The supreme auditors of Germany warned about the costs of Green energy a few years ago, but now they are paying attention to energy security too, and with sudden alarm they’ve announced that Green energy poses “an existential threat” to Germany.
It’s something dumb bloggers have been saying for years. But this is good news that German bureaucratic numerical masters are on to it.
So explosive is the German Government Audit report that Die Welt and the government auditors see the Energiewende as a “danger for all of Germany”.
Daniel Wetzel at German national daily Die Welt reports on the latest German Federal Court of Auditors’ warning: “If things continue like this, Germany as a business location is in danger. The costs are out of control – and there is a growing threat of an electricity shortfall.”
The Bundesrechnungshof in Germany or Federal Audit Office sounds rather awesome — legislators can’t tell it what to do, and its exact position in the layers of power is disputed, which only makes it sound more significant.*
The Federal Audit Office sees the danger that the energy transition in this form will endanger Germany as a business location and overwhelm the financial strength of electricity-consuming companies and private households. This can ultimately jeopardise social acceptance of the energy transition.”
No one will want to do business in Germany, everyone will be poor, and they worry about the social acceptance of wind plants?
“Ever higher electricity prices” are also to be feared in the current system. The Federal Court of Auditors quoted from a study according to which an additional 525 billion euros would have to be raised for the power supply including the network expansion in the years 2020 to 2025. Electricity prices for private households are already 43 percent above the European average.
The Auditors say the government has too many rosy assumptions and they underestimate the need for more reserve power.
According to Federal Audit Office data, the Energiewende has cost around 34 billion euros in 2017 alone. In addition to the federal government’s expenditure of almost 8 billion euros, this also includes the burdens on end consumers, in particular due to the renewable energy levy (EEG). “The Federal Government, incidentally, does not have an overall grasp of the costs or any transparency in this respect.”
The wastage of resources to implement the Energiewende was “unprecedented”…
Is there a process other countries can use?
Will government audit offices do the due diligence that the politicians, media and academics won’t?
And so the mask comes off. After forty years of cheating in a “forced technology transfer” the game is up. Trump called China for the theft of intellectual property, then launched a trade war, but the CCP already had stolen much of the information it needed.
This is not just an economic war, this is a big wet blanket on some kinds of scientific research. With one big bad player in the game breaking the rules, there is less incentive for people to announce and share discoveries. Royalties can’t be enforced, and a competitor might copy and compete against you. Are we entering a new era cold war of secrecy?
Back to Zang: Now that there is no need to hide the theft, nor pander in the hope of taking more, another Chinese Professor openly bragged about the situation last week:
For the past 40 years, the Chinese regime only did one thing: plagiarize, Zang Qichao, a prominent marketing expert and visiting professor of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, told a group of Chinese entrepreneurs recently.
“What intellectual property rights? What patented technology? We’ll get it first and deal with it later.”
Through this approach, China has skyrocketed to become one of the world’s leading economies, and now finds that there’s nothing left to replicate, Zang said.
For years, the CCP told businesses they would get access to the vast Chinese market if they worked with local firms. This arrangement meant Chinese staff soon learnt how everything worked, then gradually replaced the foreigners.
“When we look back, the factories are ours, the equipment is ours, the technology is ours, the patents are ours,” Zang said. “The foreigners have all gone.”
Imagine a Westerner anywhere proudly saying “the foreigners have all gone?”
Feel the hostility — the complete lack of respect or shred of any gratitude.
Where are the squad of progressive Sino activists lecturing Zang for his racist hate? The CCP plagiarized many things, but they didn’t copy that.
The West hoped China would develop like Japan. The good people of China probably hoped that too.
The more Woke the West gets, the more it sleeps at the wheel.
A new program promoted by the Oregon Department of Education is designed to “dismantle” instances of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.”
Calling all victims! (And if you aren’t one now, you will be soon.)
“White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions,” the guide states. “Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics.”
From the headline, this new “maths” has all the racist underpinnings of a gloriously oppressive education — one that tells students that maths is really a “white” thing. It’s implicit in the mission statement that those with a colored complexion probably won’t be good at maths and furthermore, that they can blame white supremacists for that. It’s almost like someone was working to make it harder for black mathematicans to believe in themselves, and white mathematicians too. For starters, it has people thinking about their skin color and not the numbers.
…
Lordy! Imagine having to show your work?
Examples of “white supremacy culture” cited by the document include a focus on “getting the ‘right’ answer” and requiring students to show their work.
It is as bad as you thought.
The authors of the program state that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
Whatever you do, don’t perpetuate objectivity.
The document is truly a powerhouse of hate:
…
How many young impressionable student teachers would come out of this training feeling more empowered, more able, and more enthusiastic about teaching maths?
White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions. Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics.The table below identifies the ways in which white supremacy shows up in math classrooms.
Have you harmed anyone today by talking about maths?
Ethically-sourced food, clothing, coffee and even magical healing crystals are a big draw to concerned green types, who profess to worry deeply about the origin of anything they buy.
Indeed. Awkward news came out last month that “Nearly every solar power panel sold in the European Union has its origins in China’s oppressed Xinjiang region.”
Panels include components produced in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where there are concerns about forced labor camps for Muslim minorities, including Uighurs.
The solar industry and Brussels lawmakers argue Europe’s renewable energy push should not come at a human cost amid long-standing international concern over reports China has detained 1 million people with Muslim backgrounds in camps in Xinjiang and is putting them to work.
Solar power uses slaves from every side
Eastern slaves make the panels, and western slaves pay to subsidize other people’s solar panels.
If only solar power was competitive — we could afford to pay real workers in real factories, and say No thanks to subsidies — and still get cheap electricity at the end of it.
Paul Homewood points out that the top ten solar panel makers are corporations in China, China, China, Canada, China, China, China, US, Germany and Taiwan. Even Canadian manufacturing relies on plants in Asia or Latin America and Panasonic has abandoned it’s solar factories in Malaysia and Japan. Who can compete with forced labor?
Naturally, potential solar panel manufacturers in Europe would like to see punitive tariffs, but this would drastically impact on costs, destroying the idea that solar power is competitive.
My guess is that, despite protests from MEPs, little will change, and a blind eye will be turned just as with the new Russian gas pipeline to Germany. And all for what? Solar power in the EU only accounts for 1.8% of primary energy consumption.
What kind of free speech is always and only “respectful”? Whatever the VC wants.
Peter Ridd has pointed out that Sydney Uni is trying to weasel its way around the new Freedom of Speech bill by declaring its undying support for free speech as long as it is respectful. So you can say anything you like as long as you don’t offend the VC. If an academic spots potential fraud, malpractice or corruption, they’ll have to find an inoffensive way to say it. How do you say “incompetent crook” politely?
This is a university which nurtured a play called “Kill Climate Deniers”. Sydney Uni has no respect for at least half of the tax payers who fund it. So I say fine, as long as Sydney Uni has the power to sack people that offend it, let the taxpayers have the right to sack Sydney University.
Until then, free speech is free speech. The strategy of using vague, indeterminate language like “respect” is straight out of the communist party playbook — keep ’em guessing and they shalt censor themselves.
All universities that don’t know what “Free Speech” is should henceforth raise their funding direct from the people who are willing to pay for Autocratic, Politically Correct Research. All the rest of us want real research.
Tucker Carlson: Late-night Comedy died during Trump’s Presidency.
Adam Carolla:
” You know they’ve got to everybody when they’ve got to comedians. Think about that, Professors, cops and politicans — they caved. Now the fact that comedians have caved means everyone is scared of the Woke Mob. “
UPDATE: Youtubes gone, so Bitchute whole Episode here. Mark Steyn does some parody at 11 mins. The discussion of the Death of Comedy starts at 27 mins. 25 March 2021
But comedy is not complete dead on late night cable: check Mark Steyn — especially on the fawning slavish American Media:
Biden said we have to raise every road 3 feet because of climate change, … and they took that, these people, the Court Enuchs went along with it…
Mark Steyn on Joe Biden declaring he might run for another term:
… I have no idea who the government of the United States is, but if the Deep State can get away with this, they can get away with anything.
The Deep State are saying, if we can pull this off, we don’t need anyone in the Oval Office.
Review of “Killer Cartoons,” edited by David Wallis, and “White,” by Bret Easton Ellis
Humor is dying all over, for obvious reasons. All comedy is subversive and authoritarianism is the fashion. Comics exist to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously, and we live in an age when people believe they have a constitutional right to be taken seriously, even if — especially if — they’re idiots, repeating thoughts they only just heard for the first time minutes ago. Because humor deflates stupid ideas, humorists are denounced in all cultures that worship stupid ideas, like Spain under the Inquisition, Afghanistan under the Taliban, or today’s United States.
A lot of the anti-Trump cartoons were neither all that creative nor funny — if “He’s gay and has a little dick!” is the best you can do with that politician, you probably need a new line of work …
The latest academic voodoo doll tossed at Fossil Fuels is a study claiming that the industry gets $65 billion in “implicit” subsidies in the US.
The authors of the latest paper assume the broken climate models work, and then guesstimate what the cost of all that theoretical warming would be with economic models that aren’t much better. It’s a paywalled paper, but they don’t appear to account for all the net benefits of coal, oil and gas which include, keeping people alive and fertilizing forests and fields around the world for free. These aren’t guesstimates from the future but known good and great gifts from the last century or two.
Cold weather kills 20 times more people than heat. If Kotchen can assume CO2 causes warming (despite the lack of evidence for that), it follows then that it must have saved countless lives. How many more senior citizens would die prematurely if they are forced to pay more for electricity and thus can’t afford to turn the heater on in winter? In the UK alone, in one winter there were at least 20,000 more deaths. All over the world, people die more in cooler weather, even in hot Brisbane.
Fossil fuels makes farmers richer, food more affordable, keeps people warm, greens the planet, employs thousands, pays taxes, saves forests from being razed for Drax, moves nearly everything that needs to move, and creates more flowers.
In a fair world, Yale should give back all government funding until it raises its standards and stops producing politically biased, incompetent studies.
There are real and substantial financial implications to fossil fuel producers of policies that seek to correct market failures brought about by climate change, adverse health effects from local pollution, and inefficient transportation. The producer benefits of the existing policy regime in the United States are estimated at $62 billion annually during normal economic conditions. This translates into large amounts for individual companies due to the relatively small number of fossil fuel producers. This paper provides company-specific estimates, and these numbers clarify why many in the fossil fuel industry oppose more efficient regulatory reform; they may also shape the way policymakers view the prospects for additional subsidies going forward.
“The financial benefit because of unpriced costs borne by society is comparable to 18% of net income from continuing domestic operations for the median natural gas and oil producer in 2017–2018, and it exceeds net income for the majority of coal producers. “
And yet the companies themselves don’t even try to defend what they do? Why?
Kotchen notes that he contacted all of the companies included in his study and found that none of them had anything to say about implicit subsidies.
The purpose of the hot air balloon adding two whole kilograms of chalk to the atmosphere is a glorious multipurpose marketing exercise. It might as well be a skywriting advert.
Building a sunshade for the whole planet radiates cinematic desperation — it’s advertising the terror of climate change — Really, we need to do that? It’ll get everyone talking about climate change for another five minutes, as if it mattered. But make no mistake, it’s such an ambitious Manhattan-scale idea, it’s advertising Bill Gates the billionaire, too. This is meant to raise his global cachet too. Super-Bill to the rescue. Is he God?
But it’s also advertising other things, like how stupid the climate models are, how fake the pious planetary-care is, and how daft the whole UN-herd is.
Bill Gates plans to launch a bag of chalk into the stratosphere and somehow get useful data out of it about whether we could build an Earthly sunshade to cool ourselves on the same scale as a super volcano. ( To that end, if it looked like he might succeed, watch the Paris agreement dissolve a nanosecond after someone starts to get serious about shading one nation and not some other one.)
Lordy! Imagine the disaster if the planet cooled, and the Green movement got what it wanted without the hair shirts? What really matters to them, reducing CO2 or getting people to stop driving and clogging up their roads?
Indeed, not having to bankrupt all the fossil fuel corporations? I mean really!?
It’s worse than that– the Deplorables would get hooked on pumping up the white skies, addicted to chalk to cover up for all their sins!
‘It would cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation but once you’re on to that, it’s like taking heroin — you’ve got to carry on doing the drug to keep on having the effect,’ he said.
He explained that without tackling pollution first we would have to keep lifting more and more dust into the stratosphere, which would change the daytime sky to white and if it ever stopped there would be a rise in global temperatures again.
Recklessly fiddling with the climate to save us from reckless fiddling.
Apparently the same models that have all the answers now, are pretty useless at predicting what happens when one aerosol changes.
Climatologists are also concerned that such tinkering could unintentionally disrupt the circulation of ocean currents that regulate our weather.
This itself could unleash a global outbreak of extreme climatic events that might devastate farmland, wipe out entire species and foster disease epidemics.
Which begs the question — some models are happy to say exactly what will happen if we reduce CO2, but those same models apparently don’t work at all on aerosols.
Scientists may be able to set the perfect climatic conditions for farmers in America’s vast Midwest, but at the same time this setting might wreak drought havoc across Africa.
For it is not possible to change the temperature in one part of the world and not disturb the rest. Everything in the world’s climate is interconnected.
Furthermore, any change in global average temperature would in turn change the way in which heat is distributed around the globe, with some places warming more than others.
This, in turn, would affect rain levels. Heat drives the water cycle — in which water evaporates, forms clouds and drops as rain. Any heat alteration would cause an accompanying shift in rainfall patterns. But how and where exactly?
There is no way of predicting how the world’s long-term weather may respond to having a gigantic chemical sunshade plonked on top of it.
No way of predicting long term weather indeed. Someone tell the modelers.
Imagine if the world was going to cool in the next 50 years but all the models said it was warming so geniuses put up a sunscreen and made the cooling worse?
What if a Krakatoa goes off the week after the dust is released?
Someone will have to design a nuclear-powered flying vacuum-cleaner before the next ice age hits.
So the worlds car manufacturers are lining up: The Volkswagon group and GM are going “full electric” — so they say. Ford Motor Co claims its line-up in Europe will be fully electric by 2030, while Tata Motors unit Jaguar Land Rover said its luxury Jaguar brand will be entirely electric by 2025.
But Toyota and Honda are not.
At least investors (and consumers) have a choice. Presumably , the US Democrats will want to change that.
When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.
Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”
Of those, “Consumer Acceptance” is the easiest thing to change (especially with a law and the right amount of jail time).
Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.
The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.
California and Texas don’t have grids big enough to deal with houses…
Bjorn Lomborg was going to present some economic pointers to Duke University last week, but even UN approved estimates were too high-risk for Duke . Evidently the students are so poorly trained they couldn’t be trusted around a different point of view. Lomborg might seed all kinds of wicked ideas about them doing their own research. Though, more likely, it had nothing to do with the students. The real problem with Lomborg was that he threatened their branding. What if Duke lost some big lefty donors? (Or the biggest donor of all, Big Government?)
Lomborg shows how fragile the UN-Wall of Science is
All he aimed to do was to join together two separate UN economic factoids, but he had to be axed. He even agrees “climate change is a problem”. But agreeing on the science is not enough.
One of my [axed] presentation points was highlighting the latest full UN Climate Panel report which estimates the total cost of climate change. They found that unmitigated climate change in half a century will reduce general welfare equivalent to lowering each person’s income by between 0.2 and 2 per cent. Given that the UN expects each person on the planet to be much better off – 363 per cent as wealthy as today – climate might cause us to only be 356 per cent as rich by then. That is a problem, but certainly not the end of the world.
Except it’s not a problem, just an error bar. With blind economic models piled on broken climate models, fifty years from now the world might well be cooler, and poorer too.
But Lomborg’s point is still potent. The UN are complete hypocrites and troughers.
The multiple natural disasters Australia has experienced over the past 18 months — such as the floods currently ravaging NSW — should be blamed on climate change, say experts from the Climate Council.
“The intense rainfall and floods that have devastated NSW communities are taking place in an atmosphere made warmer and wetter by climate change, which is driven by the burning of coal, oil, and gas,” Climate Council spokesperson Will Steffen said in a statement on Monday.
“For many communities dealing with floods right now, this is the latest in a line of climate change-exacerbated extreme weather events they have faced, including drought, the Black Summer bushfires, and scorching heatwaves,” he added.
The more money we put into government funded science the more it looks like witchcraft
Does CO2 cause floods? It takes 3 minutes in the historic Trove archives to test this theory. In a surprise to Supermodels everywhere, getting CO2 back to 310ppm (even if it were possible) would return Australia to 1950, so we already know how this works out.
There were a spate of floods in Eastern Australia in the 1950’s and 1960s when La Nina’s were more common and the world was cooling. For example, in 1949 8 people were killed and 20,000 were left homeless in New South Wales by flooding. The Adelaide Chronicle June 23, 1949
NEWSFLASH: There were floods in New South Wales in 1857 even before coal fired power was invented
A quarter century before the first coal power plant was built anywhere in the world, devastating floods washed over New South Wales. There were three separate floods in 1857, “each worse than the one before”. The floods and storms were described as afflicting an area from far north of Taree down to Goulburn.
Hunter River Floods, 1857
“Five years of firewood” washed up:
What amount of property was destroyed by the flood it is impossible to ascertain. The piles of wood, which of themselves would supply the inhabitants of both East and West Maitland with firewood for the next five years, have buried in, without doubt, some hundreds of pounds’ worth of property. Many families are left entirely destitute of food and raiment. It is impossible to give an accurate description of this desolate scene.
On the Hawkesbury “Windsor was almost an island, there was no escape by dry land.” In Mudgee, the “consequences were most disastrous “. .. the rain fell in torrents… ” “Other floods occurred at Penrith, Camden, Gouldburn and Cassilis.”
Read the story of boats trapped for days, including one “small trusty craft” that was “driven off course by the violence of the tempest some thousand miles” and out of sight of land for ten days, while the people survived on biscuits. The beaches were covered to “an incredible height with the trophies of some devastating flood…” the debris included the sides and roofs of houses, furniture, cabbages, pumpkins, goats and pigs. Mail was stopped, and at least three boats were seen wrecked.
Part a Floods, NSW, September 10th, 1857, Manning River, Trove, NSW. Sydney Morning Herald| Click to enlarge.
Part b. Floods, NSW, September 10th, 1857, Manning River, Trove, NSW. Sydney Morning Herald| Click to enlarge.
In 2021, among other things, cows are even being rescued from the surf on beaches, which probably makes them a lot luckier than the ones that got washed downriver in 1857.
Thoughts and best wishes for everyone caught in this natural disaster.
The Chinese government understands the weakness of the West where national self hate has become a spectator sport.
When the US Government attacks the CCP for human rights abuses, the CCP just use all the Democrats own talking points right back at them and the Democrats can hardly disagree:
Here, for starters, is the Chinese government’s assessment of our democracy:
YANG JIECHI [TRANSLATION]: Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States.
Many Americans don’t have confidence in their own democracy, he said. In other words, maybe the last presidential election was fraudulent. Suddenly China’s top diplomat sounded a lot like one of those right-wing White supremacist insurrectionists you’re always hearing about on CNN, the ones the Biden Justice Department has put in prison.
Tucker Carlson explains the Mandarin word “Baizuo” means a white liberal (in the wokest possible way):
The Chinese know our leaders well. In fact, they have a name for our self-hating professional class.
They call them “baizuo.” The rough translation from Mandarin is “White liberal,” and it is definitely not a compliment. Chinese state media describes baizou as people who, “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment, who have no sense of real problems in the real world, who only advocate for peace and equality to satisfy their own feelings of moral superiority, and who are so obsessed with political correctness that they tolerate backward Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism.“
As Chinese state media notes, “former US [sic] President Obama was considered an advocate of baizuo ideology.”
So is “German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her decision to welcome more than one million third-world [sic] immigrants to Europe.”
Other observations about baizuo, as reported by Chinese state media, include the fact that they “advocate inclusiveness and anti-discrimination but cannot tolerate different opinions.” Baizuo’s political opinions are “so shallow that they tend to maintain social equality by embracing ideologies that run against the basic concept of equality.”
According to one scholar from Peking University, “baizuo are phony and hypocritical and will make the situation in the West go from bad to worse.” And so on.
And so, a communist superpower that harvests organs from political prisoners can silence opponents by repeating their own self indulgent attention seeking critics. And the so called “Leaders” of the most powerful nation on Earth can’t even defend themselves. What would Kamala Harris say — “We are the house of horrible haters. You’re so right?”
Yesterdays free advertisement for the Renewables Industry comes from Peter Martin, ANU, and was swallowed whole by The Conversation, and then repeated by The ABC. (If only the ABC had three million dollars a day to spend on checking things before it published them, they might have warned the economist that he doesn’t understand much about the grid or even the energy market.)
This kind of anti-coal PsyOps might work on teenagers:
Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, provides up to 20 per cent of Victoria’s power. It has been operating for 47 years. Since late 2017 at least one of its four units has broken down 50 times. Its workforce doubles for three to four months most years to deal with the breakdowns. It pumps out 3 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions.
And here’s Macarthur Wind Power plant, Victoria’s largest at 420-never-attained-MW. It breaks down nearly every single day:
Fig 1: Anero.id Macarthur Wind output
Martin goes on in a non-stop infomercial for wind and solar
He must be aiming for 12 year old voters, or perhaps dogs and cats, with genius comments like this:
Nationwide, wind and solar including rooftop solar supplies 20% of our needs. It turns on and off at will.
Even 12 year olds know he can’t turn on the sun and wind. Though the AEMO appear to be happy about this level of national debate, as do The Conversation and the ABC editors. Perhaps it’s worth asking if they even read what they publish?
As for his understanding of maintenance: coal plants can be continuously refurbished. If one turbine at Yallorn isn’t being maintained properly perhaps that’s got something to do with the forced transition to random generators which strips profits from reliable power? Maybe ramping up and down this generational infrastructure “with the wind” costs more to maintain?
The bottom line:After closing two coal plants then spending four years installing renewables at world record levels, for one whole quarter, South Australian retailers have finally paid lower wholesale rates than QLD and NSW. Proving that if you take a jagged line and draw a line to a cherry picked point you can find any kind of trend you want.
Coal-fired plants close, then prices fall
Before Northern closed, South Australia had Australia’s highest price. Five years after the closure of Northern in 2016, and four years after the closure of Hazelwood in 2017, South Australia and Victorian have wholesale prices one-third lower than those in NSW and two-fifths lower than those in Queensland.
Something happened after the closure (largely as a result of the closure) that forced prices down. South Australia became a renewables powerhouse.
“Something happened”? Something indeed. Wholesale rates fell from a crisis peak, while retail prices and other costs rose (like storage, stability, and emergency control). What matters is the total cost and South Australians on average, pay 33 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly 60 percent more than people in Queensland. The closure of coal plants doesn’t cause a renewables boom, only Big Government junk subsidies can do that for junk generators.
And the closure of coal plants doesn’t cause prices to fall either. More coal means cheaper electricity.
Fig 2. SA consumer still pay more.
None of our grid now is as cheap as it was for years before renewables were added to the system
Peter Martin has cherry picked with a surgical scalpel. The last quarter, where South Australia was finally cheaper (on wholesale rates) than NSW and Qld, was the first time this has happened in eight years. For the last four years during the rapid rise of renewables, the cheapest electricity comes from the black coal state of Queensland.
Fig 3: All those renewables, and yet prices are still not as low as what they were when we didn’t have them.
South Australia might be a renewables superstar but guess where their cheapest reliable power comes from … black coal
The only thing cheaper than black coal is brown coal. Most of the hours of the day the price in South Australia is not being set by solar or wind power.
Another record! South Australia had to spend $15 million last quarter on “system security directions”. The AEMO were very busy ordering the Gas Powered generators (GPG) to stay on.
In 2020, total costs for directing South Australian generators for system strength was $49 million (or
$4/MWh), $23 million higher than 2019. During the quarter, AEMO continued to issue directions to GPGs in
South Australia and initiated directing hydro generators in Tasmania to maintain system security. In contrast to falling wholesale electricity prices in South Australia, out-of-market costs in the region have been rising. This quarter, South Australian generators’ time on directions reached a record quarterly high of
64%, surpassing the previous record set in Q2 2018 (45%). This resulted in South Australian system strength direction costs reaching near record quarterly levels of $15.6 million (Figure 40).
Fig 5: The AEMO has to manage the system, and the costs of keeping back up on standby are rising.
NSW prices spiked because 3,000 MW of coal power was out of action (mostly planned maintenance)
The spike in NSW electricity prices that Martin builds his case on, was minor and temporary. According to the AEMO Quarterly report, the wholesale costs went up in NSW last quarter because it was the quietest quarter of the year, and plant managers decided to catch up on maintenance (see figure 6). Up to 3,000 MW of its black coal generators were offline. Thus, it follows, if they had more coal they would have been even cheaper than SA and Vic. Doesn’t fit the narrative…
It also follows that the AEMO knows Peter Martin is wrong. When will they speak up and serve the public that pay them?
Why is that left to unpaid bloggers?
Figure 6. Look which state turned of it’s cheap black coal supplies last quarter for planned maintenance.
More solar PV is the system vandal that makes coal power more expensive
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Critics may argue that Solar PV on rooftops doesn’t bid, but “sets” the price by reducing demand. But renewables and coal are not swappable services. Being cheaper at noon can mean being more expensive at most other hours of the day. Random “free energy”, just steals profits from coal, makes a whole lot of infrastructure and staff sit around doing nothing on a long lunch, and run less efficiently when it tries to fill in for the energy vandal forced on the system. When the sun goes down the whole solar team and capital sit around powering nothing too.
Coal plus solar can not possibly be cheaper than coal alone. It takes more people, more capital, more land, more maintenance. In the hours solar runs, all the useful coal infrastructure has to still be there, waiting to step in. The only cost “savings” to the large coal plants is a few truckloads of coal. All the other costs are the same or higher. The solar electrons are simply surplus random supply that “is the part of the jigsaw that doesn’t fit in” (to use Peter Martin’s words).
Coal also used to provide all that frequency stability we need for free and on call 24/7 and then feed our crops free fertilizer as an unlisted bonus.
How to create market chaos and a price spike
After Hazelwood shut in 2017, the cheapest form of electricity (brown coal) suddenly couldn’t supply enough electricity to set the final price of supply very often. That’s why the system price leapt. Hazelwood was in Victoria but the effect can even be seen in South Australia in Figure 3 above, where brown coal stops setting the price as often from Q2 onwards in 2017. That was “the Hazelwood effect”.
Brown coal fired generators are still sometimes setting the final winning bids at under $10/MWh. Its unbelievably, unbeatably cheap. No wonder all the junk expensive system vandals want to close brown coal stations.
The screwed market — a world of negative prices
The low quarterly prices in South Australia were partly due to negative prices, which “cut South Australia’s average by $8.7/MWh.”
This is a graph below of the main fuels setting wholesale prices in South Australia. The brown coal average winning bids are so low they are hard to see. Gas power and hydropower are obviously setting higher prices. The black coal winning bids have settled now in the new post Hazelwood bountiful world of renewables, at a higher price than they were. Genius.
Fig 7: Some fuel sources set the price all the other fuels earn. Lower bars mean cheaper winning bids. Black coal wins bids at higher costs now that cheap brown coal plants closed and renewables have been added. | Click to enlarge.
But sometimes solar and wind power win bids too. Have a look at what happens to this same graph when their winning bids are added in (below). The effect of the large deeply negative bids changes the scale of the graph and pretty much defies any sense at all. Why would anyone pay money to provide electricity? In a normal market we only pay people to take away rubbish.
Is this craziness entirely a product of the subsidies? Is that what makes it possible to bid so deeply negative and “still make a profit” or are some of the players trying to game the system but losing?
Fig 8: The Negative price bids are all thanks to solar and wind power and are “off the chart”. | Click to wallow in a fake market.
On the NEM, suppliers bid in the hope that someone bidding a lot higher than them wins the last successful ticket in the stack. Then all successful bidders all get paid at that same top winning rate. Obviously, generators don’t want to bid too high, or they earn nothing at all. But the race to the bottom seems kinda odd (to say the least). If they win at minus $1,000/MWhr, then they have to supply the electricity AND pay til it burns for it too.
In the end, if the negative bids reduced the wholesale price of electricity by $8/MWh but that’s only due to subsidies, it’s not a savings at all, it’s just a redistribution. Someone else had to pay. It’s false advertising yet again.
The AEMO report remarks on the record amount of negative prices in Q4 last year.
1.3.3 Negative wholesale electricity prices
During Q4 2020, negative and zero spot prices occurred in 7% of all trading intervals, surpassing the
previous record set in Q3 2020 (4.6%), with calendar year 2020 averaging 4.4% compared to 1.7% in 2019.
Negative spot prices were most prevalent in South Australia and Victoria, with both states reaching record
quarterly levels. South Australia’s spot prices were negative 17% of the time during Q4 2020, exceeding the
previous quarterly of 10%, while Victoria reached a new record of 10%.
Despite the record occurrence of negative spot prices, the impact on the quarterly average prices was limited. Negative prices cut South Australia’s average by $8.7/MWh, while the impact was less in Victoria ($2.4/MWh)
and Queensland ($0.9/MWh) due to fewer very low prices below minus $100/MWh
Peter Martin — economist of some sort, thinks negative pricing means being paid to “turn off”. His junk commentary is “not even wrong” but for 17 years he was the ABC’s economics correspondent. He is so wrong he was awarded an Member of the Order of Australia (AM). Flinders uni taught him economics. They have a lot to answer for.
Peter Martin says:
Being even cheaper than the power produced by the old brown-coal-fired power stations, there is at times so much it that it sends prices negative, meaning generators get paid to turn off in order to avoid putting more power into the system than users can take out.
It’s one of the reasons coal-fired plants are closing: they are hard to turn off. They are just as hard to turn on, and pretty hard to turn up.
He is making mistakes piled on mistakes. Firstly he’s confusing negative prices with something called “Demand management”. Secondly he thinks the new random and volatile grid is progress instead of being an unnatural artificial forced transition that no one needed to have but we were all coerced into paying for.
In the new vandalized grid, no one wants to put money into coal maintenance. Plus the companies that own coal own the unreliables. What could possibly go wrong?
And who said the ABC doesn’t have advertising? It has the worst kind — the sort dressed up as “reporting” and funded –mostly — through taxpayer dollars. Pace Viv Forbes. Carbon Sense who said this earlier this week.
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