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In Australia a Woke tech-billionaire has decided to “keep” the coal assets in AGL in order to destroy them (like that’s the “free market” at work) . But in the rest of the world, coal is $400 a ton and everybody wants it.
Maybe Australians will get so rich selling coal they can afford to use electricity from unreliable generators instead?
Not behaving like a stranded asset. Trading Economics
Britain could keep coal-fired power plants open this winter
LONDON (Reuters) -Some of the British coal-fired power plants slated for closure this year might need to stay open to ensure electricity supply this winter, the government said on Monday.
Countries across Europe are drawing up contingency plans against potential disruption to flows of Russian gas because of the war in Ukraine. Russia typically supplies about 40% of Europe’s gas.
Britain can generate about 50% of its electricity from gas. Although Russia only meets about 4% of Britain’s gas needs, a significant disruption in supply would affect prices in Europe and make it harder for Britain to secure gas from others.
How screwed is that market when they have to “devise” a framework to […]
Last week small electricity retailers were bleeding so badly they doubled their prices and asked their customers to leave.
This week it’s a big gas retailer, as Australia belatedly faces the same pain that hit and wiped out UK energy retailers:
Gas retailer Weston Energy’s collapse stirs call for Labor intervention
Perry Williams, The Australian
Weston Energy, which provides gas to more than 400 companies and government agencies, ceased trading with immediate effect on Monday, creating uncertainty for major manufacturers with 7 per cent of the east coast’s commercial and industrial market forced to find a new supplier.
The company said it could no longer finance cash flow requirements of its trading portfolio “on a timely basis” with prices rising over 180 per cent since April, and almost three times higher than at the start of the year.
These are blistering rises in costs:
With spot gas prices up to four times higher than normal levels and wholesale electricity prices in NSW on track to finish the June quarter twice as high as the previous record, Mr Willox called on the Albanese government to respond.
It’s a cult.
[…]
If the Liberals stop trying to pander to the wealthy Woke electorates and focus on what most Australians want they can reinvent themselves to speak for mainstream Australia by the next election.
The dismal election result for the Liberals and Nationals in Australia may yet set them free. By shifting to the left on issues like Climate Change the Liberals were hobbled. They tried to be Labor -lite, but then couldn’t point out the sheer stupidity of trying to change the weather. Net Zero was a good goal they said, and so the voters voted for people who would do more of it sooner. By adopting Labor-Green ideas and just trying to be better managers of bad programs they lost their mojo. There were no battles on principles in this election, just personalities.
The Right have been bullied into submission — afraid of being called climate deniers, racists, sexist or anti-vaxxer, they fought for nothing much. And so the voters voted for nothing much — splitting every which way. Astonishingly a new government will be formed that nearly 70% of Australians didn’t vote for. The Labor Party won with the lowest primary vote ever recorded in Australian history.
The […]
It’s the day before the election and all through the house, electricity bills are doubling…
The price rises are so extraordinary one retailer is asking their customers to leave “in the next 24 hours”.
Across Australia small power suppliers are sending emails to customers right now warning them that their rates are going up next week by eye-watering amounts. Wholesale electricity prices were at a record high in April this year, and it hasn’t improved in May. Prices are hitting $200-$300 per megawatt hour, not as a peak, but as a 24 hour average. In South Australia two days ago, the average for the full day was $1,141. Futures contracts are rapidly taking off and these rises are starting to flow through to customers. Already, the small retailers are bleeding cash, just as they did in the UK, and if wholesale prices don’t come back to Earth soon, they will go out of business.
Reader Brett in South Australia shared an email from Discover Energy. As of next week the standard peak rate will rise from 39 cent per kilowatt hour to 70 cents. Off peak rates rise from 27 to 46. He also adds, “My brother lives in NSW […]
Bless Craig Kelly for saying the obvious that hardly anyone else will say*
The faster Australia gets to Net Zero the more we surrender to China. | Photo by Christels
China is too poor to rush to Net Zero but it cheers us on. It calls itself a developing nation while it develops a nuclear fusion plant, launches hypersonic weapons, runs a shadow war in space “every day”, and landed a rover on the far side of the moon (which has been cruising around now for a full year).
It’s too poor to do Net Zero, but it’s rich enough to buy off our Pacific neighbors, while we close factories so we can keep the lights on. China buys a belt and road while we buy off the Weather Gods with sacrificial Green electrons and try to to stop storms 100 years from now.
China is digging up more coal than any nation on Earth, but it didn’t even turn up to Glasgow. One year ago China suddenly cut its wind and solar subsidies, and reduced it’s carbon trading scheme back by two thirds. Yet Australia is going double gangbusters to install more renewable watts per capita than […]
I’ll be discussing the absurdity of Destroying Perfectly good Electricity Grids in Australia with the Friends of Science in Calgary, Canada with a presentation then Q&A. It will be live 7pm MDT Monday evening in Canada/USA and Tuesday 10th morning in Australia (11am EST, 9am WST). It will be available to watch afterwards as the wonderful Ian Plimer’s is now from last week.
“Australia – Crash Test Dummy of Renewable Energy” with Joanne Nova Click here for more information 9.8 out of 10 based on 50 ratings
Brisbane on May 3rd was a glorious 15 to 25C (or 60F – 77F) and yet the price of electricity was shocking.
The scale of the graph is so distorted that all the normal price gyrations fall to nothing, and there is only the spike — a full hour of $14,000 burning for every megawatt, and the state needing 7,000 megawatts. The demand level, or load is not unusual, but it’s about $100 million in electricity.
And this is the nice time of year for electricity managers, or it used to be. With weather that’s ideal for human habitation most air-conditioners and heaters are off. But the sun is setting earlier, and solar power is shrinking just as everyone gets home from work to turn on the oven.
AEMO
Some may blame the “lack of coal power”, but notice what’s happening to wind and solar power at critical time from 5:20pm to about 6:30pm.
All the wind and solar power in Queensland on May 3, 2022 |
Though there are other factors at work too and some are a bit mysterious according to Paul McArdle. Queensland at one point had only a 7% instantaneous reserve plant […]
Don’t mention the Australian vaccine: The TGA bans Aussie Professor from talking about his work
Australia has a mini Ministry of Truth already. It’s called the TGA.
Australians can probably still get a Pfizer vaccine in chemists and carparks across Australia, but they still need to fly to Iran to get an Australian-made vaccine. The good news is that at least this week it’s legal for Australians to finally fly to Tehran without taking Pfizer or Moderna shot first — as long as they don’t fly on an Australian airline. (Not mentioning any names, Qantas!)
The people mostly responsible for this situation are the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Association). They’re supposed to be looking after Australians health but somehow all their decisions happen to be exactly what a Pfizer CEO would want. Spooky eh? The TGA rushed the approval for the Pfizer vaccines, but still, millions of doses later, won’t release the procurement contracts, even under FOI. Signed on our behalf, and for our own good, yes? Did they even read the documents that Pfizer AND the FDA tried to hide for 75 years?
Now meet Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University, Australia, who had already developed protein based vaccines against […]
Luckily for Energy Oligarchs, Australian electricity prices have bounced right back to pre-pandemic insanity. Wholesale rates are romping around $170 dollars a megawatt hour in April across the whole national grid…
The media mouthpieces are blaming it on outages of coal turbines — even though wind power fails every week, and solar fails every day. If unreliable generators cause high prices, then Wind is King Fickle. They’re also blaming high coal prices, but coal itself, is a small part of the cost of a two billion dollar plant. Naturally, neither political team has a clue how to fix this. But it’s all so banal — the prices are set at auction, and some fuels are cheap. Add more of the cheap type, and we’d get cheaper electricity.
Right now, if there were more black coal plants setting the price more of the time, electricity would be half the cost. If enough brown coal plants like Hazelwood were still running, the prices would be a fifth. It’s all there in the data that ABC journalists never find. Consider the winning bids by fuel type in Australia for the last quarter of 2021. For Brown Coal, the average winning bid was $11 […]
Great news! We win. The Pandemic Emergency declaration is officially over and unvaccinated Australians are free to leave the nation.
Since Senator Rennick exposed it, and I mocked the Department of Health about how Unvaccinated Australians can’t leave Australia unless they escape, and how it was due to a WHO treaty so we could “protect the world” — things have changed. The mocking was on April 8th and 9th. Presumably the government recognized how stupid it all looked to restrict unvaccinated Australians when at least 72 nations around the world are happy to let them in, and everyone knows now, that vaccination doesn’t slow transmission. After all, the whole world caught Omicron thanks to vaccinated travellers.
In the last two weeks the plans to write special laws to stop the unvaccinated from leaving the country silently vanished. But most Australians will not be aware the unvaccinated were still banned from leaving the nation until a few days ago, and are now free to go.
The Australian official website still tells Australians they have to have a vaccine. Click to enlarge. | Source: Dept of Health
Two weeks ago the Chief Medical Officer even said they were dropping […]
As a director of The Australian Environment Foundation I am delighted we were able to bring Benny Peiser out from the UK.
Bookings need to be done in the next few days!
Australian Environment Foundation
Dr Benny Peiser who heads up the London based The Global Warming Policy Foundation, is visiting Australia and speaking at three major events in Sydney 26 April, Brisbane 27 April and Melbourne 28 April.
Benny Peiser
Dr Peiser has written extensively on domestic and international climate policy and has appeared on numerous media outlets to contest global warming alarmism and demonstrate the cost of policies being proposed to address it.
His visit is especially timely given the European – indeed global – energy crisis and the key issues of energy and the environment that are prominent in the Australian federal election campaign.
Sydney – 26 April 2022 Northern Sydney Conservative Forum – “The Energy Crisis’ – Moderator Rowan Dean – Tuesday 26 April
The Sydney Event includes Rowan Dean and Ian Plimer as well.
The event includes a two course meal and wine. Tickets are $110
Book by next […]
Welcome to Prison Australia where unvaccinated citizens are not able to leave. (And Canadians thought they were the only ones). If your best friend is getting married in Madagascar, the Africans will let you fly in, but you can’t go because Australia won’t let you out.
Australians who are unvaccinated or not-jabbed-enough can apply for permission to leave. But unless you need foreign medical care, live or work overseas, or are flying in the “national interest” (meaning you’re a politician) you may not qualify. Trips need to be “longer than three months” for no good reason I can think of, except that it stops most holidayers. Which is obviously the point.
People may get an exemption if they need to work overseas. Which is fine if your boss wants to send you to conventions in the Greek Islands but you can’t take the wife and kids unless she owns the company, and the kids are your employees. Otherwise, there’s no pleasure cruises for the unjabbed peasants from Oz.
Unvaccinated Australians who want to leave pretty much have to escape
We can always drive to Broome. We might find an Indonesian fishing boat and get a lift back the other […]
If Climate Change was a real threat, the Bureau of Meteorology might even look at their own historic records.
When Jennifer Marohasy and Chris Gillham did just that, they found that as bad as the current situation is, it’s happened before:
The wettest day in Lismore was in February 1954. The wettest year for Lismore was 1893. There was no increase in the intensity or frequency of extreme wet days at Lismore, or the towns around it.
Now if the BOM looks at this with a supercomputer, they might find an effect from CO2. But if the BOM just used a calendar, like I did, they might find the latest floods started the week after Hunga Tonga volcanic dust rolled across Australia. Maybe that matters?
No one needed a supercomputer to read a rain gauge in 1885, and we have excellent long data. Imagine how handy that might be if the BoM wanted to understand, say, Australian flood cycles? There are 137 years of rainfall records in Lismore from 1885 to now, but the BOM said we set a new record for Lismore based on Lismore airport where records started as long ago as… 2002.
The Bureau […]
Australia now has nearly 10GW of wind power installed on the National Electricity Grid, but look at the monthly minimums — the guaranteed power we can rely on. The good news is that it’s increased by 10% over this time last year. The bad news is that it was only 216MW.
From the 10,000MW of windpower we paid to install, at one point in the last month only 2% was working, and that’s not unusual.
The true dismal story of wind power is that we need a near total second network of generators just sitting around waiting as back up. Since the back up is reliable, we could use them instead. As a bonus, backup power won’t kill birds, bats and hypnotize crabs and it won’t destroy sleep for farmers and spotted quolls, and it doesn’t create a national security risk either. Handy, eh?
Original graph: WattClarity | Click to enlarge.
The monthly average generation is about 30% of capacity. But the world doesn’t run on average electricity.
9.8 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
The most devastating thing about this survey is not what it says about energy policy but what it says about our democracy.
70% of Australians think energy policy should be about reliable cheap supply, not about stopping storms, and 70% don’t want to even spend $1 a week saving the world from climate change. Despite this, neither major party stands for that 70%.
Imagine what our election campaign would look like if both parties were trying to win over voters?
The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) asked 1,007 Australians “How much would you personally be willing to pay each year for Australia to reduce its emissions to zero by 2050?” And 42% said “Nothing at all”. Nine out of ten Australians don’t want to spend much at all. Yet somehow both major political parties agree to spend billions every year on a transition we don’t have to have.
We don’t have to have wind or solar power, big batteries, big interconnectors, big Snowy 2.0 and we don’t have to buy international carbon credits.
Bear in mind Australians are not paying $50 or $100 a year on climate bills, they’re paying $1,300 a year.*
So state and federal governments are spending […]
In the Victorian Supreme Court a judge has just ordered that the Bald Hills Wind farm must turn off at night time. After seven years of pain and suffering, two households living nearby will finally get night time relief and some payments of $92,000 and $168,000.
“The wind farm noise has been a common law nuisance at both properties.”
Bald hills, Wind Farm, Victoria, Australia. Image: John Englart Flikr CC BY-SA 2.0
This could change everything. These industrial plants close to homes just became even less profitable because they can’t operate at night. They also need to pay damages to people affected by the noise, and do more maintenance to reduce noise — like repairing gear boxes more often, and they may have to pay to make changes at homes nearby to ameliorate the nuisance, or pay compensation. Many properties near the towers have abandoned plans to build new houses there.
What stands out in this ruling is how entirely inadequate were any of the attempts by the government that approved the wind plants, or the companies that profited from them, to measure and assess the noise, and to respond to complaints. Despite tens of thousands […]
UPDATE: Judges decision is final. Djokovic to be deported. He faces a three year ban potentially. “An embarassing farce”.
No one looks good in the Novak Djokovic Deportation saga, but ponder what it says about the vaccines. We’re deporting the best tennis player in the world — not because of the germs he might spread, but to because of the ideas he might spread.
“It’s in the public interest” says the Immigration Minister
While some are cheering One Rule for All, ponder that we’re punishing someone because of what other people might do?
Djokovic is a political prisoner:
Immigration minister Alex Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption… [he] said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.
“Mr. Djokovic’s presence in Australia may pose a health risk to the Australian community in that his presence in Australia may foster antivaccination sentiment,” Hawke said in a document detailing his decision.
“His presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community,” Hawke said in the cancellation notice.
—Wall […]
It’s a sociological phenomenon. People will find a way around the censorship.
In the space of two months Lets Go Brandon has gone from pure R&D to full retail outlet:
…
Meanwhile on a different battle, a new protest variant has appeared
All around the world, apparently, the people are singing.
It starts a bit slow, but at the 45 second mark, there’s the “Hardware Store” version, then at 1 minute — the London massed choir rendition, strangely civilized and offensive at the same time.
It is as crass as it sounds.
If the crowds were signing You can stick your coal fired power up your @***, in mass rallies of tens of thousands, the BBC-CBC-ABC-MSNBC complex would be playing that as the lead story. Since they don’t, the rest of us need to share the news.
…
Plucky Bridgett takes on the Board of Supervisors in San Diego
DailyMail:
Mariah Scary! Woman sings anti-COVID mandate version of All I Want For Christmas at California board meeting
‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas, just body autonomy,’ she started off. ‘I don’t care about the variants because of natural immunity.’
9.7 out […]
The Coalition must be thrilled. The Australia election is due in the next six months, it’s on a knife edge which the current government could easily lose, and the Opposition leader just announced that instead of the current 27% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030, they will aim for a 43% cut.
The question is whether Australian voters fall for the magical fantasy plan
As usual, Labor will “pick winners” in a competitive market and somehow make things cheaper, better and increase jobs too:
Mr Albanese said Labor’s long-awaited emissions reduction target would create jobs, cut power bills and reduce emissions.
“Electricity prices will fall from the current level by $275 for households by 2025 at the end of our first term if we are successful,” he said.
The policy would create an additional 604,000 jobs by 2030, with the majority in regional Australia, he said.
To bad that for every Green Job created, two to five real jobs are lost.
Labor is the best friend of foreign bankers
…
Labor plans to ramp up our secret emissions trading scheme. In a coded transmission, Labor announces that Australians will […]
Far from being the wild fringe, this was middle Australia speaking.
JP Morgan and Ubermedia traced the phones of people at the enormous rally in Melbourne on November 20 and discovered that they came from everywhere and every class.
Half the people at the rally were the richest, most educated or the average homeowner and the other half were the strugglers, the truckies and cleaners, but also the the young professionals and libertarians, and fitness junkies.
All sides of the political spectrum were in the streets. Something that ought to shake any politician in an election year.
Melbourne Protestors Not Extremists, Fringe Elements: Survey
Daniel Y. Teng, The Epoch Times
Tens of thousands of protestors who took to the streets of Melbourne in some of the largest protests so far against government-mandated COVID-19 health regulations hailed from a broad cross-section of society—including the wealthiest segment of the state—and were not extremist or fringe elements portrayed by some media outlets.
The heat map shows the origin of the protestors
Some people drove from miles away:
People came from all over Victoria. (Roy Morgan and UberMedia, data was anonymised).
As many as 30% were from the […]
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