Skeptics are saving whales while Greens lobby for Industrial Plants in the wilderness

By Jo Nova

Let it be known that the skeptics are, and always have been, the environment’s best friend. The Greens, sadly are the wilderness wrecking, naive minions of the Establishment Powers who will sacrifice whales in a quest to impress their industrial banker overlords. They tell themselves they are saving whales 100 years from now with the same windmills that kill the whales today.

Our good friends at Heartland and CFACT are working to stop the insanity in a guerilla campaign.

“SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG”.

@ClimateDepot

Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts

Josh Christenson, NY Post

“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally okay with this agenda.”

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”

Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the […]

Wind fantasy land: to cover 8 days of half-speed wind, UK needs 1,000 times the “biggest battery” on Earth

By Jo Nova

Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?

Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.

The exponential death of affordable electricity

It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.

Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]

Australia’s Biggest Renewable Energy Project, Snowy 2.0, grinds to a halt, with a stuck bore

The new hole in the ground in the Snowy 2.0 scheme.

By Jo Nova

Complexity has a price, and a renewables grid is a bit like a 240 volt moving Rubiks cube. Here we see an unnecessary project hit by a random factor that in turn will affect all the others, blowing out other costs and schedules.

Australia’s breakneck energy transition, driven like a crash test dummy by government subsidies, depends on finishing the massive pumped hydro scheme called Snowy 2.0. However it has hit another delay no one apparently saw coming.

“Australia’s biggest renewable energy project” is the $6 – 10 billion plan to pump water uphill so it can run back down again to generate electricity every time the windmills and solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure, which is nearly every day. The entire project is superfluous in a grid with coal power — as we know from the last fifty years when we didn’t need it.

Unfortunately a 2,400 ton Tunnel Boring Machine called Florence is quite stuck under a cave-in. According to the ABC she started ten months ago, and is supposed to be digging her way through 15 kilometres (10 miles) of mountain. […]

Who knew Scottish wind turbines are kept warm with diesel power…

By Jo Nova

Arecleoch Wind Farm | Mary and Angus Hogg.

While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?

If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.

The wind turbine industry today […]

The strange coincidence of the Offshore Wind Industry and 178 dead whales

Floating humpback whale offshore of Delaware. Photo: Marine Education, Research & Rehabilitation Institute.

By Jo Nova

There have been a lot of dead whales on the East Coast of the US lately. David Wojik noticed that NOAA was investigating 178 dead whales in something called an Unusual Mortality Event, or a UME — it’s like an episode of X-Files.

NOAA says this wave of strandings mysteriously started in 2016 which was before the offshore wind factory industry got going — but Wojik points out the timing matches very well. Offshore lease sales for the wind industry ramped up 2015-16. There were nine big sales, he says, off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. And not so coincidentally, apparently 2016 was also the year that NOAA started giving permission slips for whale hunts, sorry whale harrassments for “geotechnical and site characterization surveys“.

In bureaucrat-valium-lingo, the license to cause incidental dead whales is called an IHA — or an Incidental Harassment Authorization. This appears to have fooled Greenpeace.

Although since wind turbines are a sacred totem, NOAA could have called them a 007 License to Kill Humpbacks and they might not have cared either. The whales are dying for […]

Even in battery fantasy dreams the costs don’t make sense

By Jo Nova The amount of storage America needs for a grid run on erratic wind and solar power is so galactically vast the numbers don’t matter. Because every which way they are calculated, every estimate, the highest one, the lowest one, it doesn’t make any difference. They are all unaffordable.

And they’re not just unaffordable in the sense that it hurts. They’re unaffordable in the sense that there is no economy left.

Basically America would need 12,500 times as many batteries as it has now. At current prices this would cost about $175 trillion dollars, which is eight times the entire GDP of the United States.

Some researchers predict costs will fall, but even at fantasy low ball estimates that are one tenth of current prices, the cost of those batteries is still nearly $20 trillion.

Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”

David Wojick, CFACT

We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it […]

Italy may “Build Back Nuclear” — not quite the Great Reset the Greens or Financial Houses had in mind?

By Jo Nova

The government of Italy is planning to build new nuclear power plants. And if it happens, it marks an astonishing turnaround.

This was the Garigliano Nuclear Power plant in Italy in 1970. They already had the solution to it all, energy wars, Vladimir Putin, and fantasy “climate control” fifty years ago.

How much have we lost? Photo: Demaag

But Italy abandoned nuclear energy thirty years ago. It’s the only major European country to have stopped using nuclear power. (Though Germany is trying to).

Italy had four nuclear plants in the early 1980s but after the Chernobyl accident, they held a referendum on nuclear power, and the voters didn’t want it anymore, so they closed the last two reactors by 1990, (back in the days when voting made a difference). Furthermore, Italy held another referendum in 2011, and 94% of the voters rejected it again, which shows how desperate the situation must be now if an opinion poll like that has shifted so far in 11 years?

The thing is, Italy only makes 25% of its energy itself, and so it is suddenly very attuned to “geopolitical risk”.

Pierre Goselin at NoTricksZone found a news piece […]

Blackouts will last for days says Austrian Defence Minister — stock up now

By Jo Nova

It’s one big backside-covering Psy-Op trying to bury the bad news

Minister Klaudia Tanner, back in 2020 when she looked decidedly more chirpy.

Klaudia Tanner, the Austrian Defence Minister, dropped the extraordinary bombshell that a long blackout is coming. She hopes you don’t notice that is a dramatically bad and new threat. It’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault, she says (not the government that burned energy security on a Green bonfire in a fantasy quest for nicer weather). And when it happens, if you suffer and run out of supplies, or die in the cold, that’s your fault.

Who knew it was your job to maintain wood, oil or gas and food and water to tide you over a week long total blackout? Well, now you do.

So the announcement of the shocking state of the Austrian grid is buried under the excuses:

Austrian Defense Minister Warns Europeans Are Unprepared For Days-Long Blackouts

Paul Joseph Watson, Summit News

“The question is not whether it (the blackout) will come, but when it will come,” said Tanner, blaming the war in Ukraine.

“For Putin, hacking attacks on Western power supplies are a […]

That’ll hurt: Environmental investors lost 22% in a year when Energy investors made 54% gains

By Jo Nova

Hands up who wants to lose money?

These numbers that Rupert Darwall has put together in Real Clear Energy are extraordinary:

2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth

The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.

Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.

Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.

Not only did demand […]

UK close to nation wide blackout, while 12% of entire Germany GDP paying for energy crisis

By Jo Nova

Green Europe is running out of electrons

Last Monday in Great Britain the entire steel industry shut down because the wind stopped and wholesale prices reached £2,586 a megawatt-hour. As winter cranks up, British factories are getting ready to shutdown, as the threat of small, medium and blockbuster blackouts loom. In the fifth largest economy in the world, thousands of people are using communal warm spaces because they can’t afford electricity any longer, and the largest North Sea gas producer has decided not to drill for more gas just when the country needs it. The government has slapped a new tax on it, thus achieving the exact opposite of what the government aimed for.

Meanwhile over in Germany one eighth of the entire national economy is now consumed with paying for the energy crisis of 2022. They tried to hold back the seas in 2100 but forgot to secure their own electricity a year in advance.

These are very expensive experiments They aren’t telling you this but UK is close to nationwide blackouts

by David Maddox , Daily Express

But the one nobody is discussing is the real possibility the lights could […]

Mega Wind farm approved that can’t operate half the year

By Jo Nova

When does it make sense to build 122 giant industrial turbines that can’t operate for nearly half a year?

The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.

Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.

This is infrastructure that only works about 30% of the time anyhow, and now will be reduced to something like 17%. The theoretical capacity will be 340MW in the first stage, supposedly growing to 900MW if they can somehow build the extra 170km transmission lines and perhaps get the taxpayer to help build another undersea cable across the Bass Strait. (If the company was going to pay, why was the Tasmanian government spending $20m on the “business case”?)

It will be one of the largest wind factories in the Southern Hemisphere (the biggest being West of Melbourne), but as Tom Quirk showed years ago, when […]

NetZero impossibility point? Europe’s renewable wonderland now can’t make solar, wind, batteries or EV’s

By Jo Nova

The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero

The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.

The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)

Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.

How fast those balance sheets change…

Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.

‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]

Wild West voltage spikes in South Australia and a billion watts of wasted solar

By Jo Nova

South Australia survived the big scary sunny day yesterday, but had to shut off solar power and throw all those sacred green electrons into a thousand open circuits.

Yet again, another spooky voltage spike appeared, suddenly leaping from 245 to 257 volts in less than three minutes and shaking down any impertinent solar panels. That was at 10am. From then on, despite the growing sunlight, the combined solar output of South Australia stayed flat at around 1.2GW. Compare this to last week — before the safety cord to Victoria broke — then, solar generation was peaking at 2.1 GW. So the great renewable wonderland is managing to keep the lights on, but nearly a billion watts of solar power is sitting uselessly on rooftops and in fields every sunny day at lunch time.

This is not the cheap and efficient golden path to the future, but the Bolshevik elephant that eats your retirement plans. Despite the oversupply of unreliable generation, yesterday the state was using fossil fuels to supply between 20% and 80% of their electricity.

Mark Jessop recorded the voltage and commented: “Lovely sunny day here in islanded SA, which of course means @SAPowerNetworks has bumped […]

Renewable South Australia Islanded, flying by the seat of their pants, afraid of a solar surge on a sunny day

By Jo Nova

The biggest blackout has hit South Australia since the statewide crash of 2016. It’s due to a weather calamity, but the renewables state is struggling to keep the frequency stable for a whole week without the rest of the national grid to lean on. This time they have the back up generation, but they’re going to great lengths now to stop the surges from solar and wind — there’s no where to dispose of excess electricity…

On Saturday afternoon a storm system blitzed out 423,000 lightning strikes and brought down some 500 lines, including the Heywood interconnector that joins South Australia (SA) to Victoria. That is out of action until Friday, so for a whole week the Star Renewables State of South Australia is on its own — Islanded from the national grid. The test is here, and right now at 6am they’re running on 80% fossil fuels and 18% wind, plus millions of dollars has been spent on frequency control, and they’re trying to turn off the solar panels.

The storm caused blackouts affecting 163,000 customers or roughly 18% of the state. Power was restored for most within hours, but there were still 35,000 properties without […]

Soviet electricity: UK faces blackouts, blistering costs and still has to pay wind farms £1b to do nothing

By Jo Nova

Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told them they would still have to pay the generators even when their product was useless.

Britain wasting ‘millions a day’ in energy as wind farms told to turn off while bills soar

The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced.

By ANTONY ASHKENAZ, Express

Imagine that the government told The People that this would make their electricity cheaper (and people believed them!).

In the UK people are forced to pay unreliable generators for electricity that comes when no one wants it. No doubt this was built into the contract from the start to stop investors from fleeing for the hills.

Imagine an investment so bad that the seller has to pre-arrange payments for all the times their product is useless or it wouldn’t be worth building in the first place. There’s a message in that. (Don’t build it.)

To put arsenic-icing on this cake, the wind farms that […]

Now they tell us: Wind power giant says it was a mistake to say renewables would only get cheaper

by Jo Nova

For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.

“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”

Vestas Wind Turbine

There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.

Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.

The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.

Renewable […]

Renewable records tumble? How the ABC turns a grid headache into a glorious solar achievement

by Jo Nova

With all the calm language of a paid ad agency, the ABC is breathless because an esoteric measure called “minimum operational demand” has hit a record or two. This glorious moment may have only lasted 30 minutes, and it isn’t actually a useful thing, but it’s a “record”.

In fact, “minimum operational demand” is a grid management headache, not a badge of honor. It’s the midday moment when solar panels all work — and it’s becoming such a problem that two states in Australia have said all new solar panels need “smart” controllers so that the guys in the central control rooms can turn the darn things off. That’s how good it is.

Renewable energy records tumble around the country as rooftop solar power soars

by ABC Energy Propaganda Reporter, Daniel Mercer

Soaring power production from households and businesses with rooftop solar panels has sent records tumbling across Australia as output from fossil fuels falls to all-time lows.

The record so-called minimum operational demand excludes the power generated by consumers with their own solar panels, which met 92 per cent of South Australia’s overall needs at one point on October 17.

[…]

“There’s no such thing as a zero emissions vehicle”

“With an EV, you don’t eliminate emissions, you just export them.

You have to dig up about 500,000 lbs of material to make a single 1000lb battery

It takes 100 to 300 barrels of oil to manufacture a battery that can hold one barrel of oil equivalent.

Demand for those minerals (Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel) will increase between 400 and 4000%.

There’s not enough mining in the world to make enough batteries for all those people.”



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Global demand for Gigawatts is insatiable: To make one smartphone takes almost as much energy as a fridge

By Jo Nova

A report by Mark Mills called the The “Energy Transition” Delusion came out in August with some killer statistics. Despite the rampant glorious uptake of sparkling renewables, wind and solar provide less than 5% of the total global energy demand while the hated hydrocarbons still provide 84%. And that energy demand is growing relentlessly and with no end in sight.

Global economies are facing a potential energy shock—the third such shock of the past half century. Energy costs and security have returned to center stage, as has the realization that the world remains deeply dependent on reliable supplies of petroleum, natural gas, and coal.

It’s a hi-tech energy blackhole

As James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal, noted, some of the most game-changing statistics in the report are about mobile phones. Our need for gadgets, phones and the internet means we need more energy than ever:

Historically, the energy costs of manufacturing a product roughly tracked the weight of the thing produced. A refrigerator weighs about 200 times more than a hair dryer and takes nearly 100 times more energy to fabricate. But it takes nearly as much energy to make one […]

NetZero destroys NetZero: Europe can’t make solar panels because green electricity costs too much

By Jo Nova Ironies don’t get better than this: Thanks to the renewable energy transition, Europe can’t afford to make renewable energy.

When will the message get through that renewable energy is not sustainable?

European photovoltaic plants and battery cell factors are temporarily closing or quitting altogether because of obscenely high electricity prices. When the plants were built they expected to pay €50/MWh, but now they are €300 – 400/MWh. And the situation may last another couple of years, so it’s hard to see how these manufacturers can avoid leaving permanently.

So much for all the solar jobs. Europeans are being reduced to being installers while the production of panels shifts to coal fired China because electricity is so much cheaper. Most of the wind turbine industry has already moved to China.

European solar PV manufacturing at risk from soaring power prices – Rystad By Jules Scully, PV Tech

Around 35GW of PV manufacturing projects in Europe are at risk of being mothballed as elevated power prices damage the continent’s efforts to build a solar supply chain, research from Rystad Energy suggests.

The consultancy noted that the energy-intensive nature of both solar PV and battery cell […]