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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How Close Were We To Blackouts Yesterday?
January 9, 2025
By Paul Homewood
We came perilously close to rolling blackouts yesterday, something which I have not seen reported in the media –(correct me, I may be wrong!!).
The ever alert Kathryn Porter has the full story: Blackouts near miss in tightest day in GB electricity market since 2011
This is her conclusion:
…
Why did we get into this awful mess?
It does not take a genius to work out why? We shut down more than 20 GW of reliable coal capacity, and thought we could replace it with medieval technology that only works when the wind blows!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/01/09/how-close-were-we-to-blackouts-yesterday/#more-85168
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Good news!
Like Australia, it’s going to take large scale blackouts to wake up the Sheeple.
Of course, someone would be needed to explain the truth of what happened, not a spokesman for the Uniparty that believes in the anthropogenic global warming fr@ud like all Uniparty factions in Australia.
In Australia, in the absence of someone to tell the truth who the Lamestream Media would give exposure to, large scale blackouts would likely be spun as a case of not having ENOUGH intermittent generators and efforts would be redoubled to build more.
In fact, as Jo has reported, Australia would already be suffering regular blackouts were it not for large amounts of taxpayer money being paid for the right to load shed our few remaining large industrial consumers like aluminium smelters. Due to lack of diligence by the Lamestream Media, this doesn’t get reported
Australian Uniparty politicians are perfectly happy to complete the total collapse of the economy in pursuit of “Net Zero”. The only difference is that the fake conservative Liberals want to build nuclear reactors to replace coal for baseload but they still want more intermittents. And large scale projects of that nature, assuming they will ever get approval, would take decades in massively over-regulated Australia and we will be like Venezuela by then and it will be game over.
60
I live in Washington State where hydro is the “Big Kahuna” of our electrical supply. There are plenty of generators on tall towers and the region sends electricity south to California. (See: Pacific DC intertie)
This week the generator blades mostly have been still. I follow the action at the link below. Wind is the green line at the bottom.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
80
It’s interesting that the winds driving the Commiefornia fires, don’t get to the tower-mounted generators.
50
70 companies which make a living from censorship are very upset at free speech with Facebook.
It’s ironic that ‘free’ speech will finally be free, cheaper and not funding a whole ecosystem making their entire living from censoring, sorry ‘fact checking’ others. And AI is a special case as it should fact check itself.
130
TdeF you’ve got an extra http:// in your link and it won’t click through.
Here’s a working link.
40
Thanks.
And quietly I am still steaming about the Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. The ‘moderator’ some ten times fact checked Donald Trump and only Donald Trump.
Not only was Trump right, in what sort of debate does the moderator ‘fact check’? It is the job of the two debaters to pick up on errors or let them slip. And each time the ‘moderator’ was wrong. It was surprising that Trump did not say more about the fact that the public did not want to hear the opinion of the referee.
‘Fact checking’ is so presumptuous and outrageous. Now the left want laws defining and criminalizing lies, labelled disinformation and misinformation based on intent? Who decides? And who decides on intent? The Wuhan Virus was created in Wuhan. So the WHO renamed it. But everyone still knows about the Spanish flu, which came from America.
Free speech is free speech. You are allowed to be wrong. You are allowed to tell lies. Or just have an opinion. And if you cause commercial or personal damage, there are remedies in the law. There are few absolute facts, like the population of Greenland. So creating a Department of Truth and criminalizing opinions is tyranny.
120
And in the first Presidential debate, it must have been difficult for the ‘moderator’ not to race in and help Joe Biden the way they blatantly helped Kamala. I think the moderators were stunned.
CBS were perfectly happy to paste in video answers for Kamala on pre-recorded interviews presented as live television!
That’s was outrageous deceit by CBS and election interference and Trump is suiing commercially for $10Bn. . I hope it goes ahead. There are already commercial and criminal remedies for lies as with Trump’s $12Million settlement with ABC.
90
Not Department – Ministry . . . .
30
Here are some spoken quotes about the Ministry of Truth from Nineteen Eighty Four.
https://youtu.be/QdA_s-hxju4
30
Your “Free speech is free speech” paragraph is brilliant. I will quote it mercilessly as the need arises.
30
“70 companies which make a living from censorship are very upset at free speech with Facebook.”
Yes, the Leftist hacks at the Sydney Moaning Herald are screaming about it.. The digital age will be thrown into a dark age.. Freedom of speech will be freedom from facts! (with a picture of a hammer smashing a magnifying glass) and they hate the idea that professional opinion-makers have been replaced by a rag-tag army of volunteer moderators are shaping what we see. Real people are just no substitute for semi-bureaucrats!
Obviously what the Left opines are facts, and what anyone else says is misinformation. At least we know where the enemies of freedom are these days.
20
If you do a Goolag search for “California fires climate change” without quote marks you will see a large number of articles blaming “climate change” for the fires; not Leftist policies of demolishing dams leading to a lack of water, failure to do controlled fuel reduction burns, DEI fire department policies and management, overall bad management of the state and homeless people deliberately lighting fires.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/10/us-news/homeless-man-seen-lighting-fires-who-was-zip-tied-by-la-residents-not-yet-charged-with-arson-police/
40
Simple. Don’t build in fire prone areas and certainly not right up against a forest/trees.
00
Yesterday John Connor II posted a link to this important article with huge implications for free speech.
Also, the idiocy of claiming that the UN “owns the science” is beyond belief. No one “owns” science, that’s not how science is done. It’s just as ridiculous as having “consensus science”. That’s not how you do science.
120
Don’t expect a proactive and supportive response from Albosleazy until after the election! If Labor win Albo will be all in boots and all with “The UK government has become a key financial supporter of the UN’s campaign to stifle public dissent on climate change.” He’s already blaming The LAX wild fires on climate change.
60
My point is emphasised by this UN assault on debate.
Web articles now are full of “Globalists losing across the West” type optimism. That optimism is not tempered by reality – the left never yields power without a long drawn out, vicious fight. Most people do not have the patience and persistence to stay engaged, which is why the left win so constantly.
Simple example: the current VC of Sydney Uni. After horrendous sequences of anti-semitism on campus which he had resolutely refused to address, he finally offered a squeaky “I was wrong”. Yet he’s still there without penalty and offering no new initiatives; he’s not going anywhere. (My opinion, in case he’s litigous).
The Romanian equivalent to the Aus GG simply declared recent election results invalid because the left didn’t like the results.
Unhappily, Trump will be constantly waist deep in lawfare, with each and almost every proposed change being challenged up to the SC for the full 4 years. Given the existing stacking of most of the various Appellate Courts on the way up, this will be the bottomless, muddy, quick sand version of “You get what you vote for”.
The current situation in Britain is unspeakable. I have read elsewhere (and find it pointless to try and confirm) that Starmer commanded his backbench with its’ overwhelming majority to vote down a national inquiry into the “Rotheram” syndrome – but he himself abstained when the vote came on. How is that the globalists losing ?
Macron hasn’t won a vote in over two years, but he’s still offering government by retread. The German and Austrian lefty governments are fighting large NO votes but their constitutional authorities are constantly showing a Romanian attitude. Large-scale, definitive voting may well be “cancelled”.
Longish rant here, but Musk on X is unlikely to be sufficient, in my view, as entertaining as he is.
20
The Supreme Court is already independent of the leftists. Closer to fair.
And Trump will nominate two more members in his term. So the Supreme Court will no longer be the instrument of the Democratic party, the socialists and the Globalists. It will correctly interpret the Constitution, its sole job.
10
As the Australian Government becomes ever more censorious, the TRUMP Revolution which caused Zuck to change his mind about censorship, at least pretend to do so to save his company, will have a beneficial effect for Australians.
Andrew Bolt wrote the following but I can’t post more because it’s paywalled.
PAYWALLED
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Free speech is a threat to democracy. Strange.
70
“Free speech is a threat to democracy. Strange.”
Nope..not strange, in a system where they buy your vote anything free is a threat!
00
In Melbournistan (Australia) I find it amazing how many food delivery slaves (usually on electric bicycles) are around. Are people now that lazy they can’t be bothered to get their own food? Plus they are a road hazard.
80
Plague in the UK too, usually illegal immigrants, someone gets the gig legitimately, then rents out the job. Police do nothing about them blatantly riding around on throttle controlled electric bikes which are illegal; unless road registered, plated, and insured, like a motorbike.
30
Not so many when 5,300,000 people have to be fed.
And with smaller families, especially in the inner city where they abound almost exclusively, the value of cooking small meals for one or two or three people is quite different. They are really for people who have a need, tired, sick or not prepared to make it to a restaurant. Also connected to the dramatic increase in high rise apartments. Again, an inner city phenomenon serving a geographically small community.
00
Being called “far right” today is like being called a witch in the Middle Ages.
No evidence needed and it helps the authorities get rid of the ones they don’t like.
31
“. One official UN statement described climate dissent as part of “toxic information ecosystems.””
That’s the clear start of the witch hunts, nothing has changed in 400years. I expect the jackboots to be out this year with the usual thugs demanding personal ID papers to get on the net and then make you take responsibility of any deviation from the official propaganda. Then its off to the gulag with those who disagree, those net-banned subjects who will have to meet in person for coffee and a philosophical discussion in quiet undertones at the local library..
I can remember the days of freedom when you could buy a mobile phone, pre-pay for calls and use it, no ID required. No doubt millions of Australian lives have been saved by stopping the terrorists from using phones without three forms of ID, so it is all worth it, like the TSA and Homeland Security in America.
10
FWIW – the marvels of diplomacy!
“Starmer’s October Surprise Chagos Give Away – Stumped by Trump’s Triumph – Exploding on Him”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2025/01/10/starmers-october-surprise-chagos-give-away-stumped-by-trumps-triumph-exploding-on-him-n3798668
10
I was having a look through an article about “hottest ever winter temperature in Australia” and it’s becoming ridiculous the complete lack of scientific integrity being displayed by the BOM and lack of any actual investiagtion done by “journalists” that write these nonsense articles.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/26/winter-heat-records-broken-as-australia-set-for-more-temperatures-over-10c-above-average
The weather station that recorded the “highest winter temperature” in late August 2024 in Yampi Sound in northwest WA has only been open since 2019. And what a coincidence, the BOM placed it in the hottest part of Australia during winter. So this isn’t a national “record” by any means, it is an example of artificially finding a record, comparing new hot weather station data to different old weather station data. For all we know that hot area has recorded multiple winter days above 40 last century, but there was no weather station to capture it. And of course the highly dishonest media don’t ever investigate or mention this. Peak journalism.
One weather station in the hot northwest WA has been open since 1902 – Marble Bar. So we can actually do come analysis and compare oranges to oranges since its the same weather station – a controlled variable. The data there tells a very interesting story: the period around late August/early September has recorded multiple very hot days over the last century. Here’s a list of days above 39:
4th Sep 1944: 39.4
5th Sep 1944: 40.0
6th Sep 1944: 39.3
7th Sep 1944: 39.3
3rd Sep 2013: 39.2
29th Aug 2024: 39.7
30th Aug 2024: 39.2
3rd Sep 2024: 39.7
4th Sep 2024: 39.3
So although the 39.7 in Aug 2024 was technically a record for the calendar month of August and hence winter, it happened right at the end of August. The heatwave in early Sep 1944 was virtually the same time of year (within a week) but happened in a different calendar month and season so it’s not “winter” – a really silly technicality. To conclude, the Aug 2024 heatwave was not “unprecedented” – early Sep 1944 was just as hot, and of course not mentioned by media for context.
Just for some more context (!!mainstream media pay attention!!), here’s the hottest temperatures in each calendar month since 1902 for Marble Bar:
January 49.2 in 1905 and 1922
February 48.3 in 1916
March 47.4 in 2019
April 45.0 in 1928
May 39.5 in 1990
June 35.8 in 1998
July 35.0 in 1917
August 39.7 in 2024
September 42.6 in 1942
October 46.0 in 2002
November 47.2 in 1928
December 49.3 in 2018 and 2023
With all the “records” being talked about by the media these days you’d think each month’s hottest temp would have ALL occurred in the past few years. Nope. Half the monthly records were set pre WWII, 1928 has TWO.
This is what real journalists should be doing, but they don’t because there’s a much larger agenda to push.
00
FWIW – an “On the Waterfront” development around the Californian fires –
“Snail Darter RIP: The Species that Shut Down the Tellico Dam May Not Actually Exist”
https://hotair.com/headlines/2025/01/10/snail-darter-rip-the-species-that-shut-down-the-tellico-dam-may-not-actually-exist-n3798654
Remember back when the “Christmas Turkey” and the expedition liner were having problems being frozen in down around Antarctica there was a poem called “The Ice That Wasn’t There”?
Might be time for another of the genre titled “The Fish That Wasn’t There”
20
And the blue banded bee which shut down a gold mine. All made up. Secret women’s business. Or the cave paintings which have shut the world climbing phenomenon of Mt Arapiles in Victoria. Killing a major tourist destination. Never seen paintings whose location cannot be revealed as they are a tribal secret.
00
FWIW
“I’VE BEEN SAYING THAT ESG IS A BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTY FROM THE BEGINNING: Texas court rules against American Airlines in ESG 401(k) plan case: The presiding judge found the airline breached its fiduciary duty under federal law by prioritizing non-financial considerations in its employee retirement plan.
This was obvious, but the obviousness was overridden by the sense that anything that’s a fad among the ruling class must be okay.
(My bold)
https://instapundit.com/695413/#disqus_thread
20
SOUTH AUSTRALIA THE POWER MENDICANT STATE
Germany, Britain and South Australia boldly led the way in the wind power revolution and enough time has passed to get a clear picture of the success or failure of their grand schemes.
Germany and Britain are circling the drain with out of control electricity prices destroying their industrial base and household budgets.
South Australia is in the same boat although they are so small and insignificant in the larger scheme of things that nobody would notice them if they didn’t have two AFL sides based in Adelaide.
Net zero enthusiasts are regularly excited by the ever-increasing penetration of unreliable energy in the South Australian grid but the applause will be muted when they pay attention to the situation after the sun goes down.
Checking every morning just before sunrise in December, SA generated enough windpower to supply the demand on 5 (five) days out of 31 and imported power from Victoria (mostly coal power) on 20 days.
On the 31st, they were burning diesel.
THIS YEAR
SA has been importing pre-sunrise on 8 days of 11.
Not Self-sufficient with windpower , 10 out of 11.
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