Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it’s against the religion).
The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber rich get that kind of luck.
Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser flywheels. But none of them want to pour in their own billions anymore, despite the social credit points bonanza and the bragging rights that would bring.
For twenty years these same people have been pushing the renewable hard sell on us, now overnight, without so much as a “sorry” they’ve all flipped, leaving us holding the can of decrepit national grids that can’t do what they were designed to do.
Google will build seven small nuclear reactors, the first by 2030…Our PM and the CSIRO must be feeling hung-out-to-dry. They declared nuclear was the most expensive option and said Australia couldn’t even build one before 2040.
Google has signed a landmark deal to use electricity produced by small nuclear reactors to power its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts.
Under the agreement with startup Kairos Power announced on Monday, the California-based tech giant will back the construction of seven small nuclear reactors capable of generating 500 megawatts of power. The first reactor is scheduled to come online by 2030, with others to follow in the coming years.
“The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth,” Michael Terrell, the senior director of energy and climate at Google, said in a blog post.
Amazon is investing in US firm X-energy to utilise nuclear reactors to power its data centres.
Amazon and X-energy are aiming to have more than 5 gigawatts of SMR-generated power operational by 2039.
The reactors are currently under development, with none currently providing power to the electric grid in the US.
Big investors can help change that, and these announcements could be the “inflection point” that makes scaling up this technology truly possible, Huff said.
Feel the heat. Only weeks ago these same billionaires were raving about renewable energy, downranking and censoring the skeptics… now they are doing exactly what we said all along.
File this lesson away in the Decline and Fall of Enlightenment Science. Nature, formerly known as the esteemed science journal, is now achieving everything a captured tabloid industry sales mag could hope for. They’ve squeezed a disaster out of a tiny change in a short record, and from a good news story. Let’s not forget, for the last 100,000 years most humans would have been happy that a bit of Antarctica was greening.
“Lush”? The only people who call this lush are penguins:
To appreciate the Black Belt level of naked exaggeration going on here, consider the opening hyperbole:
A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.
“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study1, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.
All this shock and drama arise from an area of “less than a square kilometer” expanding all the way up to “nearly 12 square kilometers”. These numbers “shocked us” say the PR team, I mean, the scientists, who continue on in their best Agony-Aunt impression: “It’s simply that rate of change in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that causes the alarm.” Sob sob, and Boo hoo too. It’s a lonely peninsula. Can we find it a friend?
Everything about this shows the pathetic decay of Western Science. We’re talking about 12 square kilometers of more habitable land on a continent with 14 million square kilometers of ice. The horrible affliction of unexpected tundra now covers 0.00009% of Antarctica.
It could get worse, the mosses might make … soil:
The research is “really important”, says Jasmine Lee, a conservation scientist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Other studies2,3 have found evidence that vegetation on the peninsula is changing in response to climate change, “but this is the first study that’s taken a huge-scale approach to look at the entire region”, she says.
Previous visits to the peninsula led the authors to think that most of the vegetation is moss. As mosses spread to previously ice-covered landscapes, they will build up a layer of soil, offering a habitat for other plant life, Roland says. “There’s a huge potential here to see a further increase in the amount of non-native, potentially invasive species,” he says.
It is, of course, due to climate change:
The researchers point to climate change as the driver of the landscape’s shift from white to green. Temperatures on the peninsula have risen by almost 3 °C since 1950, which is a much bigger increase than observed across most parts of the planet.
Nobody mention the 91 volcanoes they discovered there seven years ago which line up with the warmest parts of Antarctica. We sit on a ball of lava, and there is an edge of crustal plate under there. But really, it’s more likely the warming is caused by your Ford fiesta and those beef kebabs…
Even Gallup admits the US is suffering from a crisis in confidence in their institutions, and the least trusted of all is “the media”.
For some reason, telling readers that they are selfish, small minded people who are screwing up the world isn’t resonating with the Rednecks. In 2020 40% of US Citizens thought the media was trustworthy, but now only 31% do, an all time record low. This is the same media that told us elections were secure, vaccines were safe and effective and Joe Biden was sharp as a tack right up until the day everyone discovered he had dementia.
The Pullitzer-prize-guys fell for every bureaucratic lie they could — Hunter Bidens laptop was Russian disinfo, ivermectin was horse-dewormer, and an unarmed mob with a horned hat and flags staged an insurrection against the largest military power in the world.
There’s a price to pay for lying and the media have barely began to pay it.
Obviously they need to censor blogs and social media
The big question is why do 31% still trust the media?
Possibly their paypacket depends on believing the program. And welfare is so much easier to take with a dose of Media entitlement-sauce.
It’s a long term decline
The full graph shows just how different things used to be. Once upon a time, 70% of the people believed the media.
Imagine a tool so effective, with such a brand, that 70% of voters believed it. Such a tool would be a magnet for the rich and powerful to control for other purposes, and so it has come to pass…
Port Hedland Council had a special meeting on Friday Oct 11, where they voted to call for the immediate suspension of Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines and to send letters about this to the Prime Minister, the State’s Premier, and to every other council in Australia telling them why they should do it too.
Port Hedland is the largest iron ore export port in the world, in the far north west Pilbara area of Western Australia.
The motion, based on a recent report by Canadian virologist David Speicher and letters from MP Russell Broadbent to Anthony Albanese, calls on council to send a letter to the Prime Minister supporting Mr Broadbent’s call for the immediate suspension of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
There was resounding community support for the motion, with more than 10 residents delivering speeches at public statement time, referencing a range of COVID vaccine conspiracy theories.
The man who moved the motion, Councillor Adrian McRae, said that national vaccine policy was not the councils job, but said that the state and federal governments had failed the community. The council has “grave concerns about the health impacts that could arise from contamination, including genomic instability, cancers and potential effects on future generations.” (Annexure 1)
The council shared a video made by Professor Angus Dalgleish for the Australian audience. The English oncologist explains he has personally seen a dramatic shift in inexplicable cancers among some of his long time patients who had vaccine boosters. He pointed out that a Canadian virologist, David Speicher, had studied vials of Australian vaccines and found levels of DNA contamination 145 times the permissible limit. Dalgleish also talked about recent results from Japan, The Czech Republic and Italy which all showed the number of boosters was associated with an increase in cancer. He described the risks of giving children contaminated vaccines en mass as a “disaster” worse than thalidomide.
The council is raising laboratory results that show we may be harming the gene pool of Australia, and the Premier (and ABC) offer childish ridicule in return. It’s a “let them eat cake” moment.
Why isn’t the TGA (Australia’s “FDA”) even keeping track of cancer cases in people who have had 1 – 4 booster shots?
It’s just another misinformation sausage from the Butcher of news — our ABC.
The ABC writers (not naming any names, Charlie McLean and Jessica Shackleton) de facto declared the studies raised by the Canadian virologist and the Oncology Prof “conspiracy theories”. They didn’t bother to interview either of them, (or read the studies) they just implied the DNA argument was an old one, and said it had been discredited by “international bodies” they couldn’t be bothered naming, and the “Australian Department of Health and Aged Care.” To show how little they cared about making sense, they quoted an irrelevant paragraph from the Department’s website about how DNA is in the nucleus of our cells, and mRNA can’t get in there, or affect or combine with our DNA. Since the council was talking about DNA contamination of the mRNA vaccines, this was wholly superfluous misdirection.
This is the kind of research taxpayers are forced to pay for to cover up government failures. But the more they censor the more we can use it against them. Don’t forget to mention to friends and family about things like this and Elon catching the largest rocket that ever flew yesterday. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to undermine the authority of our inept parasitic public news service, every chance you get.
The letter the Council is sending to the PM and all the other councils contains very specific details about the reasons the TGA has failed to detect the DNA contaminants in the vaccines.
My rough notes from the speech by Professor Angus Dalgleish:
Canadian virologist, David Speiker has found synthetic DNA contamination, in Australian vials of mRNA vaccines. The sheer level of contaminants detected — up to 145 times the permissable limit — means the vaccines are a form of gene therapy.
Professor Angus Dalgleish reports that we are already seeing effects of this in real patients. “Patients who had been cancer free for many years, were suddenly showing rapid progression”. They had been completely stable for 5, 8, 10, or 18 years. “I am used to seeing people progress when they face severe depression, for example during divorce, bereavement, debt etc, but all these patients had only one thing in common. (3:20) They had been forced to have a booster vaccine.”
It is not an isolated issue. His own research shows the boosters suppress the T Cell response and switch the antibody response to tolerizing [the kind of antibodies that reduce the immune response rather than ramp it up]. That means it’s the perfect example where we have part of the immune system turning off the policing of foreign invaders and cancer.
Australia has administered more than 60 million vaccines, but the Australian public health agencies are not tracking cancers in patients.
The Dept of Health and the TGA have chosen not to monitor the cancer incidence in people post vaccination.
It is troubling that the Dept of Health has not made data on cancer trends publicly available.
Each booster increases the chances of cancer across the board. Studies from the Office of National Statistics of Japan, and Checkoslovakia and Italy, and in all these countries shows an increase in all cancers across the board and they are associated with the number of boosters.
The contamination of this vaccine with DNA should have been picked up before they were administered. But the first thing we should do is stop all doses of the vaccines at the moment. This could be an unmitigated disaster, that would make the thalidomide disaster, previously, look very small beer in comparison.
Speicher, David J., Jessica Rose, L. M. Gutschi, David M. Wiseman, PhD, and Kevin McKernan. 2023. “DNA Fragments Detected in Monovalent and Bivalent Pfizer/biontech and Moderna Modrna COVID-19 Vaccines from Ontario, Canada: Exploratory Dose Response Relationship with Serious Adverse Events.” OSF Preprints. October 19. doi:10.31219/osf.io/mjc97.
https://x.com/DJSpeicher
For anyone dealing with cancer now, or vaccine injuries, my deepest sympathies. There is a lot you can do. In addition to discussing it with your own doctors, study the FLCCC site for their cancer treatment protocol and their Covid and vaccine recovery protocols. The FLCCC are a team of top specialist doctors in the US like Paul Marik (currently touring Australia) and Pierre Cory. They explain and list the drugs and vitamins they recommend with reasons and all the references. These are excellent resources.
If Elon had not jumped in with the Orange Hitler Man, this would have been on every news channel.
Seen from a distance we can appreciate just how fast it was hurtling toward the ground. The pre-launch information mentioned that the rocket would decelerate so rapidly it would cause audible sonic booms in the area.
Elon Musk commenting on the lawfare being used to slow launches: “The next fight of Starship is ready to fly. We are waiting on regulatory approval. It shouldn’t be possible to build a giant rocket faster than the paper can move from one desk to another.” More on ZeroHedge
Maybe it’s lucky Australia didn’t have to fight a war when Chris Barrie was the Australian Defence Force Chief.
Admiral Barrie says “ security threats from climate change dwarfed those posed by China”. Apparently the land of drought, fire and flood is will be overwhelmed with a one millimeter annual sea level rise. The things that really scare him are not the subs, drones, propaganda programs, embedded spies or hypersonic missiles, what really freaks him out is a half a degree of warming.
So, five or six retired defence types are calling for an “emergency mobilization” and another government bureaucracy — a dedicated office of Climate Threat Intelligence — which if it was intelligent would do what no government has ever done, and audit the UN climate models. They’d discover the models fail on humidity, drought, rain, clouds, the upper troposphere, the Antarctic, the sea ice, the short term, the long term, ocean currents, and practically everything else.
They also want some kind of “early warning system” — in case the cyclones develop Stealth mode perhaps?
A group of former national security leaders says the federal government needs to radically overhaul the way it plans for climate threats, warning that Australia is totally unprepared to deal with the cascading and existential risks that climate change presents to the region and the world.
The starkly worded new report by Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG) — which includes former Australian Defence Force chief Chris Barrie — says that climate change presents such a serious security threat that it demands an “emergency mobilisation” in response.
“Today, unimaginable new climate extremes confront us: record-breaking droughts and floods, cruel heatwaves, unstoppable bushfires, broken infrastructure, and coastal inundation. Worse is to come,” it says.
Win wars with wind turbines!
The ASLCG says the federal government must make sharper and faster cuts to emissions, as well as pressing the largest polluters to collaborate on driving down carbon pollution.
The answer to everything is solar panels, for sure.
They’re also calling on the government to establish a new climate threat intelligence branch and early warning system to assess the impacts with “brutal honesty,” while improving planning for the disruptions climate change will bring.
Lord help us, if our military bases can’t handle a drought-surprise in a continent of deserts, or a flood in a land of monsoonal rains, we are already in trouble.
Admiral Barrie said that the latest climate science showed that large parts of northern Australia “could become uninhabitable within 30-40 years, threatening military bases, communities, and the economy.
Hypothetically President Xi would be happy about statements like this:
“All the billions of resources being put into confronting China will not help one iota in dealing with the greatest threat to our future security in Australia and the region — and that is climate disruption.”
If the CCP had funded a group which aimed to reduce Australian industrial competitiveness, our defence capability and also raise electricity prices, it might make similar arguments to ASLCG. Just sayin’…
Government funded science is not so much a search for truth as new chapter in the Communist Manifesto
It’s a form of cultural warfare. These funds are not just diluting science, but actively sabotaging it. They enable experts who “decolonize geoscience” and offer a million dollars to the kind of people who say “white supremacy permeates … STEM education”. It is the antithesis of the dispassionate observer, instead the observer is all that matters. If you can’t see your oppression, it’s because they didn’t give you enough money…
Two billion dollars buys a lot of loud shouty voices, amplifying their messages through impressionable teenagers. These pseudo experts don’t just waste offices, they get invited to sit on committees, they raise PhD students, and their words can be used in legal cases and “fact checking” situations. Not to mention, their output trains AI engines too. It legitimizes a whole twisted way of thinking.
Under the Biden-Harris government The US National Science Foundation is gradually being converted to a Neo-Marxist PR machine. A US Senate Committee Report shows that in the first quarter of 2024 more than a quarter of all new NSF grants were written in far left class-war regalia.
“Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.
Redirecting funding to these subjective, ideologically based projects was deliberate. Beginning in 2021, the White House and NSF created scientific integrity policies to require that agencies “[i]ncorporate [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.”4″
The NSF was already captured by Big Government years ago, this reformation takes it to a new level of cultural warfare:
Americans are losing confidence in science, but perhaps that’s the point?
American confidence in the scientific community has declined significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a quarter of the American public now reports that they have “no confidence” or “not too much confidence” in scientists; just 12% held those views when the pandemic began. Far fewer Americans believe that science produces a “positive effect on our society,” too. In 2019, almost three out of four Americans felt science had a positive effect. As of fall 2023, that number stands at 57%.
Geoscience got “decolonized” which probably didn’t help find the lithium
The Biden-Harris NSF has responded by sending over $2 billion to projects geared towards advancing divisive social ideologies rather than investigating hard science. In 2022, NSF gave Columbia University $4.4 million for its Implementing Novel Solutions for Promoting Cultural Change in Geoscience Research & Education (INSPIRE) program to “decolonize geoscience.” The following year, NSF awarded $5 million to Arizona State University and two other schools to build “an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in artificial intelligence education.”
It’s straight out of the Communist Manifesto:
American university campuses have become saturated with DEI initiatives and courses that use neo-Marxist theories to code individuals as members of an “oppressed” or “oppressor” class based on the color of their skin, heritage, or political perspectives. In Marxist theory, the “oppressor” is typically the class or group that holds economic, political, and social power over others, while the “oppressed” are defined as those who must support the oppressors—through their labor or service—to survive. In his Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx called for the dismantling of the current capitalist order through a revolutionary process. He later wrote “revolutionary terror” was needed to bring about a “new society” that would allow the oppressed class to rule.
The Committee found instances where principle investigators who were DEI funded ended up leading protests on campus in support of terrorist groups like Hamas.
One, Shirin Vossough, was known to say ““the ideology of white supremacy permeates all of the nation’s institutions, including our existing system of STEM education”. After that, she got a million dollars:
Shirin Vossoughi is an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University and the co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 NSF grant awarded in 2023 for a project titled, “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” Vossoughi credits Marxist traditions for her decision to teach children “the meaning of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’” after Hamas’s attack against Israel.
If you wanted to stir up trouble on campuses, just fund the right professors eh?
It’s not that girls (whatever they are) need help with science, it’s that science is designed to exclude women:
Thus and verily “science” must be changed to be more girly creative, and less mathematical and unemotional…
Many of the 1,058 grants that fell into the Gender category funded research that investigated the supposed harms of “mislabeling” individuals or using the wrong pronoun to refer to a person. Projects also went beyond programming that might provide more opportunities for girls and women in science; they presumed that scientific disciplines are purposely constructed to exclude them.
And if the science that made our civilization possible is too white, then we must devolve that thinking, we wouldn’t want to be racist, would we?
As described above, grants in the Status category—3,160 awards—received funds for research related to race, ethnicity, or social groups in ways that presumed the sciences were inherently biased against certain communities.
• Social Justice grants—2,585 awards—tended to approach the admirable goal of providing more and better Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education opportunities to students of selected backgrounds by presuming that oppressor (always, white) communities were acting as a deterrent and purposely suppressing participation of other groups.
If an enemy wanted to destroy the things that made the West great, the plan to dismantle science would probably look a lot like this.
Banker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…
It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?
Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned.
It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it won’t be legally able to supply electricity unless the bureaucrats change the rules. So Delta has issued an urgent request for a rule change to add the words “or cash” to the current market rules.
Anthony Albanese could solve this in five minutes. Apart from the banal rule change, all these banks are only allowed to trade in Australia with government approval, and their role is to serve the people, not to control the weather, or run political agendas. All the PM has to do is threaten to revoke their licenses or issue a new license to a competitor that will serve fossil fuel entities. He could also pull government contracts and pension accounts from bankers who boycott legal Australian entities for political reasons. (See how Ron de Santis did that in the US). The US Republican States have already solved this to some extent.
Delta Electricity, which operates the Vales Point coal-fired power station in New South Wales, has requested an urgent rule change from the Australian Energy Market Commission after 15 banks refused to offer it credit on emissions grounds.
Chief executive Richard Wrightson said he had even offered to deposit money with an institution as security, simply to procure the financial instrument necessary under the rules, but even that offer was refused.
“We’re actually not asking them to lend, we’re just asking them to issue a bank guarantee,’’ Mr Wrightson said.
“This de-banking is dangerous … I won’t describe it as a crisis now, but unless we prepare for this, it’s chaotic.’’
Delta Electricity runs the Vales Point coal fired station in New South Wales. It has a capacity of 1320MW, and was marked for closure in 2029, but the Czech group that owns it said it should run at least another 4 years. The poor sods. What foreign company would want to invest in Australia any more with a rabid government that allows the banking mafia to run the electricity grid and to bankrupt legal entities on a whim?
What looks, acts and smells like a banker cartel?
What are the odds in a free market that 15 out of 15 banks decided to adopt the same “anti fossil fuel” boycott program at the same time? All of them are saying “No thanks” to the profits from arrangements with thermal coal. Speaking of which, why aren’t all the other private coal plants struggling? The plants owned by Alinta and EnergyAustralia are Chinese State assets, so President Xi is happy to help. But AGL and Origin Energy own coal plants and they aren’t begging for a rule change. Do they get a free pass from the bankers because they also own unreliable generators too? Is that how this works — to squeeze out the only independent coal plant with no vested interest in sabotaging coal power?
The octopus grip of the big bankers spreads.
All the Australian “Big Four” bankers signed the GFANZ banker cartel agreement — ANZ, CommBank, Westpac, NAB, plus Macquarie Bank, and Bank of Queensland. They serve the globalist UN, or their BlackRock and Vanguard masters, not the Australian people. All banks depend on government protection for their ability to create legal currency out of thin air. If you or I loaned money we didn’t have, it would be called counterfeiting.
The money-printers have more control over our national grid than our PM seemingly has.
With four weeks to go ’til D-Day for the parasitic blob (the US Election), the headlines today are biblical hellfire with photos. Earth’s vital signs have hit record extremes they tell us. In all the years we’ve been recording things, which is practically nothing, storms, floods, droughts and the mental health of jellyfish have never been worse, which is obviously why food crops are higher than ever before, the Earth is greening and more humans are alive than have ever existed.
Like soothsayers with chicken entrails, captive scientists are squawking disaster like their funding depends on it:
“We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardises life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” said Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University (OSU), who co-led the group. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives.
It’s “like nothing humans have ever seen” says Prof Ripple, who has forgotten the Eemian, the ice ages, the Toba supervolcano, countless asteroids, and the Black Plague.
We’re panicking about a couple of degrees of warming, but cavemen had it hotter and colder, and for 150,000 years their air conditioners didn’t work.
It’s like the modern “scientists” are trying to erase all of prehistory
What we’re dealing with is nothing like what humans have already suffered through. Humans saw the seas rise by 125 meters (twice) — children used to play on the continental shelf until all their beaches disappeared, their homes washed away, and their favourite reefs were destroyed. Humans saw ice caps a mile thick roll over Manhattan and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too.
Nothing we’re dealing with today is remotely as bad as what humans have already dealt with.
Every kind of disaster will hit “Billions of people”:
The hyperbole knows no bounds. The “millions of climate refugees” that didn’t happen, are now “billions”.
No disaster is off limits to the Scare-fairies:
“Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”
Every bad thing under the sun is caused by climate change. That’s how we know it isn’t science.
The climate is doing just fine, but the The State of Climate Science is a tragedy.
REFERENCE (if you can call it that)
William Ripple, et al including Michael Mann and Naoimi Oreskes (2024) The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth, BioScience, biae087, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087
Commiserations to friends in the UK, where Ed Miliband, or worse, his new National Electricity System Operator (NESO) think that flywheels will save money because the UK won’t need to maintain back up power stations and import so much electricity.
Ed Miliband is the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is a bit like being the Minister for War and Peace at the same time, or perhaps more like Health and Ebola. His big new plan is to set up a big new bureaucracy (NESO) and their big idea is to stop blackouts by installing giant flywheels around the country.
Flywheels are good at smoothing out the frequency glitches, but the second largest flywheel operation in the world would only power the UK for a fraction of a second. It’s going to take a lot of flywheels, or as David Evans dryly remarked, if they can speed up the flywheels it might work, but to put enough energy in, they may need to get close to the speed of light.
Giant flywheels are to be installed around the UK to minimise the risk of blackouts as the power system goes carbon-free.
Flywheels are energy storage systems that use surplus electricity to accelerate a massive metal “wheel”…
NESO said the schemes would save consumers money by cutting the need for maintaining backup power stations and importing power from overseas via interconnectors.
A spokesman said: “The pathfinders alone are expected to provide consumers with savings of £14.9bn between 2025 and 2035.”
As Paul Burgess explains, the flywheel sales team often talk in megawatts but rarely mention megawatt-hours (probably because they are embarrassed). The worlds second largest flywheel system has 200 carbon fibre flywheels spinning in a vacuum chamber and provides 20 megawatts. But it can only supply 1 megawatt for 15 minutes, which is a quarter of a MWh, which is a problem because the UK uses about 860,000 MWh every day.
Paul Burgess estimates the second largest flywheel installation in the world can power the UK for about one 200th of a second.
A flywheel is like a coal generator the second after it runs out of coal.
Then there’s “The Cost”
Burgess points at a study by Dongxu et al that reviews the costs of supplying energy via flywheels, and its in the ballpark of $1,000 to $5,000 per kilowatt hour. (That’s a million dollars a megawatt hour). It’s 1,200 to 4,600 times as expensive as gas in the UK, and about 100,000 times as expensive as Australian brown coal power.
It’s cheaper to cook food over a pile of burning money.
…the capital cost per unit power of a FESS [Flywheel Energy Storage System] with a rated power of 250 kW and a maximum expected storage time of 15 min is 250 to 350$/kW, and the corresponding unit energy cost is 1000 to 5000$/kWh. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that the unit energy installation cost of FESS will decrease by 35 % by 2030, from the current estimate of 1500–6000$/kWh to 1000–3900$/kWh [14]. — Dongxu et al.
Yet NESO says it will “save consumers money”. Aren’t there laws about fraud or dishonest advertising that apply to statements like these?
Then there’s “industrial accidents”
The same paper mentions that things can get fairly hairy with heavy objects moving at high speeds:
In order to fully utilize material strength to achieve higher energy storage density, rotors are increasingly operating at extremely high tip speeds. However, this trend will lead to severe centripetal stress and potential safety threats caused by rotor failure.
In 2011, two carbon fiber composite rotors weighing 1 ton and storing about 30 kWh failed and began to disintegrate.
Flywheels are also known as “Synchronous Condensers” though coal, hydro, nuclear and gas plants effectively have free flywheels built into the system. The only reason to add flywheels to the grid today is to allow the wind and solar generators to run without crashing the system. It’s yet another subsidy for wind and solar generators, and the costs should be laid at their feet.
The real issue here is that the people running the country are innumerate simpletons, and the professors who know that are too afraid to say anything lest they lose their next grant, or fall off the Honours list, and the journalists are too indoctrinated, and the editors too captured for the bad news to make it to the front page.
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