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By Jo Nova
Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told them they would still have to pay the generators even when their product was useless.
Britain wasting ‘millions a day’ in energy as wind farms told to turn off while bills soar
The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced.
By ANTONY ASHKENAZ, Express
Imagine that the government told The People that this would make their electricity cheaper (and people believed them!).
In the UK people are forced to pay unreliable generators for electricity that comes when no one wants it. No doubt this was built into the contract from the start to stop investors from fleeing for the hills.
Imagine an investment so bad that the seller has to pre-arrange payments for all the times their product is useless or it wouldn’t be worth building in the first place. There’s a message in that. (Don’t build it.)
To put arsenic-icing on this cake, the wind farms that […]
By Jo Nova
The core baseload of the European grid is in trouble, and there is no back up. If the rest of Europe had enough coal or nuclear power, this wouldn’t be so bad, but they were all too worried about heatwaves in 2100 they forgot…
Half the French Nuclear Fleet will not be back in time for winter and there is no other nation that fill the gap. | Photo by Spiritrespect.
This is bad news for Europe. Half of France’s nuclear power fleet were already out of action and EDF was hoping to bring “all of them” back online for winter. But they’ve just announced that at least four plants they planned to restart will suffer a major delay. France’s electricity prices have hit €1,000 per MWh for January delivery. (Which is a blockbuster $1,500 AUD).
France’s large nuclear fleet is normally a major exporter of electricity, referred to as the “backbone” of the whole European grid. Blackouts are not only being forecast in France, but there is growing recognition that they are now more likely in the UK too. Where else will this spread?
To make matters worse, a week ago, a pipe ruptured […]
by Jo Nova
For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.
“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”
Vestas Wind Turbine
There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.
Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.
The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.
Renewable […]
by Jo Nova
With all the calm language of a paid ad agency, the ABC is breathless because an esoteric measure called “minimum operational demand” has hit a record or two. This glorious moment may have only lasted 30 minutes, and it isn’t actually a useful thing, but it’s a “record”.
In fact, “minimum operational demand” is a grid management headache, not a badge of honor. It’s the midday moment when solar panels all work — and it’s becoming such a problem that two states in Australia have said all new solar panels need “smart” controllers so that the guys in the central control rooms can turn the darn things off. That’s how good it is.
Renewable energy records tumble around the country as rooftop solar power soars
by ABC Energy Propaganda Reporter, Daniel Mercer
Soaring power production from households and businesses with rooftop solar panels has sent records tumbling across Australia as output from fossil fuels falls to all-time lows.
The record so-called minimum operational demand excludes the power generated by consumers with their own solar panels, which met 92 per cent of South Australia’s overall needs at one point on October 17.
[…]
“With an EV, you don’t eliminate emissions, you just export them.
You have to dig up about 500,000 lbs of material to make a single 1000lb battery
It takes 100 to 300 barrels of oil to manufacture a battery that can hold one barrel of oil equivalent.
Demand for those minerals (Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel) will increase between 400 and 4000%.
There’s not enough mining in the world to make enough batteries for all those people.”
…
9.9 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
By Jo Nova
A report by Mark Mills called the The “Energy Transition” Delusion came out in August with some killer statistics. Despite the rampant glorious uptake of sparkling renewables, wind and solar provide less than 5% of the total global energy demand while the hated hydrocarbons still provide 84%. And that energy demand is growing relentlessly and with no end in sight.
Global economies are facing a potential energy shock—the third such shock of the past half century. Energy costs and security have returned to center stage, as has the realization that the world remains deeply dependent on reliable supplies of petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
It’s a hi-tech energy blackhole
As James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal, noted, some of the most game-changing statistics in the report are about mobile phones. Our need for gadgets, phones and the internet means we need more energy than ever:
Historically, the energy costs of manufacturing a product roughly tracked the weight of the thing produced. A refrigerator weighs about 200 times more than a hair dryer and takes nearly 100 times more energy to fabricate. But it takes nearly as much energy to make one […]
By Jo Nova Ironies don’t get better than this: Thanks to the renewable energy transition, Europe can’t afford to make renewable energy.
When will the message get through that renewable energy is not sustainable?
European photovoltaic plants and battery cell factors are temporarily closing or quitting altogether because of obscenely high electricity prices. When the plants were built they expected to pay €50/MWh, but now they are €300 – 400/MWh. And the situation may last another couple of years, so it’s hard to see how these manufacturers can avoid leaving permanently.
So much for all the solar jobs. Europeans are being reduced to being installers while the production of panels shifts to coal fired China because electricity is so much cheaper. Most of the wind turbine industry has already moved to China.
European solar PV manufacturing at risk from soaring power prices – Rystad By Jules Scully, PV Tech
Around 35GW of PV manufacturing projects in Europe are at risk of being mothballed as elevated power prices damage the continent’s efforts to build a solar supply chain, research from Rystad Energy suggests.
The consultancy noted that the energy-intensive nature of both solar PV and battery cell […]
By Jo Nova
Just to recap: Energy prices are so wildly high in Europe — thanks to a quest to alter the planetary climate — that 70% of fertilizer plants have already shut down, half the aluminum and zinc smelters have closed, and glass-makers and tilers who survived both world wars may go out of business. German homes are reduced to being wood fired (if they can find the firewood). Meanwhile someone very naughty set off explosions on the Nordstream gas pipes from Russia, and since a third of all UK gas comes from an underwater pipe to Norway now suddenly people are very nervous about that. Before most of this unfolded, UK consumer confidence was at minus 44 — the lowest ebb ever recorded since 1974 when people started recording these things. Now it’s even lower (minus 49). As many as one in four people in the UK were saying they won’t heat their homes in winter. It’s the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages. Luckily, at least the UK and Germany both have some old coal plants they haven’t blown up.
To make things more exciting, last week, after the underwater bombs went […]
“It’s difficult to imagine it could be accidental”
The leaks are massive
Indeed “leak” does not seem like the right word.
@JavierBlas
The explosions are marked with stars.
The sites are 75 kilometers apart just outside official Danish territory.
Euronews –– Swedish national broadcaster SVT reported that national seismologists had registered “two clear explosions” around the area, first at 2:03 AM and then at 7:04 PM (CET) on Monday.
Hours after the explosions, coincidentally, Gazprom also warned that one of the two remaining major pipelines to Europe was at risk due to a legal dispute over fees. Gazprom was refusing to pay a transit fee that the Ukrainian energy firm said it was supposed to pay.
At this stage everyone is saying the leaks are sabotage, but no one is claiming to know anything for sure. The US government has said it is ‘ready to provide support’ to Europe.
So, below, this is quite an awkward flashback, to say the least. It’s from February when Joe Biden was trying to talk Russia out of invading Ukraine:
Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream […]
Kill trees, pollute the air, punish the poor and protect coal underground
Just another day in Green heaven.
Wood smoke over Canberra | Photo from Clean Air Canberra
The Australian capital city Canberra in midwinter is often minus 1 to 5 degrees C in the morning. Australian homes can get very cold and with heating bills rocketing, things are defacto becoming like life in Berlin, which is in a pre-War energy crisis. No one labeled Canberra public halls as “warm spaces” and they definitely aren’t open at night (it’s the public service!), but crowds are arriving at libraries just to escape the cold.
The ACT Government are a Labor-Green alliance, and are proudly, exuberantly “100% Renewable”, but won’t dare cut the cord to the coal plants that keep the lights on, making the claims of being 100% renewable a form of 100% false advertising. Even the ABC admits that the ACT itself only generates 5% of its own power, and 80% of the energy coming to the ACT through the wires is from fossil fuels. They pay off some distant wind farms to balance the theoretical gigawatt-hour tallies, and sponge off the states around for cheaper backup and […]
It’s just another day in the global energy crisis: Years of climate goals are evaporating
When your currency is backed by renewables… | 1 year of Euro/USD
The threat of the Russians cutting off gas completely through Nord stream 1 has focused Europe on the blessings of coal and the reality of surviving winter with only windmills and solar panels to keep warm.
Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, and the UK have already changed plans to shut coal plants or have plans to revive old ones. Poland is buying coal directly for homes. Hungary has now also declared a state of emergency and said it will boost gas production and stop exports. No sharing allowed now.
Only two years ago Greece was going green — phasing out brown coal but now the Greek power corporation has been told to stop the phase out of coal. Last year lignite provided only 5% of the electricity in Greece, now the aim is 20%.
Hungary declares ‘state of emergency’ over threat of energy shortages
Euronews
Budapest says it will boost its annual production of natural gas from 1.5 billion cubic metres to 2 billion cubic metres. The […]
This is Fall of Rome type stuff — everything is coming undone
National rolling blackouts have been occurring for days in South Africa and are forecast to continue for another week at least. One engineer warns they are just a step away from a total blackout and says it will be very difficult to reawaken the entire system. Traffic lights are failing, trains are stopping, and mobiles phones, ATMs and fuel pumps may not work. With unemployment at a shocking 35% already, the million dollar losses from blackouts make for a dark feedback loop.
The immediate cause is strikes for wage claims and terrible maintenance leading to major power outages lasting as long as nine hours. But Green targets and activism only makes it worse because there’s no interest in maintaining plants properly which are planned for closure. South Africa runs mostly on old coal plants, and one of the largest plants is closing (supposedly) as soon as September. And the wind and solar power they have often isn’t helping with the peak loads either.
There is vandalism from every direction. At the bottom end, apparently up to half the people in Soweto are not even paying for electricity […]
Marcus Wong Wongm
Effectively — the AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) is the taxpayer funded advertising agency for the Renewables Industry. The point of the latest AEMO super-report, apparently, is to get Australian taxpayers or consumers to foot the bill for the high voltage lines that the unreliable industry desperately needs but can’t pay for itself.
The AEMO has declared we need to rush to cough up $12.7 billion to build new interconnectors in Australia. That’s $500 from every man woman and child and let’s call it what it is, a Gift Card for the Renewables Industry. The net benefit of all that money will be to allow wind and solar industrial plants to connect their unreliable product to the grid we already have, and to the storage products that we still have to pay for, and all so that their green electrons will make the weather 0.0 degrees cooler in a hundred years. Australians alive today will pay now and basically get nothing but views of more criss-crossy-steel-wires and spires, and more wind towers too. Sing Hallelujah.
The 104 page Blueprint imagines all kinds of scenarios except for an actual free market, true competition, consumer […]
The people making wonder wind turbines are having a tough time. They thought they were picking the hottest new industry, saving the world, and expecting to make great money. Instead supply chains are in crisis, competition is fierce, and profit margins are razor tight. They know that the solar panel industry has largely gone to China, and worry that wind turbine manufacturing will do the same.
What they don’t seem to realize is that the reason the factories went to China is that the country isn’t powered by wind turbines. No country powered by unreliable power is also a growing manufacturing base. And as well as having cheap coal power, China also has the advantage of cheap slave labor, few environmental rules, no ethics and hardly any red tape. It’s a red-light flasher. About now, a wise investor might be wondering about the the odd disconnect in the idea of building devices to save the world while imprisoning people and polluting lakes. What if the environmental movement is a hollow geostrategic trojan fantasy serving Russians, Chicomms, socialists and investment banker cartels?
For Ben Hunt, the light-bulb moment isn’t there yet. These are the guys trying to make ends meet […]
Would you like blackouts or floods with your Green Burger?
Tumut Generation Station No. 3 Snowy scheme | Joe “velojo” A
Here in Weather-Dependent Renewable World the chief crash test dummy is struggling because of yet another bit of terrible luck. We desperately need the only reliable renewable energy we have to generate while reliable but-badly-maintained-coal is breaking — and our national grid sits on the edge of blackouts. But Lordy No! Oh the schadenfreude — the dams are all full. Seems we have too much water thanks to the La Nina we didn’t predict, and the excess rainfall that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the dams that weren’t supposed to fill. Now if Snowy Hydro releases too much water to make electricity they may flood lower areas.
You can’t make this stuff up. Hydroelectric dams serve two purposes and sometimes they conflict. If we are lucky, we might avoid both blackouts and floods, but we won’t avoid the bonfire of electricity bills that are coming.
Ponder the impossible quandry of the Green religion. Like the Escher puzzle of Energy — It’s always the weather’s fault. If only we could use enough renewables to get perfect weather we […]
The climate experts didn’t warn us we’d need more electricity for winter in Australia.
If only carbon dioxide make winter nights warmer, Australians wouldn’t have been using up stockpiles of coal and gas in the last six weeks, and setting winter-time demand records. These geniuses got everything wrong.
Coldest start to winter in decades for eastern Australia with power grid under strain
The Guardian
Early June temperatures in Melbourne didn’t go above 15 degrees for first time in 70 years as cold weather pattern starts to break
Eastern Australia’s giant cold snap is finally breaking down but not before temperatures reached lows not seen for seven decades or longer and pushed the country’s main electricity grid to the brink.
The extended chill was caused by an unusual weather pattern that locked in cool pools of air over southern and eastern states, triggering the deepest snow dumps in the alps since 1968, according to Ben Domensino, a senior meteorologist at Weatherzone.
Australia so cold it’s already setting winter electricity demand records
It’s not about record cold snaps, it’s more of a long run of below average days. In a sign of […]
So it’s a new record. In the 20 years since the National Energy Market formed it has never operated on such a vapor thin margin. Only a few days ago Paul McArdle at WattClarity thought a mere 15% instantaneous reserve plant margin was a headline event, but tonight the grid survived (so far) on a tiny 3% Instantaneous Reserve Plant Margin NEM-wide. Things were so tight the NSW Minister for Energy sought emergency powers to force coal companies to provide fuel to coal generators for the next 30 days on his say so. Presumably next on his list would be emergency powers from God to make the wind blow.
Two years ago Australian taxpayers spend $13 billion a year in climate action (Moran). As researchers at ANU noted, Australia was leading the way — installing more megawatts per person than any other nation on Earth. (Blakers) Despite being the fastest growing and sparsest population, on the most remote nation which was practically a quarry and farm built on coal and uranium deposits, Australian political leaders rushed to compete for green booby prizes in Beautiful Weather Contests.
And the toll from the bonfire in prices is just starting with Iron […]
Reality must be depressing for Green-believers. Here they are, after all this revolutionizing, they’ve installed more than a million megawatts of glorious solar and wind totems and it has barely made a dent. The world still stubbornly runs on fossil fuels.
The BBC laments:
Climate change: Green energy ‘stagnates’ as fossil fuels dominate
Matt McGrath, BBC
A new study says that the world is using more fossil fuels than ever as the transition to green energy stalls.
The Renewables 2022 Global Status Report says the share of wind and solar in the global energy mix has risen minimally in the last decade.
“The share of renewable energy has moved in the last decade from 10.6% to 11.7%, but fossil fuels, all coal and gas have moved from 80.1% to 79.6%. So, it’s stagnating,” said Rana Adib, the executive director of REN21. “And since the energy demand is rising, this actually means that we are consuming more fossil fuels than ever.” As the world rebounded from Covid-19 in 2021, there was a significant rise in overall energy use, most of which was met by fossil fuels.
Here is the […]
The Renewable Crash Test Dummies: Test in progress
A LaTrobe Valley Coal Plant
Day #3: Huge Yallourn coal plant in Victoria loses 2 of 4 turbines. The AEMO suspends the whole market. Blackout warnings continue. Australians are being asked to conserve electricity. It’s just another day in the forced transition we don’t have to have.
How much lower can we go? Half of the generators from the ultra cheap brown coal Yallourn plant went phht yesterday. This was “unplanned”. It normally makes 20% of Victoria’s electricity. It’s owned by EnergyAustralia (China Light and Power) which is keen to close it early in 2028 and has a special secret deal with the Victorian government to do so. Perhaps China Light and Power is scrimping on those maintenance costs?
Warnings about potential blackouts exist for all five states on the National grid during the next 48 hours. The Minister for Energy, and the head of the AEMO, and several state Ministers have asked Australians to turn off all the non-essential electrical items. The NSW Minister asked people not to use their dishwasher tonight. Go first world modern nation! Meanwhile Matt Canavan wonders why people can’t use their dishwashers but the […]
All the rules are breaking.
The price market broke on Sunday night and now the interconnectors rules are broken too. The whole Eastern five state “National” grid is flying seat of the pants — the reserves are so incredibly thin that there are LOR3 forecasts — meaning Lack Of Reserve Level 3 rolled out for all five states. It doesn’t mean blackouts will happen, but it means all the protective layers of this onion are gone. The system is running bare.
UPDATE: There were some blackouts in Sydney’s northern suburbs last night. “Millions of homes” were apparently told to conserve their power in Brisbane and Sydney. Welcome to RenewableWorld!
ht/ WattsUp, Eric Worrall, and RicDre
The price market broke on Sunday night when for the first time the AEMO imposed somewhat anachronistic price setting clauses it had never used. By fixing the wholesale price in Queensland, market bidding suddenly phase-changed into a twilight world where prices were set too low (at an obscenely high $300/MWh, but not high enough now), and generators didn’t want to bid. So offers to supply “Yo-Yo’d” and the AEMO had to run emergency orders of a different kind to […]
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