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To understand the real value of electricity, consider the price at which people will give it up. “Demand Response” is the nice euphemism for a voluntary blackout. At what point do people volunteer to go without? For most of the market, apparently, it’s more than $7500/MWh.
If I read this graph correctly, look how fast the prices rise, and how small the response is. For example, in South Australia there is only about 10MW available at less than $300/MWh? (From this AEMO report). For reference the total SA demand is around 1500MW. So 10MW is less than 1%.
(See below for the
Consider how few people are willing to turn the electricity off:
AEMO expects there to be approximately 50 MW of demand response in NSW when the price reaches $1,000/MWh.
The total size of the NSW state market is about 10,000MW. Retail electricity sells for $250 — $470MWh (and only $100/MWh in the US). Hence when the price hits two to four times the normal retail cost of electricity, only about 5% of the market say they will willingly stop using it. When the price hits $7500MWh another 2% will give it up. We can’t […]
Six months to go and why waste a perfectly good press opportunity?
Hold on to your hat: This draft is almost the same as every other draft ever was.
A draft United Nations climate science report contains dire news about the warming of the planet, suggesting it will likely cross the key marker of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of temperature rise in the 2040s, and that this will be exceedingly difficult to avoid.
Blah. Blah. Must act urgently. Blah. The two messages we will never hear is that we are doing enough or spending too much.
The leak is so predictable, and such a standard marketing tool, that the IPCC even has an excuse at-the-ready:
The document’s leak has become a standard affair for major United Nations climate science reports, because they are seen by so many reviewers.
This is supposed to be a transparent process to solve a global problem. How can that be “leaked?”
A slight change in flavour is that while we were always aiming for two arbitrary degrees of warming, now we are now also aiming for an arbitrary 1.5C as well. The lower target is unachievable, apparently, allowing […]
Great news (though how low is our bar, that it’s “great” that after seven long expensive years Tim Ball can speak freely?). As reported on WUWT: Tim Ball’s free-speech victory over Andrew Weaver – all charges dismissed!
Anthony Watts: I got word tonight from David Ball, son of Dr. Tim Ball via Facebook messenger:
This morning the judge dismissed all charges in the lawsuit brought against Tim by BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver. It is a great victory for free speech.
Andrew Weaver launched the suit in 2011.
In 2014 Ezra Levant’s wrote: “Silencing Critics instead of debating them”
Weaver sued climatologist Dr. Tim Ball for, amongst other things, saying Weaver was “lacking a basic understanding of climate science,” according to a glowing New York Times article, cheering on his SLAPP suit.
Seriously? Suing someone, in a court of law, for saying you don’t understand global warming? This from a scholar, an academic, a teacher? And now a politician – an opposition politician, no less. Weaver is now a Green Party MLA in British Columbia, someone who hurls insults as part of his job description.
That’s not what true academics do. […]
“Valve Turners” in action. The Hi-vis vest will help a lot if that gas leaks.
The Five “Valve Turners” broke in and turned off valves on the Keystone Pipeline and four other cross-border pipelines — in Washington, Montana and Minnesota. They are in their fifties and sixties and brave enough to risk jail, but not apparently brave enough to read skeptical material that might show that the actions they think are noble are really misguided, illegal, narcissistic, risky stunts as well as being pointless and inconvenient to thousands.
Foster, who is 53, was charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. At his bond hearing in Cavalier, N.D., he learned that he faced a maximum sentence of more than 26 years.
The NY Times gives them hero treatment. Scott of the Antarctic could not get a write up this nice:
What Foster didn’t expect was that once he’d broken through the chain-link fence, he would be briefly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he was about to do. He faced away from the biting wind, and allowed himself to cry. He then put a gloved hand on the […]
Australia has a gold plated network, which is why our electricity is so expensive.
However we also have gold plated possums:
Distributor blames possums for third power outage
More than 20,000 homes in Melbourne’s southeast had another night without electricity on Sunday, the third major power outage for Victoria in three weeks.
An Ausnet spokeswoman confirmed 23,915 customers were left without power for about 90 minutes from 11.42pm in suburbs including Bayswater, Boronia, Ferntree Gully, Heathmont, Knoxfield, Scoresby and Wantirna. She said the power cut was the result of a fault at the Boronia substation, which could have been triggered by leaves or branches or other plant debris flying into overhead power lines, or animals, birds or possums on the line.
Incredibly bad luck.
Or not. They don’t really know why this blackout occurred yet.
Workers are still investigating the cause of the fault…
The Victorian government blames the privately owned retailers, and has ordered them to pay compensation. This is the funny asymmetry with electricity pricing – it costs less to generate it, than to not generate it. A 3 – 20 hour blackout might “earn” $80 in compensation.
8.9 out of 10 based […]
What energy transformation?
The EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2018 is out. The hard heads at the US Dept of Energy crunched the numbers, assumed technology will improve, and modeled the outcomes. According to their best estimates (and even their “worst” estimates) thirty years from now, the main energy source for the US is natural gas and fossil fuels. Renewables grows from 5% to 14%, but coal, nukes, hydro stays about the same. When the Australian Greens say “we don’t want to be left behind”, the answer is “Exactly! So explore for gas! Use Nukes!”
The World’s largest economy will still be nearly 80% fossil fueled in 2050.
On the road, most people are still using gasoline cars, and here’s the kicker — electricity prices are still at about 11 cents per kilowatt hour. Weep all ye Australians, Brits, Germans and other who would be grateful if electricity only rose 10% a year, not 10% over 30 years.
How much does an interconnector cost from Townsville to Texas? 😉
h/t Paul Homewood who has quoted Mark Perry from AEI:
Despite all of the hype, hope, cheerleading, fuel standards, portfolio standards, and taxpayer subsidies for renewable energies like wind and […]
The Green Blob is going to have to get rid of satellites. Real data is so inconvenient.
For years many people called scientists have assumed, like any smart 5 year old would, that islands are fixed blobs of rock and sand that just sit there and sink as oceans rise. Now satellite images show that three quarters of the islands in Tuvalu are growing rather than shrinking.
Total land area is up 2.9%. Total government funded scientists who predicted reality, down 97%.
…
Since our emissions helped create nearly a square kilometer of free real estate in Tuvalu, it seems only fair that they return any climate funds, and pay a royalty. 😉
The whole of Tuvalu is 26km2 and about 10,600 people live there. Total GDP is $32 million. It’s a cheap marketing tool. In May last year, despite Tuvalu being used as an advertising posterchild for climate change for years, it had not received funding from the Green Climate Fund. In August 2017 UNDP finally promised $38 million. That’s theoretically an extra income equivalent to 20% of their GDP for the next seven years. No wonder these islanders are keen to talk “climate change”.
Scientists who have […]
….
Complexity has a price
Royal Adelaide Hospital, dubbed the “third most expensive building in the world” is doing more to help with global climate control than any other first world hospital. But a few weeks ago some of the planet saving batteries leaked all over the floor.
The government has claimed it [Royal Adelaide Hospital] produces half the greenhouse gas emissions of other hospitals.
Shame about 80 litres of sulphuric acid spilled into a hospital room. Firefighters were called in, and one person had to be decontaminated.
Are battery acid burns covered on your health plan?
Four giant batteries installed inside the new $2.4 billion Royal Adelaide Hospital to help the facility meet the Weatherill government’s strict low-emission targets have ruptured without warning, spilling 80 litres of sulphuric acid.
The toxic accident in a power generator room inside the hospital, which opened in September after delays and legal disputes over building defects, saw one person exposed and decontaminated at the scene by firefighters.
The batteries won’t be replaced til people know what went wrong:
Central Adelaide Health Network chief executive Jenny Richter said replacement batteries had been ordered but would […]
Another variation of Climate-Panic was unleashed today on hapless tourism operators. The whole entire $40b tourism industry in Australia is at risk apparently. Here are three points the doom-mongers and our “journalists” didn’t think of:
People like hot weather holidays. “Climate change” (if it happens) would mean longer beach seasons, more greenery, and coral reefs could spread. Average temperatures vary by 14C across Australia. The average January maxes range from 22.5C to 36.5C. Some fans of the renewables industry want you to believe that a two degree rise will wipe the nation off the list of visitable places, as if Hobart at 24C will be unvisitable? Sure. (Please sell me your tourist resorts now.) In recent record breaking hot years, international tourist arrivals to Australia have grown 40%. See the devastating effect of the last super hot years on international tourism to Australia.
Australia got more tourists than ever in the hot El Nino years of 2015, 2016.
Amos Aikman in The Australian:
‘$40bn at risk’ as climate change threatens tourism
Australia’s $40 billion tourism industry is in danger, with visitors likely to face more bad weather, deadly jellyfish and damaged beaches due to climate change, […]
Australia’s oldest and most iconic site has changed dramatically, but major site changes are not even being recorded.
The way the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) treat this site says a lot about the unscientific, shoddy, biased standards it uses at sites everywhere. This was their headquarters. Experts walked past new walls, construction and highways, yet they didn’t record them? Beggars belief.
Just as Peter Ridd warns us that we can’t trust some marine and reef institutes, Bill Johnston is the whistle-blower warning us about the Bureau of Met. There is no law of science that says human institutes are infallible. When they run off the rails, how do we find out? Ridd issued a warning from the inside and ended up in the Federal Court. When people, like Bill write from the outside, the BoM waves the peer-review gatekeeper, and anonymous reviewers can easily shut that gate, and without any penalty.
The louvered thermometer house in front of the Observatory in 1864. (Courtesy of the State Library of NSW.)
Sydney Observatory is one of the longest running stations in the Southern Hemisphere, starting in 1859. It was Australia’s premier meteorology site and in the 1800’s it was known […]
Another day, another apocalypse. Life in a perfect climate
Poor sods. After 90,000 dismal cold years things were finally just warming up when a bunch of comet fragments from a a 62 mile-wide comet, crashed into our atmosphere. It was around 13,000 years ago, and the fireballs started the ultimate black Saturday blaze which converted 10 million square kilometers of wilderness into unauthorized carbon emissions*. Somehow, all those reckless greenhouse gas additions didn’t seem to stop the airborne dust triggering a return to a mini ice age for a thousand years. It also punched a hole in the ozone layer meaning everyone probably had to wear more yak-fat sunscreen or get more skin cancer (I suspect data is bit lean on that).
Glaciers started growing again, some ocean currents changed and thus the Younger Dryas unfolded according to a couple of new papers.
In a fairly dramatic shift of landscaping styles, mother nature razed whole pine forests and replaced them with poplars.
Gaia is full of surprises: in the end, falling lumps of ice set fire to 10% of land on Earth, and making 10,800BC the worst carbon footprint since the last 62 mile wide rock hit Earth. Primitive tribes […]
Everyone is talking about The Nunes memo, possibly because the bigger implications of what it reveals — something like an attempted coup. Explosive. Corruption at the highest level.
Big Claims:
Bigger than Watergate. Tip of the Iceberg. More Memos to come.
This thread covers the most interesting things I’ve read. First up, some very provocative talk. Further down, elected Reps. speaking I presume in careful legally vetted words. Lastly, some Democrat replies. In the middle, a diversion about the role of the media — also a part of the Deep State. h/t David. Roger. Scott of the Pacific. Charles. Pat. RAH. others… Thanks.
THE RIGHT’S SPIN: Watergate X1000: What The MSM Is Hoping you Ignore About the FISA Memo,
by Lucian Wintrich:
With the release of the memo, we finally have proof that … the Clinton machine, powered by the Obama Administration, using the DNC as its main appendage, funded the creation of a false dossier, that they simultaneously leaked to the press and sold to the FBI, and then pressured top government employees to turn that into a FISA warrant, and more broadly into what the MSM refers to as the “Russia Investigation”.
Hillary Clinton, […]
AEMC is the Australian Energy Market Commission. It’s “the rule maker for Australian Electricity and gas markets”. They make the National Electricity, Gas, and Energy Retail rules. There are a lot of government bureacracies. AEMC sound more influential than most, and they are asking for consultation, but by Monday. There will be a chance to comment in March, but I know some readers have material already written that is relevant. Sorry about the short notice.
AEMC invites consultation on ways to deliver a reliable supply of energy at the lowest cost
Stakeholders are encouraged to provide input on the Interim report.
9.1 out of 10 based on 47 ratings […]
Something great is happening in the US
Here’s a smattering of US news that isn’t being heard much in Australia. 75% of Americans liked Trump’s speech, and 80% felt proud. Trumps tax reforms means companies are returning to the US for the first time in decades. (How will Australia compete?) In the last month, approval for his tax bill has tripled as people figure out they will get to keep more of their money. Meanwhile James Delingpole notes a big moment in the climate debate: “It’s over” he says. Climate change didn’t rate a mention in The State of the Union or in the Democrat rebuttal.
On the other hand, the Australian ABC said Trump’s State of the Union call for unity falls on deaf ears. Sure. Listen to the crowd. There is so much applause you will get bored of it. The ABC spin is the sanitized reference to how the left half the crowd sits, stony faced, wearing black, with sad expressions, apparently disapproving of wages rising and other good news. Black jobs. Tax cuts. Car companies coming back to the US. Who cares? Meanwhile, the other half of of the audience is doing a fitness workout, up, […]
UPDATE: Funding target reached already. Thank you! I am astonished, very relieved and most importantly incredibly grateful for the support. I would also particularly like to thank Anthony, Jennifer Marohasy, Jo Nova, Willie Soon, Benny Peiser and many others for getting the issue up on blogs and spreading the word. Kind regards, Peter _________________________ JCU is trying (and failing) to gag Peter Ridd from discussing why we can’t trust scientific organisations
Last August Professor Peter Ridd said the unsayable — that we can no longer trust scientific institutions. His employer, James Cook University (JCU) could have explained why they were trustworthy, but instead they fired back with a formal censure and ordered him to be silent, effectively to stop him criticizing the current state of science or scientific institutions. Then knowing exactly how respectable, ethical, and scientific this is, they also ordered him not to mention the censure too. Let’s censor the censure!
If there was a crisis in science, what academic would be allowed to point it out?
It gets dirtier, apparently now they are even trawling through his private emails as well, hunting for more ammunition for their misconduct case. Who’s a bit desperate?
Hypothetically, […]
Perth was lucky enough to see a full blood moon eclipse last night (and at a sensible hour). The red color comes as sunlight passes through dust, and became much more obvious once we got half the moon covered. It was also a supermoon and a so-called blue moon (being the second full moon in January). h/t Tom Q. Thanks for the call.
Blood Moon, Super Moon, Blue Moon. Photo, Jan 2018
With a different exposure the shadow of the Earth was more obvious.
Blood Moon, Super Moon, Blue Moon. Photo, Jan 2018
Unlike the edge of sunrise on the moon, which is beautifully sharp, the edge of the Earth shadow was blurred and spread over a wider area. The camera found it hard to cope with both the intense full moon light and the shadow side. In some exposures there is a real sense of it being a 3D ball hung in space. A curiosity, but well worth the look if you get the chance. The next total lunar eclipse that will be visible in the UK is on July 27, 2018. Americans and UK folk can look forward to another “super blood moon” eclipse coming on […]
More bad luck for the renewables industry. Despite providing free energy from the sun and wind, electricity prices keep rising relentlessly, shockingly fast. Even doubling in wholesale costs in South Australia and Victoria.
It was supposed to be cheap to collect low-level-energy across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Who knew that subsidized, unreliable energy would induce volatile pricing, allow the players to game the system, create obscene spikes, drive out the cheapest providers, require expensive battery storage, more frequency control, more maintenance, just as much back up supply, $400 million dollars worth of extra diesel generators (and the rest) and extra long transmission lines? Who knew? — Probably thousands of engineers.
Spot the pattern? Every other nation with lots of renewables has expensive electricity and our forward market says there’s more price rises coming.
Australian electricity prices rising six times faster than wages are growing
Sydney Morning Herald
Electricity prices have jumped by six times the rate of the average pay rise, new figures reveal, as family wallets are increasingly squeezed by essential services such as education, utilities and fuel.
The most significant price rises were electricity, up 12.4 per cent, fuel up 10.4 […]
Ideas that don’t belong…
7.7 out of 10 based on 26 ratings
What happens to a poor tree when you withhold rain for a whole month, then hit it with four days in a row of 43C temperatures? It was so hot, some of the leaves on these trees got close to 49-50 °C.
In at least one gum species in Australia, the answer is “not much”. They suck up lots of water from their deep roots and sweat it out til the heatwave passes. The trees become evaporative coolers “siphoning up” water. They cope so well, that not only did the trees not die, but their trunk and height growth were unaffected. Indeed, only about 1% of the leaf area even exhibited browning.
Whole tree chambers in Richmond, New South Wales, Australia. Twelve 9-m-tall chambers in a field setting (a) enclose the canopies of individual Eucalyptus parramattensis trees rooted in soil (b). Two heatwave chambers can be seen on the left of the infrared image, along with several control chambers (c; temperature in °C).
But with global warming running at a heady 0.13C per decade, you might wonder how many years will it take for the trees to adapt?
From the paper — “one day”:
The gums rapidly […]
How much do we hate Lignite Gas?
Victoria is suffering the largest rises in wholesale electricity prices in the country, as it sits on large gas fields that it won’t touch. Why — geniuses hope to reduce global droughts and floods and sea level in 2100.
Robert Gottleibsen savages the state governments that conducted the renewables experiment without mentioning the real costs or the cheap alternatives.
If Victoria allowed its gas to be developed the energy scene in Australia would be transformed, as would the outlook for the nation.
But that’s not much consolation for those in vast areas of rural NSW and Victoria plus suburban Melbourne and small areas of South Australia who suffered blackouts or reduced power on Sunday night. It’s true part of the outages were caused by fuses, but the outages were too widespread. It’s another smokescreen.
If similar conditions are repeated on weekdays and/or extend over several days the blackouts will be devastating as a result of the political vandalism. Government spin doctors and others are desperately trying to conceal the truth about the damage governments headed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (plus her predecessors […]
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