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Prices are “off the chart” in Vic and SA right now and likely for the next few hours. Factories will be closing. Diesel generators will be running, but only in South Australia and Victoria. At these kinds of prices tens of millions of dollars could be going up in smoke every hour. By the end of today the bill could come to more than a hundred million dollars.
In QLD and NSW where there are old or evil coal fired plants the wholesale electricity costs are only $105/MWh.
Victoria
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South Australia
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The national electricity market (or at least the Eastern half and 90% of the population).
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Today when we need it, wind power on the NEM is running at about 20% of total capacity. Four out of five windfarms are not working.
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UPDATE: LOR3 (highest level warning) issued in Victoria but resolved at 8pm. In SA the diesel jet engines have been switched on for the first time as emergency reserve. We didn’t used to need to buy expensive machinery so it could sit around for 18 months before it was needed.
h/t Ian B, LightningCamel, George, […]
By David Evans
Joanne called today from Doha, on her way to give a speech in Germany. I mentioned that Bill Shorten was promising to a rebate of up to $2,000 per household to install residential batteries … and a quarter of a second I heard “what a brilliant way to waste a lot of money!”
Batteries schmatteries:
Bill Shorten unveils $15bn energy plan to help tackle climate ‘disaster’, by Katharine Murphy.
Bill Shorten has unveiled a $15bn program for driving the transformation in Australia’s energy system to low-emissions sources, declaring climate change is no longer an emergency, “it’s a disaster”. …
Labor is proposing an emissions reduction target across the economy of 45% and aims to have renewables achieve a 50% share of the electricity market by 2030.
Eight coal-fired power stations are set to close over the next two decades because they have reached the end of their operating life, and Labor’s higher emissions reduction target will drive a faster rationalisation.
What do you think? Is Bill Shorten’s climate plan a disaster for Australia? Should the Federal Government have conducted some due diligence before heading down this […]
“Paris” is rock solid and on the brink simultaneously
In a kind of Schrodinger’s-Agreement Paris means everything and nothing all at once. The Grand Emissions-Mouth says every country on Earth has signed up except the US. The Giant Money-Mouth says it’s unravelling, an emergency and on the brink.
How can that be? Spot the pea. This strange superposition can exist because the emissions agreement is vaporware: 200 countries signed up but almost none of them are going to meet their agreement and no one cares. On the money side though, almost no one is going to give or get what they expected, and it’s a complete bunfight down to the last comma.
It was and always is, about The Money
No one gives a toss about the CO2:
The Paris climate change agreement has started to unravel as a dispute over a $US100 billion-a-year climate fund prompts new demands that developing countries be given greater freedoms to increase their emissions.
Environment groups have claimed the Paris deal was “on the brink” after an emergency meeting in Bangkok at the weekend failed to reach consensus on crucial details on how the agreement would be managed.
The […]
In one of the more pointless and inane “scientific” publications of the year, Brulle et al has added up climate lobbying dollars across the years and sectors, but missed the two largest sectors and blended friend and foe unto homogenised pap. Even Brulle admits that gas companies lobby for climate legislation, while coal companies lobby against it, yet Brulle still lumps them all into the archetypal ogre called “Fossil Fuels”. Let’s perpetuate a mindless stereotype, eh?
Was that an accident or an aim?
Thus and verily do “fossil fuels” predictably outspend environmental organisations:
“Unsurprisingly, sectors that could be negatively affected by bills limiting carbon emissions, such as the electrical utilities sector, fossil fuel companies and transportation corporations had the deepest pockets. Their lobbying efforts dwarfed those of environmental organizations, the renewable energy industry and volunteer groups.”
Fossil fuels didn’t just outspend enviromentalists, they might as well have been them. Shell leaned on World Bank to nobble the competition. It begged for Big-Green subsidies to sequester carbon and lobbied for carbon trading. BP committed to a low carbon world, and went so far as to join Greenpeace and lobby the BBC itself.
Gas companies benefit from climate change […]
The university grant engine is just a part of the whole Green Scare Machine. Click to enlarge.
Science Funding is monopsonistic, one-sided and poses a real threat to science. Governments are strangling research. The more money governments throw at politicized science, the tighter the deadly grip.
Read the cutting commentary from Don Aitkin — the former vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra and foundation chairman of the Australian Research Council. There’s a vested interest here, rarely discussed, that has ballooned in the last thirty years to billions of dollars.
In The Australian and on Aitken’s blog
Don’t you Dare Upset The Money Making Machine
The engine works this way. There is strong pressure on all academics to bring in research grant money for the department, the faculty and university. Those who do it well find their careers advancing quickly. To assist them there are media sections in universities whose job it is to frame the research work of academics in a way that will gain the attention of the media. Such media releases will come with as arresting a headline as the media section can devise. Buzzwords like ‘breakthrough’, ‘crucial’, ‘cutting edge’ and ‘revolution’ will […]
Tell me again how solar power is cheaper than fossil fuels
People in the UK have been misled into taking out loans to put solar panels on their roof — they were told the panels would “pay for themselves” but discovered they were losing money. The UK Ombudsman has received around 2,000 complaints.
Barclays bank hit by solar scandal
Solar manufacturers paired up with banks to install and finance solar installations telling customers they’d make money, except many didn’t:
… a common method was to encourage households to buy the panels on credit from a partner lender. Households were often told that the subsidy income, combined with the savings from buying less electricity, would more than cover the loan repayments. In some cases this proved to be false.
Many of those to whom panels were allegedly mis-sold were either “retired or approaching retirement” and some were “left in financial difficulty”, the financial ombudsman said. One customer was left £1,000 a year worse off.
We can all say fair’s fair, do your homework before you buy. But under UK law, the partner-banks are responsible for the financial scam not the solar manufacturers (and not the customers). […]
Two researchers looked at the ten main countries in East Africa in the last fifty years and compared global temperatures to a database of wars, conflicts and refugees.
They found that regional drought and global temperatures didn’t cause wars or drive the total number of displaced people. The things that did were rapid population growth, poor economic times, and political instability.
“What our study suggests is the failure of political systems is the primary cause of conflict and displacement of large numbers of people.”
Thus, if you love peace, it’s better to defend free speech and the constitution than to use cloth shopping bags and change your light globes.
Climate change is not a key cause of conflict
The Conversation, Mark Maslin
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Probably the most surprising thing about this study is that sometimes academics test hypotheses and publish sensible conclusions.
In our recent paper, my student Erin Owain and I decided to test the climate-conflict hypothesis, using East Africa as our focus. The region is already very hot and very poor, making it especially vulnerable to climate change (in fact neighbouring Chad is by some measures the single most vulnerable country in the […]
Businesses are closing, customers are cutting back spending, company bosses are all suddenly spot trading experts in the energy market, or planning to become their own electricity supplier. Meanwhile scouts from the US have arrived to poach companies who want cheaper energy (and tax cuts).
Happy New Year Australia. These are all headlines and stories in The Australian from yesterday and today.
Cut power bills or lose more jobs: ACCC chief’s warning on energy costs
Glenda Korporaal writes:
Australia’s competition regulator, Rod Sims, who has been tasked with finding ways to cut power bills, has warned that high energy costs will force more plant closures and job losses as prices continue to increase.
“Energy affordability is Australia’s largest economic challenge,” the chief executive of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission told The Weekend Australian.
“We have already seen jobs lost, investment reduced, plant closures (because of high energy prices). Unfortunately, we are going to see quite a bit more.”
Some businesses will be OK – like those that are not involved with fertilizer, paper, glass, steel, bricks, telecommunications or refrigeration:
He said the biggest pressure would be on manufacturing companies […]
It’s a very well written article: Bonackers vs. Big Wind by Robert Bryce. h/t Andrew. The good news is that opponents of wind power are having a lot of success onshore. The bad news is that the renewables industry is pushing offshore instead, but fishermen don’t want them either, and families that have been fishing the same areas for 300 years are up in arms.
“The South Fork fishermen are fighting to preserve their access to some of the most productive fisheries in the world.”
Some eye-opening numbers:
Obama set a target of 10GW of offshore wind power by 2020. But right now there is only 30 MW. It’s 9,970MW short. The offshore push is on. To replace a single nuclear generator will take 45 offshore wind plants. Offshore generation costs as much as three times what gas power costs per KWh.
They face big money renewables proponents — not just rich beachfront homeowners, but large corporations who want tax credits worth millions, and groups like Norwegian oil giant Statoil ASA, plus the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Governor Andrew Cuomo has a goal of “producing 50 percent of the state’s electricity from renewables by […]
Ergodan does his own climate maths — decides that the most significant inflatable cash cow has disappeared from the sky. The global climate suddenly looks clearer, and so Turkey pulls back from Paris accord:
(Reuters) The U.S. decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement means Turkey is less inclined to ratify the deal because the U.S. move jeopardizes compensation promised to developing countries, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.
“Therefore, after this step taken by the United States, our position steers a course towards not passing this from the parliament,” he said. (link)
Turkey, saving the planet, one bank account at a time.
How many other nations do the same maths but are aren’t quite so, ahem, honest?
9.6 out of 10 based on 144 ratings
The The Climate Institute is a private think tank set up in 2005. It got about $2m a year back in the heyday of climate panic. Today Planet Earth is still about to collapse, but it’s not important enough for the team to keep working without a salary. Amazing what someone, who really believes in what they do, can achieve with 1% of what they had.
No more propaganda surveys from them then:
Climate Institute announces closure, citing lack of funding to continue
After a decade of climate advocacy work, climate change research organisation the Climate Institute has announced it will be closing in late June.
The non-profit’s survival has until now been dependent on donations, and it has cited a lack of funding as the reason for its closure.
Best known for its Climate of the Nation reports, the organisation also helped, among other things, expand the renewable energy target in 2008.
The Climate Institute could be relied upon to pay for trite motherhood style surveys to score meaningless headlines about how 110% of Australian believe we have a climate.
My past posts:
Climate Institute Poll finds we are all […]
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Pierre Gosselin reports that environmental experts, professors, and some green leaders in Germany are fed up at the deforestation, the fraud and the futility. They are protesting at the waste of money in the name of ecology as trees and birds get destroyed, electricity prices skyrocket, but nothing gets achieved for the climate. One has put together a book titled: “Sacrificed Landscapes – How the Energiewende Is Destroying our Landscapes.”
They might mistakenly think there is a man-made crisis in the climate but they are honest players, and they realize that real environmental causes are being used as a guise for a planned economy and self serving corruption:
Now that Germany’s Energiewende has been in full swing for a number of years, many leading environmentalists are in a state of shock as huge areas of the country are being deforested and landscapes disfigured to make way for hundreds of wind turbines.
Environmentalist Georg Etscheit is a regular contributor at Germany’s leading climate alarmism site, Klimaretter, and he as well, has had enough. Etscheit will be releasing a book in early November.
Wind farms dominate the landscape in Germany. From the promotional […]
Giant climate funds issue giant press releases but not much else.The pledges aren’t being kept, hardly any money is being handed out. The posterchild drowning Islands are being left dangling in danger because the forms are too complicated.
Everyone wants to save the world, but not enough to make the forms simpler: Red tape’ locking small island states out of billions in climate funds
Many small developing countries are so administratively stretched that they cannot fill in all the complex forms needed to access climate money to help them to reduce emissions and adapt to increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather.
Small Pacific Islands will drown in red tape before they drown in a rising ocean:
Although billions of dollars of climate money is theoretically available, in practice red tape and paperwork makes it is extremely hard and slow to get hold of, says the Commonwealth Secretariat, the central institution of the 53 Commonwealth countries, who are among the hardest hit by climate change.
UN priorities? What’s more important — collecting funds to save the Islands, or saving the actual islands…
Fiji’s high commissioner in London, Jitoko Tikolevu, said the process […]
On a good day South Australia has more than 40% renewable energy. On a bad day, it’s -2 or something. Wind towers suck in so many ways. They can even draw more power out than they bring in and best of all — their peak electron sucking power comes just when the state needs electricity the most.
Business blows up as turbines suck more power than they generate
The sapping of power by the turbines during calm weather on July 7 at the height of the crisis, which has caused a price surge, shows just how unreliable and intermittent wind power is for a state with a renewable energy mix of more than 40 per cent.
South Australia has more “renewable” wind power than anywhere else in Australia. They also have the highest electricity bills, the highest unemployment, the largest number of “failures to pay” and disconnections. Coincidence?
The emergency measures are needed to ease punishing costs for South Australian industry as National Electricity Market (NEM) prices in the state have frequently surged above $1000 a megawatt hour this month and at one point on Tuesday hit the $14,000MWh maximum price.
Complaints from business […]
The tide of money, the vested interests flows
H/t to Eric Worrall at WattsUp.
The current “green” industry is already around $1.5 Trillion a year. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England said he expects this to grow to $5-7 trillion.
Financial Post: Climate change a $7 trillion funding opportunity
He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound.
If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leading investors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market…
Again we get this “free market” myth:
[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney
[…]
John Ioannidis paints a picture of a vast hive of researchers all pushed to publish short papers that are mostly a waste of time. The design is bad, the results useless (even when meta-collated with other badly designed studies). Basically, humankind is pouring blood, sweat and tears into spinning wheels in medicine — just paper churn. Most papers will never help a patient.
Ioannidis wants rigor – full registration before the study, full transparency afterwards, fewer studies over all, but with better design. Astonishingly, fully 85% of what is spent on clinical trials is wasted. It’s really a pretty big scandal, given that lives are on the line. I can’t see the media or pollies joining the dots. Imagine how many quality life-years are being burnt at the stake of the self-feeding Science-PR-Industry.
And this is clinical medical research, where standards are higher than in many other scientific areas and where there are easily defined terms of success unlike “blue sky” studies. Ioannidis doesn’t say it directly, but his description of the effect current funding has (which is almost all government based) almost guarantees that researchers will be wasting time in the paper churn — fast, short papers of little […]
The story of three kinds of curiosity — two genuine, one “induced”
Several wise men foresaw the decline of organized science. Here, a man called Gordon Tulloch was inspired by Popper to look at the social organisation of scientists to try to figure out what made it work. He noticed there were three kinds of researchers, one driven by curiosity for the truth, another on a mission to solve a problem, and a third with an “induced” curiosity created by demand from elsewhere — boss or government. He predicted that the system would fail if those who were induced outnumbered the truly curious, as the “induced” curiosity was not well connected to reality, whereas the other two types were. The primary aim of the induced researcher was not to solve a problem or uncover an answer but just to keep their jobs, and there were many ways to “keep their jobs” that did not involve actual discovery. Indeed for some jobs, thinks Jo, actual discovery could be a catastrophic event.
He foresaw a degenerative spiral which appears to have come to pass. Once induced researchers are managed by people without enough skill to read and assess […]
The December 12th Draft on UN web site.
h/t Andrew McRae and Pat in comments
Here are some rough preliminary thoughts on the latest version of the COP21 document.
The Australian ABC news made it sound like Moses was just about to come back from the Mount. “There were tears!”.
James Hansen, though called Paris talks ‘a fraud’
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
It’s a rare moment when I am on the same side as he is.
On the other hand, The Wall St Journal writes that it is watered down but will “transform” the economy:
If approved and implemented, the agreement would force businesses and citizens to sharply reduce their use of fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal and could fundamentally transform the global economy.
Both James Hansen and the […]
Bask in the hypocrisy — the concern about CO2 is faked
Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Merchants of Panic don’t really care if we reduce CO2. Follow what they do, not what they say. This is our last chance to save the planet, but they won’t consider nuclear energy — apparently the planet is just not that important. Nor will they consider Ultra Super Critical hot burning coal, which could reduce emissions by 15% at a stroke. Likewise fracking. Instead, the answer to everything is always inefficient, government-dependent industries and trading schemes. These schemes don’t reduce much CO2, but they reward the patrons of big-government and punish the opponents. They suck money from independent corporations, and churn that cash through the “renewables” cheer-squad, the financial houses, and the groups that profit from keeping the climate scare going. Ponder that the EU had a monster emissions trading scheme, but the USA cut far more emissions — thanks to fracking and no thanks to any fake “free market”. The bottom line is that we may face the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event, but apparently things are not so bad that the Greens will consider fracking. The big […]
NSW (and a lot of Australia) is a closeted corner of the world where electronic news can take decades to arrive. The electrons themselves make it downunder in 150 milliseconds or so, but the message may never make it past the ABC-Fairfax filter. Apparently the highest office in NSW wants to emulate California. It’s like it’s 1994.
“When it comes to clean energy, we can be Australia’s answer to California.”
— Rob Stokes, NSW Environment Minister.*
Maurice Newman sets him straight in The Australian.
In short — companies are fleeing from a green California to Texas where electricity is half the price. For some reason jobs, profits, products and opportunities are following the energy. California’s unemployment rate is 7.4%. Texas’ is 5.1%.
California dreaming is nuts in NSW
“The NSW government must also be oblivious to the steady exodus of Californian businesses and jobs. Companies like Toyota, which after 60 years has moved its US headquarters to Texas, or Occidental Petroleum, which after 50 years has left for Houston. Chevron is next. Other stalwarts like ARCO, Getty Oil, Union Oil, Fluor, Calpine and Intel have all moved in search of a more business friendly environment and […]
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