How much wind power can a grid handle?

Could Australia end up with synchronous failure across states?

When wind power is maxing out it’s bad for grid stability — it pushes out the reliable spinning inertia — the massive rolling turbines that relentlessly pull the grid back to 50Hz. Here’s a graph of SA and Victoria wind farms last month, and you can see that for all the thousand kilometers that might separate them, they are controlled by much larger common weather patterns.

Wind power in South Australia and Victoria often both max out or crash together.

Tom Quirk looks out our national grid in light of the SA blackout debacle. The message from South Australia is that wind power does not make for nice stable and synchronous grids. As I mentioned before the whole idea of alternating current (or AC electricity) is about the exact push pull of electrons at a set frequency. The grid lives and dies by its frequency. We can’t add a 53Hz current to a 47Hz one and get a 50 Hz average. When different frequencies meet we get interference patterns — a mess of spikes and dips. Say hello to Lumpy Electricity. Say goodbye to your computer.

Indeed when the frequency […]

Climate Change may destroy sunsets — Southern Cross Uni teaches children

Apparently CO2 can absorb sunsets:

The Climate Change Challenge will be held at the Lismore campus from 10am where students from ages 8 to 15 can take part in the ‘photo voice’ competition, where they can use photography to have a voice on the issue and win prizes.

‘Some students take photos of beautiful things such as sunsets or waterways and then write about how it could be lost or destroyed because of climate change. Some take photos of land that has been bulldozed; they are very aware about how plants repair from damage, produce oxygen, absorb CO2 and so on.

Challenge to Grownups: take a photo of anything and then write about how Southern Cross Uni is destroying our children’s chance to understand it.

The agitprop is barely disguised as science: Climate Change and Me — That’s our tax dollars ruining their education. Is there anyone is Lismore who can go along tomorrow and join in?

Thanks to Tim Blair for The Sun sets on Sunsets. He comments that Southern Cross University, “is launching some kind of Greens-breeding program in NSW schools”

h/t Andrew.

 

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BOM September failure — but who can predict the climate a whole month ahead?

The World’s Best Practice climate models predicted Australia would be hotter than normal in September, instead the maximum temperature anomaly was 1 to 5 degrees below average across most of Australia.

That long range prediction was made all the way back on August 21. Four weeks later it was obvious it was wrong.

Prediction of a hot September versus actual outcome. (Click to enlarge).

Thanks to Warwick Hughes who saw this failure coming and The Marcus Review who points out the mismatch and goes on to log how much the BOM predictions for October have transformed from hotter than average to cold cold cold.

The BOM bravely predicted Tasmania would have an 80% chance of having hotter than average maximums. Temperatures ended up being spot on average. What’s 80% certainty worth? About the same as 95%.

Thanks to Chris Gillham who pointed out the big cold blob of ocean surrounding Australia on the south and west that gave Perth its coldest ever September nights. Wasn’t that cold blob present on August 21 when those models were run? On August 25th, the BOM predicted Perth’s chances of being cooler than average at 50:50. Toss a coin, or use a climate […]

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The Big Bluff: Paris Agreement to “come into force” 4 days before US election. “Force” means nothing.

UN makes power play against Trump

International governments have made a power play against Donald Trump by ratifying an international climate deal earlier than expected, effectively preventing him from “canceling” the deal as he has promised to do.

That means Trump, should he be elected president in November, could not “cancel” or renegotiate the terms of the agreement.

Which army is going to make the US pay?

More than anything else the Global Parasites are afraid of free voters and November 8th. That’s why this “Paris Agreement” charade had to be rushed in to pip the US election, and the news headlines are full of meaningless terms like “coming into force”. There is no international force. There are no auditors or policemen that are going to turn up to Fort Knox and take the money, or jail the “wrong doers”.

The UN says the Paris deal is done, because it wants to fool the voters into submission. But the US voters can choose a Congress that disagrees. Nothing stops the US from simply ignoring an international law. Which army is going to make the US pay?

It’s a bluff designed to fool US voters […]

Victorians to pay $2300 each, Queenslanders $5600 to make “renewables” target

Did anyone ask the voters if they wanted to spend $10 – $20k per family on a program to change the weather?

Renewables are all over the media in Oz. Suddenly free energy has a cost. Before SA knocked itself out, mainstream pundits talked of “ambitious” targets, now the term is “aggressive”.

We nationally have an obscene 23% “renewables” target — burning billions so our great grandchildren might be a millionth of a degree cooler. But some of our states are even crazier (SA, Victoria, and Queensland) and the Federal Minister for Energy is telling the nuttier ones off, pointing out the cosmic cost of achieving their even higher goals.

Josh Frydenberg sounds halfway sensible:

“Victorians for years have enjoyed some of the lowest energy prices across the country, which has created jobs, investment and growth. But now Victorians, like other Labor states, are being threatened with higher prices to fund ill-­considered renewable energy targets where there is no practical and realistic road map to get there.” — The Australian

The preliminary estimate from Mr Frydenberg’s department:

The capital cost of the extra ­renewable capacity would be least $14bn in Victoria and $27bn in Queensland, […]

SA Blackout: Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster

Finally, the gritty info we’ve been waiting for: The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) preliminary report. The message here is of how a combination of both transmission towers failing and probably the auto-shut-off of wind farms combined in 12 seconds to crash the South Australian system. It’s looking awfully bad for the wind industry. The AEMO pins the crash on the sudden reduction from the wind generators, but stops short of declaring why they dropped power so suddenly. Was it the auto-shut-offs, lightning strikes, a software glitch, turbine failure, or was it a key transmission line that broke? Reneweconomy is about the last-man-standing trying to defend the wind industry in Australia. Giles Parkinson argues it was the third transmission line that took out some wind generation.

Even if the third transmission tower took out two “farms”, the fragility of wind-dominated grids is on display. And above and beyond this, South Australian electricity is a management debacle. The only question is, which mistake was the worst: Is this is epic indulgence of running the wind farms flat out in a storm only to trigger a blackout with their auto shut offs? There’s a compelling case, but there are tenths or less […]

German environmentalists say renewables are destroying their landscapes, killing nature, wasting money

 

….

Pierre Gosselin reports that environmental experts, professors, and some green leaders in Germany are fed up at the deforestation, the fraud and the futility. They are protesting at the waste of money in the name of ecology as trees and birds get destroyed, electricity prices skyrocket, but nothing gets achieved for the climate. One has put together a book titled: “Sacrificed Landscapes – How the Energiewende Is Destroying our Landscapes.”

They might mistakenly think there is a man-made crisis in the climate but they are honest players, and they realize that real environmental causes are being used as a guise for a planned economy and self serving corruption:

Now that Germany’s Energiewende has been in full swing for a number of years, many leading environmentalists are in a state of shock as huge areas of the country are being deforested and landscapes disfigured to make way for hundreds of wind turbines.

Environmentalist Georg Etscheit is a regular contributor at Germany’s leading climate alarmism site, Klimaretter, and he as well, has had enough. Etscheit will be releasing a book in early November.

Wind farms dominate the landscape in Germany. From the promotional […]

India signs on to do-nothing deal for Paris Climate “Theatre”

Look who “signed up” to the Cabaret called the Paris Agreement?

India is doubling its coal use by 2020 and tripling its emissions by 2030. That’s what “going green” means.

India has ratified the weakest kind of non-reduction, just a promise it will try to “cut emissions intensity“. That big goal is to increase its carbon emissions by slightly less than the rate its population is growing at. An achievement most countries do just by being there. It’s the default condition as economies develop. Instead of reducing emissions, India is set to increase its total emissions threefold by 2030. Ratify that, eh?

Though even that pitifully weak anti-goal is not enforceable. Nearly everything in the Paris deal is optional, voluntary, and written as a should, not a shall. After ten months of delays and frivolous ambit claims like trying to get entry to the nuclear club (and access to more uranium), India has finally signed up for Paris anyway. Which is signing nothing much — all India has agreed to is to submit a new goal for itself every five years, and do a stocktake. It’s that banal.

As I’ve said before, there are so many reasons […]

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500% more rain over a million square kilometers – Wettest September across Eastern Australia in 116 years

It is not surprising there are floods all over the East coast at the moment

September brought 500% of normal rain to 2 million square kilometers of Eastern and Northern Australia. There are floods across the South East. There are flood alerts in South Australia, floods have been washing through NSW (and some of those floods were caused by a dam release). There are floods in Tasmania. Flood watches are active in Victoria. Spare a thought for farmers who are taking big losses from both frost and flood in Australia. (So much for endless droughts, and early springs. Hello, Tim Flannery.) Heavy snow has also fallen — 25cm in Threadbo (it so late in the season, some ski lifts have stopped operating). Right now, thousands of people still don’t have power in South Australia, while others are being rescued from floods across SA and NSW. Floods have stranded 181 families for month on islands in the middle of NSW.

h/t to Warwick Hughes, and Lance Pidgeon

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

A large part of the scary purple area got only 100-200mm of rain in a month (4-8 inches). It’s just very unusual in these dry areas.

To give […]

Coldest Perth September recorded in 120 years of records (must be climate change)

In the last 120 years in Perth there has never been a September as cold as this one. We know that thanks to Chris Gillham, who has been tracking Western Australian weather in detail for years at WAClimate.net.

The headline in The West Australian today was Perth shivers through it’s coldest ever September. For some reason (I can’t think why) the extreme weather journalists did not mention climate change (has that ever happened on a hottest ever record story?). It’s so unusually cold here that wheat farmers, only weeks away from harvest*, are struggling with frost damage on crops. They are making snowmen from the frosts. It is supposed to be rapidly heating up but it is three degrees below normal.

Given the freak weather, Will Steffen immediately announced that “This is a prelude to a disturbing future. And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t address climate change.” No. Wait. Scratch that. That was South Australia, where one bad storm was caused by coal fired electrons. A record cold month is just weather.

Curiously, The Bureau of Meteorology(BOM) announced it was the coldest ever September for Perth since 1994 when records started at Mt Lawley, and […]