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Tuesday was a wild day for Queensland Electricity. An explosion struck the Callide C Power Plant triggering a cascade of other plants to switch off within seconds. The massive 2.5GW fall in supply took the grid frequency in Brisbane to a hair raising 49.55Hz. How close did it come to falling over? Half a million people lost power for a couple of hours but a Statewide blackout was averted. Luckily no one was hurt.
Meanwhile the people in power were not saying “Hydrogen”, or “explosion” but the Supercritical Units at Callide are cooled with hydrogen, and there was an explosion. The owner CS Energy called it just “a fire”. But in other news reports people in the nearest town said it was “the loudest explosion they have ever heard”.
Hydrogen, it seems, is used in some coal plants as a coolant, but Holy Hindenberg, it is known to explode. (See Ohio in 2007, Pittsburg in 2017 and India, 2019) . A Union official said it appeared the hydrogen filled generator of the main turbine had suffered a catastrophic failure. And it’s all exquisitely awkward, as David Archibald points out, happening while a two day Hydrogen Conference is on — as […]
Evil weather-destroying equipment will be banished:
Photo Kwon Junho
Victorians building new homes will be denied the choice to pick their preferred heating and cooking appliances in the hope that this will stop storms and droughts for their great grandchildren.
As household prices rise, the money that could have been used for holidays, health, or education will be used to enrich a few corporations and make a small percentage of the population feel important and calmer.
If only the low carbon revolution was clean, green and cheap, no one would have to ban anything.
Suffer the children:
Push to turn off gas to help reach state’s climate goal
Tom Cowie and Nick O’Malley, The Age
Gas appliances including heaters, hot water services and cooktops would be phased out under a proposed moratorium on new gas connections to Victorian households to help the state achieve its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions by up to 50 per cent.
Victorians are the nation’s biggest users of natural gas for heating, hot water and cooking due to the state’s historically cheap and plentiful supply piped in from Bass Strait since the 1970s.
But […]
China seems to operate in its own bubble of rules
Image by Chris Feser
Imagine the apoplexy if our ecology minister said we’d fund coal power in the third world? Why is it only China that gets to build coal at home and abroad? What kind of developing nation can’t afford to run on “solar and wind” but is rich enough to be helping build coal plants in other nations too?
China has ‘no other choice’ but to rely on coal power for now, official says
Evelyn Cheng. CNBC
“China’s energy structure is dominated by coal power. This is an objective reality,” said Su Wei, deputy secretary-general of the National Development and Reform Commission. CNBC translated his Mandarin-language comments, which he made late last week following Xi’s separate remarks at a U.S.-led global leaders climate summit.
“Because renewable energy (sources such as) wind and solar power are intermittent and unstable, we must rely on a stable power source,” Su said. “We have no other choice. For a period of time, we may need to use coal power as a point of flexible adjustment.”
He added that […]
Emden, Germany by Gritte
On January 1st, Germany shut 11 coal fired plants with about 4.7GW of generating power — supposedly as a part of the Big Phaseout. But eight days later the wind wasn’t blowing and according to Pierre Goslin the system got so unstable that the managers had to turn back on some of the coal power.This on-off-cycle repeated so many times that one large plant — Heyden –was restarted six times in the next eight weeks.
The Federal Network Agency have reclassified the four of the big plants as “system relevant” which means they have to hang around on standby ready to rescue the grid at any time. So the largest efficient and cheap generators on the grid will be paid to sit around waiting for the unreliable expensive energy to fail.
2021 German Coal Plant “Phaseout” Lasted Only 8 Days…Put Back Online To Stabilize Shaky Grid
By P Gosselin on 13. April 2021
The Federal Network Agency has now confirmed that it has reclassified the Heyden, Datteln, Walsum 9 and Westfalen power plants, which had already been shut down, as system-relevant and that they now must remain […]
The latest academic voodoo doll tossed at Fossil Fuels is a study claiming that the industry gets $65 billion in “implicit” subsidies in the US.
The authors of the latest paper assume the broken climate models work, and then guesstimate what the cost of all that theoretical warming would be with economic models that aren’t much better. It’s a paywalled paper, but they don’t appear to account for all the net benefits of coal, oil and gas which include, keeping people alive and fertilizing forests and fields around the world for free. These aren’t guesstimates from the future but known good and great gifts from the last century or two.
Greening the Earth. Zaichun Zhu, (2016)
Send them the bill: the fossil fuel companies are subsidizing taxpayers
How much is a hundred years of free fertilizer worth?
If only academic institutions were more than Big Gov advertising agencies they might also have considered that fossil fuel companies are never paid for their part in boosting agricultural yields, nor in greening the forests. Some 18 million square kilometers of Earths surface has more biomass. Arid regions of the world are 11% greener, mostly thanks to CO2 and deserts are […]
Yesterdays free advertisement for the Renewables Industry comes from Peter Martin, ANU, and was swallowed whole by The Conversation, and then repeated by The ABC. (If only the ABC had three million dollars a day to spend on checking things before it published them, they might have warned the economist that he doesn’t understand much about the grid or even the energy market.) This kind of anti-coal PsyOps might work on teenagers: Electricity has become a jigsaw. Coal is unable to provide the missing pieces
March 16, 2021 1.46pm AEDT
Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, provides up to 20 per cent of Victoria’s power. It has been operating for 47 years. Since late 2017 at least one of its four units has broken down 50 times. Its workforce doubles for three to four months most years to deal with the breakdowns. It pumps out 3 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions.
And here’s Macarthur Wind Power plant, Victoria’s largest at 420-never-attained-MW. It breaks down nearly every single day:
Fig 1: Anero.id Macarthur Wind output
Martin goes on in a non-stop infomercial for wind and solar He must be aiming for 12 year old voters, or perhaps […]
Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips
Texas toyed with cascading crises
The Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.
ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:
Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
— by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune
The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds […]
…
Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators.
López Obrador is called a populist, he talks of energy sovereignty, and speaks badly of predecessors who opened up the energy sector to foreign and private interests. He vowed to put ” at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.””
Mexico was once a climate leader – now it’s betting big on coal
David Agren in San Juan de Sabinas, The Guardian
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.
Not […]
Coal power is surging in the second largest economy even as China tells the rest of the world to “cut carbon”
If, hypothetically, China were to fund anti-coal groups in the countries it competes with — it would be a successful strategy to hurt them and advantage China. Which journalists would tell us if that were happening?
China’s new coal power plant capacity in 2020 more than three times rest of world’s: study
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.
The country won praise last year after President Xi Jinping pledged to make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060. But regulators have since come under fire for failing to properly control the coal power sector, a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas.
Including decommissions, China’s coal-fired fleet capacity rose by a net 29.8 GW in 2020, even as the rest of the world made cuts of 17.2 GW, according to research released on Wednesday by […]
Transport accounts for 15% of human emissions of CO2, or practically nothing.
Despite the lip service everyone pays to “climate change” when Leonardo asks them to buy a smaller car, they nod and buy an SUV. They are voting with their wallets.
SUV growth, graph. 2020
Rise of SUV’s Complicates efforts to rein in Auto Emissions
Scott Carpenter, Forbes
…SUVs are conquering the world. ….For the first time ever in the U.S. last year, sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) likely accounted for half or just over half of all vehicles sold, according to recent data from IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm. Others are rapidly catching up. Between 2010 and 2019, the share of SUVs in overall car sales in China jumped from 14% to 44%. In Europe the SUV share climbed from 10% to 36%.
Seas are rising, storms are coming, and heat waves are wiping out crops and ski seasons, but half of all new car buyers are buying SUV’s in the USA.
h/t GWPF
9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
All good environmentalists detest renewables and are appalled at the money wasted on the industrial renewables corporations.
All the rest are unwitting marketing agents who provide free advertising for banks and multinational conglomerate profits. In the process they hurt the poor and scorch the Earth.
In short: The world spent $3.6 trillion dollars over eight years, mostly trying to change the weather. Only a pitiful 5% of this was spent trying to adapt to the inevitable bad weather which is coming one way or another. Both solar and wind power are perversely useless at reducing CO2, which is their only reason for existing in large otherwise efficient grids. Wind farms raise the temperature of the local area around them which causes more CO2 to be released from the soil. Solar and wind farms waste 100 times the wilderness land area compared to fossil fuels, and need ten times as many minerals mined from the earth. Biomass razes forests, but protects underground coal deposits.
The role of large wind and solar power in national grids is to produce redundant surges of electricity at random or low-need times. They are surplus infrastructure designed in a religious quest to generate nicer weather. […]
The Red Brigade uniforms are mass produced and the same all over the world.
Big finds in Mozambique, Saudi trouble, and the anti coal movement are helping African oil and gas:
Why Africa’s Oil & Gas Sector Is Exploding
By Tsvetana Paraskova – Nov 05, 2019, OilPrice
Major oil and gas discoveries and subsequent investments in infrastructure projects are set to help the oil and gas industry in Africa to grow, also helped by improved governance and regulation, PwC said in its newly released Africa oil & gas review 2019.
“One of the most dramatic finds in Africa over the past decade is Mozambique’s natural gas estimated at over 180 tcf, which has already unlocked the first three large-scale LNG projects,” according to PwC.
These projects and additional exploration could make Mozambique the world’s third-largest LNG producer after Qatar and Australia by 2030, PwC says.
So seven XR groupies turn up outside an African oil and gas conference to show just how arrogant they are:
Extinction Rebellion calls Africa Oil Week delegates “climate criminals”
By Madison Yauger, GroundUp
In a media statement, the group said: […]
Australia is so irrelevant. India is cancelling fifty times as many nuclear power plants as Australians ever dreamed of building.
Let’s build another million wind farms.
If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.
Energy Post – thanks to GWPF.
The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.
The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.
Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?
The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.
India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are […]
The gold-plated stars of our national grid are the old coal plants we’ve built and paid off.
A US report (thanks Lance) shows how fantastically cheap and bountiful old coal and nuclear plants are. The LCOE or the Levelized Cost of Electricity includes the costs of the concrete, turbines, car parks and coal, plus the maintenance and salaries. It reveals that thirty year old, and even fifty year old coal plants, are the gift from past generations — enormous infrastructure, built and paid for, and ready to churn out bargain electrons. Or in crazy-land, ready to be blown up.
Look how long it takes to pay off the capital cost of building them (the red sector in the graph), and look how wonderfully cheap that electricity is from a 30 year old plant. Watch the pea. All those “investigative news stories” that compare the cost of building new coal to the cost of solar or wind are hiding the most brilliant and essential assets on our grid. Reopen Hazelwood now. (!)
Both sides of politics are choosing to destroy the family jewels in the hope of controlling global weather.
….
From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the […]
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