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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. […]
Australians used to have an electricity grid that gave them the freedom to work from home
For years they told us to work at home to help the environment. But thanks to a decentralized unreliable grid, Australians are now being warned that it will be a “disaster” for the grid if they stay home and work with their air conditioner on in summer.
Now we better drive to work so the solar-windy-grid doesn’t fall over:
Why working from home could be a disaster for Australia’s electricity grid this summer
Emma Elsworthy, ABC
Air conditioners could send Australia’s power grid into meltdown this summer, as roughly one third of the workforce do their jobs from home, experts have warned.
According to research company Roy Morgan, more than 4.3 million Australians are working from home…
But warmer weather has come with a warning that increased use of air-conditioning in homes could lead to more blackouts and higher electricity bills.
“Air-conditioning is what drives our maximum demand in Australia,” said Peter Dobney, the former founding chairman of the Energy Users Association of Australia.
“We can expect higher prices, in fact, I […]
The Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a $10 billion bandaid to make up for Wind and Solar’s unreliability. Hydro storage is an anti-generator that destroys 20-30% of the electricity fed into it. It turns out it also destroys three quarters of the money fed into it, and some of the environment as well. What’s not to like?
by Steve Hunter. h/t StopTheseThings
Today a Who’s Who of Australian engineering are scathing about Snowy 2.0 in The Australian
The mammoth pumped Hydro scheme is a $10 billion dollar disaster that will never pay for itself, is already being superceded by battery technology, and will scar the land, infect pristine alpine lakes, risk critically endangered species, damage fishing grounds, and breach the Biosecurity Act in a National park. (Where are the environmentalists, Tim Flannery? Does anyone care?)
Pumped Hydro doesn’t even work on a small scale. Projects like it are being junked around the country before they get built and there has been only one other pumped hydro project “committed” in the last 20 years.
On the revenue side, the output of Snowy 2.0 from 2025 to 2042 is now forecast to be less than half the business case estimate, […]
President Xi will be delighted that so many industrial competitors are sabotaging their electrical grids with erratic, unreliable solar and wind power. Right now, The People’s Republic of China is the biggest platform in the world for the deployment of nuclear power technology. In twenty years, China has increased its fleet of nuclear power reactors from three to 48, with 11 more plants under construction. That means it will soon surpass France which has 57:
By the end of the twentieth century, France’s mature nuclear energy industry operated over fifty nuclear power reactors to supply about 80 percent of the electricity consumed by its population of 60 million people.1 By contrast, when China connects its fiftieth nuclear power reactor to the grid, which is expected in a few years, China’s nuclear power plants will contribute only about 5 percent of the electricity demanded by its population of 1.4 billion.2
Carnegie Endowment
At the moment the USA has the largest nuclear generation in the world, with more than double the production of the nearest competitor — France. But China began stockpiling uranium in 2007, and in the last five year plan released in 2016 — China aimed […]
The parasites take $1,300 per household each year in Australia
Australians could save $13 billion dollars a year if they weren’t forced to pay for pagan climate witchery.
If the bill collector knocked at the door and demanded $1,300 dollars each year to try to stop storms and floods a century from now, there would be riots in the streets. Instead the money is buried in complexity and taken in slices through unlabeled bills and receipts throughout the year. We list the GST. Imagine if we listed “the Climate Tax”?
Malcolm Roberts, a One Nation Senator has commissioned a study by Alan Moran to add up the cost. But why did he have to do that? Where was the Treasury, the Minister for Energy, the CSIRO, the ABC, the Labor Party, the State Premiers, and all our universities? All apparently, are out to lunch with the vested interests or running chicken, afraid of being called names.
Alan Moran adds up the state and federal subsidies, including the renewable schemes (like the SRET) that charge every electricity user for other people’s solar panels. He also includes the costs to businesses from higher electricity charges — which are invariably passed on to […]
South Australia has built unreliable generators on one third of all homes in the state. They are expensive, encased in glass, and all fail at the same time, usually for breakfast, and definitely for dinner. They randomly fail when clouds roll in, but consistently fail all night long. When they do work, they all work together, producing an excess of energy when no one need an excess. In order to pretend that this surge is useful, a billion dollars of working infrastructure has to switch off, scale down, spin its wheels, and toss money out the window.
A few weeks ago, the State Energy Minister of SA, Dan van Holst Pellekaan, warned that the state is only a few years away from reaching “net negative demand” which is a fancy-pants way of describing the moment that solar power makes more energy than the whole state can use. His reassuring comment was “The grid blowing up is not the right term, but it simply will not work.”
With 250,000 unreliable generators in the state the midday excess is now so large it threatens to break things, drive up voltages, drive out reliable generators and generally muck up what was a finely […]
Solar Power, not-so-sustainable?
Solar panels need a special kind of recycling that costs 4 to 8 times as much as the recycled bits and bobs are worth. And the first major generation of solar panels will hit their use-by date soon.
Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash
Maddie Stone, Wired
By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions.
The solar sleeper awakes:
Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years, and the world didn’t start deploying solar widely until the early 2000s. As a result, a fairly small number of panels are being decommissioned today. PV Cycle, a nonprofit dedicated to solar panel take-back and recycling, collects […]
On average, every 3 days, wind farms generating as much as one coal fired unit, fail on the Australian grid
TonyfromOz exposes a failure rate so common it’s hidden in plain view. Wind “Farm” intermittency is even worse than we thought.
On average, every three days within a one hour period there’s a sudden failure of 500 MW of wind generation — equal to one industrial coal turbine. That’s four full wind farms or about 250 spinning turbines that stopped spinning.
Every time a coal plant trips out, it’s reported as a problem of relying on our “old coal fleet”. But when the same power output fails from wind, it’s the new clean green future at work (!) , and a sign we need to spend another $20 billion to “upgrade the grid” with interconnectors we don’t need, and Hydro schemes we don’t want.
A few wind farms are bad for the grid. More windfarms are worse.
100 times a year we get a 500MW outage
TonyfromOz (Anton Lang) laboriously finds and documents two different kinds of failure. The largest and longest outages are when wind farms are becalmed. But there are many more short sharp and very sudden failures […]
A $1,500 million dollar emergency line is needed to rescue South Australia from renewable blackouts. Image: Marcus Wong Wongm
Why do so few see the enormous subsidy cost of keeping the South Australian electricity experiment alive?
Having got too much intermittent, unreliable electricity, the state is still in danger of another statewide blackout. One third of the solar panels on homes are being switched off automatically because the electricity they provide is not just useless, but dangerous. What the state needs is baseload power, but the solution we’re told is to spend another incredible $1.5billion dollars on an interconnector with NSW, presumably so SA gets a lifeline to the reliable coal power in Queensland.
That’s a $1,500,000,000 repair bill for an unreliable system that cost a fortune to build, but is unsustainable without a giant bandaid.
Price rises coming in NSW and QLD:
As more unreliable generation and random green electrons infect the NSW and Qld grids, their cheap baseload providers will also find it harder to compete. The increased downtime will chew out some of their profit margins, but their costs will be almost the same. So, as sure as the sun rises, they will have to […]
Another hidden renewables tax buried in complexity
Here in Renewables World we now have to pay companies to make less of the products we want. It’s a sign of how fragile and dysfunctional the Australian grid is.
“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.
They call it “wholesale demand response”. We call it planned blackouts. All over the country equipment will be switched off when its needed most so that our green grid doesn’t fall over, or create billion dollar price spikes.
With some of the most expensive electricity in the world, there is already a strong price signal driving companies to use electricity efficiently. This new “price signal” drives them to be less efficient. Because the grid is now incapable of providing regular reliable electricity whenever it’s most useful to companies, the government is adding a whole new layer of complexity to try to squeeze out the spikes they can’t handle.
This move will mean more people will have to be employed in account-management, but the products made will […]
As Paul McArdle of WattClarity says: “the NEM* is becoming increasingly dependent on the weather“
Saturday week ago in Queensland was cold enough to break records. Brisbane “only” made it up to 17.9C (64F). It hasn’t been that cold there in May for 40 years. At the same time a band of cloud covered the populated slice of the state.
The cloud cover meant all the large solar “farms” in Queensland — with a total rated capacity of 1.7GW — produced only 79MW as an aggregate average daily output.
Sunshine State forgets its own branding on Saturday 23rd May 2020
Averaged across the 24 hours in the day yesterday, average aggregate output across all of the Large Solar plant in QLD was a very meagre 79MW only:
1a) Dividing this by an aggregate 1,664MW installed capacity* across the Large Solar plant in QLD this represents a capacity factor the day of just 4.7%
Not surprisingly the same clouds that ruined the large solar farms also wrecked the rooftop solar.
One in three homes in Queensland have solar panels. With 1.8GW of theoretical capacity, rooftop solar is Queenslands largest generator (except it hardly ever […]
A week ago the Australian Government released their Technology Investment Roadmap Discussion Paper. Presumably they want a map because they’re lost. They’d like submissions by June 21.
David Archibald lets rip on why hydrogen fuel is not going to save us, but coal, gas, and nukes will. He has wondered for years why Australia is so concerned with talking about a thirty year energy plan when we don’t even have a 90 day supply.
Australia’s Energy Plan
Guest Post by David Archibald
Image: Gus Pasquerella
Global warming is the new state religion and Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is its high priest…
The fad of the moment is hydrogen. To recap, when global warming started out the villains among us realised that the easiest way to make money was to turn Australia from being a low-cost power producer to a high cost one and take a slice of the action on the way through. So the likes of AGL and Macquarie Bank concocted solar farm and wind farm schemes and sold them on to people wanting a high, government-enforced rate of return. They then used their own money to generate a yet higher return on equity by taking […]
In 2017 in its last month of operation, the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant was still operating reliably 24 hours a day at around $30/MWhr and producing 1360MW of electricity. Despite its age, it could peak at 86% of its original rated output.
After Hazelwood closed, wholesale prices jumped 85% in Victoria. And the annual average spot wholesale price in Victoria in the last year was $100/MWH.
So naturally Victoria wants to build more wind power, and blow up old reliable coal. Every single week in January, when electricity demand peaks in Australia, there were days when one old coal plant could have provided more electricity than all 57 new wind farms on the National Electricity Market could.
How much did it cost to build 57 not-there-when-you-need-it wind farms?
The output of all the wind farms in Australia still isn’t enough to reliably produce more than one 50 year old coal plant.
In its lifetime Hazelwood made $15 billion dollars worth of electricity (or 520TWH). It paid for itself many times over.
Source: Anero.id
h/t David B, Serp
..
9.8 out of 10 based on 75 ratings […]
Last November at lunchtime 64% of the entire generation of South Australia was coming from across thousands of small generators that the Grid Managers had no control of, and that clouds could wipe out. This is the junk conglomerate infrastructure that billions of dollars in forced subsidies have created.
The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) has no control over the vagaries of two-thirds of the electricity generation. Audrey Zibelmen has described it as “”It’s almost like driving without your headlights.” She wants new panels to get “smart inverters” which means they can be dumb servants — controlled by the AEMO, just in case there is an emergency — lest the state suffer another System Black. They also want old panels to get the new style inverters when the next replacement is due.
Who could have seen that coming (only anyone with an engineering degree).
Poor solar home owners are feeling pretty miffed. They didn’t realize their panels were never economic, a burden on the grid, and they’ve been riding on the backs of fellow Australians for years. And after reading this ABC story (below), they still won’t know. So it’s a complete surprise to them that the green electrons they […]
It’s like someone read all the major skeptic blogs in the world and turned them into a documentary.
The new Michael Moore documentary: Planet of The Humans
1 – unapologetically exposes Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Robert Kennedy, etc. for being con artists and hypocrites, 2 – crucifies the Sierra Club and their ilk for being disingenuous and primarily in it for the money and influence, and 3 – also carefully documents how wind, solar and biofuels are scams. — John Droz, jr.
h/t Thanks to Peter D, AndyG, Michael S, Colin, Willie, and Jim Simpson who enjoyed this “even the credits”.
Richard Branson will allegedly spend $3 billion to fight global warming! Then Branson, sitting next to @AlGore, is asked “Is Al Gore a prophet?” Branson replies “How do you spell “prophet””? [Profit!!!] Everyone laughs! — @tan123
HaroutDSDZ: It’s the moment when Winston Smith realizes that O’Brien is not a revolutionary but a loyal member of Ingsoc… Covering article by genuine environmentalist –
Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind […]
…
Do young adults learn anything that matters in school?
They’re protesting in the streets but can’t even answer the most baby-basic questions about energy or their pet molecule “CO2”.
It’s almost like carbon dioxide is totally irrelevant? Teachers don’t care. Kids don’t care. Media don’t care, and when they all grow up the adults won’t care either.
More than 72% of Gen Z ‘don’t know nuclear power is low carbon energy’
Dimitri Macrokefalidis EnergyLive News:
Only 26% of people aged 18-24 understand that nuclear power is a low carbon source of electricity, compared with 76% for renewables such as wind and solar, according to a new poll by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).
Older people are more likely to say that nuclear power is low carbon. The poll found the level of understanding rising from 47% among 35 to 44-year olds to 61% among 65 to 74-year olds, although it remains well below levels seen for renewables.
Good on the Mech Eng’s for asking. I call “fake” on the protesters that tell us the world is at stake but can’t be bothered learning the basics.
Wait til they find out […]
The Tasmanian Government has just announced they will be “200% renewable” by 2040 — a feat only possible because they have an umbilical cord to hostages in the mainland who have to pay for irrelevant surges in electricity that arrive when they don’t need it. The same hostages will send back fossil powered electricity every week to keep Tasmania running when the wind and sun stop and the water is worth more in the dam than out of it. Not to mention container-ships of GST cash to support the state with the second highest unemployment in the nation.
This is the same state that went 100% renewable for three months in 2015 and launched itself into an electricity crisis. They decommissioned the last fossil fuel power station, just in time to get islanded by a break in their umbilical cable and thence had to order flying squads of diesel generators to keep the lights on at a cost of at least $140m. They also had to restart the same plant they just closed. The state lost half a billion dollars in the crisis — nearly twice the cost of the newish gas plant which had only built in 2009.
[…]
Since SA was islanded the costs just to keep the frequency stable are as much as the energy itself
Two weeks ago the Australian grid had a major near miss, and South Australia has been isolated from the rest of the nation ever since. It was supposed to be connected again in two weeks, but repairs to the 6 high voltage towers that fell over, evidently will be longer. Strangely, apparently no news outlet has mentioned this in the last two weeks.
While SA has been the renewables star of the world for two weeks, there’s been mayhem in the market. Instead of cheap electricity with 50% renewables it’s chaos. Allan O’Neill explains that the cost of stabilizing the grid has gone through the roof. It’s so bad, and generators have to contribute to balance their output, that solar and wind power are holding back from supply because they can’t afford to pay the costs to cover their share of frequency stability.
But when South Australia became islanded by the transmission line collapse, FCAS requirements for that region could only be supplied from local providers – and there is only a small subset of participants in South Australia […]
Here in Renewables-World downunder, most people don’t know the grid has barely scraped through the last two weeks. We almost lost an Aluminium smelter, came close to a statewide blackout and South Australia is (possibly) still islanded from the rest of the National Grid.
The AEMO held a crisis meeting yesterday but this trouble started Friday week ago in what was described as a “white knuckle event” by energy analyst, Paul McArdle at WattClarity. A storm knocked down six large transmission towers on the high voltage interconnector line in Western Victoria which left South Australia suddenly islanded. This time SA had 1,000MW more energy than it could use, so frequency in SA suddenly rose to a near disastrous 50.96Hz and briefly perhaps even higher. (Wait for the official reports). The system teetered but managed to stay running. Prices rocketed up to the usual spike to $14,500/MWh in both Victoria and South Australia.
It would have been nerve-wracking in the control rooms. The Portland Aluminium Smelter in Victoria, which is the largest single user of electricity in Victoria, had a near death experience. Both pot lines shut down immediately. It appears emergency workers only managed to get 50% of the […]
Wind turbines pose a threat not just to bats, birds and bedtime, but also Buicks, buildings and babies.
By some miracle luck, no one was killed. This wind turbine was installed two weeks ago…
Coming soon: insurance premiums to rise in car parks under turbines, and real estate values to fall. Children’s car seats to be reinforced with 6ft thick titanium shells.
Presumably Al Gore and the member for Warringah will dismiss the risk and plan to build one in their own backyards.
Repeat after me: Wind energy is free and there are no hidden costs from installing gigatons of infrastructure across the country to catch low-density random unreliable energy.
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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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