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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
Games with levelized guesses don’t take all the hidden costs into account
Prize of the day for national policy research goes to Nick Cater, who managed to ridicule our billion dollar national science agency, the CSIRO, with a newspaper column.
The CSIRO put out a report proclaiming that nuclear power would be impossible before 2040 and cost “twice as much” as renewables. But Nick Cater just compared electricity in New South Wales to Finland to prove their 129 pages of modeled costs were wrong:
Finland’s clean, Green nuclear power a lesson for Labor
On Saturday…. Electricity generation in NSW was releasing 750g of carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of electricity. In Finland, it was 35g.
If the CSIRO’s GenCost report is to be believed, Finnish electricity prices should have gone through the roof a year ago when its newest reactor was turned on. They did not. The retail price of electricity in Finland, which is indexed to the spot market, came down almost immediately.
Were Energy Minister Chris Bowen to spend a few days in Finland, he might realise almost everything he says about nuclear is complete […]
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 […]
…
By Jo Nova
About 90% of solar panels installed in Germany come from China, and earlier this year one of the last solar panel manufacturers closed in Germany. Last week, what was left of the industry begged for mercy (and subsidies) which they didn’t get. Now another German solar panel manufacturer has closed down.
For some cruel reason German factories which are close to their customers, can’t compete with distant foreign factories which have access to slave labor, fossil fueled shipping and cheap coal fired electricity?
The bigger question, seemingly, is how did the country that invented the printing press, diesel engines, and the theory-of-relativity get fooled by such a stupid ploy? Someone told them they could save the world with unreliable energy, so they converted their generators to unreliable ones, only to discover that they can’t afford to use unreliable generators to make the unreliable generators they need to keep saving the world?
The only government stupider than Germany is the one that has already seen how badly this worked out and announces they’re going to do the same thing. Australia is not only ten years too late, but China has flooded the market to the […]
Solar panels eat the profits of the reliable generators for lunch
By Jo Nova
The system is reaching a crisis point and April is turning out to be the month of confessions
His speech was the sound of an industry being tortured. The transition is going backwards. Big projects are stalled. Costs are rising and reliable old assets are being closed too quickly. It’s like we are disassembling the plane as we fly it…
A couple of weeks ago in Australia the chief of Alinta Energy admitted in a big speech that the industry needs to be honest with the public about the costs of the transition. This marks a big shift from the “cheaper and cleaner” misinformation which the renewables industry was practically built on. Jeff Dimery had a stark warning — his company bought a large old coal plant in Victoria for a billion dollars in 2018, and it powers one fifth of Victoria. But to replace that today with renewables would cost $10 billion.
But he also laid bare the crushing effect subsidized rooftop solar PV panels are having on the transition. No news outlets seemed to appreciate the implications of this. Fully one in […]
By Jo Nova
In the Bermuda Triangle of electricity bills, the more cheap generators you add, the higher your electricity bills grow
The experts at the CSIRO tell us that renewables are the cheapest sources of electricity, with all their Capex calculations and their levelised maths, and yet the electricity bills set the house on fire. (It’s Russia’s fault!) Could it be that the experts accidentally forgot to analyze the system cost and that all the hourly megawatt dollars per machine don’t mean a thing?
In the race to the most expensive electricity in the world, this week the UK is the winner. Germany is handicapped by being bundled into the EU27, lumbered with all the French nukes and is therefore not in the running. Australia is missing in action, but possibly only because the price rises were too fast and too much for the Eurostat, the US DoE, and IEA to keep up with, so they gave up.
And people wonder why China is the world’s manufacturing base.
A European Commission study:
In the next graph is the “rest of the world”. After 2021 Australian electricity prices are unmarked for some reason, but officially they rose 20% two […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another signpost on the way to the Great Green Economy Downunder
We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.
The Driven, explains just how big it was:
The company says it has sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in more than 40 countries. At its peak it claimed to be the biggest maker of fast chargers in the US with a 30 per cent market share (unclear if this included the Tesla network), and a 75 per cent share in Australia, and one of the top three in Europe.
When it launched in 2021, shares were selling for $2,500 each. The current price is $1.35.
Tritium Share Price. NASDAQ
Tritium is the perfect emblem for the Technocratic Planned Economy
Only one year ago the Prime Minister of Australia was raving about them, and using Tritium as the posterchild to sell […]
By Jo Nova California was the Land of Solar Panels at the top of the Magic Subsidy Tree but that boom went bust
If solar panels were actually cheap and useful, everyone could have them, they’d pay for themselves, and there would be no point where the panel-party would grind to a halt. But if they were expensive, made something useless, and their product became toxic to the grid itself the government would have to artificially subsidize them to get them onto the grid in the first place, and then pop its own bubble before the bubble popped the grid. And so that time has arrived in California and there is carnage in the market.
The Duck has quacked
In a strange coincidence the Californian government cut the payments for solar-powered-electricity by 75% last year, and sales of solar panels fell to a quarter of what they were a year ago. That’s a “to” not a “by”. One in five solar contractors has already left the market. Careers and businesses — gone.
The new price for solar-powered-electricity is probably slightly closer to the true market value, which is almost zero, or even less for holy-green electricity at noon. The Duck […]
Paul Englher | ABC News
By Jo Nova
Just how wise is it to have a grid dependent on all this fragile infrastructure?
Nature seems to be telling us something about adding another 10,000 kilometers of vulnerable transmission lines.
Yesterday six high voltage transmission lines collapsed in Victoria leaving half a million people without electricity for hours. But only a few weeks ago five towers collapsed in Western Australia putting 30,000 in the dark. And out in Kalgoorlie, when the gas backup plants failed, thousands of people went for days without power in 40 degree heat. Some people were unable to call triple zero, freezers full of food were spoilt and nearly everything left to buy had to be paid for in cash.
In Victoria the towers fell at 1:10pm during a storm. Their loss triggered the shut down of 4 large coal power units at Loy B Yang taking out 2 GW of generation. It took three hours to get one turbine back on line, and eight hours to restore the second. Everyone is talking about “the coal fired outage” but about half the wind power running at the time was also lost, and over the […]
By Jo Nova
This week the agitprop-media was full of contrived good news about electricity prices in Australia, associated suggestively, in the loosest, most meaningless way with the word “renewables”. Not one of them said that long term prices were still higher than when we started trying to force unreliable wind and solar power on the grid, and not one of them said prices would be one half of the price now if the country was lucky enough to run off brown coal.
These misleading stories were disguised adverts for renewable energy pretending to be “news”. They were on display at The Guardian, The ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald, and every other paper across Australia. Not one journalist apparently had the wit to ask the AEMO how this compared to long term prices. But all of them obediently repeated that prices this December were 48% cheaper than the December before that, as if Australians like to discuss that sort of thing across the BBQ. Were monthly average wholesale prices good for you Jim?
Australia’s wholesale power prices fall by almost half as carbon emissions drop
Wholesale power prices across Australia’s main electricity market almost halved at […]
A wind farm near Emerald, Queensland (ABC)
By Jo Nova
After all these years, finally, signs that more Greens are waking up to the awful truth
Steve Nowakowski was a Greens candidate in Cairns in 2006. He was a co-founder of Rainforest Reserves Australia, and was hired as a photographer, but he didn’t like what he saw. Two years ago he was concerned at the environmental damage of the Emerald Wind farm, now he’s filming the destruction in the hope of stopping wind farms being built in Queensland. He’s calling it lunacy, and arguing we need nuclear power.
In a big leap, he even realizes the green groups are “colluding” with the government and the money making environmental vandals in the greatest land grab of the age. Mark my words, eventually this issue will split the Greens.
First Bob Brown former Greens leader, and now footsoldiers like Nowakowski and a few other conservationists are campaigning against wind turbines — word is spreading…
John McCarthy InQueensland writes:
Former Greens eco-warrior says we should all fear wind turbines
“I have never seen such collusion in my environmental career as I do now between big business, NGO’s and state […]
By Jo Nova
In a radical move, the French government has quietly dropped their renewables targets from their draft energy bill, risking being seen as unfashionable losers in billionaire ski clubs. The nation that, forty years ago, built 56 nuclear reactors in 15 years has decided they just need to build another 6 to 14 new nuclear plants to reach “Net Zero” by 2050. This puts them in danger of being one of the only nations on Earth that might reach their target.
This, of course, is terrible for the renewables industry as it risks exposing the wanton frivolity and utterly superfluous nature of the wind and solar subsidy farms. If France can do this without the bird chopping, the slave labor and the lithium bombs, so can nearly everywhere else.
It’s a big change from 2014 when France aimed to reduce nuclear power to just 50% by 2025.
As NetZeroWatch says in their email newsletter, this is a win:
France drops renewables targets, prioritises nuclear in new energy bill
The proposed text, which is slated to go before the cabinet early next month and then be submitted to lawmakers, reaffirms France’s commitment to nuclear power to […]
By Jo Nova
Two and a half years ago President Xi promised to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects” in China. Before this solemn pledge the CCP had approved a blockbuster 54 gigawatts of coal fired power plants in just two years. Afterwards, to show how committed they were to Net Zero principles and international agreements, they *only* approved 131 GW. As President Xi promised — he’s “strictly in control” (of a massive increase). He’s also strictly in control of the world’s manufacturing.
After being deceived, the UN, Greenpeace, and Joe Biden promptly did nothing at all — it’s not like the future of life on Earth is at stake. And John Kerry somehow saw only “agreement” and “hope”.
When faced with this environmental catastrophe, the BBC told the world about China’s green power surge instead, and only mentioned the coal in passing as an aside. China had spawned a world record in coal plant construction, but apparently these coal plants are not so bad because many are built on renewable parks, “partly as backup for all the new wind and solar farms”. As if CO2 emissions are neutralized just by the presence of the sacred talisman of “renewables”. It’s […]
Jo Nova
It seems people only wanted renewable energy if they got cheap loans
Just as the quarterly reporting season revealed crippling losses for wind power and EV’s, so it is with Solar energy.
The general US S&P shares index gained 15% this year but The Invesco Solar ETF (Fund) which invests in solar energy stocks around the world — fell by a dire 40%. Even the US “Inflation Reduction Act” couldn’t save the solar sector. As finances tighten with rising interest rates, apparently solar panel orders are among the first to be cancelled.
Some of the worst performers in the whole US share market are solar shares, with SolarEdge and Enphase losing 70% each this year. A few weeks ago, the CEO of SolarEdge said revenues this quarter were about half of what was expected. He blamed “unexpected cancellations” from European distributors. But US demand was down too. Indeed, the bad news started in California, the largest market in the US, when the government slashed home solar “net metering” payments in April by about 75%. Suddenly, it was going to take 10 years to pay off the panels. Solar panels were a luxury item.
If only solar panels […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
It’s just emblematic of your Clean Green Future
Complexity and false hope is eating the crown of Australia’s Net Zero transition — the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro scheme. Things have gone from “debacle” to Soviet Grade Industrial Fiasco. After Florence-the-tunnel-borer got stuck and created a sinkhole, workers spent seven months trying to shore up the ground, playing God against the mountain — pumping in grout, cement and polyurethane foam. But the foam made a gas so toxic the tunnel had to be evacuated. To make things worse the workers were originally told the gas was water vapor but it turned out to be isocyanate. At every point the Snowy Hydro team hid the bad news and issued propaganda, and it’s only taken the ABC a year to tell us the workers predicted the sinkhole, and three months to investigate the safety breach.
Still, that’s better than the NSW regulator who knows all the other safety breaches but won’t even share them, because it’s so bad ” it may affect the contractor’s reputation.” (Which it surely just did anyway.)
This is your low-carbon future. It was supposed to cost $2 billion but the bill […]
They’re not much use without a lot of cabling. | Image by Norbert Pietsch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Thanks to Oldbrew at Tallblokes Talkshop
Who knew high voltage cables running for kilometers in a deep electrolytic moving body of water would be expensive?
The 245kV Wolfe Island Cable | Photo by Z22
Despite offshore windfarms dealing in a kind of mechanical hell of high speed salt water spray, big waves and volatile wind conditions, surprisingly 85% of the insurance claims are because the underwater cables are failing.* If the subsea cables can’t be insured, it’s another unexpected cost threatening the economics of offshore wind.
The underwater cables needed for offshore wind are apparently so costly to repair, and the losses from lack of generation so steep, they are in danger of becoming uninsurable.
Subsea cable failures pose global threat to offshore wind
Energy News Live
The race to harness offshore wind energy has hit a significant roadblock, with the reliability of subsea cables emerging as a critical concern.
Global Underwater Hub (GUH) has raised alarm bells about the escalating issue of subsea cable failures.
October 6th, 2023 | Tags: Basslink, Subsea Cables, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable, Wind Power |  Print This Post | |
Wedge-tailed Eagle | Photo by “Fir0002/Flagstaffotos“
By Jo Nova
Greens destroying nature again
Some experts think there may be only 1,000 of these eagles left, our largest bird of prey, and yet in the last 12 years some 272 of them have been killed or injured in the vicinity of Tasmanian wind towers. That’s at least as far as the maintenance crews have noticed, and not that they were specifically looking…
So the number can only go up, and other types of birds are getting the chop too.
The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed eagle has been known to have a wingspan as large as 2.8m (9ft 3in). They mate for life, and a single nest can be 1 – 3 meters across.
Tasmanian wind rush ‘may push eagles to extinction’, says study
By Matthew Denholm, The Australian
Tasmanian wind farms and transmission lines have killed or injured 321 threatened eagles in 12 years, but the real figure is likely far higher, a new study finds.
The peer reviewed study, published in Australian Field Ornithology, uses data from wind farms, TasNetworks and eagle rescuers to identify the death or injury of 272 endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed […]
By Jo Nova
The Year of Gloom continues for Wind Power
Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.
The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:
‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms
Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs
Jillian Ambrose
None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.
The companies had warned […]
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