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All it took was a War.
Policies based on fashion can be dead-set one day and gone the next. Until Saturday Germany was about to close its last nuclear power plants, gas production had been falling for 20 years and it planned to phase out coal plants by 2030.
Germany was the largest energy consumer in Europe, but was also determined to pursue Energiewende, the policy of transitioning from fossil fuels.
On Sunday all that changed:
Nuclear, coal, LNG: ‘no taboos’ in Germany’s energy about-face
By Christoph Steitz, Riham Alkousaa and Maria Sheahan, Reuters
In a landmark speech on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz spelled out a more radical path to ensure Germany will be able to meet rising energy supply and diversify away from Russian gas, which accounts for half of Germany’s energy needs.
“The events of the past few days have shown us that responsible, forward-looking energy policy is decisive not only for our economy and the environment. It is also decisive for our security,” Scholz told lawmakers in a special Bundestag session called to address the […]
Marc Morano is On Fire
The man from Climate Depot
…
Morano: ‘In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance’
MORANO: “We are already seeing – the first part of it is in California, $6 a gallon. Gas is already up a dollar. Estimates are seven, $8 a gallon possible with recession if Putin, who we’ve given all of this power to by literally shutting down U.S. domestic energy.
Just a little history lesson here. In 2020, the United States was back to 1952 with energy, not just independence, but energy dominance. We were the world’s largest oil and gas producer. More energy exports and imports, more energy production than consumption and we hadn’t done that since Harry Truman was president. Joe Biden came in at he said the first thing he wanted to do was jail fossil fuel executives. Biden’s energy secretary had done a video singing about no more gasoline, The is world aflame due to global warming.
9.1 out of 10 based on 54 ratings […]
Mike Cannon-Brookes might be an Australian tech-billionaire who wants to buy out one of our biggest energy companies and get rid of coal, but not only does he apparently not understand electricity grids, he doesn’t even know what a free market is.
In a free market customers could choose not to buy green electrons:
If we had a real free market in energy, we could a tick-that-box on our plan that said “100% coal fired, cheapest available reliable electricity”. Instead, all Australians are forced to buy electricity from a hobbled patchwork grid which has been repurposed as a Global Air Conditioner.
It’s a national grid crafted through “Renewable Energy Targets”, and pure hopium. Hidden in our electricity bills, taxes, and frozen-pea packets at Coles, are multiple subsidies to help wind and solar power. Poor Australians have paid to help put discounted solar panels on their rich neighbors roofs, and are paying for back up, storage, stabilizers, unnecessary two-billion dollar interstate transmission lines, and demand management plans.
Every windless minute at night the poor pay more for electricity than they would have — if the Agents of Weather-changing Sorcery were not allowed to romp freely through the energy market. Once […]
Do EV’s make good reefs?
h/t to Paul Homewood who notes The BBC didn’t mention the burning lithium battery story.
The Felicity Ace cargo ship caught fire on Wednesday last week:
German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that an internal email from Volkswagen USA stated that the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands.
It’s not clear if the fire started in an EV battery but once the flames got into them, the ship was abandoned to burn.
According to a study done in 2013 by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development, the batteries burn extremely hot and produce noxious gases.
“In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable,” the report concluded. — The Independent
Five days later the fire has finally run out of material to consume.
Now Felicity Burnt. | Reuters
Luxury cars on fire on cargo ships is a thing now
March 12th, 2019: The Grande America caught fire with 2,000 luxury cars on board and sank.
[…]
We’ll be teaching our children different fire safety lessons soon — starting with “don’t try this IN your home?”.
All the kilojoules came out at once.
Commentary sent with the video:
The battery of a scooter explodes while it is being charged. The person still had the presence of mind to remove the socket, but it was too late because the chemical reaction was already underway. This is what firefighters fear when it comes to electric cars.
As well as the battery of your ebike! Charging in a fireproof box or outside is not a luxury.
h/t Alistair P, and Helen D.
10 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
With an energy crisis hitting the Northern Hemisphere and China streaking ahead, an atomic renaissance is brewing.
The UK is putting more into new nuclear power. France has flipped from shrinking nukes to growing them. The Netherlands had changed its tune. The EU has quietly drafted rules allowing nuclear power to count as “green”.
There are 443 Nuclear Power plants in the world. Another 54 plants are under construction, and more than a third of those are in China. Right now China has about half the capacity of the USA, but within five or ten years China will be the largest nuclear power in the world.
The Green energy experiment is failing to produce cheap reliable energy.
Australia has one third of the world’s known uranium, but has no nuclear power. Why don’t the Coalition do something a tiny bit brave and do what 32 other countries already do.
WANO Member World Map
There is no reason under the sun that the nation with the world’s uranium and the most stable tectonic plates on Earth shouldn’t go nuclear. We’re getting the subs, why not the power?
Nuclear Ban Has To Go
Adam Creighton, The Australian
Even the worst imaginary scenarios for global warming are nothing compared to a year without electricity. Bunky Mortimer III thinks US priorities are screwed.
Get one at Indiamart perhaps?
The US will spend some $555b to prevent a theoretical warming of a degree or two. A warming which may not occur for a century, if at all, and about which the largest competitors to the USA are doing nothing.
In contrast, a solar Carrington event, one nuclear blast, or a cyber attack taking out just nine interconnector sites could collapse the entire US grid for 18 months.
Which environmental threat matters? The West is in apoplexy over the environmental degradation affecting polar bears, but the environment we need the most right now is the one with fresh water, edible food and a room temperature above freezing.
Securing the grid should be this country’s highest environmental priority
Taki’s Magazine
A prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the U.S. population. This figure has not been disputed, yet this prospect has received virtually no attention from policy makers or the media. The […]
Amazing what countries too poor to commit to Net Zero get up to
China’s EAST Tokamak Reactor in 2015
China is the fastest growing nuclear power in the world, poised to have the largest fission fleet by 2030. But it has just scored a bit of a leap forward in nuclear fusion:
China’s Artificial Sun Breaks Record by Hitting 120 Million F in Race for Nuclear Fusion
Robert Lea, Newsweek
The team at China’s “artificial sun” fusion facility—the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)—have said that on December 30, 2021, they were able to generate 120 million degrees Fahrenheit plasma (around 70 million degrees Celsius) and hold it for 1,056 seconds.
Tokamaks, like the donut-shaped EAST reactor, are often referred to as “artificial suns” as they are devices that replicate the fusion processes that occur within stars.
In the Sun, two hydrogen atoms are bashed together to make one helium atom, plus lots of energy. In stars the temperature only needs to be 60 million F (or 33 million degrees C) for that to be self sustaining, because the pressure is so much higher at the centre of the Sun. Here on Earth, […]
It’s almost like some at the ABC are sympathetic to the anti-wind-farm movement?
The awakening begins. There is an opening here for the two opposite ends of the political debate to come together, and to figure out who the real enemy is — something that would transform the political landscape. Before anyone gets the urge to rub their noses in it (no matter how deserved it is) ponder how useful this is as a way to open a conversation. There are still good green tinted people out there who have no idea they are being used, or that there is a cheaper energy source that feeds plants, doesn’t chop up birds and bats, and doesn’t consume 13,000 hectares of wilderness either.
The wind farms angering renewable energy fans
Steve Nowakowski was a fan of green energy, and hired as a photographer:
Now, as he looked down, he was shocked at what he saw.
Mt Emerald Wind Farm, Queensland, ABC
“I thought, ‘Geez, there’s a lot of destruction here. They’ve transformed what was a really great, pristine area … into a really industrial area’.”
Biologists don’t like it either:
According to James Cook […]
China’s Long March-5B launch*
This should rattle the Wokeness Cage: Russia and China are actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis. US assets are being harassed with lazers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms. The Russians even launched a satellite into an orbit so close to a US Security satellite that from the ground people couldn’t tell if it was being attacked, then, in something like a James Bond movie stunt, the Russian satellite launched a little target and shot it, “dangerously close”. That was in 2019. We can see now why Trump set up “Space Force”.
Last week the news came out that China’s space program was going nuclear, and the 1MW reactor would be 100 times larger than the one NASA plans to put on the moon by 2030.
Gen. David Thompson from Space Force estimates China may overtake the US in space by the end of the decade.
So by 2030 the US hopes to reduce CO2 by 50% and China hopes it will command space.
Meanwhile, China is a developing nation that doesn’t need to reduce CO2 emissions at all, and in the […]
The great offshore revolution that never happened
Dogger Bank Wind Farm
Dogger Bank will become the World’s Largest Wind Farm and maybe the World’s largest white elephant too.
Despite years of research and hyperbole we can conclusively say that offshore wind is still a charity project, losing money from start to end. The GWPF highlights a new Norwegian report that shows that the Net Present Value of Dogger Bank is “minus £970 million.”
Britain’s biggest, newest offshore wind farm still isn’t profitable. It may be killing eagles and hypnotising crabs, but it isn’t cost effective at making energy, and it isn’t cost effective at changing the global weather either.
NetZeroWatch saw it all coming:
The report confirms as series of findings published by the GWPF and others [1–5], which show that offshore wind costs are very high, at best are only falling slowly, and are far above the auction strike prices being agreed.
Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch said:
“We have been warning since 2017 that there has been no revolution in offshore wind costs. Every time we get new financial data from offshore wind farms, the cost estimates […]
Some poor sods will be paying extra to help Griffith Wind Farms cover the cost of shutting down for part of the COP26 Superhero Costume Party. If only that secret charge was listed on their electricity bill. Where is the transparency?
Twitter
Big Lie Number 1: that the Glasgow COP26 event is powered by 100% renewables.
It’s hard to believe, but some people think the wind powered electrons can be tracked and relied upon.
Sustainability Mag
There will be some accounting shell game where “100% of the annual supply” means they supply the whole years electricity in lumpy packets at times that no conference centre could run on. We know it’s wrong because lies don’t scale up. If the whole nation can’t be 100% renewable at the same time and in the same way, then the Conference centre isn’t 100% renewable either. It’s relying on coal and gas just like everyone else is.
The 100% renewable fakers are show-pony parasites on the system. They need the transmission lines, the back up, the inertia and the stable frequency but they Lord their 100% Renewable Badge knowing full well, that if everyone was “100% renewable” the system would […]
This is what Decarbonization Failure looks like:
Our World In Data
After three decades of effort, twenty-six glorious international COP meetings, six IPCC reports, and the installation of around 400,000 wind turbines, the total energy supplied in the big renewable energy transition still amounts to about 5% of total energy production.
The artificial Global Green energy transition is but a decoration on the energy cake. Twenty five thousand commercial planes aren’t electric. 6,225 bulk carriers are not powered by solar panels. And 260 smelters are molten hot and none of them work on wind turbines.
While the media green junkies tell how inevitable the renewable energy transition is, the wave we ride is the massive increase in the use of coal, oil and gas.
And it’s still growing.
9.7 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
Welcome to your prison comrade
A new Taiwanese study investigated wind farm noise on people in homes made of sandstone, concrete, iron or bricks. And they measured the low frequency noise inside and out, and with windows open and closed. Given the health risks involved, they advised that governments ought to set limits on how close towers can be, and recommend airtight windows that nobody opens much.
pixelrockerz
Perhaps someone should have done more studies like this before the world installed 750GW of wind power?
The same people that panic about the effect of a hot weekend on your grandchildren a hundred years from now, don’t seem so worried about whether the wind towers destroy your sleep or put you at risk of heart attacks today.
Thanks to MasterResource.
From the introduction of a new paper in Taiwan on the effects of wind turbine noise on people:
LFN [Low Frequency Noise] exposure has been found to cause a variety of health conditions. Exposure to LFN from wind turbines results in headaches, difficulty concentrating, irritability, fatigue, dizziness, tinnitus, aural pain sleep disturbances, and annoyance. Clinically, exposure to LFN from wind turbines may cause increased risk of epilepsy, […]
The GWPF have published a provocative piece by Professor Gwythian Prins, which I highly recommend. One chapter in particular captures the fragile moment around which global affairs is orbiting. The West, comfortable and corrupted, is only just starting to become aware of the duplicity and hostile intent of the Chinese Communist Party.
Excerpts from Chapter 3 below.
The Worm in the Rose Gwythian Prins
War by other means is upon us:
Part III: The security threats of Net Zero
The Chinese Communist Party’s Fifth Plenum text of October 2020, setting out the strategy to 2035, told the nation for the first time in decades to ‘prepare for war’(备战) – meaning in any and all forms. It is true that the Chinese military build-up since 2000 has been relentless and remarkable. However, as we will see, at present we do not face open war, but instead war by other means.
The West needs to be aware of the 36 Strategems from an Era of War
“To Loot A Burning House”
Xi’s tactics are also informed by The Thirty Six Stratagems from the era of the Warring States, a manuscript which is probably a little older than Sun […]
Yet again Australians vote for something and get the opposite. Toss the idea out of the airlock that this has anything to do with science, trees or weird weather. In a world of corruption and superpowers there are bigger forces at work.
As I said a week ago —the Net Zero pledge was apparently tit-for-tat for nuclear submarines. We get their subs; they get our promise to cripple-our-grid. Which sounds bizarrely unlikely, as if we needed more solar panels to fry the foreign frigates, or more windmills to foil their radar. As if, lord help us, a 0.0001 degree cooler climate will make us harder to invade? Sure. No one ever went to war with a solar powered tank. (Though NATO is thinking about it.)
Read Scott Morrison’s freaky words again. Join the dots. He told the party room that “climate change action had become a key pillar of the western alliance” which means AUKUS (or Australia-UK-US for foreign readers), and that “…there were economic and security imperatives in transitioning to a carbon neutral future.” He also said we need the western alliance “now more than ever”. In the same flavour, just today we hear suddenly that taxpayers will spend […]
Hello Nuclear Subs means Hello Net Zero Targets?
HMS Ambush
As I suspected, the whole Net Zero witchcraft push is being driven by our defense partners, and has nothing much to do with Australian voters. That explains why the government that won The Climate Election with a skeptical stance are now pushing blindly for “Net Zero targets”. It also explains why the public debate has shifted since the AUKUS deal just in time for Glasgow and has no content, apart from the insistence that we don’t want to be “left behind” in some global fashion race to wreck our electricity infrastructure faster than everyone else. Kudos to The Nationals who are still trying to respond to both The Voters, and the Science. Send them your support.
With this admission from inside Cabinet, we see that the AUKUS sub deal was probably quietly loaded with a climate deal too. If you want our subs, and our protection, you need to obey the carbon cult. Translated — “the Western Alliance” means nuclear subs from the US and UK. The veil is pulled back on the illusion of Democracy.
So now it’s “Build solar farms, and windmills, sign up for carbon […]
The Greens will not be happy. The push for pointless decarbonization inexorably leads to nuclear power. The UK is not only about to sign deals for 16 small nuclear reactors, they are shortlisting sites for a fusion plant. It’s another unintended consequence the Greens did not see coming.
UK to put nuclear power at heart of net zero emissions strategy
Jim Pickard and Natalie Thomas, Financial Times
U.K. ministers will put nuclear power at the heart of Britain’s strategy to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 in government documents expected as early as next week, the Financial Times reported.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is to unveil an overarching “Net Zero Strategy” paper as soon as Monday, along with a “Heat and Building Strategy” and a Treasury assessment of the cost of reaching the 2050 goal, the report said.
The main strategy will have a heavy focus on Britain’s nuclear power program. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was expected to give the go-ahead to the documents on Friday, according to the report.
The catch, consumers will have to pay a levy years before they get the electricity:
The […]
Edible crab like the one used in the study. Jean-Pol Grandmont Wiki
It’s a Nightmare on Crab Street
Crabs are being drawn to high electromagnetic (EMF) fields around undersea cables and getting trapped there for hours, “mesmerized”.
They are not just immobilized, in lab tests it screws up their blood chemistry and circadian rhythm too.
Nature-lovers might wonder what other marine life is also being impacted? What if the magnetic fields are playing havoc with migrating fish and turtles too? It might be handy to find that out before we build bigger taller towers offshore with bigger stronger cables.
Where is the Green outcry, or the Save-the-crabs campaign? Perhaps some kinds of pollution are OK “for the greater good”?
These are not some esoteric rare crustaceans, by the way, but common dinner crabs — the ones food chains and fisheries depend on.
If these crabs were victims of coal plants the headlines would be a catastrophe.
Underwater power cables are ‘mesmerizing’ crabs around Scotland
In a new study, researchers found brown crabs ‘freeze’ when they come too close to the electromagnetic fields generated by these cables. This disturbing behavior may negatively affect the marine creature’s […]
The Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant by Pareixk Federi
The global energy crisis is squeezing the green religion to its logical endpoint. As long as we pretend “carbon” is pollution, the only way out of the maze for badgered politicians is nuclear power. The renewables industry may have thought that beating us over the head with climate propaganda was going to make renewables dominant and profitable, but it may just push everyone into nukes instead.
With the gas price crisis, wind drought, and coal shortage, suddenly everyone is talking about nuclear power:
Nations Go Nuclear As Prices Spike & Renewables Fail
Michael Shellenberger
National leaders around the world are announcing big plans to return to nuclear energy now that the cost of natural gas, coal, and petroleum are spiking, and weather-dependent renewables are failing to deliver.
France was reducing nukes from 70% to 50% of its total power generation fleet, but not any more:
“The number one objective is to have innovative small-scale nuclear reactors in France by 2030 along with better waste management,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.
“But the mood has now changed,” the paper writes today. “Macron […]
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