By Jo Nova

How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.

Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.

With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.

We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.

Anero.id

Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.

It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our […]