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Solar panels eat the profits at lunchtime
By Jo Nova
The system is reaching a crisis point and April is turning out to be the month of confessions
His speech was the sound of an industry being tortured. The transition is going backwards. Big projects are stalled. Costs are rising and reliable old assets are being closed too quickly. It’s like we are disassembling the plane as we fly it…
A couple of weeks ago in Australia the chief of Alinta Energy admitted in a big speech that the industry needs to be honest with the public about the costs of the transition. This marks a big shift from the “cheaper and cleaner” misinformation which the renewables industry was practically built on. Jeff Dimery had a stark warning — his company bought a large old coal plant in Victoria for a billion dollars in 2018, and it powers one fifth of Victoria. But to replace that today with renewables would cost $10 billion.
But he also laid bare the crushing effect subsidized rooftop solar PV panels are having on the transition. No news outlets seemed to appreciate the implications of this. Fully one in three Australian homes now […]
By Jo Nova
The term “Net Zero” has become a dirty word
It’s a win. The climate wars will rage on, but the Net Zero spell isn’t working any more, so they will have to find a newer one without such a smell. The sacred propaganda term that was going to save all life on Earth until five minutes ago is more than just a worn out advertising slogan, the skeptics campaign against it has made it a toxic term. Like ESG, it’s become a liability.
The people know “Net Zero” is not just a fluffy footprint on a forest, but an attack on their wallet and their lifestyle. It’s a great credit to GWPF and NetZeroWatch in the UK for turning this phrase back against the infinitely well funded financial-house-and-government-alliance.
Net zero has become unhelpful slogan, says outgoing head of UK climate watchdog
The Guardian (of the ruling class)
The concept of “net zero” has become a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate, and may be better dropped, the outgoing head of the UK’s climate watchdog has warned.
“Net zero has definitely become a slogan […]
By Jo Nova
In the Bermuda Triangle of electricity bills, the more cheap generators you add, the higher your electricity bills grow
The experts at the CSIRO tell us that renewables are the cheapest sources of electricity, with all their Capex calculations and their levelised maths, and yet the electricity bills set the house on fire. (It’s Russia’s fault!) Could it be that the experts accidentally forgot to analyze the system cost and that all the hourly megawatt dollars per machine don’t mean a thing?
In the race to the most expensive electricity in the world, this week the UK is the winner. Germany is handicapped by being bundled into the EU27, lumbered with all the French nukes and is therefore not in the running. Australia is missing in action, but possibly only because the price rises were too fast and too much for the Eurostat, the US DoE, and IEA to keep up with, so they gave up.
And people wonder why China is the world’s manufacturing base.
A European Commission study:
In the next graph is the “rest of the world”. After 2021 Australian electricity prices are unmarked for some reason, but officially they rose 20% two […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another signpost on the way to the Great Green Economy Downunder
We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.
The Driven, explains just how big it was:
The company says it has sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in more than 40 countries. At its peak it claimed to be the biggest maker of fast chargers in the US with a 30 per cent market share (unclear if this included the Tesla network), and a 75 per cent share in Australia, and one of the top three in Europe.
When it launched in 2021, shares were selling for $2,500 each. The current price is $1.35.
Tritium Share Price. NASDAQ
Tritium is the perfect emblem for the Technocratic Planned Economy
Only one year ago the Prime Minister of Australia was raving about them, and using Tritium as the posterchild to sell […]
By Jo Nova
The Roman Climate Optimum lives
Quietly hidden in a paper about ancient pandemics is the most detailed estimate of Roman temperatures I’ve ever seen. For 800 years temperatures gyrated over a three degree range. The Climate Alarmists of Rome could have run the whole warming-cooling-warming-scare back to back for 400 years. But make no mistake, the good times, Pax Romana — were the warmest and wettest ones. The colder times are associated with aridity, plagues and collapse.
Two thousand years ago plankton bloomed and died, and the different ratios of warm and cool species left thick layers on the ocean floor just off the heel of the boot of Italy. Every ten years another centimeter thick layer of dead dinocysts collected on the sea floor, which makes for a remarkably detailed record. They report a jaw dropping “three year resolution”. The record was so rich they could pick out the seasons, and wow, by golly, they could compare it with modern air temperatures. (See graph A below) Though, for some reason they don’t make that easy, or say much about how those ancient temperatures compare to today. (Presumably, if they found things were hotter today, they’d have […]
By Jo Nova
Buy my weather changing machines before midnight and I’ll save you $38 Trillion dollars and throw in some rainy days (or sunny ones, whatever you need).
Trust me, Earth’s Chief Climate-economist said, while stacking climate models that don’t work on top of crystal balls that forecast the economy. Two failures squared and projected to infinity makes great headlines and a never ending grant.
Their climate models can’t predict the most influential global climate phenomenon on the planet even six months in advance, so 25 year predictions are “obviously” the way to go. (No one will know they were wrong). The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives heatwaves and floods across the globe but no matter what supercomputer they use, not one of the 23 General Circulation Models of Climate can tell you whether 2025 will be La Nina or El Nino, let alone 2045. We’re in the chicken-entrail days of climate forecasting.
Not one of the UN experts can even name the key variables that drive the ENSO cycle. Is it the solar wind blasting us at a million miles an hour, is it the interplanetary magnetic field, ultraviolet cycles, or cosmic rays? Is it geothermal hot […]
By Jo Nova
Where are the tears? Elephant Seals and Penguins were forced off the Ross sea 1,000 years ago because it got too cold
One thousand years ago Southern Elephant Seals were happily living in the Ross Sea of Antarctica. Likewise Adelie Penguins frolicked in the sun there during the “Penguin Optimum” of three to four thousand years ago. They had lived there on and off for thousands of years in the Holocene, but the glaciers came back and the cold times returned, and all the colonies were wiped out. All that’s left there now is just their rotting bones and fur as testament to the devastation of Global Cooling.
Thanks to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone for his dedication in digging up these papers.
The Ross Sea is a part of Antarctica that is south of New Zealand, and in the pictures below the remains of the seals and penguins show that they had well established colonies in places where they are unable to live now. The red circles mark the seal colonies, and the blue stars show the penguins. The colonies ebbed and flowed but then were lost as the Little Ice Age began and have not […]
By Jo Nova California was the Land of Solar Panels at the top of the Magic Subsidy Tree but that boom went bust
If solar panels were actually cheap and useful, everyone could have them, they’d pay for themselves, and there would be no point where the panel-party would grind to a halt. But if they were expensive, made something useless, and their product became toxic to the grid itself the government would have to artificially subsidize them to get them onto the grid in the first place, and then pop its own bubble before the bubble popped the grid. And so that time has arrived in California and there is carnage in the market.
The Duck has quacked
In a strange coincidence the Californian government cut the payments for solar-powered-electricity by 75% last year, and sales of solar panels fell to a quarter of what they were a year ago. That’s a “to” not a “by”. One in five solar contractors has already left the market. Careers and businesses — gone.
The new price for solar-powered-electricity is probably slightly closer to the true market value, which is almost zero, or even less for holy-green electricity at noon. The Duck […]
Perth on Wednesday | Australia: The Road Ahead
“We are more divided as a nation than ever and are feeling increasingly disillusioned and disempowered.”
Hon. John Anderson | Brendan O’Neill (Spiked Magazine) | Tony Seabrook (PGA) | Janet Albrechtsen (The Australian) | Jennifer Grossman (CEO of the Atlas Society) | Scott Hargreaves (IPA) | Professor Stephen Wilson | Professor Simon Haines (Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization) | Dr. Bella D’abrera | Russell Delroy | Steve Whybrow Sc | Professor Gary Banks | Gemma Tognini | Dan Ryan | Brianna Mckee | Freya Leach | Ron Manners (Mannkal)
Sydney, April 23rd | An evening with Brendan O’Neill (CIS)
Sydney, April 30th | Australia’s Nuclear Future (CIS)
10 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
By Jo Nova
Electric cars and carbon target fantasies are hitting the wall
Right when they are meant to be growing by double digits German EV car sales are down an astonishing 30% compared to a year ago. Their market share is actually shrinking. EV’s are not much good at reducing carbon dioxide over their lifetime but they are very useful for pretending to “decarbonise” the transport sector. So this creates a vast hole in the German government’s so-called transition, which has fixed targets for every sector. Problematically, the transport sector just doesn’t seem to run on wind and solar panels, or pumped hydro. It’s hard to decarbonize. Liquid fuel is just too convenient.
It seems the German Transport Minister is threatening to ban weekend driving as an ambit claim to expose the absurdity of the Green’s position. He is warning that if the Greens don’t sign a change in legislation to average emission across all sectors, he will have to take drastic action to meet the transport sector goals, which means banning driving on weekends. (Trap set.)
The Greens responded like any petty tyrants would, saying he shouldn’t aggravate people unnecessarily, because there were other ways to fix […]
By Jo Nova
Right about now the Greens should be rushing to reverse all the plastic bans
Now we know that CO2 is aerial fertilizer and feeds the world, but this study highlights the crazy unscientific randomness of environmental policies chanted by the same people who say “follow the science”.
It turns out paper shopping bags produce five times as much CO2 over their lifetime as plastic HDPE bags do. Apparently, plastic bags might strangle a turtle, but in the mind of a dedicated Green, paper bags could be causing the sixth mass extinction. Oh the dilemma?
A new study in Environmental Science and Technology looked at 16 applications of plastics in modern life found that in 15 of them, the plastic version produced fewer emissions than the paper, concrete, steel, glass or aluminum sort. And these 16 applications accounted for about 90% of global plastic volume. It seems that with paper bags people often “double bag” their groceries because the bags are prone to breaking, and in the end, in landfill, the paper waste is degraded into methane.
THE DAILY CHART: PLASTIC MADNESS
Steven Hayward, Powerline
So we went and banned plastic straws and plastic […]
By Jo Nova
Politicians are supposed to care about the voters, but trillions are being spent on a issue that voters don’t give a toss about. Who are politicians serving exactly, because it isn’t the voters. There is no grassroots clamoring demand for “climate action” and there never was. Could it be that politicians are more worried about what the banker cartel think, and the media moguls, or President Xi, or are they just carving out a post-political job for themselves at the UNEP or the WEF?
The Wall Street Journal reports on a survey that shows even young voters know almost anything is more important than climate change.
Biden Is Spending $1 Trillion to Fight Climate Change. Voters Don’t Care.
By Amrith Ramkumar and Andrew Restuccia,Wall Street Journal
A Journal poll, which surveyed voters in seven swing states in March, found that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration. That is roughly in line with voters of all ages, 2% of whom cited climate change as their top issue.
This has been this way for years. In 2015 only 3% […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day in the death of the early 21st Century EV bubble
The fantasy of battery powered vehicles that also fix the weather was foisted upon the people by Big Government. But all the regulatory wands in the world, and even billions in free gifts don’t make a market appear when the product is a dog.
EV’s are meant to be storming the market on their way to domination. But in the UK the market share of EV’s rose only 3.8% last month but the whole car market grew by 10% — so EV’s are in danger of becoming a shrinking part of the UK car fleet. Plug-in hybrids saw a 37% increase.
The EV experiment has gone so very wrong. Last year Ford was the number 2 EV brand in the US, but it was hit with the $4.5 billion dollar black hole of fiscal carnage, losing $38,000 on every single EV. Obviously, something had to change, and now months later, Ford is abandoning plans to bring in two new EV models, and retool their EV manufacturing plants. Instead, it is shifting to hybrid vehicles — copying the Toyota plan.
EVs have crashed […]
By Jo Nova
…
Dear Australians, people are sneaking into your house and stealing your money every year. You may have no idea because the theft comes in one thousand little instances, hidden within labels like “electricity bill”, “peas” and “soccer fees”. It’s also hidden in your income tax. Pagan fantasy plans to stop storms and hold back the tide are being funded by you, whether you like it or not.
Solar panel installations are partly paid for by their neighbors who don’t have solar panels, it’s hidden in their electricity bills. When a wind farm is built out past the Black Stump, shareholders of the wind farm don’t pay for the high voltage line to connect themselves to the grid, you do. When the new unreliable generators wipe out the midday profits from the old reliable plants, the old essential plants still have to pay their capital costs, insurance and staff. So they just have to charge more for the hours they do run. The new vandal plants make the old reliable ones more expensive than they would have been. (See Stacy and Taylor) You pay that bill too.
When the soccer club pays higher electricity […]
By Jo Nova
There is such a glut in solar panels, the Financial Times reported that people in Germany and the Netherlands are using them as cheap garden fencing, even though the angle is not good for catching the sun. Though given that there is also a glut of solar power at lunchtime this is probably a “good” thing.
Solar Panels
Great time for the Australian Government to spend a billion dollars setting up a giant solar panel production industry, eh?
With exquisite timing the Australian Labor government has just announced a Solar Sunshot for Our Regions. It our Prime Ministers ambition for us to be a “Renewable Energy Superpower” twenty years too late. One third of homes in Australia already have solar panels, but only 1% were made here. The NSW State government will also lob $275 million to support the embryonic industry and workers, most of whom will presumably be doorknocking to give away the panels with lamingtons. After we finish building garden fences, we might be using them to build sheds and cubby houses.
The big solar rush is over…
The global frenzy to install solar panels has suddenly flattened out last year when it […]
By Jo Nova
This tells us everything we need to know about modern Western civilization. A blimp with wings.
These pufferfish of the sky could be the ugliest, most absurd planes to take to the troposphere.
They are emblematic of the era we live in. Wind turbines destined to rot in the ocean are so big now they can’t even fit on a truck, so someone is planning a plane specially for them. It will be 100 feet longer than a Jumbo jet but carry no tourists, except the fibreglass kind that torment whales, deafen porpoises and vandalize fine electricity grids. The whole point of these machines is a quest to appease the weather Gods one hundred years from now.
Presumably these will run on fairy dust or fermented tofu.
The Flying white elephants could “hit the sky” in four years
To be clear, all that was announced two weeks ago was that Radia has “plans” to make these aircraft and wants $300 million dollars. Presumably the photos here were made by ChatGPT or equivalent.
Radia’s WindRunner to be the world’s largest aircraft ever built
by Rizwan Choudry, Interesting Engineering
The WindRunner’s colossal dimensions dwarf […]
By Jo Nova
Strange sightings of Batman and Robin have been occurring in London
Thousands of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) cameras have been installed to record numberplates of offending older cars so their owners can be charged £12.50 for daring to drive a non-compliant car in London. This usually means any diesel car made before 2014 or a petrol car made before 2006, so the fines especially hurt low paid workers, students and retirees.
The two masked crusaders have been seen helping the local bat population by installing homes for them in front of ULEZ cameras. Since bats are a protected species (unlike motorists) once the bat boxes are installed they can not be tampered with nor disturbed by law. Batman and Robin helpfully also place legal notices on the poles so workers coming to fix the cameras know they risk a six month jail sentence or an “unlimited” fine if they so much as touch the bat box.
The bat boxes cost £10.
Bat roosts have legal protection:
Vigilante anti-ULEZ campaigners hang bat boxes on cameras to stop engineers fixing them
By Adam Toms and Rom Preston-Ellis, The Mirror
The £10 animal homes […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
As Western grids are teetering, people are suddenly realizing demand for electricity is about to skyrocket
Unstoppable demands are about to meet immovable rocks. A year ago the grid managers thought they had their five year plans figured out, but now the same experts think we are going to need to add twice as much generation as they did then. The watt-hogs have arrived to chew on some gigawatt hours.
The usual slow grid planning processes are getting upended. Take the US State of Georgia for example. They have scored lots of new electric vehicle and battery factories, a few large “clean energy” manufacturing projects, and have attracted a bunch of energy-sucking data centers, but all of these things add massive loads to the grid.
In the last 22 years demand for electricity hasn’t growth much, so in 2022 Georgia Power were expecting to close their coal fired plants pretty soon, and not even put forward a new plan til 2025. Instead Georgia Power are knocking on the state regulators door to let it expand generation. They’re now expecting winter demand will grow 17 times faster than their previous plan, and summer use will explode to […]
By Jo Nova
Sometime a few years ago the Carbonistas stopped trying to pretend it was science, climate change has morphed into a ecclesiastical piñata instead. (If they whack it hard enough, grants fall out).
Instead of talking about 30 year trends (because they were wrong), the experts started coloring weather maps blood red and hyperventilating with every warm weekend. So it makes perfect sense they need the ritual reminders of holy mythology, and this is one of those stories. It’s the weekly nod for the awestruck fanatics that the world really does revolve around “climate change”. They can nod solemnly, and pat each others solar panels.
The theory is that because our showers are too long or our beef steaks are too big (don’t you feel important?), the poles are melting and some ice near the poles has dribbled out to the equator, slowing the planet’s spin. Since the Earth is a rotating ball of rock 10,000 kilometers across, the movements of a few millimeters of water on the surface are somewhat minor. But nevermind. So the dire news, such as it isn’t, is that the Earth’s clocks might have to be wound back by one whole second in […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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