Solar panels across Australia reduce our emissions by almost nothing.
The ABC is whipping Gorgon for not getting carbon sequestration to work, claiming that this is a crisis that will wipe out the entire “gain” from installing two million solar panels across Australia. What the ABC don’t say is that the entire infrastructure of solar panels (on 20% of Australian homes) is only reducing our CO2 emissions by one pointless percent. So the Gorgon delay in achieving the impossible is likewise irrelevant. Australian emissions are rising at 1.5% pa now anyhow.
In terms of our national emissions, the real question is if we shut every solar panel in the nation would anyone notice?
Despite the $1.1b budget, the ABC could have got this bigger and more useful perspective for free from any number of skeptics, none of whom it tried to interview.
With minimal training in arithmetic ABC staff could even have figured it out for themselves. Instead, as per usual, the ABC provides free advertorials for green-industry hacks, with no hard questions and little research.
Can someone please explain to ABC investigative journalists the difference between a megaton and a ton? All they had to do was graph the solar contribution on the same graph or even in the same units…
Almost 2 million Australian households have installed solar panels to cut their power bills while also doing their bit for the environment. Households account for most of the country’s total solar panel emission savings.
Look how useful solar panels are — there are lots of zeroes on that axis when we use the odd units like “tons of carbon”. What nation graphs anything in tons?
…
The whole Renewable Energy Target (RET) cuts total emissions by around 5%
The ABC helpfully provides the dismal detail:
“If the RET is met and 33,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable electricity is generated in 2020, this would represent avoided emissions of about 26 million tonnes of CO2-e [a standard unit for measuring carbon footprints] per year,” Dr Hare said.
“These reductions in emissions from the power sector are unfortunately almost completely offset by the estimated increase emissions from the LNG sector.”
How easy is it for ABC readers to compare the value of solar panels in terms of our total emissions as measured in the standard megaton unit? How many readers didn’t see the fine print at the bottom explaining the units?
….
…
Our Paris targets are obscenely ambitious. See the graph below regarding how much we have to cut. And there is no allowance for having one of the highest population growth rates in the West.
Still, the Paris agreement is a nonbinding, ineffectual plan that almost every other nation is going to fail to meet. So “whatever”. We can bail out at no cost apart from being called a few names.
Chevron predicted that process would have seen between 5.5 and 8 million tonnes of CO2 injected into the ground during the plant’s first two years of production from the Gorgon field, making it one of the largest carbon abatement activities in the world.
Instead, technical problems with seals and corrosion issues in the infrastructure have delayed CO2 storage and the Federal Government, which contributed $60 million towards the green technology, is not expecting the problem to be rectified until March 2019 — about two years after production began from the Gorgon gas field.
By that point, experts including energy consultancy firm Energetics predict the additional CO2 emitted into the atmosphere will be roughly equivalent to the 6.2 million tonnes in emissions saved in a year by all the solar panels in the country combined — from small household rooftop systems to major commercial installations.
Let’s calculate the cost per ton “saved”
Can someone with some time to spare add up the cost of all those solar panels? I’d like to know how much we spent to achieve something so insignificant.
No nation should ever feel bound,
To store CO2 in the ground,
While hungry plants need,
A good CO2 feed,
When there isn’t enough to go ’round.
Thank the ABC. This is the best comedy I’ve seen them do on “climate change” — albeit unwittingly. The ABC has a new comedy show on Wednesday nights called RoadMap to Paradise.
This is Big-Government Comedy. You’ll swear this was made by a skeptic. No really.
Unconvinced that ‘feel good’ environmentalism is making any real impact @mrcoreywhite sets out to come up with a fresh solution. Could incentivising greed and laziness for a good cause be just what this country needs? #RoadmapToParadise tonight at 9.35pm. pic.twitter.com/JJUqU4lblp
Is he a skeptic infiltrator? Nooo. The same episode includes an interview with a CSIRO scientist, Kathleen McInnes, who drops in to tell us things are “pretty bad”. And one of Corey White’s big ideas is to treat Elon Musk’s business like a tax deductible religion. I don’t think he sees the funny side of that either.
What was he thinking?
It’s tough being a comedian.
I’m guessing Cory White wanted to expose the futility of individual voluntary action to change the planet’s climate, with the bigger aim of convincing the audience that only Big-Government regulation can save us!
Sadly for him, Big-government action is futile too, and worse, no matter what hair-shirt-hell you can make for yourself, the government can do it ten times better. You, personally, can only waste one life. The government can waste a nation — it can bankruptgood citizens, blow up assets, and jail people. (Like Tommy).
Australia’s public broadcaster is under public fire. It’s about time.
The rank and file of the Liberal Party voted to sell it off which sparked off a national debate about the value of subsidizing the largest media outlet in the country in an era when the average Australian can broadcast their opinion for free from their own phone. We don’t need a government funded voice, we just need free speech.
Fighting back, the ABC head says Australians think the “ABC is priceless”, so I say: Fine — let those people pay for it.
I’m Pro-Choice on the ABC. Let the people choose which media outlets they want to contribute to. Since the ABC costs $1.1b that’s about $50 per person per annum or $200 per household of four (assuming everyone pays, which they won’t). I say, launch the IPO, sell the shares, or at least, give us the tick-a-box option on our tax return. Make it voluntary.
Stop the forced payments for Big-Government-lovin’ propaganda
We could spell out the actual cost on the tax returns, and ask who wants to pay…
In a democracy this could be done for lots of items — want to send your tax dollars to medical research instead of windmills, or welfare for art? Want to keep your tax dollars so you can employ another Australian? Why not.
Let us vote with our wallet — what could be more democratic?
…Ms Guthrie launched a counter-attack saying the public and media industry was against privatisation.
“I think the public regards the ABC as a priceless asset, more valuable now than ever in its history. I can appreciate that the ABC would fetch a high price in a commercial market. But does the public want a new media organisation that compromises quality and innovation for profit? Does the commercial sector want a new advertising behemoth in its midst? I think not.
Why should a farm hand who doesn’t watch the ABC have to subsidize the Double Bay crowd that do? If the ABC is so loved and respected, why do we have to force Australians to pay for it?
Time to discuss the options
It doesn’t have to be this way. Australians paid the Television License Fee from 1956 until 1974 when Gough Whitlam made it a forced payment. (h/t Jeff) Should we consider the optional tax return “tick-a-box”, or a license fee, or sell it off outright?
I’d rather sell it, but the tax-return option may be more achievable. Though there are risks. There will be heavy social pressure, school indoctrination and advertising for people to tick “yes”, so what will the uptake be? Without any enforcement or punishment, the uptake, despite the ABC’s “pricelessness” may be very low. That would tempt pollies to adopt the British system where everyone with a TV pays regardless of whether they like or use the BBC. The cost is about £150pa and though a quarter of Brits don’t watch the BBC in any given week, as many as 200,000 people get fined each year for the criminal offence of avoiding the fee. If I understand things correctly, the “fee” has the illusion of being optional, but really isn’t. Do Brits have to give up all screens (including their PC, laptop and mobile phone) in order to not pay the BBC? Some “choice”.
The benefit of the tick-a-box tax payment is that it would reorient the ABC towards taxpayers (but only if taxpayers really can opt-out), and provide a slight dampener on their derision and scorn towards taxpaying Deplorables since they may punish the ABC come June 30th.
The ABC might even have to serve the public to keep its funding. What a change!
Let’s make the people the gatekeepers instead of the deep-state bureaucrats and the politicians.
For what it’s worth, there were 12.8million people who filed tax returns in 2013FY.
What would China do if it wanted competitors to keep shackling themselves to an industry-crippling religious weather-fetish?
mock their economy-killing stupidity openly til they realized it, or
nod vigorously and set up a big inflatable strawman idol in the streets of Shanghai? It protects no fields but looks convincing to Greenpeace and good enough for Goldman Sachs…
Notice the size of the carbon markets: The EU’s trading scheme is the largest in the world and “covers” 1.8 gigatons of carbon emissions. China’s power sector (just power) produces 3 gigatons of emissions. The plan is to carefully strap a very mild carbon market on the Chinese power sector starting in 2020 and expand it later to other industries which would then include some 5 gigatons of emissions.
Sounds like a marvelous advert for people trying to sell carbon trading schemes:
Clean-energy advocates trumpeted the creation of the planet’s largest carbon market, which will be nearly twice the size of the European Union’s.
… the government’s goal for now is to reduce the rate of increase in emissions rather than to achieve absolute reductions…
…. this approach will encourage plant operators to improve the efficiency of plants, [but] it “weakens or eliminates the incentives … to shift from coal to gas or renewables,” according to the Nature Climate Change paper.
So this is the kind of giant carbon market where emissions will still increase and there will be no incentive to stop using coal. Note the main outcome — factories will get more efficient — which is a nice side benefit which happens in every maturing economy anyhow.
The Chinese know exactly what they are doing.
…early signs indicate that China is taking an extremely cautious approach, driven by fears of undermining economic growth.
Despite 20 years of non-stop propaganda and belligerent namecalling, strangely, expert green policies have achieved exactly nothing of what they said they aimed for. Coal provided 38% of our power in 1998 and it is still the same 38% in 2017. The non-fossil fuel sector has actually declined slightly as nukes decrease.
We spent billions doing exactly what was asked. Perhaps following the advice of people who think the debate is over and “denier” is a scientific term might not be the best national energy policy?
Fuel shares in global power generation for the last 20 years | BP Energy Review, 2018.
Global demand for coal and gas to generate electricity was back on the rise last year …
Most striking had been the failure of renewable energy to make an impact on the fossil fuels share of power generation, BP group chief economist Spencer Dale said.
“Despite the extraordinary (global) growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years,” he said.
The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38 per cent, exactly the same as 2017.
“The share of non-fossil fuel in 2017 is actually a little lower than it was 20 years ago, as the growth of renewables hasn’t offset the declining share of nuclear,” Mr Dale said.
h/t Pat.
Engineers and other skeptics predicted this would happen. At this point, honest Greens who care about CO2 emissions would be asking for help. Since they aren’t, we can assume the expert green policies are achieving what the Greens want, they just aren’t being honest.
Make no mistake, renewables policies are achieving “Green” aims
Policies pretending to reduce CO2 have shrunk the role of the free market, turned a fifth of all homes in Australia into subsidized generators, and increased government control of our energy as a larger sector becomes dependent on handouts. They’ve demonized independent energy producers, created a crisis and are using that crisis to blame “privatization” and the free market. They’ve polluted the concept of a free market to the point where people came to think that a fake market where the government entirely and artificially fixed supply and demand was “free”. They’ve polluted the word pollution…
If the Greens/Labor really cared about CO2 they’d be doing something different.
BP toes the line of the Ruling Class perfectly
Why wouldn’t BP? It profits from it – gas sales increase with more unreliable wind and solar generation, plus pandering holds the bullies at bay.
Spencer Dale, Group Chief Economist at BP gnashes teeth, “Oh Woe”
The power sector really matters. It’s by far the single biggest market for energy: absorbing over 40% of primary energy last year. And it’s at the leading edge of the energy transition, as renewables grow and the world electrifies. This year’s Statistical Review for the first time includes comprehensive data on the fuel mix within the power sector, aiding our understanding of this key sector.
Global power generation increased by 2.8% in 2017 close to its 10-year average. Almost all that growth came from the developing world. OECD demand edged up slightly, but essentially the decoupling of economic growth and power demand in the OECD seen over the past 10 years continued, with OECD power broadly flat over the past decade.
Spot a problem: half the growth in total power generation and yet only making 8% of total power?
The increase in global power generation was driven by strong expansion in renewable energy, led by wind (17%, 163 TWh) and solar (35%, 114 TWh), which accounted for almost half of the total growth in power generation, despite accounting for only 8% of total generation. Although wind continued in its role of the bigger, more established, elder cousin, it was solar energy that made all the waves.
This is striking and worrying, and we recommend …doing more of the same.
Standing back from the detail of what happened last year, the most striking – and worrying – chart in the whole of this Statistical Review is the trends in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years.
Striking: because despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years. The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38% – exactly the same as in 2017 – with the slight edging down in recent years simply reversing the drift up in the early 2000s associated with China’s rapid expansion. The share of non-fossil in 2017 is actually a little lower than it was 20 years ago, as the growth of renewables hasn’t offset the declining share of nuclear. I had no idea that so little progress had been made until I looked at these data.
Worrying: because the power sector is the single most important source of carbon emissions from energy consumption, accounting for over a third of those emissions in 2017. To have any chance of getting on a path consistent with meeting the Paris climate goals there will need to be significant improvements in the power sector. But this is one area where at the global level we haven’t even taken one step forward, we have stood still: perfectly still for the past 20 years. This chart should serve as a wake-up call for all of us.
Keep calm and keep doing what we’re doing
Conclusion: Global energy markets in 2017 took a backward step in terms of the transition to a lower carbon energy system: growth in energy demand, coal consumption and carbon emissions all increased. But that should be seen in the context of the exceptional outcomes recorded in the previous three years. Some backsliding was almost inevitable. The road to meeting the Paris climate goals is likely to long and challenging, with many twists and turns, forward lurches and backward stumbles. To navigate our progress will require timely, comprehensive and relevant data. That’s the role of BP’s Statistical Review.
Academic Freedom in Australia: Academics are free to use hotmail at work
For the first time in months the ABC suddenly finds time to mention Professor Peter Ridd — but not because he got sacked for an email with the illegal line “for your amusement”. That new development in academic freedom was not newsworthy on the billion dollar ABC site. Nor did the-blob’s-ABC feel Australians needed to know that the international outcry over his sacking was so strong that Ridd raised $160,000 in donations in a mere couple of days. However now things are apparently “serious”: other academics at JCU have given up using the official email network, hiding their thoughts on hotmail and gmail instead. Finally, 27 days after he was sacked, the ABC have arrived…
Management of JCU insists Ridd’s sacking was not about academic freedom. But everyone at JCU acts otherwise. Staff at JCU now know exactly how free they are — if they say something the management doesn’t like, they too could be victims of a personalized email trawl. Anyone could lose their job at any time for falling foul of a selectively enforced and unknowable “code of conduct”.
A leading Great Barrier Reef researcher says academic staff at James Cook University (JCU) are avoiding using their staff emails in the wake of the sacking of climate change sceptic Peter Ridd. “They’re using G-mail, Hotmail and Yahoo instead,” Jon Brodie from the University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies told 7.30.
Professor Brodie was the target of some of Peter Ridd’s criticisms, but he still feels the search of the outspoken academic’s emails sends a “terrible signal” to the rest of JCU’s academic staff. “A lot of people will be thinking about what they wrote in email they thought were private to the people they were sent to,” he told 7.30. “We know already lots of people are now not using the JCU email system, it’s happening now.
“If they wanted, they (JCU) could go back through anybody’s emails and find what they said…”
So they have academic freedom to write emails to colleagues through external email systems. And the public who pay their salaries while they sit at work using hotmail have the right to see none of that. So much for transparency. So much for integrity. Bravo JCU.
As I said at the time: “This taints all research James Cook University puts out. We know all reports will be pre-filtered or self censored.”
If staff don’t even feel they can write freely in an email, we know for sure they won’t put it in a peer reviewed paper.
Give me a reason taxpayers should send one more dollar to this institution.
The new paper has zero mentions of the word. But other scientists have published plenty of papers describing how the West Antarctic zone is being warmed from below by 1200 degrees of magma. According to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co, it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1]His words. Thwaites Glacier,, smack in the middle of the warming is being melted from below by geothermal heat. Then there is the large blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. The researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”…. Capping it off, only last year 91 new volcanoes were discovered 2km underneath the West Antarctic Rift. That’s new, as in, we didn’t know they were there.
Follow the reasoning, either a trace gas 10 kilometers up is causing some spots of Antarctica to warm and other parts to cool, or hot magma at 1,200C is. What’s more likely?
Antarctic ice is warming in West Antarctica and the Peninsula, but not over most of East Antarctica.
From the new paper we get the same old pattern. The biggest part of Antarctica is East Antarctica and it’s not melting — even in this alarming new paper.
I thought there was CO2 there as well?
…
The battle of Big Meaningless Numbers
From the abstract we find tiny fractions are written up as big numbers of small units with no real context. Then they extrapolate a 6 year trend on an ice mass that’s been around for millions of years. Adding up the losses, in this “worst of the worst” scenarios Antarctica might be losing 187 billion tonnes of ice per year (give or take a lot). That’s 187 cubic kilometers of ice, which sounds like a lot until we look at the size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (29 million kilometers cubed). At this new “accelerated” rate the total loss is one 155,00oth of the total mass. Expressed another way, it’s 0.0006%. At this rate Antarctica will be entirely melted 155,000 years from now.
The Solar Wind is a torrent of space weather cruising past at 500 — 800 kilometers per second which is around 1.5 million miles per hour or, if you prefer, Mach 2,000.* It’s so powerful it erodes rocks on Mars, ejects particles up high and creates a kind of atmosphere of tiny rock particles which we can study. Then it blows that Martian atmosphere away.
In this new research people realized it was not just the rain of tiny high-speed protons fritzing Mars at 800 km per second that were carving up the rocks — the main role was from the heavy and highly charged He2+. (Now there’s a molecule you don’t see too often).
You might think that a variable torrent of charged particles that are constantly changing speed and direction might have an impact on our atmosphere, but you’d be wrong (or at least, politically incorrect). On Earth the solar wind “just causes the northern lights”. How do we know? We’ve got climate models. In all known GCMs the total global forcing for solar wind is “zero”. Must be true.
Thus and verily the IPCC can conclude that a flow of high speed charged particles *definitely* doesn’t change jet streams or affect ozone in any way, nor does it change cloud cover. Don’t bother looking. CO2 can cause droughts, floods, volcanoes and belly fat, but the solar wind is just a trace gas, I mean, a magnetized plasma. Whatever.
In IPCC “Science” our magnetic field and dense atmosphere protects us from the solar wind like a perfect Level 3 Containment field — see the USS Enterprise, Stardate 2369.Obviously.
But anyhow — for the astrochemistry buffs – another example of a model gone wrong:
The true power of the solar wind
The planets and moons of our solar system are continuously being bombarded by particles hurled away from the sun. On Earth this has hardly any effect, apart from the fascinating northern lights, because the dense atmosphere and the magnetic field of the Earth protect us from these solar wind particles. But on the Moon or on Mercury things are different: There, the uppermost layer of rock is gradually eroded by the impact of sun particles.
An Exosphere of Shattered Rock
“The solar wind consists of charged particles — mainly hydrogen and helium ions, but heavier atoms up to iron also play a role,” explains Prof. Friedrich Aumayr from the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien. These particles hit the surface rocks at a speed of 400 to 800 km per second and the impact can eject numerous other atoms. These particles can rise high before they fall back to the surface, creating an “exosphere” around the Moon or Mercury — an extremely thin atmosphere of atoms sputtered from the surface rocks by solar wind bombardment.
This exosphere is of great interest for space research because its composition allows scientists to deduce the chemical composition of the rock surface — and it is much easier to analyse the exosphere than to land a spacecraft on the surface.
Forgot the charge — it’s only physics:
Charge matters
However, this requires a precise understanding of the effects of the solar wind on the rock surfaces, and this is precisely where decisive gaps in knowledge still exist. Therefore, the TU Wien investigated the effect of ion bombardment on wollastonite, a typical moon rock. “Up to now it was assumed that the kinetic energy of the fast particles is primarily responsible for atomization of the rock surface,” says Paul Szabo, PhD student in Friedrich Aumayr’s team and first author of the current publication. “But this is only half the truth: we were able to show that the high electrical charge of the particles plays a decisive role. It is the reason that the particles on the surface can do much more damage than previously thought.”
They forgot the ol’ double-plus-helium
When the particles of the solar wind are multiply charged, i.e. when they lack several electrons, they carry a large amount of energy which is released in a flash on impact. “If this is not taken into account, the effects of the solar wind on various rocks are misjudged,” says Paul Szabo. Therefore, it is not possible to draw exact conclusions about the surface rocks with an incorrect model from the composition of the exosphere.
Protons make up by far the largest part of the solar wind, and so it was previously thought that they had the strongest influence on the rock. But as it turns out, helium actually plays the main role because, unlike protons, it can be charged twice as positively. And the contribution of heavier ions with an even greater electrical charge must not be neglected either.
After half a billion million years of climate change, I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that life on Earth (and specifically corals) have so many ways to cope with the climate changing. After all, it’s natural (if you are trained by Greenpeace) to assume that corals can only survive in a world with one constant stable temperature just like they never had.
One more tool in the coral-reef-workshop
Corals don’t just have a tool-box, they have a Home Depot Warehouse. h/t to GWPF
We already knew corals chuck out the symbionts that don’t work so well and pick up better partners. Plus, evolution left a stack of genes lying around that were honed in a world that was warmer, and natural selection has a way of amplifying better combinations as conditions shift. Then there is the way corals can be reseeded from safe sites, far away. Now we find out that corals can use epigenetics too.
Epigenetics is that kind of spooky effect where people can inherit the exact same DNA code yet it works or doesn’t work depending on whether it was Dad’s copy, or Mum’s, or whether parents were starved, fearful or stressed. It’s weird, see more on that below.
It’s an extra layer of information above and beyond the DNA code which is strictly just A, C, G’s and T’s in a four letter alphabet. Each section of DNA can also be compressed, zipped, or tagged with a methyl group so it is “archived” but not readily available. For example, we’ve got a copy of every gene in every cell, but obviously a liver cell has a bunch of genes that are “switched on” that are different to the suite of ones turned on in, say, skin cells. So it is with corals. During a heat wave, they switch on some inactive genes, and when hit with another heatwave soon after, they cope much better in the second round. People wondered if corals could do the epigenetic tricks which animals and plants do, and surprise, evidently, they can. We still haven’t confirmed whether those changes are inherited (which is pretty important, since the definition of “epigenetics” has itself evolved to mean “heritable”, at least in the rest of the animal kingdom). Since baby corals can evidently learn from lessons that happened to mummy corals I presume that epigenetics in corals is inherited and finding evidence of that is just a matter of time.
Anyhow, bowl me over, after millions of years of evolution in a turbulent ocean where temperatures and pH can vary by degrees in a single day and in every season, corals can cope with a smaller change, spread over a century.
They [Liew et al] placed colonies of the smooth cauliflower coral, Stylophora pistillata, in seawater aquariums with varying acidity levels for two years. Ocean acidification is a consequence of climate change and hinders the ability of corals to produce the calcium carbonate skeleton they need to maintain their structures. The researchers hypothesized that DNA methylation might allow corals to mitigate these effects by changing the way they grow.
After two years, the team sequenced the genomes of the corals and determined changes in methylation patterns.
“We noticed that corals grown under more acidic conditions had higher levels of DNA methylation,” says geneticist Yi Jin Liew. “Genes with increased methylation were related to cell growth and stress response, but not to calcification as we initially proposed,” he says.
The team next plans to investigate whether these epigenetic changes can be passed down to future generations. “The idea is fairly revolutionary,” says Liew.
As many as 74 genes are activated or archived under hot conditions
In the Samoan corals, for example, out of 16,728 genes investigated, the activity of 74 changed significantly when placed in elevated temperatures. Although many have unknown functions, some produce so-called heat shock proteins that stabilise vital chemical processes, binding to other proteins that have been misshapen by stress and bending them back into working order. “They’re like protein chiropractors,” says Palumbi.
Heat-shock proteins are good for us too. They are handy weapons I’ll be talking about more soon. They may help us live longer.
If the activity of 74 genes is changed under heat, that is a pretty complex response. That raises the question: if epigenetics controls the genes, what controls the epigenetics? How does a cell know to activate or archive the right 74 genes?
Here’s an interesting video if you want to know more about epigenetics:
Hungry boys are more likely to go on to have grandchildren with less heart disease?
In the Överkalix study, paternal (but not maternal) grandsons of Swedish men who were exposed during preadolescence to famine in the 19th century were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease. If food was plentiful, then diabetes mortality in the grandchildren increased, suggesting that this was a transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.The opposite effect was observed for females—the paternal (but not maternal) granddaughters of women who experienced famine while in the womb (and therefore while their eggs were being formed) lived shorter lives on average.
Freaky weird — can a phobia be inherited?
Fear conditioning
Studies on mice have shown that certain conditional fears can be inherited from either parent. In one example, mice were conditioned to fear a strong scent, acetophenone, by accompanying the smell with an electric shock. Consequently, the mice learned to fear the scent of acetophenone alone. It was discovered that this fear could be passed down to the mice offspring. Despite the offspring never experiencing the electric shock themselves the mice still display a fear of the acetophenone scent, because they inherited the fear epigenetically by site-specific DNA methylation. These epigenetic changes lasted up to two generations without reintroducing the shock.[143]
Even twins can drift in epigenetics – archiving different genes as they age:
In this case, only healthy twin pairs were studied, but a wide range of ages was represented, between 3 and 74 years. One of the major conclusions from this study was that there is an age-dependent accumulation of epigenetic differences between the two siblings of twin pairs. This accumulation suggests the existence of epigenetic “drift”. Epigenetic drift is the term given to epigenetic modifications as they occur as a direct function with age.
REFERENCES
Liew, Y.J. Zoccola, D., Li, Y., Tambutté, E., Venn, A.A., Michell, C.T. Cui, G., Deutekom, E.S., Kaandorp, J.A., Voolstra, C.R., Forêt, S., Allemand, D., Tambutté, S. & Aranda, M. Epigenome-associated phenotypic acclimatization to ocean acidification in a reef-building coral. Science Advances4, eaar8028 (2018).| http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar8028Press release.
NSW has been hit by clouds and a lack of reliable coal power. Prices are soaring. In NSW the Tomago Aluminium Smelter consumes about 10% of the state’s electricity. It has been forced to switch off three times in the last week because there was not enough reserve power on the grid.
“This is not summer with extreme demand. This is the likely future of our energy grid as once reliable baseload generators exit the [NEM] and are mostly replaced with intermittent wind and solar projects with no practical storage to speak of,” Mr Howell said. “Our energy debate should not advocate either renewables or conventional thermal,” he said.
— SMH, Peter Hannam,
Aluminum pot lines can only sit idle for a few hours before they cool too far and the damage becomes permanent and wildly expensive as the aluminum becomes solid.
Renewables-fans blame the emergency on the unreliability of coal
See @TheAustraliaInstitute. Suddenly Australia is the only western nation on Earth with coal resources that can’t maintain its coal plants. We did it for decades, but now the economics for coal is pathetically inadequate — thanks to government interference destroying the free market. So coal infrastructure, worth billions in any other nation, is being run into the ground.
Tomago said it had been forced to halt each of three potlines this week – one on Tuesday and two on Thursday – because of a lack of reserve across the grid serving eastern states.
Matt Howell, Tomago’s chief executive, told Fairfax Media on Friday lunchtime, the company was concerned it may face another curtailment of operations later in the day. Just before 6.30 pm, he said the company had probably “dodged a bullet”, with the demand peak over.
AEMO said this was partly due to heavier than expected cloud cover which reduced the output from solar rooftop generation, resulting in increased demand from the grid.
Dang Clouds
On Friday, solar power had one of its worst days so far this year hitting a peak of just 2,000MW. The normal June solar PV output of the entire east coast 40,000km network is over 3,500MW, so fully 1,500MW was missing.
Strap yourself in! This is more useless infrastructure than anywhere else on planet Earth. The only time solar PV panels provide something we might need is at afternoon tea time in summer when airconditioners are on. So for three quarters of the year they provide electricity when we don’t need it, and for three quarters of every day they don’t even work. The rest of the time they burn capital, increase the blackout and fire risk and sit there collecting dust and hail stones.
Electricity at the wrong time is not just wasted, it’s a burden
Too much electricity bumps up the grid frequency and voltage, potentially damaging equipment and risking blackouts. Obviously we have to “manage” this flood of green electrons. Your money or your lights.
If you like your computer, you can keep your computer. But hand over your job, the economy and your quality of life.
Welcome to the Duck Curve
Each year as more solar power arrives when we don’t need it in the middle of the day, the belly of the load curve swings lower and lower. Then as the sun fades and the peak need of the day arrives after dark the demand ramps up, and so must the supply. This peak is the ducks head. The neck of the duck is when generators must ramp up steeply to take over from the failing sun. It’s often when prices spike.
The tail of the duck is the secondary peak at breakfast. The belly of the duck is noon, when otherwise profitable cheap baseload electricity infrastructure sits around and burns cash. The middle of the day is “theoretically cheap” but the rest of the day gets more expensive.
If we add more storage, we just toss more money in the pit in an attempt to flatten a curve that we created in the quest for greener electrons.
The solution, just stop, stop already!
The commentariat below are saying that at best we switch our hot water systems to “soak” up electricity we didn’t need, or buy electric cars we don’t want. Or we need fancy-pants switches to disconnect the panels, or we need to pay millions for batteries or billions for pumped hydro. Pay now, pay later, pay, pray and pay!
I say, just stop. Stop installing infrastructure we don’t need, stop subsidizing it, stop pretending we need green electrons. Stop pretending we need “storage” to solve a problem we never had. Stop buying electricity at inflated prices from generators which don’t make it when we need it. People wanting to make money selling solar power can pay for the batteries themselves.
Start spreading the costs of this pointless experiment as fairly as we can instead of dumping it on electricity consumers who don’t have solar and on taxpayers who voted against a carbon tax.
Call it a “solar spill” — doesn’t sound so bad
Everyone seems to think this is just an unlucky accident happening because of an inevitable transition. Instead this is a slow motion train wreck — utterly predictable:
“Solar spill”, when high levels of energy are generated by rooftop installations in the middle of the day when demand is low, is becoming a problem for Australia’s electricity networks, according to Andrew Dillon, the head of the grid representative body Energy Networks Australia.
“If this goes badly, one of three things is going to happen,” he said at an Energy Networks 2018 event on Wednesday.
“Either we get voltage and frequency issues at the local level or even localised blackouts and things tripping off.”
Or rooftop solar would have to be stopped from coming into the grid or, he said, the networks would have to spend a fortune to have the capacity to deal with it.
Energy companies are becoming concerned about excess solar power in grid
Residential solar panels feed extra electricity into grid which can overload it
Electricty experts say residential battery packs are needed to stop blackouts
The best solution to soak up the excess energy and stop it from coming into the grid is by installing battery packs.
‘We have to soak up the energy somehow, battery storage is an efficient way of doing this; we can get energy recoveries of around 90 per cent,’ energy service company Greensync’s chief executive Phil Blythe said.
At the ABC this is a “success” for renewables, where Queensland is a “world leader”.
And the solutions are smart and involve the government spending even more of your money:
Mr Dillon said if the issue was not addressed, problems could occur.
“The first one is we start to get voltage and frequency issues, which can damage equipment or even localise outages,” he said.
“The second one is we have networks saying to customers wanting to connect solar, ‘No you can’t do it because we’re full’.”
Or, he said, the networks may end up having to spend a fortune to upgrade their facilities.
Some call this profligate emergency patch for our grid — “future proofing”:
Queensland Energy Minister Dr Anthony Lynham said the Government had introduced several measures to future-proof the network. “We have to move the peak that we’re seeing during the middle of the day when we have solar, to that night time cooking peak, and we’re doing that,” Dr Lynham said. “The big thing we’re doing obviously is the pumped hydro, the big Wivenhoe pumped hydro storage solution. That’s 570 megawatts … that’s a coal-fired power station.
Queensland Energy Minister Dr Anthony Lynham said the Government had introduced several measures to future-proof the network.
“We have to move the peak that we’re seeing during the middle of the day when we have solar, to that night time cooking peak, and we’re doing that,” Dr Lynham said. “So during the middle of the day when all the solar panels on roofs are working, we’re storing energy through pumping water up the top of the hill at Wivenhoe and at night time we’re driving it back down.”
Dr Lynham said the Government was taking a smart approach to the issue.
“We’re bringing on an interest-free loan scheme for batteries later on this year,” he said. “Instead of peaking your hot water at night when power used to be cheap, you peak your hot water during the day, you have your pool pump running during the middle of the day when the solar is on. “And also you can’t have a normal meter installed in a house — if you build a house or change your meter it must be a smart meter so all those controls are available to the household.”
h/t David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz, Pat, Ian, others Thank you.
The Queensland government is concealing its financial support for large-scale renewable energy projects, guaranteeing subsidies to solar companies that do not appear on balance sheets.
With an expert panel previously finding the government would need to spend between $500 million and $900m in subsidies to meet its 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, there are now calls for spending to be made public.
The government has struck four deals with major solar-farm developers, under “contracts for difference”, with floor prices nominated for the sale of their energy in order to attract finance. When the market price falls below that threshold, the government has to make up the difference.
Luckily for Queensland taxpayers — who don’t know how to spot a good investment or the energy source of the future — the Government can spend their money for them. The Palaszuczuk government has hammered out such a good deal for Queenslanders that it can’t tell them what it is. Try to figure out a situation where the Taxpayers are winning, but the government doesn’t want to say so.
Two of the four lucky subsidy farms have capacities of 50MW and 15MW which will make a big difference to the states 14,000MW generation capacity. These two solar farms are expensive but token to the point of being nearly imaginary. As commenter Terrence says:
“Yesterday at 9 am Queensland was generating 7,000 MW from fossil fuels/hydro and 80 MW from windmills and solar panels which is typical of Qld’s power mix over the last couple of months.
…These [50 and 15MW] capacities are nameplate ratings only if they run 24/7/365, …. The real ratings of these two baby power projects is more like 12.5 MW and 3.75 MW respectively which are definitely not large scale. “
Queensland has quite a lot of coal, oil and gas, so the Queensland govt has decided to use… something else. The state is aiming for a miraculous 50% renewables. Ponder the brave task ahead. To be 50% renewable, Queensland needs to generate more like 3,500MW on average with the unreliables, and that’s after capacity factors are taken into account.
Secret subsidies paid underhand,
By the government of sunny Queensland,
To give solar capacity,
An unearned veracity,
Which their climate-change masters demand.
Back from travels finally. So much to catch up on.
Last week, the world leading nation in solar panel manufacturing announced big cuts to subsidies in order to make their electricity cheaper. Can you believe? The cuts are big enough for The Motley Fool to headline this “Why the Lights Went Out on Solar Today”. (h.t GWPF)
Put this in perspective — in late 2016, Scientific American declared that China Is Dominating the Solar Industry. Apparently, the Chinese forced the prices down, drove US leaders out of business, and the US could only hope to be second. Without a hint of impending doom, Scientific American went on to title one sub-part: AN INDUSTRY PROPELLED BY TAX CREDITS. The Chinese government picked a “winner”, grabbed the industry from all over the world, brought it to China, and ran with it. Now apparently rising electricity prices hurt too much. Who could have seen that coming?
“According to some veterans in the U.S. solar industry, China bought solar companies and invited others to move to China, where they found cheap, skilled labor. Instead of paying taxes, they received tax credits.”
[Capital Watch] Chinese regulators said Friday they were unexpectedly suspending construction of new solar panel farms and cut subsidies to the industry, sending solar energy companies’ stocks plummeting Monday.
Some media reports said this policy approach was the most austere in years, and that it indicated a more significant rollback of subsidies for industry players.
Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, said the policy will curb the fast growth of PV power bases, amid efforts by the central government to make electricity cheaper for consumers.
“This year’s government work report clearly stipulated that 2018 electricity prices will be lowered by 10 percent. But the PV subsidy comes from continuous hiking of electricity prices in the past, which was paid for by ordinary consumers,” Lin told the Global Times on Sunday,
He added that with the need to cut electricity prices, the PV subsidies must now be scaled back.
The academic also admitted that the PV subsidy is paid for by “ordinary consumers”. If only Australia could aspire to have academics so honest, open and free to speak?
Both moves are aimed at keeping in check the more than 100 billion yuan (US$15.6 billion) deficit in a state-run renewable energy fund, which is financed by a surcharge on power users’ bills.
All this and Chinese electricity consumers don’t even get meaningfully votes…
No company will be spared from the reduction in China’s solar incentives. Out of 99 gigawatts (GW) of solar projects built in 2017, 53 GW were built in China. That bullish streak came to an end on Monday when China took steps to slow its solar industry. Feed-in tariffs that provide set prices for electric power sent to the grid will be cut and distributed generation (DG) projects will be capped until further notice. Early estimates are that solar installations will fall to around 35 GW in 2018, with a lot of that already installed. The impact of the policy changes will be widespread, and no company will be spared…
China’s National Development and Reform Commission said there would be no more planned ground-mounted solar projects in 2018 and subsidies for future ground-mounted projects would be forbidden…
Distributed solar farms were also capped at 10 GW for 2018, a level that may have already been exceeded…
Demand is going to fall and prices could go with it. Roth Capital estimates the solar market will be oversupplied by 34 GW of panels…
Even SunPower’s (NASDAQ:SPWR) premium-priced high-efficiency solar panels will have a little more competition as Chinese manufacturers look to dump solar panels on anyone who will buy them…
So if 50% of the worlds solar was being built in China and it has suddenly slammed on the brakes there will be a flood of cheap panels in the next few months but solar manufacturers will go broke as the industry adjusts, and then panel prices will recover in a smaller market.
“Britain has enjoyed its sunniest and warmest May since records began in 1929, provisional figures show…”
The average daytime maximum temperature was 62.6F (17.0C), just beating the previous all-time high of 62.4F (16.9C) set in May 1992.
However not-so-provisional, long known and well studied records show that this May was just like a lot of other Mays. So far, this controversial and unexpected result has not been reported.
The Met Office appear to have lost the worlds oldest and longest temperature dataset. Luckily unfunded blogger, Paul Homewood of Notalotofpeopleknowthat, kept a copy of the historic Central England Temperature record on a spare USB stick and spotted that this May in England really wasn’t that unusual.
The average temperature from May 1 to 10 was the highest ever noted since meteorologists first started gathering precise daily data in 1772.
If only all Met Bureaus had a 359 year thermometer record to selectively sweep so they could meet their mandatory Hottest Ever Headline Quota.
The Agency-of-Data-Amnesia has been reporting the first ten days of May as a national benchmark for at least the last 456 hours. It’s up there with the Hottest EVER Bank Holiday — a climate marker of an era that started when Bank Holiday Weekends were first discovered as long ago as 1978.
Coming soon, the hottest EVER third weekend of June.
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