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UN climate conference drops “fossil fuels” from the draft deal. Activists say “We have nothing left”

By Jo Nova

It is as if Satan disappeared from the Bible

The sacred fabric of the climate religion is unravelling by the day. The COP30 deal is being hammered out in Brazil — but in the draft any mention of “fossil fuels” has been dropped.

Apparently the rich oil nations have formed a block that objects to a sentence committing countries to stronger, faster, action to reduce their use of fossil fuels. The UK, France and a few other nations have rejected this but the same small island nations that are frightened of drowning have joined the oil block.

Apparently they were offered more money to adapt to climate change.

UN climate summit drops mention of fossil fuels from draft deal

By Georgina Rannard, BBC

All mention of fossil fuels, by far the largest contributor to climate change, has been dropped from the draft deal under negotiation as the COP30 UN climate talks in Belém, Brazil enter their final stretch.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and some countries including the UK want the summit to commit countries to stronger, faster action to reduce their use of fossil fuels.

An earlier text included three possible routes to achieve this, but that language has now been dropped after opposition from oil-producing nations.

French Environment Minister Monique Barbut said the deal is being blocked by “oil-producing countries – Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, but joined by many emerging countries.” She suggested that small island nations may agree to a weaker deal on fossil fuels if they secured more finance to adapt to the changes in their countries caused by rising temperatures.

It was always about the money

The big question here (if this sticks) is why the oil block didn’t do this years ago?

The even bigger question is whether the oil block have found a way to circumvent The UN Blob? If they are paying the small countries off directly behind the scenes, the UN will miss out on collecting its share of the cash flow. The travesty!

The irony is that if  “man-made climate change” was really a crisis, it makes more sense for the oil giants to pay the islands to build sea-walls  — instead of rearranging the global economy to try to control the clouds and the ocean. But this unthinkable sacrilege cuts out the middlemen Blob-o-crats and stops the whole totalitarian power game.

The UN will not give up its aim to be the One World Government so easily.

The French Environment Minister was not happy:

On France’s position she said:”At this point, even if we don’t have the roadmap, but at least a mention of the fossil fuels, I think we would accept it. But as it stands now, we have nothing left.”

Expect The Blob to fight this all the way. There will be wrangling and then possibly “euphoric joy” about a “historic agreement” ready for cameras on the nine o’clock news.

Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay

 

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 108 ratings

Saturday

9.4 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

A momentary outbreak of sensibleness in Australia

Turtle, fantasy, dystopia, city, surreal.

By Jo Nova

A new day dawns Downunder

For the first time in years, the Opposition doesn’t sound like a school girl (well, not all the time). And, suddenly the government has realized they shouldn’t go burning $2 billion on a COP31 UN-love-fest while voters can’t afford electricity — their political opponents could turn it into a stinging election campaign. Instead, as a consolation prize, they will fly Chris Bowen, the Minister for Weather Fiddling, to Turkey to preside over the COP meeting there and star in the bureaucratic beauty contest.

Giving up on the COP Cabaret will save billions, not just in hotel rooms in Adelaide, but in all the tokenistic daft climate projects the government might have started to impress the UN powerlords. As it is, the PM radically increased our Net Zero target in September — was that to earn favor with the UN to cinch the deal — if it was, the UN won. The fantasy target certainly wasn’t done to impress voters, because the Labor Party hid it from them during the election. Who was ‘Albo’ trying to impress?

Freed from the shackles of the Net Zero straight-jacket, the Opposition’s Energy spokesman can finally talk with some conviction about the awful costs, the poverty, the national productivity loss, the decline in standards of living, and the smelters that are closing. In a rare moment of functional governance, the Opposition promises to force the grid manager (the AEMO) to put cheap electricity ahead of weather voodoo. So, lucky Australians can still have hope, that one day our power stations might even be directed to make cheap reliable power rather than change the jet streams over Antarctica.

But the Opposition are camouflaging themselves in the talisman of climate virtue, as if chanting the spells of the Paris Agreement will protect them from the Global Bullies. To ward off the bad spirits, and BlackRock bankers, they still say they’re committed to the Paris agreement, while promising to consider building coal plants, which sounds a lot like the Chinese “net-zero plan”. Smile and say ‘Yes‘ while doing whatever you were going to do anyway.

Apart from burning the token Parisian incense, its heartening to hear some of the messages we’ve been saying for years, even if we feel like beating our head on the wall:

Australians desperately need reset on energy for more affordable power

By Dan Tehan, Opposition Spokesman for Energy in The Australian

Australia is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. This is undeniable. We have suffered the steepest declines in living standards of the developed world. Real disposable income has fallen by 8.5 per cent since 2022. More than a million Australians now work multiple jobs simply to get by. Under Labor, poverty has risen from 12.4 per cent (one in eight) to 14.2 per cent (one in seven). That is 3.7 million Australians, including 757,000 children, are living below the poverty line.

Our industries are collapsing under this strain. Closures in Whyalla, Port Pirie and Mount Isa are costing thousands of jobs. These are real livelihoods of real people that are being lost. Rio Tinto, who owns the Tomago Aluminium Smelter, directly attributes its imminent closure to soaring electricity prices. ASIC data shows 14,722 companies entered external administration in the 12 months to June 2025. Under the Coalition in 2021, that number was just 4,235.

And the clincher:

All of this pain has achieved nothing. When the Coalition left office, emissions were 28 per cent below 2005 levels. Today they are just 28.7 per cent below 2005 levels. Labor talks tough on climate but has delivered virtually no emissions reductions and higher costs. This is abject policy failure.

Here comes the incantation:

We remain committed to the Paris Agreement and to responding to climate change responsibly and affordably. We will reduce emissions on average year-on-year, and in line with comparable countries, moving as fast as technology allows rather than pursuing arbitrary, unachievable targets. To that end, we will use the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA to support scalable, breakthrough low-emissions technologies, including carbon capture and storage and advanced nuclear technologies that enable whole-of-economy decarbonisation.

The Blob rewards the Blob players?

Did anyone think any Australians would feel warm and gooey inside just because “an aussie” starred in a field of UN Blob-o-crats?

Chris Bowen to serve as COP31 president after Australia cedes hosting rights to Turkey

Chris Bowen will become Australia’s “part-time” Energy Minister as he takes on “all the powers” to lead global climate negotiations for the next 12 months, after the Albanese government ceded the right to host next year’s UN climate change summit to Turkey.

Many are wondering if Chris Bowen can be a part time Minister when our electricity grid and gas supply are in a crisis.

Sussan Ley challenged the ­decision, saying “Australians ­simply cannot afford to have a part-time minister in charge of energy policy”. “Families deserve an Energy Minister who is focused on their bills, not on chasing headlines overseas,” the Opposition Leader told The Australian.

But I say, if Turkey wants him, they should keep him. The further he is from the Australian electricity grid, the better.

Image by SAIF 4 from Pixabay

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

Friday

8.5 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Thursday

9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Opposition drops Net Zero and suddenly Labor are not so keen on hosting a $2b Climate Conference?

By Jo Nova

Just after the Coalition announced they would put cheaper energy ahead of global weather control, Anthony Albanese has been struck with cold feet about hosting the Climate COP31 giant junket in Adelaide.

After campaigning for this for three years like it was the Olympics, Anthony Albanese is now suddenly worried about Germany.  If Australia and Turkey don’t sort this out between them, the climate circus will default to the poor Germans who will have to host COP31 — something they’ve said they don’t want to do.

Albanese puts COP31 truce on the table after blast from Turkey

By Ben Packham, The Australian

Anthony Albanese has signalled his government is prepared to cede the hosting of next year’s UN climate conference to Turkey but says he wants to salvage some benefits for Pacific Island countries.

The Prime Minister was yet to withdraw Australia’s bid but said on Tuesday that if Turkey was preferred by delegates at this year’s COP (Conference of the Parties) then Australia would not challenge the decision.

He said there was “considerable concern” in the international community that the impasse between Canberra and Ankara would see the 2026 COP default to the German city of Bonn, as required by UN rules.

Amazing how fast political certainty can flip, isn’t it? One moment Anthony Albanese was hoping to stand beside Antonio Guterres on the glorious world stage and brag about how many solar panels Australia has, but now he probably wants a quiet exit.

It doesn’t help that the current COP30 is a flop where Russia, China, India and the US didn’t turn up and most countries didn’t update their plan. If the Australian opposition find their feet and wage a climate war, COP31 in Adelaide will be a sitting duck, radiating upper-class green out-of-touch vibes while voters struggle to pay their electricity bills. It would be a gift to political opponents. Two thousand million dollars is a lot to burn on a lame UN event.

The Opposition may have just saved Australia $2 billion dollars. Or maybe COP30 did.

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 120 ratings

Wednesday

The internet broke for the last couple of hours as Cloudflare crashed, taking X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, this site, and even (the irony) DownDetector. Lots of people on X are asking why the internet is so big, yet so hopelessly concentrated.  (e.g. AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud). This augurs well for Digital ID…
Below, an explanation from a guy that might work at Cloudflare:
I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused. Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack. That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.

@chaeynz_ tweeted: “in retrospect of the cloudflare outage, let us celebrate this meme once more

9.8 out of 10 based on 51 ratings

UN makes “landmark” deal on information integrity to shut up annoying denialists

By Jo Nova

Look out. Climate Denialism is a “security threat” now

As the Net Zero fantasy crumbles and the political tide shifts, the Blob has up’d the ante and pressed the red hot “security threat” button. Climate deniers are now such a mortal threat (to the sinecures of the Blobcrats) they must be contained.

As David Archibald says “When they have lost the argument, they change the rules.”

Countries seal landmark declaration at COP30—marking first time information integrity is prioritized at UN Climate Conference

Drafted in collaboration with civil society members of the Global Initiative Advisory Group, the Declaration has been endorsed by ten countries so far – Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay. 

“Climate change is no longer a threat of the future; it is a tragedy of the present,” said President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Belém. “We live in an era in which obscurantists reject scientific evidence and attack institutions. It is time to deliver yet another defeat to denialism.”

Oh, the horrible obscurantists! Humanity will be saved, but only if governments can rule without having to answer difficult questions.

The UN must be feeling fragile because the term “denialism” is decidedly unscientific — it is the language of political and religious struggle, not of atmospheric physics.

Perhaps they’re afraid the world might recognize that the UN is a superfluous, bloodsucking freeloader?  To make themselves useful, the UN are providing an excuse for sympathetic (socialist) governments to launch information integrity commissions, or to fund “research” into misinformation online.

The new key phrase is “Information Integrity”

The Greens are the Bankers and the Bureaucrats best friend.

They couldn’t call it the Ministry of Truth again, so the new catchword of censorship is “information integrity”. The question the UN hopes you won’t ask is  “who defines integrity?” for they be the Kings.

Strangely the Australian Greens were already speaking this lingo five months ago. The new Global Initiative for Information Integrity sounds spookily similar to The Select Committee on Information Integrity that the Australian Greens set up in August.  It’s almost like the UN phoned up the Greens in July and told them what to do?

Google Trends shows that there was a sudden mysterious global interest in “information integrity” from July this year.

Keep reading  →

9.7 out of 10 based on 120 ratings

Tuesday

8 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

Monday

8.5 out of 10 based on 23 ratings

Sunday

8.1 out of 10 based on 21 ratings

UN tells Australia (but not China) that digging up our own gas might be a breach of “international law”

By Jo Nova

What looks smells and acts like One World Government?

The UN, which we fund for some reason, is telling us we can’t drill for gas on our land and are being very naughty. They’ve sent a Special Rapporteur, Astrid Puentes Riano, to join three cases in Federal Courts in an amicus curiae role. She is here to cast a spell and see if she gets lucky and scores some shake-down-money in reparations.

It was only a few months ago the International Court of Climate Justice (ICJ) declared that nice weather was a “human right”, thus supposedly allowing the whole world to sue everyone else, ad infinitum for bad weather.

The case was originally launched by Australian Conservation Foundation and another group called Friends of Australian Rock Art in the Federal Court challenging the Ministers decision to extend the Woodside gas project out to 2070. So the UN is sending a performance artist to tell us we are “in breach of international laws.” If she succeeds, it’s a foot in the door, a precedent for more.

UN rapporteur intervenes in Federal Court case over Woodside’s gas project

By Paul Garvey, The Australian

Her shock intervention comes just months after the UN’s International Court of Justice found that countries that did not take appropriate action to protect the climate could be breaching international law.

Amicus curiae allows a person or group to offer information or expertise on a case without becoming a formal party to the matter.

Elaine Johnson, the lawyer representing Friends of Australian Rock Art in the proceedings, revealed that the group had previously warned Senator Watt that approving the North West Shelf could put Australia at risk of breaching international laws.

“The night before this project was approved, our office wrote to the minister advising him that his proposed actions could constitute a breach of Australia’s international law obligations, after Vanuatu warned that approval of the project would represent an internationally wrongful act,” Ms Johnson said.

It’s surprising that the Australian government appears to have taken no steps at all to respond to the recent International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion, which confirmed that continued fossil fuel production could expose countries like Australia to liability for transboundary climate harms. Business as usual is no longer an option that comes without serious national economic and social risks.”

And if we stop selling gas will other countries sue us because their people are hungry or cold?

As I said when the ICJ made it’s ‘historic ruling’ in July — it’s a toothless tiger that serious counties (including Australia) have ignored many times. But make no mistake, the Blob is knocking at our door in a game of bluff, and sooner or later it will get in — unless we shut it down first.

The country that has generated the most carbon dioxide, bar none, is the US, and it withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction from the International Court of Justice 40 years ago, and the ICJ can’t hear a case against the US unless the US consents. (That was Nicaragua v. United States of 1986). In 2005, the US just ignored the ICJ ruling that the US violated the Vienna Convention. (Even Australia withdrew from ICJ jurisdiction over maritime boundary disputes  in 2002 — just before East Timor was about to sue it over the Timor Gap oil field.)

The number two country on the global emitters list, — that has historically burned the most coal on Earth — is China, but good luck getting them to pay. They will, however, offer a Belt and Road climate loan, paid back in harbors, airports and railway lines or just pro-China votes in the UN.

So who is this legislative theatre aimed at? The only suckers left —  Europe, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

It’s time to defund the UN

Nothing about what they do serves Australians, except for the few who score a job “after politics”.

There should be law about that…

 

Related posts on Lawfare:

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 119 ratings

Saturday

8.3 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Australian opposition finally abandons Net Zero Targets. The Government calls them names…

Liberal Party jumps from Net Zero.

By Jo Nova

The unwashed masses drag the Liberals back closer to reality

After spending six months wallowing in the pain of indecision, the Liberal Party has done the obvious and only thing they could do and stepped back from Global Weather Control. Party members in nearly every state had been pleading for this. The polls show it has been a buried goldmine for votes in Australian politics for more than a decade (Tony Abbott won a 90 seat landslide in 2013). Minor right wing parties were stealing the conservative base out from under their feet. The Nationals, their partner party, had leapt off the Net Zero Zeppelin while tied with a military-grade kevlar-lead to the Liberals. Shadow Ministers had resigned in protest, and competitors were circling the leaders position.

Could Sussan Ley have left it even another day?

We are scraping the bottom of the barrel of Australian democracy. When asked who would be better to manage the cost-of-living-crisis, last week more than half of Australia voters aged 35 to 49 didn’t say Liberal or Labor. They said “neither“. In August, eighty three percent of Australians didn’t want the higher emissions targets the Labor Party forced on the country in September. But who could 83% of the voters vote for?

So this is democracy working (very slowly), via handicapped carrier pigeons, limping through mud in the darkness.

The Liberals will axe the carbon tax, lift the moratorium on nuclear power and drop the emissions program back to whatever most like-minded countries are doing. They might even consider building new coal plants, and are talking of keeping the old plants running for longer. Hallelujah.

Liberals capitulate to Nationals and reignite climate wars

By Phillip Coorey, Australian Financial Review

The Liberal Party has reignited the climate wars by releasing a carbon copy of the Nationals’ energy policy which claims to be able to reduce emissions and energy prices while abandoning all current targets, including net zero emissions, and extending reliance on coal and gas-fired power.

Under the new policy, the Liberals have copied every measure announced by the Nationals. These include abandoning any pursuit of net zero emissions by 2050 or any other date, and pledging to tear up Labor’s 2030 and 2035 emissions reduction targets and replacing them with much lower targets aligned with the average reductions of “like-minded countries”. The Nationals will pin their targets to the OECD average.

The Liberal policy also adopts the Nationals’ plan to abolish all emissions reduction policies, such as the Safeguard Mechanism that applies to the nation’s top industrial emitter, and the New Vehicle Efficiency Scheme designed to force down transport emissions.
The Liberals will also lift the moratorium on nuclear power and expand Labor’s Capacity Investment Scheme, a subsidy scheme for renewables, to include coal, gas and nuclear.

Some great news — Axing a carbon tax, and a free market for cars

This policy change by the Liberals was ten years too late, and cost the nation untold billions. The good news is that the new National-Liberal policy gets the big things right. Finally the Coalition says it will abolish all emissions reduction policies, such as the “Safeguard Mechanism” which is a de facto carbon tax on our largest companies effectively ratcheting up by more than 5% a year. They will also abolish the New Vehicle Efficiency Scheme — a way to force farmers, families and tradies to subsidize inner city EVs. Car manufacturers would have to raise the prices of popular fossil fuel cars and use the proceeds to subsidize uncompetitive EVs.  If manufacturers don’t sell EV’s they just end up subsidizing Chinese ones.

The new Coalition policy still panders to climate sorcery, but mostly in symbolic ways. They will stick with the Paris Agreement which means turning up to the annual UN COP party and speaking in tongues but not actually doing anything. This is what most of the world does. Staying in Paris costs very little — the penalties are imaginary, the compliance is voluntary, and half the signatories aren’t meeting any of their targets anyway.

It is a great shame the Liberals don’t have the courage or intellectual wherewithal to lead Australia out of the Net Zero crony-religion. That would be real leadership. They hope by pandering on the Paris Agreement, that they won’t be called anti-science, or climate deniers, but it won’t make any difference. They might as well free themselves of the socialist shackles and make jokes about how the Labor Party think they can stop storms and hold back the tide with bug burgers and bicycles. That act of bravery and rebellion would win them the youth vote. 

The Liberals need to start translating the true meaning of the cheating word games the carbon fans use:

Translating Teal-speak:

The teal independents, who won a swag of Liberal seats at the 2022 election due largely to climate politics, piled on.
“The country needs certainty on energy, but the Libs haven’t just abandoned net zero, they’ve abandoned evidence-based policy thinking,” said Allegra Spender.

“Certainty on energy” really means “certainty on subsidies”. This is what parasites do — demand a free meal. Teals talk about ‘certainty’, but in practice they mean locking in subsidies so their billionaire backers don’t lose money.

And “evidence-based policy thinking” apparently means doing whatever the UN bureaucrats and foreign bankers tell them to do. The Teals can’t name evidence that shows carbon dioxide causes a catastrophe, they can only name climate simulations. But they don’t realize that they don’t know what evidence-based policy thinking even is.

All the Prime Minister has is namecalling

The only thing Anthony Albanese can say is to call the opposition deniers and unbelievers. (It’s all so religious, isn’t it?).

The federal Coalition was walking away from climate action, Albanese said, “because they fundamentally do not believe in the science.” 

[Sky News] However, Mr Albanese claimed at a press conference on Thursday that the Liberal Party were climate denialists and were lurching to the right.

“The lesson that the Liberals have learnt from their (election) defeat… is that they need to be more right-wing, more sceptical, more in denial about climate change,” he said.

“Australia needs to move on” said Anthony Albanese, resorting to vacuous cliches as a substitute for any actual scientific or economic point.

In other psychological tricks, Net Zero is just “two words”

To make the Liberal revolt over Net Zero sound less important, the ABC and others refer to it as “two words” — as if the Liberals are just getting hung up over a couple of syllables rather than a reassessment of a policy that affects national productivity.

We are in an information war and petty word games are the ammunition the cheating team uses to cover their tracks and distract us from the real issue.

Every time the cheating team is exposed avoiding debate, using namecalling, petty insults and mindless cliches they look like manipulative pettifoggers. The trick is to make sure the public notice the mind games.

ht/ Bally, RickWill, TdeF.

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

Friday

10 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Thursday

8.8 out of 10 based on 25 ratings

“Catastrophic” double failure of Waratah Battery transformers cruelly delays Net Zero miracle yet again

By Jo Nova

It’s the worst kind of surprise for the Renewable fantasy

The billion-dollar “shock absorber” for NSW’s renewables grid has effectively short-circuited before it even ramped up to full power.*

One of the world’s most powerful battery storage projects has suffered a crippling failure just a couple of months before it was supposed to be ready for full operation. The problem with one, and possibly two of its three transformers is so bad, it’s the kind of glitch that affects the whole national transition. This battery was supposed to provide stability for the grid as coal power stations were forced out by the renewable subsidies. But suddenly generators all over NSW are recalculating maintenance schedules and closure dates.

The company is saying it will be six months to a year-long delay, but, given the waiting times for transformers in the US have blown out to an astounding 120 weeks, and up to 210 weeks or 2 to 4 years, it seems wildly optimistic to hope this can be back in action next year. Currently the AEMO officially describes this fault as continuing until May 3rd, 2026.

This highlights the fragility of the whole transition which is dependent on new technologies that are being invented just-in-time (or not). This giant battery was supposed to arrive in time for Eraring Coal to shut last August.

And the grid, once again, is rescued by an old coal plant that keeps running.

The big battery project is part of a $500 million BlackRock consortium which include NGS Super and $100m from the Australian government “Clean Energy Finance Corporation” — just to make sure the foreign bankers make some money.

Two transformers fail on hook up

The one-billion-dollar Waratah Super Battery is rated at 850 MW (1680 MWh) — in other words, it can deliver 850 megawatts of power for about two hours before it’s a flat battery.

The team had one transformer running on October 18th, and was testing the other two to add them in, when it suffered what the CEO of Akaysha Energy describes as a “catastrophic failure”.

Nick Carter’s internal message to staff: — As seen in The Australian Financial Review

Dear Akayasha Team, I wanted to let you know of an incident that occurred at Waratah over the weekend that is serious and has implications for Akayash in a number of ways. On Saturday, High Voltage Transformer (HVT) #3 had a catastrophic failure. This results in damage to the transformer and it is beyond repair.

… As a precaution, HVT#2 has been de-energised and put into a safe state pending further inspection. Of course, everyone is bitterly disappointed as we were only a few hours of testing away for passing Hold Point #5 and a week or so away from final SIPS testing, which the final step in completing the project.

Each of these custom-built transformers was a feat of engineering in itself. The three at Waratah were made in Victoria at Wilson Transformer Company, and according to Tristan Rayner at PV Magazine, it took nine days to transport the last 477 ton unit 950 kilometers from Glen Waverley to its new home, about 100 kilometers north of Sydney.  For the engineers reading, the unit is described as 350MVA 330/33/33kV. It converts the grid’s 330 kV transmission voltage down to 33 kV for the battery inverters. The three transformers arrived in May last year, so they’ve been waiting 18 months to feed them into action.

SIPS stands for System Integrity Protection Scheme (it’s a thing we didn’t need a name for twenty years ago because spinning coal turbines provide it for free).

But exact details of the fault or the state of the third transformer are hard to come by. According to Colin Packham today in The Australian  “industry figures said they had never seen two transformers suffer crippling issues simultaneously.”

NSW’s $1bn Waratah Super Battery faces a year-long delay after major fault

By Colin Packham, The Australian

“Transformers can be a difficult asset to quickly replace in the energy market. The Waratah Battery is located within the 330kV network so getting a like-for-like replacement might be difficult as it is not a common network voltage across the planet,” he said.

“The Waratah transformers were delivered in May 2024 more than 18 months ago.”

The delay underscores the growing pains facing Australia’s transition to renewable energy. Large-scale batteries, considered vital to smoothing the intermittency of solar and wind-powered generation, rely on complex electronics systems and high-voltage equipment but industry figures said they had never seen two transformers suffer crippling issues simultaneously.

It’s not clear if both transformers need to be rebuilt from scratch, or whether one can be refitted, or whether the problem was with the control unit, testing process, or system harmonics. The fact that the third unit was locked out of action suggests they suspect it would have catastrophically failed on contact too.

Transformers are the new bottleneck

In the US the demand for transformers is so high that waiting lists are measured in years, not months. Though the US only makes 20% of its own transformers. Demand for transformers is surging with new data-centres for AI work. Because transformers need to be made to custom specifications they are not mass produced factory items sitting in a warehouse waiting to be put on a truck. Plus, in this case, the need for a 330 kV transformer is not very common. Even with the full force of a desperate government behind them, it may be difficult to commandeer a half finished transformer and rejig it to speed things up.

The left are baffled, it’s such bad luck

The left wing Grattan Institute is mystified. The director of energy there says that we thought transforming our energy  was going to be easy and cheap but it’s not turning out that way. Like, it could happen to anyone, you know…

It’s almost like redesigning major infrastructure with new technology that was crafted with a century of engineering —  was nothing at all.

Waratah’s $1 billion super battery failure throws coal-to-renewables transition into disarray, experts warn

Oscar Godsell, Sky News

Tony Wood, senior fellow and director of energy and climate change at the Grattan Institute, said the energy transition has turned out to be increasingly difficult.

“When we began this transition, I think there was some optimism that almost it was going to be easy and pretty cheap, and it’s turning out not to be easy or cheap,” he said.

“I think our governments didn’t realise how challenging getting it all lined up was going to be.”

The arts graduates running the country have no clue how engineering works — which would be fine if they just listened to the engineers.

*UPDATE: I’ve rephrased that first line. Technically it has started, just not reached full power. To clarify — the Waratah Super Battery is currently working at about half pace at 350MW and 700MWh, so it is still “useful” (but only for a grid crippled with unreliable generators and if you don’t mind wasting a billion dollars). But until we know exactly what went wrong, questions remain about how much we can rely on it. It’s lost a key redundancy, and it could be that there is a lot we don’t know about operating giant batteries that could come back to bite us so easily.

The video of the nine day trip of the last transformer:

h/t  Neville, Bally, Penguinite.

 

10 out of 10 based on 111 ratings

Wednesday

***Auroras being seen all over NSW Victoria Tasmania and NZ  tonight.***

See Glendale app!

AURORA WATCH   —  This week has been one of the most active of this whole solar cycle. A major X5.1 Class Flare went off at 8pm AEST time yesterday from Sunspot AR4274. The strongest flare for a year. It appears to be full halo — which means is is probably aimed at Earth. There may be auroras on Nov 13th, especially since there were two smaller X class flares in the last couple of days. Sometimes a stacked set of strong solar flares can give a bigger show.

See Glendale App.             SpaceWeatherLive.         Or X (Twitter)     BoM space Weather.

 

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 39 ratings

The unwashed masses know it’s a scam, but will the Liberals finally escape Net Zero?

By Jo Nova

The unwashed masses know Net Zero is bad science

Plumbers, taxi drivers, boiler makers, tradies — they don’t believe the Professors of Climate Science (just ask them).

Climate change has been pushed too hard for so long, that nobody needs a PhD in atmospheric physics to know it’s a scam. Climate change causes everything that’s bad and nothing that’s good. It’s just like long form infomercial for a weather pill. 100% guaranteed to make your Wedding Day sunny in 2096 or your money back. *Terms and conditions apply.

CO2 will cause the sixth mass extinction — but the people who say they worry about that, don’t worry so much they want to use nuclear power. If you thought the oceans were going to boil, and you could stop that with a nuclear plant, wouldn’t you? It’s a fifty year old technology with a great record. If we’d started building the plants 15 years ago, we’d be done now. Instead, they were so worried, they insisted we use a totally new technology and invent the answers, and the batteries for it, on the way. Sure, in an emergency, break glass, discover stuff!

No one needs an Earth Science degree to notice that the same people who say they are panicking about carbon emissions still fly private jets, and buy houses on the beachfront.  There is no missing that *Doom* has been coming for thirty years, but the world still looks the same. Fifty million climate refugees never came, the beaches didn’t shrink, the oceans didn’t boil, and global crops hit record highs.

The real world is beating the Liberals over the head — but yet they still might not get there.

Faced with oblivion — at the last minute, the Liberal Party are finally thinking about dumping Net Zero this week.

They are meeting in Canberra on Wednesday.

Donald Trump did all the hard work for them, took all the risks, and proved voters want this twice. Nigel Farage shows it translates to  other countries, and polls show 69% of Australians want more coal and gas power if they get cheaper electricity. And yet the “moderates” pretend that elections are unwinnable if any party annoys the 7% of voters who think carbon emissions are more important than cheap electricity.

Everything has flipped

As a topic Climate Change is more likely to push voters away.

This week AGL Energy is selling its stake in Tilt Renewables. Tellingly, the team at the Australian Financial Review say this is a trend:

The divestment comes as gentailers across the world move away from holding and funding capital-intensive renewables projects on their balance sheets.”

Across the country the members of the Liberal Party in state branches are voting against Net Zero.

The grassroots membership is trying   Queensland | WA | SA | Victoria | and the Northern Territory.

Map, Australian States.Members in the  South Australian branch are so fed up there has been a mass exodus. More than 200 members quit the party in the last month. According to The Australian longstanding members were leaving and saying it was because of Sussan Ley’s weak leadership, and the Net Zero policy. Branches in Sydney are also demanding Sussan Ley drop Net Zero.

The only people in the world still scared of being called a Climate Denier are in the Australian Liberal Party.

In just one year, the UK Tories went from being a 200 year old ruling party in government to being a minor party. Kemi Badenoch finally vowed to repeal the UK Climate Change Act, but it was too late. The UK conservatives had failed to represent half the country, thus leaving the door wide open for a real alternative. That space was filled by Nigel Farage and Reform, and now Farage looks brave and the old conservative party looks like they are just copying him.

Real leaders make decisions when they are hard to make. They don’t wait until every man and his dog has figured it out and is barking at them.

In Australia 93% of Australians don’t want to spend any more than $2 a week to get to Net Zero. (And yet they are).

How is that not an election winning majority just begging for a party to vote for?

 

 

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