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By Jo Nova
Finally, twenty years too late, Australian leaders are talking about the galactic cost of making a spare energy grid that might, maybe, hopefully one day reduce world temperatures by one thousandth of a degree. Sadly they are still not talking about why that’s a pointless quest, why CO2 feeds the poor, warmth is good, humans emissions are irrelevant, or how science has become a turgid swamp patrolled by dead sacred cows. But it’s a start!
We got the trifecta: Our car-crash energy bills, the revolution of common sense in the US, and the appearance of our own election on the horizon have set off the Air-raid sirens to wake a sleeping nation.
It’s only half a trillion dollars
The Minister for Energy says the cost of renewables by 2050 will be $122 billion (AUD). Not convinced, the Opposition commissioned a study that estimates it’s more like $650 billion. But what’s a half a trillion dollars when you have hope, faith, and a fantasy to make storms a bit nicer? It’s a horror show. The Labor Government wants every family of four to spend something like $100,000 on their wind and solar vision over the next 25 […]
Photo by Ansalmo Juvaga
By Jo Nova
Seen on X
Spare a thought for the people of Cuba
The situation went from awful to something much worse.
They ran out of working electrical plants ten days ago, and endured blackouts lasting for four straight days, including one hurricane. Reports coming out suggest that though electricity is partly restored, it’s often only for four hours a day. Not surprisingly, the country is semi-paralyzed — schools are still closed and “labor services” are largely non-existent, apart from hospitals, funerals and efforts to repair the damage caused by Hurricane Oscar.
Soon they may run out of people. People were fleeing Cuba before things got this bad.
The big blackout began on Friday October 18th. In the next four days they restarted the grid three or four times only to have it crash again, and while power is sort of mostly restored the structural problems appear to be dire. Nothing really sums the state of the communist economy better than one line on Vox news which described the moment the big blackout began:
“Seven of the country’s eight thermoelectric plants, which generate power for the island, were […]
Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.
The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.
Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’
By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian
Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without […]
By Jo Nova
Soon every tech billionaire will have their own nuclear power plant
Two weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.
Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it’s against the religion).
The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber rich get that kind of luck.
Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser […]
By Jo Nova
Thanks to Paul Homewood at NotAlotofPeopleKnowThat for finding this gem of a video.
Commiserations to friends in the UK, where Ed Miliband, or worse, his new National Electricity System Operator (NESO) think that flywheels will save money because the UK won’t need to maintain back up power stations and import so much electricity.
Ed Miliband is the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is a bit like being the Minister for War and Peace at the same time, or perhaps more like Health and Ebola. His big new plan is to set up a big new bureaucracy (NESO) and their big idea is to stop blackouts by installing giant flywheels around the country.
Flywheels are good at smoothing out the frequency glitches, but the second largest flywheel operation in the world would only power the UK for a fraction of a second. It’s going to take a lot of flywheels, or as David Evans dryly remarked, if they can speed up the flywheels it might work, but to put enough energy in, they may need to get close to the speed of light.
Ed Miliband reveals plan to prevent net zero blackouts
by […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day of profligate waste in Renewable World
It’s barely spring in Australia and already we’re reaching the point where there’s too much solar. There’s such an excess of useless energy, prices are negative, meaning the hapless generators have to pay people to take the poison power away. And on Sunday, at a time when investors ought be making their peak profit for the day, they were rushing to turn 80% of their panels off.
Feel the pain — the stunted curve of the solar plants (below) is supposed to be the same shape as the rooftop PV.
In reality, this is how we make the parabolic curve of orbital solar physics fit a rectangular box — by building five times as much as we need and wasting most of it.
Anero.id
Bear in mind, this is just the start of a the lumpy road to nowhere. Even though we already have more solar panels than we can use, we’re supposed to be installing 22,000 more panels every day in Australia to reach our mystical NetZero target.
Paul McArdle of WattClarity noticed the dire situation. As he says “rooftop PV is killing […]
The clean green future doesn’t have much room for wilderness
By Jo Nova
John Constable puts some numbers on The terrifying scale of the green revolution in The Spectator this week.
Ponder just the scale of the Sophia Offshore industrial wind plant being built off the UK. The wind is free, but to collect enough of it to power 2% of the country, the UK will have to build 100 wind turbines, some 200 kilometers out in the North Sea. Each blade is 108m long and weighs 65 tons, or about as much as a semi-trailer. When the wind blows hard enough, about 200 tons of matter will rotate above the ocean. The box holding all the spinning parts together weighs another 500 tons and needs to be suspended 140 meters up in the air over the waves and during storms.
Each of the 100 turbines will reach 250 meters high, which is “only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building”. So much effort and so little to show for it.
To make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall in the drink with the first stiff breeze, the turbines need to be weighed down with more than a thousand […]
ENI Katherine — might as well be a pagan temple to the Sun.
By Jo Nova
The Northern Territory is a test case for renewable energy and it’s a bonfire
In 2016, the new Labor Government waved a magic wand and commanded they would be 50% renewable by 2030. The experts said it was doable and would save $30 million a year. They gave out the permits for large solar installations, which began construction in 2019, but then suddenly changed the rules in 2020, and wouldn’t let the solar plants connect to the main Darwin-Katherine grid. Unbelievably, 64 megawatts of solar panels that cost $40 million dollars have sat, doing nothing, for four long years.
“It’s just reflecting back into space, not being used to power the grid and to substitute for diesel and gas turbine production,” said local vet Peter Trembath, who leased his land to energy company Eni Australia for the solar project.
“It’ll be some technical issue, but you’d reckon they would have sorted that out before Eni spent $40 million to erect it.” — Max Rowley, ABC News June 2022
It’s always the Grids fault…
The reason they […]
By Jo Nova
What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?
Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?
Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:
“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”
It’s only a week without electricity…
Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)
Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]
By Jo Nova
Hiding the costs of renewables until after the next election
The largest coal plant in Australia was supposed to close in August next year, but the NSW government decided to buy a two year extension until a few months after the next state election. Now the modeling comes out showing that they decided to keep the Eraring coal plant running to prevent the shocking price spikes from disturbing the voters. Keeping the coal plant will reduce wholesale electricity bills by a few billion dollars. (Why don’t we keep it open for ten years?)
Presumably his reelection chances would be worse if “saved the planet”, and shut the coal plant a few months before the election instead.
They know the voters don’t want the transition. They know it will cost more. And yet they do it anyway…
Bizarrely, this news comes from the renewable industry site Reneweconomy, where Giles Parkinson doesn’t seem to notice this shows coal power is cheap and renewables are hideous. Apparently he doesn’t mind inflicting costs on hapless homeowners, he is just bummed that they couldn’t force more unreliable energy and battery packs on the grid even sooner:
NSW confirms Eraring closure delay […]
By Jo Nova
The Crash Test Dummy Nation wins a Gold Medal in Electricity Prices
And you thought last week was bad. While the single spike at $17,000 a megawatt hour in five states simultaneously was a record, just a week later we have the double spike bonfire — peaking at breakfast and dinner on the same day in our two largest states. That’s a high degree-of-difficulty (to pay the bill). This was not just a 5-minute bid rocket — it was 90 full minutes of blitzkreig twice in a day for both NSW and Victoria. With admirable supporting efforts in burning money in Tasmania and South Australia for breakfast, and then in Queensland, which joined the financial bonfire for dinner.
The average price for the whole 24 hour period of August 5th was eye-watering. Last week the spike flattened out to about $300 per megawatt hour across the day. But yesterday in NSW and Victoria, the average price was $2,150 across both states for 24 hours in a row.
It’s possible the AEMO will have to take over the market again in some states to put the fire out.
Welcome to renewable hell
At both peaks Victoria was burning […]
Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built
There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:
The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip […]
By Jo Nova
The real cost of back up
Imagine building and maintaining a perfectly good gas plant and then having it sit around for five whole years “just in case”?
There’s been a wind drought in the last three months in Australia, which meant hydro power had been used more than expected to fill the gap. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s been dry spell for most of the last year in Tasmania too and the dams were getting low. So on June 6th, the Combined Cycle Gas plant at Tamar Valley was set up to run for the first time since 2019.
Back in 2016 the maintenance costs of the keeping the CCGT at Tamar Valley on “30 day” standby was $12 to $24 million a year, depending on who you asked. So the five year cost of gas backup is in the order of $100 million, but those costs will be slapped on the gas plant bill, when really they’re a weather dependent renewables cost. What we need is reliable energy, not random electricity. If energy companies were only paid for reliable dispatchable power, the wind and solar plants would have to build their own “back up […]
By Jo Nova
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia
For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.
If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?
The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]
By Jo Nova
Global fossil fuel use hits a new record level in 2023
We spent $1.77 Trillion dollars on the clean energy transition last year, yet our fossil fuel use is still rising and our emissions are still increasing.
The Energy Institute released their annual “Statistical Review of World Energy”. Total energy used in the world went up by 2% showing no sign of slowing down. For the first time, more coal was used in India than Europe and North America combined, a trend that is unlikely to stop soon. Despite there being more EVs on Earth than ever before, oil consumption was up 2% to above 100 million barrels for the first time. China overtook the US as the country with the largest oil refining capacity in the world last year at 18.5 million bpd. But the US overtook Qatar as the largest exporter of LNG. And global man-made emissions of carbon dioxide exceeded 40 gigatons for the first time.
Imagine what a different place the world would be if we spent that money on something useful? Just a tenth of that might provide clean water and sanitation for the poorest of the poor and stop children […]
By Jo Nova
The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road
Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.
Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them to, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along in the mist. The ultimate low-emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, […]
By Jo Nova
How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.
Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.
With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.
We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.
Anero.id
Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.
It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our […]
by Lieven
By Jo Nova
But who needs radar right?
We found out last year that offshore wind turbines scramble Air Force Radars. RAF pilots already use the turbines in training exercises to help them hide. But ships also use radar and a new study quietly reported a couple of years ago that offshore wind turbines will interfere with shipping radar, may cause collisions, and interfere with search and rescue. The 2022 report was from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US.
But it’s OK right, we just need to upgrade all the old radar systems, keep boats out of the area, or wrap the blades of the turbines in the same material we use on stealth aircraft. (That will add to the costs of wind power). No doubt GPS and AI systems can help, but radar adds an independent and well developed layer of safety. Who wants to purely rely on the satellite connection on a stormy night?
And after we’ve built all the wind towers, upgraded the boats and planes, then we can build the second and third generation of turbines and fill holes in the ground with the waste from the […]
By Jo Nova
There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste
Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.
The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).
Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.
The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.
Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re […]
By Jo Nova
The more wind turbines we have the more useless they are
There goes those plans to cover the continental shelf with talismen to the Wind Gods.
New research shows wind turbines off the East Coast of the US could end up stealing as much as a third of the energy from other wind turbines downstream. And in some conditions, the turbulent wake they leave might stretch out 55 kilometers behind them. This effect is worst on turbines in the same “farm” but could even affect other wind farms a long way off.
The wake effect will be strongest in summer. We’ll just have to ask everyone to turn off their air conditioners then?
Scientific civilizations do this sort of research before they commit $10 trillion dollars, set up a trading scheme, and blow up the coal plants. Imagine if building a coal plant near another plant made it 30% less efficient on hot days…
Hat tip to the NetZeroWatch email list:
Wind turbine ‘wake effect’ could reduce arrays’ power output by 30%
By Kirk Moore, WorkBoat
The researchers’ paper published March 14 in the journal Wind Energy Science suggests that offshore wind […]
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