimately the 40% renewable SA grid was crippled by complexity. The AEMO Report blamed renewables: The SA Blackout was due to lack of “synchronous inertia”, they said. The early estimates suggest the blackout costs South Australia at least $367m, plus their normal electricity is twice the price. Welcome to the future of unreliable electricity: More bad luck for South Australia, yet another blackout followed the first one, 300 powerlines down, 125,000 homes cut off. By 2019, things still weren’t secure, SA was offering $6,000 subsidies to buy batteries but people didn’t want them. In 2020 SA is still at risk of blackout, one third of solar PV “switching off” to save state, and they need a $1.5b interconnector bandaid to NSW. In 2022, they suffered more blackouts. South Australia was Islanded, flying by the seat of their pants, afraid of a solar surge on a sunny day. By 2023 the Renewables Star state “urgently” wants to force two diesel plants back to stop blackouts. The pain of bad decisions never ends, unless they admit they were stupid.
April 30th, 2025 | Tags: Blackouts, Europe, Media bias, Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (98)
Is this the Net Zero world we’re aiming for?It could be a coincidence, but Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewables for the first time on April 16th. Less than two weeks later, at lunchtime Monday Spain and Portugal and even parts of France suffered massive cascading blackouts. Thirteen gigawatts of electricity, about half the grid, suddenly disappeared at 12:30pm. Trains were halted, and people were stuck in dark subway tunnels. A tennis tournament was stopped, flights were cancelled and diverted, and prosaically, as an emblem of the Western World, Spain’s nuclear plants shut too, and are now running on diesel back up. Shops have been stripped, people are fighting over taxis, and landlines and ATMs are down, and even the mobile network failed in Madrid. The mayor of Madrid has urged the PM to declare an emergency and deploy soldiers. Electricity has been restored to some areas, but the grid operator has said “it could take up to a week to fix”. Other reports say “six to ten hours”. Notably, Spain has one of the highest proportions of renewable power in Europe — with 50% of the national supply coming from pure unreliable power. Spain has 32 GW of solar power, and 32GW of wind turbines. As it happens, the wind turbines have been largely useless for the last 24 hours. The Telegraph is reporting that solar power was providing almost 60% of Spain’s power two hours before the blackout. Blackout ChaosDailyMail, UK Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days. Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty. Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going. Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice. A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’ It must be an attack of the “Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon”There were rumors it was a cyber attack, or a fire in a transmission line. But Portugal is blaming Spain and says it was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which sounds like a polite way to say “a renewable energy failure”. After all, it’s hard to imagine a rare atmospheric phenomenon blacking out a nuclear plant. What caused it?The Guardian The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns. REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.” It appears the phenomenon occurred when it was a climate extreme of 23 degrees C in Madrid today. The Daily Mail has a fancy diagram explaining how extreme temperatures cause some regions to use more power than others for cooling. As energy “moves to hotter regions” they say, parts of the grid are “left with different voltages and frequencies”. This creates “‘anomolous oscillations in very high voltage power lines, leading to synchronization errors across the network”. I remain unconvinced that this is anything other than panicked post hoc hand-waving excuses. It’s all kind of obvious when we look at network five minutes before the crisis. Some particular event may turn out to be the trigger, but a system that is 78% reliant on unreliables could probably be knocked over by a teddy bear, or perhaps a wayward cloud.
h/t auto, Tonyb, MrGrimNasty, Another Delcon, Old Ozzie, CharlesM, Stephen Neil, Bella, and Bally.
April 29th, 2025 | Tags: Blackouts, Europe, FCAS, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (137) |
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