|
|
One big government agency quietly admits renewables make electricity more expensive, and another big gov media agency hides it.
The new AMEC report tells us renewables will make electricity prices go down a tiny 2% in the short run but make electricity more expensive in the long run due to forcing out cheap baseload players. What matters most to Australians — that we can expect our electricity costs to be 2% less than “obscene” for the next couple of years, or that the artificial transition we are forcing on the grid will indirectly make electricity more expensive?
Which message does the ABC headline? Say hello to Trivia!
Renewables set to drive down power prices, new AEMC analysis shows The ABC is essentially a taxpayer funded advertising machine for the renewables industry.
A flood of new renewable energy projects is likely to drive down household electricity bills, according to new analysis by government policy adviser the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC).
On a national basis, household bills are set to fall by 2.1 per cent — but price falls in the eastern states and South Australia are offset by increases in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and […]
Here’s a problem coal fired plants don’t need to worry about.
Sydney’s ‘catastrophic’ hailstorm happened on Thursday, the damage bill said to top $125 million. How much of that damage is to rooftop Solar PV? The last massive hail storm in Sydney was in 1999 — but there were hardly any solar panels then.
From SBS News
There are wild scenes and images everywhere.
Worst Sydney hailstorm in 20 years declared catastrophic
Jessica Cortis and Sascha O’Sullivan, The Australian
At least 50,000 homes remain without power in northern Sydney and more than 1000 calls for help are waiting to be responded to by State Emergency Services after Sydney and the NSW central coast were yesterday rocked by the worst hailstorms in almost 20 years.
Before anyone yells “Climate Change”, Reader, Pat, found stories about hail the size of Eggs in Sydney in November 1929. Hail the size of Tennis Balls fell on Reids Creek near Brisbane in 1934 and hail the size of Tea Cups fell on Brookville in 1902. Paddington had “ice inches deep” on Nov 1, 1931. There are scores more Hail-the-size-of… Maybe building 2 million solar panels on a continent with […]
Got Solar PV? Don’t let the kids play on the roof
Would you like a 240Volt shock with that?
In Australia, shonky fly-by-night installers are botching the wiring and not screwing the panels on properly. As many as a quarter of solar panels pose a high or severe “electrical safety” risk. Since there are two million households with solar panels, that’s half a million homes sitting under a live problem.
By mismanagement and delusional climate-changing schemes the government has entirely and artificially created the solar bubble. Hopefully people won’t die like they did in the Pink Batts Bubble. Back then, to stop droughts and storms and save the nation from the Global Financial Crisis, the government decided to rush out home insulation. The artificial bubble brought in poorly trained workers and four people died. Kevin Rudd (former PM) now says he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known the risks. But heck, way back in 2010 no one could have realized that artificial government industry bubbles wouldn’t mix well with 240 Volts. Sure.
Australia’s big advance seems to be to stop unnecessary deaths under roofs, and start doing them on top.
Warning of deaths over solar panel installations Simon […]
It’s Santa’s happy hour in electricity land
Finally, No really, renewables are so cheap we can switch to them and change the global climate for free.
This is a new study by the kind of “independent” group that is totally dependent on Big Gov handouts. It compares Australian prices to other obscenely expensive countries and finds that “renewables push down prices”. Compared to what? Not compared to nations with cheap electricity. And not compared to most of the last thirty years in Australia before we added all the unreliable gear.
The tricky graphs clearly baffled Peter Hannam. If only he were a journalist, he could have asked some hard hitting questions and shown this study to be the concocted vaporous PR exercise that it was.
‘No trilemma’: Study finds increased renewables push down power prices
Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald
Renewable energy drives down wholesale power prices well in excess of subsidy costs and a further expansion of wind and solar would likely push them lower still, a study of Australian and European markets shows.
If renewables actually reduced average prices, this would be a first. Around the world, the more intermittent generators you have, the […]
The Crash Test Dummy accelerates. Australia is steaming ahead in the forced transition to unreliable energy
A lot of the reason for the growth in renewables is the Renewable Energy Target (the RET). Renewables must supply 16% of our electricity in 2018, and even more in 2019.
Strap yourself in. Buried in the AEMO summer readiness plan was the news that our intermittent renewables capacity is forecast to increase by fully 50% this year. All the renewables we had accrued in the two decade “transition” til December last year, we’ve added half again. We are already pushing the bounds of stability and setting price records, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are escalating the rate of change.
In toto, we have 56GW of generation of all sorts in the national grid on the east coast. The wind and solar component increased from 4GW at the end of 2017 to over 6GW by the end of 2018. But it doesn’t take much intermittent power to change the way the whole grid works.
Things are so fragile that a few weeks ago, when 240MW of reliable supply was suddenly not available for this summer, the AEMO had to issue a […]
Even the AEMO is warning of blackouts coming, because the BoM is forecasting hot, dry conditions. El Nino on the way, and I hear rumours our Snowy Hydro Dam levels are not great.
Print Email Facebook Twitter More
There’ll be blackouts this summer if nothing is done, AEMO report warns
Stephanie Dalzell, ABC News
Victoria and South Australia are at a high risk of forced blackouts this summer if no action is taken, according to the latest report by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
Not enough supply? Put another million bucks on the BBQ:
To stop that from occurring, the AEMO has sourced emergency energy reserves, which are typically not available to the market and are only accessed when supply is not keeping up with demand.
Those emergency reserves — otherwise known as Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader (RERT) resources — do not come cheap.
It’s only money:
The report stated that last summer emergency energy cost taxpayers in Victoria and South Australia almost $52 million.
That equated to an average of an extra $6 per household bill.
That’s nothing. The two day heatwave […]
Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away.
Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another drawback to solar panels, lo! Solar Panels are pushing up the voltage at midday often as high as 253 Volts when it supposed to be more like 230 to 240V. This means appliances are using more electricity, that makes bills even higher. It may also be breaking appliances (making other bills go higher too). We’re not really sure about that, but when that study is done, it’ll already be 1.8 million panels too late.
Non-solar users are paying for this surge (and the appliances) — for every 1% increase in voltage, the costs go up 0.7%. Then, to ice that gravy-cake, the inverters on solar panels are also shutting off at 253V, meaning that poor home owners who paid thousands are not generating power for the grid. All up, solar is bad for you, bad for them, bad for our light-globes.
The warning comes from groups running the electricity networks in Australia.
Spot the key word missing from the ABC headline […]
Another Hazelwood-size batch of renewables coming on line in Australia by 2020.
That’s 1600MW of random subsidized energy dropping into a market that is artificially priced to value weather-changing potential over reliability. Now, even the bosses of two gentailers which both benefit from renewables subsidies are warning things are chaotic, going to get turbulent and more expensive. Why do they admit this? Probably because they want the government to add another layer of policy interference to reward “firm capacity” which they both also own.
Instead, lets get the government and the RET octopus off our grid. Surely we can set up a market that allows players who want electricity at 9am tomorrow to pay more for generators which can actually guarantee to be there. All the market players who don’t care when or if electricity arrives can buy the unreliable energy. Which businesses, industries or homes can use electricity that arrives at midday and random other times, remembering that wind power drops to 5% of capacity for days sometimes:
Renewables threaten volatile power supply, says AGL, Origin bosses
Perry Williams, Matt Chambers, The Australian
Power giants AGL Energy and Origin Energy have raised concerns over a surge […]
It’s not often we see a report that turns things on their head quite like this.
Wind turbines may cause more local warming than global cooling in the next century.
Photo: Jo Nova
If the US were to install a lot of turbines, Wind power could warm the United States by 0.24 degrees Celsius instead of cooling it, because wind turbines “redistribute heat” in the atmosphere. They mix the surface layers. (0.24C would be equivalent to two decades of recent warming.) The largest effect is at night where wind plants can warm the local area by 1.5C.
At least 10 previous studies have now observed local warming caused by US wind farms. Keith and Miller compared their simulated warming to observations and found rough consistency between the data and model.
Nick Carne — Cosmos magazine
The new studies by Keith and Miller were published in Environmental Research Letters and Joule.
Major downer. The power density of wind energy is up to *100 times* less than predicted.
The new research suggests we can’t put too many turbines to close together or the whole group become far less efficient. That means we need 5 – […]
China said it would stop coal power construction, but CoalSwarm activists have caught it restarting construction at many plants it said it would close. It’s a tsunami of coal plants according to EndCoal. We’re talking about new capacity of 259GW, equivalent to the entire US coal fleet or more than ten times the total Australian coal fleet (23GW).
China said it was done with these coal plants. Satellite imagery shows otherwise. By Nathanael Johnson on Sep 25, 2018 Newly released satellite photos appear to show continuing construction of coal plants that China said it was cancelling last year, according to CoalSwarm. In January 2017, China announced that it was canceling more than 100 coal plants across 13 provinces. At the time, a researcher familiar with Chinese politics said that regional officials might try to skirt the central government’s order.
The Huadian Plant was suspended in Jan 2017, but look at those cooling towers…. (Slide the centre line left and right).
Satellite imagery from Planet, February 2017 to March 2018, shows construction clearly ongoing at the plant.
Matt McGrath, BBC News
Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis […]
Old coal plants don’t have to die, they just need to be fixed
Vales Point, Power Station, NSW, Australia
The Vales Point Coal plant (Part B) was built in 1978. It was sold for $1 million in 2015 by the NSW government. It’s now making a bumper profit. If it gets a $750 million renovation it could keep running til 2049 when it will be 70 years old. Vales has a nameplate capacity of 1,320 MW.
On the other hand, we could follow South Australia and spend $650m and get a 150MW solar plant that only works half the time.*
When is an old coal plant on death’s door a better bet than the worlds largest solar plant? — Every hour of every day. Plus you get free fertilizer.
Profits to keep Vales Point coal-fired power station going for another 20 years
John Stensholt and Perry Williams, The Australian
The Vales Point power station near Lake Macquarie, which supplies about 4 per cent of power for the national grid, could receive a $750m injection to ensure it runs until 2049, making it the nation’s last standing coal station, with the country’s other facilities due to […]
Australia now has 200 years of frackable gas to add to the 300 years of coal
And yet we are still buying Chinese solar panels. The big question is how much of our our gas and coal can we use before nuclear energy makes them irrelevant? h/t GWPF
In April the Northern Territory lifted its ban on fracking. The Beetaloo basin may have a whopper 50 to 100 trillion cubic feet of gas, and it appears to be a “stacked play” in layers (like Texas). To put that in perspective, the largest gas project in Australia in the Bass Strait has produced 8 trillion cubic feet so far with another 7 trillion to go. Shale turned the USA from an energy dependent state to the worlds largest fossil fuel producer.
Geoscience Australia estimates the NT has about 257,000 petajoules of shale gas
[Australian Associated Press]
The Northern Territory holds enough natural gas to supply Australia for 200 years-plus and is comparable to the shale resources that have revolutionised the US energy sector, Resources and Northern Australia Minister Matt Canavan says.
Senator Canavan described Beetaloo, located southeast of Katherine, as “a world class shale […]
Green genius: Pay $1400 a year to not stop any storms
Finally some veteran engineers checked the Labor Party 50% renewable plan and the AEMO “65% scenarios”. Unlike others, their study that did not involve magical assumptions that the cost of renewables would dramatically fall. Instead they used “actual costs” and found the price of electricity will rise “84%” and cheap coal power will be forced out of business (just like what we also found here). The engineers include Barry Murphy, former managing director and chairman of Caltex. Robert Barr, an electrical engineer and academic at University of Wollongong. If only Kevin Rudd had asked them in 2007.
Engineers warn of bill shock under green energy surge
Adam Creighton, Economics Editor, The Australian
Electricity bills will soar and gas and coal-fired power stations will close if the share of wind and solar generation increases dramatically, engineers have warned after analysing the nation’s energy supply.
It found bills were likely to soar 84 per cent, or about $1400 a year, for the typical household, if wind and solar power supplied 55 per cent of the national electricity market.
A quarter of Australian rooftops have solar, […]
The world still runs on coal and oil
After 20 years of subsidies, intermittent renewables account for just 3.6% of total energy generation. That’s the tiny purple sliver in the graph. Global power means not just electricity, but also fuel used in transport. And this is where wind and solar power are respectively old and slow, or modern but useless.
Someday solar powered planes might make their first round world trip in 48 hours but at the moment they need 16 months. There’s a a bit of hitch in the global energy transition.
Hello fossil wonder fuels:
Global Primary Energy, Graph, 1965-2018
Intermittent renewables are pretty useless everywhere:
Global Primary Energy, Graph, 1965-2018
Solar energy might have “made waves” and increased by an astounding 100GW last year, but it’s still irrelevant:
Oil remains the world’s dominant fuel, making up just over a third of all energy consumed. In 2017 oil’s market share declined slightly, following two years of growth. Coal’s market share fell to 27.6%, the lowest level since 2004. Natural gas accounted for a record 23.4% of global primary energy consumption, while renewable power hit a new high of 3.6%.
— Spencer […]
Once upon a time we could afford heating.
Volunteer knitters in high demand as soaring power prices leave people cold
A national army of knitters is in desperate need of more volunteers to help them meet the growing demand for winter woollies.
Victoria returns to the Victorian era
Knitters can not keep up with demand
“Some people say it has been a colder winter — I actually don’t think so,” Ms Rogers said. I think it’s been milder than what we’ve had, it’s just the need that’s so much greater unfortunately.
“Even if people have got heating, they can’t afford to run it, so they need the warm clothes or the blankets.”
Can you knit to keep a poor Victorian warm?
UPDATE from Beowulf:
I hear Audrey Zibelman, boss of AEMO, is a dab hand with a set of needles. Here’s her favourite pattern ladies: plain one, pearl one, skip 10, repeat.
It makes a jumper full of holes that must be plugged with other materials, but it saves heaps on the cost of wool and we don’t need to breed any more sheep to make our jumpers. […]
In Victoria, 40C used to be known as “A Hot Day”, but now thanks to climate change it’s called an “extreme condition” (wasn’t it meant to become a common event?) Nevermind.
The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) has pretty much warned us the Victorian electrical grid can no longer cope with “a hot day”.
[The AEMO] predicts a one-in-three chance of load shedding under extreme conditions this summer unless additional action is taken.
“Specifically, temperatures of 40C or more in Victoria could be the catalyst for extreme, one-in-10-year electricity demand conditions.
“Particularly when these temperatures are experienced towards the end of the day when business demand is still relatively high, residential demand is increasing, and rooftop PV’s contribution is declining.”
So since solar PV is useless in this situation, the Victorian government is spending one billion dollars installing Solar PV. One billion dollars of generation that is guaranteed not to work when we need it.
Will the new PM, Scott Morrison, be able to solve this problem? Thousands of engineers can.
Once upon a time even the brainless inanimate free market did.
h/t Dave B, Pat
PS: Still travelling.
9.5 out of 10 based on 93 ratings
The advantage of communist autocrats is that they can create government havoc so much more efficiently.
The Chinese solar boom was so big it became the world’s largest solar market. It was so big it pushed up global “clean energy” investment to a record high. China became the veritable show pony of the solar spruikers: “leading the world in clean energy investment”. Mashable tells us it was so big “the solar boom could be seen from space“.
But the star advertisement for renewable glory was all based on subsidies:
The Chinese solar boom was “pretty significant”
A couple of months ago the Chinese government admitted they were cutting the subsidies to make electricity cheaper again for consumers. That hit the stock market. Now projects are being cancelled and orders are drying up for the hapless manufacturers.
The free market might be telling us something China’s solar industry is at a crossroads
“Without subsidies there’s no return on investment for over a decade, so investors and property owners aren’t interested in distributed solar. With subsidies it only takes seven years to recoup the investment,” he adds.
China’s solar manufacturers are unhappy with recent government policy changes […]
Why Australia must exit the Paris Climate Agreement, The IPA report.
IPA estimates Paris Agreement to stop storms and hold back the tide may cost $8500 per Australian family
What a deal. You could have free electricity for the next four years or an imperceptible difference in the air outside the nursing home for your children’s 94th birthday.
The Americans went for the money. So did nearly everyone else.
Damian Wild at the IPA calculates that the Paris Agreement will cost patsy Australians $52 billion dollars in the next 12 years.
Paris deal spells ‘irreparable damage’: IPA report
Rachel Baxendale, The Australian
A study by the Institute of Public Affairs, “Why Australia must exit the Paris Climate Agreement”, estimates our Paris target of reducing emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 will impose a $52 billion economic cost between now and 2030, equating to $8566 a family.
Paris Agreement To Cost Australia $52 Billion
“The immutable law of energy policy is this: lower emissions mean higher prices.”
“Each family in Australia will be at least $8,566 worse off under the Paris Climate Agreement, on average. This is at […]
Last year AGL made $539 million net profit. This year, $1,600 million. What’s not to like about closing Hazelwood?
…
Profit statements confirm what we’ve said — closing cheap coal boosts profits for generators. No wonder AGL won’t sell Liddell for a hundred million dollars. It also shows us that the big “bubble” in electricity prices is from the doubling of wholesale electricity costs. These corporates are reaping it in far above costs. The way to cut wholesale prices is to get rid of the RET, and fix our old coal.
[ABC] Its underlying profit, which excludes one-off items and changes in value in investments and hedging positions, rose 28 per cent to $1.02 billion, at the upper end of the company’s guidance.
Even Andy Vesey admits the coal closures helped AGL:
“This increase in prices in the broader electricity market has mostly been a result of the abrupt closure of non-AGL power stations such as Hazelwood in 2017 and Northern in 2016 and higher input costs from coal and gas,” AGL chief executive Andy Vesey said.
But watch the pea. Who is trying to blame high profits on higher input costs?
Then he tosses […]
Pull the other one.
No Bias — Audrey Zibelman,
Audrey Zibelman, the improbable green-lawyer manager of our National Energy Market claims her advice is not biased towards renewables. This is the same Zibelman who tells us that “resisting the energy transition is like trying to resist the internet.” As if governments had to legislate “An Internet Target” and mandate we do 16% of our shopping online. The same Zibelman believes “we’re the last generation on earth who can really do something about climate change.” She thinks she’s changing global weather with our power grid. By 2100 historians will have people rolling in the aisles with that one. What were they thinking?*
Her bias is so all encompassing she can’t imagine a world twenty years hence which still runs on coal and gas and views the temporary experiment with unreliables as a disastrous, predictable mistake, a historic dead-end. Renewables are the B-size-batteries, the hydrogen-filled-air-ships and the X-rays for shoe shops that didn’t take over the world. She assumes that the forced “transition” to renewables is inevitable, natural and necessary. What if it’s an artificial, uneconomic, unnecessary accident of profit hungry industry rent-seekers and fatuous virtue signaling fools?
Hands up who […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments