Renewable energy is too expensive to make “green hydrogen” — Twiggy goes to Arizona instead

Image by Manuel Angel Egea

By Jo Nova

Only 18 months ago the Australian government gave $14 million dollars to Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest to figure out if his team could build a 500MW electrolyser to make hydrogen gas on an island near Brisbane. It was going to be a glorious Australian green-techno future, the largest hydrogen plant in the world, but it’s missed three deadlines in the last three months to greenlight the project. Instead the Australian company is going overseas.

As Nick Cater points out this part of the made-in-Australia renewable superpower is going to be made-in-Arizona because they still have cheap electricity — a miraculous 7.5c a kilowatt hour!

Australia’s manufacturing decline is a story of broken promises and failed industry welfare programs

Nick Cater, The Australian

Bowen described the project’s success as “critical” to Australia’s ambition to be a green energy superpower.

It turns out abundant sun was not such a competitive advantage in the manufacture of green hydrogen. Low taxes, fiscally responsible government and cheap and reliable carbon-free energy are far more appealing drawcards for investors.

The future is already being built in Buckeye, […]

Tuesday

8.7 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Monday

8.1 out of 10 based on 25 ratings

Sunday

8.8 out of 10 based on 28 ratings

Ford lost $1.3 billion in a quarter, a loss of $132,000 on every EV sold

Rutger van der Maar

By Jo Nova

Remember when Ford was just losing $38,000 on every EV? Those were the good days

The biggest star in the automotive world at the moment is a black hole, and it’s swallowing whole industrial giants. It’s hard to imagine a faster way to sabotage whole nations than to disguise your spies as academics and environmentalists. Then get them to convince the government to command a whole new market into existence in a highly technological field with the wave of a legislated wand.

These numbers are astronomical:

Ford just reported a massive loss on every electric vehicle it sold

By Chris Isodore, CNN: Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.

Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its […]

Saturday

9.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

People don’t believe renewables are cheap any more, so activists pretend they never said it was

By Jo Nova

The sore losers of the renewable-fantasy hope you don’t expect them to apologize

We are at the beginning of the big-flip. The activist pundits are suddenly realizing that renewables aren’t cheap and worse, that the public know it. Without blinking, they’re switching from telling us how cheap renewables are to saying of course, it’s going to be difficult, like everyone knows this and they haven’t been completely wrong for twenty years and wasted trillions of dollars.

They hope of course to erase the past, skip the apology, and slide the public straight into acceptance — that the transition will cost more, of course.

Take Peter Lewis, of Essential Polling. He writes snidely in The Guardian:

Here’s the truth: energy transition is hard. Not everyone gets a pony

The climate crisis has long been defined by its lies: From the original sin of science denial, to Tony Abbott’s confected carbon tax panic, to the latest yellowcake straw man. But the most damaging porky of all might be that the transition to renewable energy will be easy.

Did you see what he did there? He blamed and named conservatives and then pretends they were the ones […]

Friday

9.3 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Alinta chief admits the transition has “soaring costs”, and has stalled because of the rooftop solar glut

Solar panels eat the profits of the reliable generators for lunch

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 […]

Anzac Thursday

Lest We Forget.

9.8 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

Backpedalling: Now “Net Zero” is an unhelpful slogan says UK Climate watchdog

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 […]

Free Speech Wednesday

Long live Elon Musk

10 out of 10 based on 39 ratings

The most expensive electricity on Earth is in countries with “cheapest sources of electricity”

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 […]

Tuesday

9.9 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Monday

8.9 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Sunday

9.7 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Another day on the road to Green Energy Ruin, and the posterchild of Green Manufacturing collapses

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 […]

Saturday

For readers in Perth: David Archibald, long time skeptic and author will be speaking tomorrow. Topic: “Building Australia’s Defence” Sunday 21st April at 2.30pm to 4.30pm David Archibald is the author of: Twilight of Abundance, Australia’s Defence 2016 and Beyond, and American Gripen; The Solution to the F35 Nightmare. APIWA Club Room, Rear 10 Mallard Way, Cannington, 6107

 

10 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

In hot ancient Rome, it’s not the heat but the cold times that align with plagues

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 […]

Friday

9.8 out of 10 based on 9 ratings