End the taboo: The obvious solution to our expensive unreliable electricity is to fix old coal plants
The proposed NEG (National Energy Guarantee) will cut a pathetic sliver off our obscene bills. Malcolm Turnbull thinks Australians will be grateful for $100 off. We pay $3,700 a year for an average 4 bed house (and it’s heated with gas)? Are they kidding?
No one is even discussing the most obvious, cheap way to cut our electricity bills. Fix the old coal plants. As Ian Waters, engineer, says “Enlightened, motivated people can do it!” Just getting Liddell back up to full power would deliver another 800MW of cheap, despatchable, and reliable power. Wouldn’t that be “handy”?
All the talk of new coal ignores the cheapest source of electricity around the nation. Our star infrastructure, gift of the older generation to the younger, are our old coal power stations, paid off over decades and still powering the nation.
Ian Waters, describes below how the NEG serves the big retailers not the consumers, and it’s in their interest to run old coal plants into the dust. (Our electricity market is so screwed thanks to the RET. — Wholesale prices leapt when Hazelwood closed, and all successful bidders get paid at the same highest-winning-bid rate.) Are AGL driving the Liddell plant into the ground? Hard to tell, but easy to see why it might be appealing to turn a once valuable asset into a show-pony for End Of Coal. Remember AGL would rather trash Liddell than swap it for a billion bucks.
See his scathing red pen. This mass email went out last night. Andrew Vesey, runs AGL.
Jo
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Turnbull, Frydenberg: Who is running this country? You or Andrew Vesey?
Click to enlarge
By Ian Waters
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Australian Federal Government and the Energy Security Board are not being totally honest with us about the NEG.
They are quoting these marvellous figures of $550/year saving and all the rest of the nonsense – but, just like many real estate agents or used car dealers – are not telling us that there is in fact a viable simpler option to save much more! That option is to upgrade every single coal fired station in Australia back as close as possible to the original MCR, stop building wind turbines and build a 2,500MW Coal Fired Station in the Latrobe Valley. With an extra 800MW from Liddell alone, many more MWs from other stations and an additional 2,500 MW from the Valley, prices will drop like a stone – and we will have more reliable electricity and enough to get us through future summers. Also there will be less opportunity for the bare faced, extreme rorting that is going on right now. Think about S.A. today and yesterday. With the wholesale price up to $228/MWh yesterday when there was not much wind (5 times what the electricity is actually worth out of the Valley) – and down to -$1,000/MWh for a short time today (yes negative $1,000/MWh!). Now Ladies and Gentlemen, picture perhaps a hamburger seller, who knows full well that there is a Hawthorn Geelong game on Saturday, he can control how many hamburgers he has available at any given time and there are massive price variations for his product amounting to hundreds of percent depending on how many he has available and the demand – what do you reckon the hamburger seller will do?
You guessed it! That is what some energy companies are doing to the citizens. They are doing us over!
The very last thing they want is a large supply of cheap reliable coal fired power that is “boring” and does not have spectacular fluctuations and capably covers the country’s requirements. That is why they – and their industry group mouthpieces – want an NEG.
Just in case the Politicians and professional “spinners” have deluded you into thinking that there is anything good about the NEG, think about these three points:
The NEG aims to reduce emissions by 26%. If you think that this addition of renewables – and resultant shut down of coal fired generation – won’t increase prices, reduce reliability and waste precious gas – let me introduce you to the tooth fairy and Easter Bunny!
All around the world the climate druids are at work.
Show me the error bars
Once upon a time a scientist talked about thirty year trends and anachronistic things like “confidence intervals”. Now, thanks to the discovery of Unscience, any noisy, random short data is fair game to be declared undeniable climate change. Periods of flooding also qualify, as do periods of nice weather, though strangely no one mentions those. Where are the headlines? If climate change caused drought on the East Coast of Australia, it’s also causing average rain and good crops in Western Australia.
In terms of scientific data analysis we don’t get that many droughts or six-day-August-heatwaves to analyze. They’re complex phenomena caused by multiple factors and we only have short records. This makes them ideal to be oversold to hapless folk as a “sign” of climate change.
We can’t predict when individual droughts are going to happen, but we *know* they are caused by coal plants.
Megadroughts in Europe that climate models didn’t predict:
….
Megadroughts in Australia the climate models didn’t predict either:
Megadroughts in Australia were much worse
To predict in this sense means to hindcast or explain.
One day in the far flung future, climate models might work and “predict” a past drought that someone can test by looking for it in a proxy record. Imagine that, a falsifiable model?
“…the drought is spreading—eastward into Ethiopia and southward into Dahomey, Egypt, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania, and Zaire. … Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend …
“… Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently in India—indeed, through much of Asia, the world’s hungriest continent. … Some climatologists think that the present cooling trend may be the start of a slide into another period of major glaciation, popularly called an “ice age.””
Crash Test Dummy Update: Data analysis thanks to Tom Quirk
In the South Australian experiment total wind power capacity is now far above the average state demand most hours of the day. This effectively destroys any economic case for cheap baseload power (I hear that was the aim). This fleet of unreliable generators is being supported by forced subsidies through power bills from all around Australia. Sadly, despite this rain of money falling in SA, those funds end up with renewable investors, not South Australian consumers who pay some of the highest rates in the world.
These legislated subsidies have fed so much wind power that sometimes the state produces more power than it can use. That excess power will be exported, but may or may not be actually useful at whatever time it happens. Unless it happens at peak-time, it will be eating into the efficiency of baseload providers in other states. Like an infection, inefficiency and underutilization of infrastructure spreads…
This volatility appears to make freak wholesale price spikes more likely. Quirk calculates that one hot January day last year was so wildly expensive in South Australia it added $2/MWh to the entire years average wholesale cost. Can’t beat that for excitement in the trading room floor.
Figure 4: Average monthly demand in 30 minute intervals for June 2018 and the maximum and minimum demand. The green area marks the 1,806 MW capacity of operating wind farms in South Australia.
Victoria is determined to follow South Australia. While it currently has a small proportion of windpower — there are so many new unreliable plants being planned that these will randomly, but inevitably make cheap baseload economically impossible there too. The cost of wholesale electricity prices will rise, which will work out very profitably for renewables companies and electricity retailers and any generators that survives.
Figure 6: Average monthly demand in 30 minute intervals for June 2018 and the maximum and minimum demand. The green block represents the 1,549 MW capacity of installed Wind power, and the graded-green block represents the 5,525 MW planned wind farms for Victoria
With so much windpower coming and going on the daily load curve, coal and gas infrastructure will sit idle for random parts of the day. Staff will watch cat videos on youtube. Mortgage bills will keep coming. Maintenance costs will go up. The coal and gas plants will have to recover all the same costs in fewer hours a day so will bid higher to recover the costs. (Gone forever are the $30/MWh bids.)
In the US windpower makes gas power $30/MWh more expensive. This is added to the gas bill when really it’s just one of a thousand hidden renewable costs. Renewable energy saves fossil fuel, but wastes infrastructure, land, labor and resources. Like an infection, wind power damages the efficiency and economics of every other generator, except for perhaps solar power, which is like wind, a rot in the system. See the Duck curve, the 1000MW that goes AWOL and the warnings. Solar energy is energy we don’t need for most of the year.
No sane investor would purchase a coal plant in these circumstances (unless they could sell off-grid in private deals to Chinese Cryptocurrency dealers). Only the government would be crazy enough to buy one. Perhaps that’s part of the plan too?
The National Electricity Market, Victoria and Wholesale power prices
Guest Post by Tom Quirk with help from Jo Nova
There are ways to rescue the country from the strangling morass of regulation in the supply of electricity. The fundamental problem is the variable supply of wind power. Its privileged entry into the wholesale market has and will destroy the financial viability of coal burning baseload power stations.
Her bias is so all encompassing she can’t imagine a world twenty years hence which still runs on coal and gas and views the temporary experiment with unreliables as a disastrous, predictable mistake, a historic dead-end. Renewables are the B-size-batteries, the hydrogen-filled-air-ships and the X-rays for shoe shops that didn’t take over the world. She assumes that the forced “transition” to renewables is inevitable, natural and necessary. What if it’s an artificial, uneconomic, unnecessary accident of profit hungry industry rent-seekers and fatuous virtue signaling fools?
Hands up who thinks that solar panels and windmills will stop storms and lower the tide!
Hands up who thinks techononogy will save the day and is 100% guaranteed to convert high maintenance, low efficiency energy collectors into something reliable and cheap, and in our lifetimes? What if our solar panels are a hundred years too soon? Say hello to the modern cargo cult, and who put a clan chieftain in charge of 50,000 gigawatts?
Who indeed… Malcolm Turnbull knew exactly what she was when he rescued Zibelman from the collapsing Clinton empire last year. She is hopelessly, intractably, biased, and that’s just what Turnbull wants. If he wanted cheap electricity, he would have appointed someone else.
The government should auto-bin every AEMO report until someone else runs it, or Zibelman admits that we don’t have to have one single windmill or solar panel operating in Australia. There are no laws of physics, nor economic, free market arguments or even one national example that suggest that intermittent, unreliable power generators should be driving our grid. The only thing they have are computer models based on simplistic assumptions that no one has audited and which fail every test. And there is no country on Earth that has lots of wind and solar and also has cheap electricity.
If Zibelman wanted cheap electricity the AEMO would consider all options, including the one where we just do what all our competitors are doing, and what we used to do, and stop subsidizing a failed, immature technology, start building the 1601st new coal plant around the world, start talking about nuclear energy, and stop destroying what was a perfectly good and efficient national grid and market.
AEMO chief rejects claims of renewables bias in energy model
Perry Williams, The Australian
“There’s no bias in the model,” Ms Zibelman said yesterday. “It’s a cost-base engineering optimisation model. The implication that somehow the modelling is biased one way or the other is simply not true.’’
A few sane men:
Government backbenchers Tony Pasin, John Williams, Ken O’Dowd, Craig Kelly and George Christensen criticised a report released last month by the AEMO into the electricity sector, saying it did not focus on lowering prices.
Spot the bias?
The report warned Australia would need to spend up to $27 billion replacing retiring coal plants in the next two decades with fossil fuels set to be ousted from the country’s national electricity market. In its place would be a mix of solar, wind, storage and gas along with new investment in electricity transmission.
Who says?
The problem is not so much that there is bias in the model. The disaster starts with the bias mandated in the legislation that says we have to force this transition, we have to pick technologies, we have to mess with the market, and we need to pick supernatural weather controlling cult clanswomen to run our grid.
Is this the AEMO Report they refer too: Integrated System Plan, July 2018? This unbiased document refers to REZs 244 times. What’s a REZ? It’s not defined, but a REZs (how awkward) means “Renewable energy zones”. For some reason, the unbiased, technology neutral AEMO has spent money and time identifying REZs so that supposedly profitable competitive suppliers don’t have too?
This is the How to Save Money Report that Vestas would write.
Here’s more bias buried in vague blah:
Due to the changes in technology, the transformation requires the adoption of new technologies and approaches to provide services needed to operate the power system that are currently provided predominantly by thermal generation.
Nobody mention that thermal generation is and will be the mainstay of almost every country on Earth:
When existing thermal generation reaches the end of its technical life and retires, the most cost-effective replacement of its energy production, based on current cost projections, is a portfolio of utility-scale renewable generation, energy storage, distributed energy resources (DER), flexible thermal capacity including gas-powered generation (GPG), and transmission.
Why do we need more “storage?”:
• There is a growing need for energy storage over the next 20 years to increase the flexibility and reliability of supply.
The Australian grid didn’t need storage for the last hundred years. An unbiased report would mention that. It also didn’t need more billion dollar interconnectors. Each state used to be able to power itself.
The invisible elephant in this room is the option of Not Subsidizing Renewables, or Not Mandating we have to have green electrons.
At no point does the AEMO model compare costs of the renewable cult to costs of Australia’s renewable-free history. All the savings and improvements are compared to strawmen mismanaged-half-bodged expensive grids:
AEMO estimates that the additional transmission investment proposed in the ISP would conservatively deliver savings of around $1.2 billion on a net present value (NPV) 3 basis, compared to the case where no new transmission is built to increase network capabilities between regions (in the modelled Neutral case).
The value of the identified transmission investment can be quantified by comparing total costs of supply against a ‘no new interconnection’ option…
It’s like a hundred years of grid efficiency and history has been made invisible. It’s beyond bias — the AEMO has become a marketing and advertising tool for the Renewables Industry. This is the How to Save Money Report that Vestas would write.
Depending on who you ask, we’ve shared the Homo genus with six other species across the millennia. And those are just the ones we know about. One by one they’ve all vanished. Around 30,000 years ago, the last of the Neanderthals disappeared…– Science Alert
Homo erectus spread from Spain to Indonesia, but stuck to forest and grassland. Neanderthals specialized in cold northern realms and survived hundreds of thousands of years of ghastly ice ages. They coped better than we do with cold but we are the ones still living in Siberia. Tell the world: we’re adaptable!
Maybe it’s time to stop trying to adapt the planet to us, and get back to adapting us to the planet instead?
Some of the ecological challenges faced by Pleistocene H. sapiens. a. The Thar Desert of northwest India at the site of Katoati. Credit: James Blinkhorn. b. The highlands of Lesotho at the site of Sehonghong. Credit: Brian A. Stewart. c. The Siberian steppe of Russia. Credit: Yuri Demyanov. d. The tropical evergreen rainforest of Sri Lanka in the vicinity of one of the earliest occupied sites in the region. Credit: Patrick Roberts.
Other animals are stronger, more resilient, and faster than humans, who cannot fly, can only inhabit water for a limited amount of time, and who are lacking in natural weapons. Yet, if humanity was threatened by animals, poor crops, natural disaster, or some other problem in an area, it could leave and leave easily. Not just from one green field to another, but to extreme conditions like mountains and deserts.
A new evolutionary theory claims humans ended up out-surviving all the other hominids because we adapted ourselves to extreme niches and they didn’t. We pushed ourselves into cold mountain peaks, arctic tundra, and the sahara desert. Where most species are either a generalist or a specialist, we are both — the ultimate generalist specialist. Today there are permanent human settlements in places as cold as minus 50 C and as warm as plus 40C. We survive across a ninety degree range (and panic about two degrees of warming).
And if we did spend half a million years evolving into extreme adaptability, can we evolve into snowflakes in just one generation?
Rather than obsessing over our artistic or lingual or technological abilities – which are incredibly hard to demonstrate, let alone prove – the team suggests that being “human” meant going boldly where no hominin had ever gone before: conquering challenging environments, and thriving there.
It’s a worthy prospect to test (and refreshingly the researchers discuss how). I suspect the old theory is that our extreme adaptability is the result of our creative intelligence (but apparently the development of art, or at least the evidence of it, comes too late.). But it’s a chicken-egg type problem. Did we get the mental tools to adapt and then do it, or did we have the sense of adventure and curiosity, and then we found ourselves in extreme situations that made us what we are?
Anyhow, spread the word — humans ought to know that extreme climates and environments may be our defining feature. Some are spinning the story that humans can only make it in a perfect preindustrial climate where seasons all start on the same day each year and 32 degree C is a heatwave.
From the plateaus of lofty Peru,
To the deserts ’round Timbuktu,
Where folks have survived,
Adapted and thrived,
Could teach warmists a lesson or two.
Fujimori et al estimate that if we aim for the 2°C Paris commitment as many as 84 million more people will be going hungry by 2050. Their solution, naturally, is to still aim for futile, global weather management targets, but to add another layer of socialist complexity and welfare. It’s only money.
If we feed corn to cars instead of people, and we limit land-use to carbon storage rather than food crops, how could the outcome be any other way? A million dead here, a million dead there, and pretty soon someone will be using their deaths to ask for for a grant, a tax, and a supranational committee.
For thirty years people have been saying we need to reduce our emissions as a precaution even though we can’t predict the climate. But when we can predict that people will starve, the principle seems to be do it anyway and “give them your money”. I can find zero mentions of the precautionary principle in their paper.
This paper is, yet again, another variation on a plea for more governance, more tax, more fiddling with global systems.
Inclusive climate change mitigation and food security policy under 1.5 °C climate goal
Abstract
Climate change mitigation to limit warming to 1.5 °C or well below 2 °C, as suggested by the Paris Agreement, can rely on large-scale deployment of land-related measures (e.g. afforestation, or bioenergy production). This can increase food prices, and hence raises food security concerns. Here we show how an inclusive policy design can avoid these adverse side-effects. Food-security support through international aid, bioenergy tax, or domestic reallocation of income can shield impoverished and vulnerable people from the additional risk of hunger that would be caused by the economic effects of policies narrowly focussing on climate objectives only. In the absence of such support, 35% more people might be at risk of hunger by 2050 (i.e. 84 million additional people) in a 2°C-consistent scenario. The additional global welfare changes due to inclusive climate policies are small (<0.1%) compared to the total climate mitigation cost (3.7% welfare loss), and the financial costs of international aid amount to about half a percent of high-income countries’ GDP. This implies that climate policy should treat this issue carefully. Although there are challenges to implement food policies, options exist to avoid the food security concerns often linked to climate mitigation.
Fun games you can play with carbon taxes: Use the graph to figure out how many million people your policy might kill.
With enough grant money it’s possible to generate fancy pants graphs exploring entirely pointless policies in full color.
Clearly the safest outcome is “NCP” or No Climate Policy. That’s the baseline. Higher emissions and more food security.
…
SSP means a “shared socioeconomic pathway”. NDC means Nationally Determined Contributions and all this jargon means Life Is Too Short to pursue this nonsense much further.
Three SSPs (SSP1, SSP2 and SSP3) are chosen for this study and they are referred to as ‘sustainable development’, ‘middle of the road’ and ‘regional rivalry’, respectively. From a climate change mitigation point of view, the challenge to mitigation is increase going from SSP1, over SSP2, to SSP3. We consider four mitigation levels: no climate policy (baseline), GHG emissions reductions by 2030 in line with the NDCs, and scenarios that limit global mean temperature in 2100 to below 2 ◦C and 1.5 ◦C in which cost-effective emissions reduction are assumed from in 2020 onwards.
Note that the current Paris agreement here (known as NDC) is near the baseline because almost no country has promised to do something meaningful. The other two options — actually aiming for the magical 2 ◦C and 1.5 ◦C — are wildly higher and harder and might as well be projections for Neverland.
What happened to “first do no harm”?
REFERENCE
Shinichiro Fujimori et al (2018) Inclusive climate change mitigation and food security policy under 1.5 °C climate goal, Environmental Research Letters, Volume 13, Number 7, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad0f7/meta. Full PDF
Strangely, despite NASA Giss “discovering” that the world has heated a lot since 1998, fires have declined.
Apparently increasing our CO2 emissions means less fires. Tell the world.
Figure 2. Wildfire occurrence (a) and corresponding area burnt (b) in the European Mediterranean region for the period 1980 – 2010. Source: San-Miguel-Ayanz et al. [37].
This new paper points out that the perception is that fires are worse than they have ever been, but that this is simply not true, not in the last thirty years, and not in the last few hundred either. It also documents how much money and effort we put into suppressing almost all fires and that this is in contrast to tens of thousands of years where humans used fire as a tool. Suppressing fires is getting increasingly expensive and sometimes costs lives as well.
Putting things in perspective. We spend a lot of money to avoid death and damage by fire, yet earthquakes kill 700 times as many people and floods kill 1,800 times as many people. There is something primal about fire that we feel driven to stop.
Table 1. Global comparison of human and economic losses derived from wildfire, earthquakes and flood disasters from 1901 to 2014. (Source: EMDAT 2015 [83].)
Perhaps we have a politico-social problem with fire, rather than a real one
Perhaps rather than a ‘wildfire problem’ that has worsened globally in recent decades, the negative, and sometimes tragic, consequences of fire themselves may be gaining wider public attention and, therefore, recognition. The fact that nowadays the latest news reports about disasters from around the world are readily available to large parts of the population may be a contributing factor. What is not spreading equally well is the recognition that fire is a fundamental natural ecological agent in many of our ecosystems and only a ‘problem’ where we choose to inhabit these fireprone regions or we humans introduce it to non-fire-adapted ecosystems [3]. The ‘wildfire problem’ is essentially more a social than a natural one.
The media are dominated by reports from fires where lives are lost or at risk, and these are typically from fire-prone regions exhibiting high population densities (figure 4)…. there is likely to be a bias in reporting of losses for Western countries given that the largest number of people affected by fire and losses of life appears to be elsewhere (i.e Asia…)
We thus need to move towards a more sustainable coexistence with fire. This requires a balanced and informed understanding of the realities of wildfire occurrence and its effects.
Table 2. Human and economic losses from wildfire ‘disasters’ by global region from 1984 to 2013. Costs are based on the actual value of US$ in a given reporting year. (Source: EM-DAT 2013 [83].) | Click to enlarge.
I want to know how Africa with so many people has so few affected by wildfire. Is that just a reporting artefact, or is there something real going on? The paper does not say.
The Renewables Lobby subsidy and handouts are still growing. In 2018, Australia must get 16% of all our electricity from “renewables”, up from 14.2% last year.
That’s 28,000 Gigawatt hours of magical green electrons from generators that give us nice weather as opposed to generators that cause droughts, floods, cyclones and spread crocodiles, dengue fever, cause wars and change butterflies.
Welcome to modern Australia where our grid is designed by witchcraft, run by superstition, and panders to every whim of the Giant Renewables Industry Lobby.
The noose tightens in Australia.
Renewables must supply 16% of our electricity in 2018, and even more in 2019.
Prices are rising too: Could there be a connection here?
Even the ABC now says “Something has gone terribly wrong with our electricity prices”. Prices went off the ranch from 2007, rising much faster than the CPI. This is also the point Australia started ramping up the intermittent renewables. Before that the Snowy Hydro Scheme –the only reliable and cost effective form of renewable power — had been operating for decades. Correlation is not causation, but it’s true to say we had cheap electricity when we didn’t have much wind and solar.
Cheap energy might save more lives than expensive “climate-changey” energy?
Researchers looked at 47 major cities in Spain, from 1980 to 2015 and checked 554,491 deaths. Even though temperatures have risen, less people are dying of heat in Spain. Apparently human ingenuity, energy and air conditioners were more than able to keep up with climate change. The population is older but less vulnerable to heat now than it was forty years ago.
Air conditioners rose from 5% of the population to 35% during the study period.
Oh the dilemma — to save lives, should we build more windmills to try to change the global climate or aim to get 100% of households access to an air conditioner?
Welcome to the dire threat of climate change:
The relative risk of death fell as temperatures rose (According to the model used). See the caption below.
From the Discussion in the paper:
The temporal evolution of heat-related mortality risks here found is, in general, consistent with those reported by previous studies in some other countries [12–15], which provide evidence for a decrease in vulnerability to climate warming despite the ageing of societies. For example, in Spain, the proportion of people aged over 64 years increased from 11.6% to 15.0% in men and from 15.9% to 19.6% in women between 1991 and 2011 [40]. The general downward trend in mortality risks has been attributed by some investigators to socioeconomic development and structural transformations, such as improvements in housing and healthcare services [12–15], or even to specific public health interventions [16–18]. The large socioeconomic advances that occurred in Spain during the last decades might have also contributed to this response, thus reducing the effect of mortality risks over time. For example, the gross domestic product (from €8,798 per capita in 1991 to €22,813 in 2009), the life expectancy at birth (from 77.08 years to 81.58), the expenditure in healthcare (from €605 per capita to €2,182) and social protection (from €1,845 per capita to €5,746), and the number of doctors (from 3,930 per million inhabitants to 4,760 per million inhabitants) have all largely increased in Spain [41]. In addition, the use of air conditioning, which has been postulated as a major contributor to the reduction in heat-related mortality in the United States [13], has also experienced a strong increase in Spanish households within the analysed period (from 5.3% to 35.5%) [42].
The researchers are not sure if this trend will continue as the world warms. But if people can afford to run their air conditioners — why not?
Those crashing ratings would change overnight if news networks threw open the doors and pitted skeptics against believers in a real televised form of debate. The spectators would suddenly be able to pick sides — may the best person win. There would be genuine controversy. Sacred cows would be slaughtered, and for a while at least, climate change would rate well.
What stops the media doing this? Most editors are too scared of being called climate deniers if they dare allow the other side to speak. Look at the pushback when the BBC allowed Professor Bob Carter to do one interview:
Here’s a tantalizing bit of gene research. Scientists were able to switch off a central gene in the nucleus of a mouse cell. That in turn meant the mouse’s mitochondria started failing (I’m going to be talking a lot more about these fascinating bits of machinery in our cells). After two months, the poor lab mice were wrinkled, going bald and their organs were aging rapidly, but lo, after the gene in the nucleus was switched on again, the mitochondria were restored, and wow, all the hair and skin grew back to what it had been before.
Mitochondria have their own DNA loops.
Why get excited about mitochondria? These are tiny biological batteries we have inside every cell. The are the mini-factories burning sugar or fat, generating free radicals on a mass scale and churning out the chemical energy that is then used in most of the chemical reactions in our body. They are turning up in every second paper these days related to aging. These little organelles are so important and rule breaking they even have their own DNA loops with 37 genes — this is the only genetic material in us that is not part of the Big 23 Chromosomes.
What this means? Specifically, we can cure one type of artificial aging in rodents. It’s possible this tells us something very significant about our own aging bodies, but it’s also possible we may go bald and wrinkled for other reasons (or multiple reasons simultaneously). It also may not be safe to play games with this gene. But we’ve learnt something that’s important. If we can slow aging itself we also slow all the diseases of aging — cognitive decline, cancer, heart disease, stroke. Mostly we tackle the symptoms of aging, not aging itself. That’s what makes this research so interesting.
As I’ve been saying for twenty years, within all our cells are the same genes that we had when we were young. If we can figure out how to switch on the right ones at the right time, and correct errors, in theory we can restore body parts from within using our own genes. That’s when everything changes. — Jo
The Sun:
“This mouse model should provide an unprecedented opportunity for the development of preventive and therapeutic drug development strategies to augment the mitochondrial functions for the treatment of ageing-associated skin and hair pathology and other human diseases in which mitochondrial dysfunction plays a significant role.
“It suggests that epigenetic mechanisms underlying mitochondria-to-nucleus cross-talk must play an important role in the restoration of normal skin and hair phenotype.”
In other words, the research suggests the mitochondria plays an important role in the ageing process and should be investigated further to determine new ways of reversing ageing.
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Scientists reverse aging-associated skin wrinkles and hair loss in a mouse model
A gene mutation causes wrinkled skin and hair loss; turning off that mutation restores the mouse to normal appearance.
Researchers have reversed wrinkled skin and hair loss, hallmarks of aging, in a mouse model. When a mutation leading to mitochondrial dysfunction is induced, the mouse develops wrinkled skin and extensive, visible hair loss in a matter of weeks. When the mitochondrial function is restored by turning off the gene responsible for mitochondrial dysfunction, the mouse returns to smooth skin and thick fur, indistinguishable from a healthy mouse of the same age.
The same mouse, left to right — before treatment, then after mitochondrial function was switched down for two months, then finally one month later after mitochondrial function was restored. Credit UAB.
Wrinkled skin and hair loss are hallmarks of aging. What if they could be reversed?
All those billions we spent and yet at 6pm, many days coal, gas and hydro provide 98% of the power Australia needs. Wind and solar are our spare bikes, the third ski, the Banana-Slicers of the National Grid (read those reviews). Just what would we do if wind and solar were all we had? — Jo
At peak time intermittent renewables often make less than 2% of total Australian electricity
When power is required the most, wind and solar are missing almost entirely. This isn’t cherry picking of one time — peak time is the most important time on the grid, when the most power is required. The almost non-existent contribution from renewables is so common it has occurred now for seven days out of the last 14 days.
I’ve been doing a series on the Australian generation and demand curves on a daily basis for seven weeks, the totals are settling down, so that now the percentage changes are only in tenths of a percent, and consider that when it comes to total power and coal fired power, a tenth of one percent is 600MegaWattHours, so at that end of the scale, small is actually large, if you can see that.
At the moment, after 10 weeks, coal fired power is delivering 72.37% of all power, and wind is delivering only 6.16% of all generated power. I have all the percentages, but those two are the ones of most importance. Wind power has just had a very good week (for wind), but in the end, coal fired power is still delivering more than 3 times the total for every renewable power source in the country.
You might wonder why I haven’t mentioned solar power here, because ALL the solar plants, (not rooftop solar) only generate 0.38% of the required power, so just a tick above nothing at all.
….
The main evening peak occurs at 5.30 to 6PM, when power consumption is always at its greatest when people come home, cook dinner, throw on the washing and have showers. (Note here the time, 5.30/6PM, so the Sun has set and there is ZERO power from any solar power plant, and also ZERO power from any rooftop solar installation as well). It’s that one point in time when a large supply of power is at its most critical, so now look at this data for seven days of 14 days in the middle of winter. Wind has had a poor time of it lately, due to those High Pressure weather systems hovering over the area where there is the largest concentration of wind plants, hence very little pressure gradients for wind, and they are in South Australia and Victoria.
Here’s a sample of seven of those 14 midwinter days at 6pm peak power time:
Wednesday 20 June – Peak power – 29680MW. Wind power – 500MW. Total from wind and solar – 1.7%
Thursday 21 June – Peak – 29950MW. Wind – 100MW. Total from wind and solar – 0.33%
Monday 25 June – Peak – 30870MW. Wind – 170MW. Total from wind and solar – 0.48%
Tuesday 26 June – Peak – 30600MW. Wind – 340MW. Total from wind and solar – 1.1%
Wednesday 27 June – Peak – 30480MW. Wind – 340MW. Total from wind and solar – 1.1%
Thursday 28 June – Peak – 30400MW. Wind – 450MW. Total from wind and solar – 1.5%
Sunday 01 July – Peak – 28190MW. Wind – 200MW. Total from wind and solar – 0.7%
There were three other days when it was between 2% and 3%, but these are the seven lowest. This is all wind, as the Sun has set and in winter, solar is useless at 6pm.
So, when power is required the most, wind and solar are missing almost entirely. The point here is that even though the country is consuming the most electricity it actually can consume, on those 14 days, almost ALL OF IT was actually being delivered from coal fired power, natural gas fired power, and hydro power.
From the low point of 0.3% (100MW of that Peak) to the high point of 2%, (600MW) is between one and three units at a gas plant just waiting for the call already to ‘fire up’. The fact that those three main sources have already proved they can handle it is an indictment on the total and utter uselessness of wind power, solar power, and rooftop solar power.
Coal power just keeps going, while hydro and gas are volatile depending on wind generation
In LA temperatures are forecast to reach as high as 32C (90F) on Monday and 36C (97F) on Wednesday. (They call this a heatwave?) But gas is running so short that Californians are being asked to turn off non-essential lights and not use their biggest appliances from 5pm to 9pm.
Welcome to the future, where you need to plan ahead to run your washing machine or oven.
Back in the dark ages when we had coal plants, we just switched these things on hither, thither…
(Reuters) – California’s power grid operator on Monday issued an alert to homes and businesses to conserve electricity on Tuesday and Wednesday when a heat wave is expected to blanket the state.
SoCalGas issued a gas curtailment watch on Monday, notifying customers to be prepared to reduce gas use if needed… the watch would remain in effect until further notice.
The ISO said consumers “can help avoid power interruptions” by turning off all unnecessary lights, using major appliances before 5 p.m. and after 9 p.m., and setting air conditioners to 78 degrees or higher.
By 2020 California may get as much as 33% of its energy from renewables (they are not far behind South Australia). Indeed, the solar sector is on “fire” producing as much as 50% of total demand on at least one day at 1pm last year. Luckily, to get solar to peak at 7pm when it would be useful, they just need to legislate a plus-six-hour daylight savings plan, or keep the same time-zone and move California 90 degrees West.
Huge police numbers were on hand to manage the crowds in London, with only small flare-ups occurring when the demonstrators clashed with pro-Trump counter-protesters outside a pub on Whitehall. Wearing Make America Great Again hats, the small group chanted “USA” and also voiced their support for English far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
But our ABC did feature an interview with a guy wearing a MAGA hat that was there because he “happened across the March”. Obviously the ABC needs more money so it can train staff to use Youtube and teach the Arts grads how to interview leaders of protests instead of anonymous random uninvolved bystanders.
Tommy Robinson seems also to have vanished from mainstream news.
No one needed a smart meter when we had smart baseload. Beware Australians, despite the promises and threats, smart meters may or may not make UK customers a paltry saving. When all is said and done it’s not even clear the benefits outweigh the costs.
Customers have financed the smart meter programme by paying a levy on their energy bills, while suppliers have frequently blamed the levy for rising costs. However, the report claimed most of the eventual savings would be made by energy firms, rather than consumers.
It is an £11 billion programme. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears the country would be richer if the government just gave back £170 to each person instead.
Smart meter looks like a dumb elephant:
The report also said that:
More than half of smart meters “go dumb” after switching, meaning they stop communicating with the supplier
Up to 10% of smart meters don’t work, because they are in areas where mobile phone signals are not strong enough
By the end of the year only 22% of households will have the meters installed, meaning the 2020 deadline is certain to be missed
The eventual cost of the programme could even outweigh the benefits
Remind me why the UK needs them?
Smart meters are supposed to play a major part in the UK’s clean vehicle revolution by allowing electric cars to charge overnight when wind power is strong, demand is low, and energy is cheap. — Read it all at the BBC News.
Another hidden cost of wind and EV’s.
Note the advertising spiel — every dumb program has the word “smart” in the title.
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