This temple to carbon neutrality happens to be the largest plant in the UK . It generates about 7% of all the megawatts used there. But a new study by Sterman et al, suggests the Drax plan is backfiring badly.
When is carbon neutrality not neutral? When the carbon debt is not paid off in our lifetimes…
Burning forests instead of coal deposits raises CO2, and in so many ways:
Wood is a less efficient fuel. Megawatt for megawatt, wood produces more CO2 than coal. In terms of efficiencies, the combustion efficiency of wood is 25% compared to coal at 35%.
Processing losses to supply wood are around 27%, while losses to supply coal are 11%. (NEA 2011, IEA 2016, Roder 2015)
This is the slow road to carbon neutrality. It takes 40 – 100 years to grow the trees.
In a century, lots of things can go wrong. The natural forest may never grow back thanks to disease, development or fires. Cleared land may be converted to pasture. There are many ways to leave a permanent carbon debt.
If the slow-growing hardwood forest is replaced with fast-growing pine, the site can only soak up 60% of the carbon “lost”. Oak-Hickory forest stores 211 tC/ha compared to 131 tC/ha for pine plantations. A managed plantation can’t store as much carbon as an unmanaged one. After 500 million years of evolution, nature has fine-tuned carbon extraction in ecosystems. In an unmanaged forest, biology fills every carbon-sucking niche and doesn’t leave gaps for heavy machinery.
If power stations don’t use as much coal, the coal price may fall, and other people may use the same coal elsewhere anyway.
The kicker: As long as biofuel use is expanding so are CO2 emissions. All biomass burning from an existing forest creates an immediate carbon debt. And if you are continually chopping down more forests, the carbon debts accrue…
The next pair of graphs shows that Shortleaf Lobilly (a pine) regrows quickly, while Oaks take 80 years to recoup the CO2 lost.
Click to enlarge and read the caption.
The real kicker
It’s all very well thinking about how long it takes one year’s wood-pellet electricity to become neutral, but power stations need more fuel every year and if we keep razing more land, the carbon debt keeps growing. In the two scenarios below the biomass industry keeps growing linearly every year. But in S8 people settle down on the whole biomass idea and stop razing extra forest in 2050. Even so, the total industry carbon debt keeps accruing for another 56 years until presumably the regrowth reaches a point where it is pulling in more carbon that the yearly raze produces. It takes 144 years after the industry stops expanding before the net carbon debt is back to zero.
What other industry today won’t produce a net benefit (its whole reason for being) for one and a half centuries?
“Scenario 8 (S8), CO2 continues to rise for 56 years after bioenergy production growth stops and only falls below initial levels 144 years after growth stops” Click to enlarge and read the caption.
If razing forests for electricity makes any sense at all (in the world of climate voodoo) it only begins to “help”, maybe, in 150 years or more. Would anyone let me buy carbon offset futures for 2168 and get a refund on the RET/carbon tax/electricity bills now? Who are we kidding?
If you believe that CO2 is a threat, then you’d have to also believe that biomass burning makes the next century even hotter than burning coal. Most greens will choose the biofuel. What’s more important – to be pro-climate or anti-coal? We all know the answer to that…
Even under a best case scenario burning wood is “not good” for the climate
The numbers are so clear here, every single pin needs to line up in the right way for forest to be useful as a fuel:
… using wood in electricity generation worsens climate change for decades or more even though many of our assumptions favor wood, including: wood displaces coal (the most carbon intensive fossil fuel); all harvested land is allowed to regrow as forest with no subsequent conversion to pasture, cropland, development or other uses; no subsequent harvest, fire or disease; no increase in coal demand resulting from lower prices induced by the decline in coal use for electric power; no increase in N2O from fertilization of managed plantations; and no increase in CO2 emissions or methanogenesis from disturbed land. Relaxing any of these assumptions worsens the climate impact of wood bioenergy.
It is quite difficult to imagine a way that burning forests for electricity could possibly make sense while the world has hundreds of years of coal underground and thousands of years of uranium and thorium. But if the aim is not to change the climate but to hurt independent companies that stand on their own two feet, then burning wood in power plants is just the thing.
The Australian Climate Sceptics gave the UK govt the Inaugural Gorebel Prize (for inconvenient outcomes) thanks to Drax
The winner of the Inaugural Gorbel Prize is the UK government whose green policies aim to make it uneconomic to burn coal. So the tax-payer funded Green Investment Bank has loaned £100 million to help convert the huge Drax coal-burning power station in Yorkshire to burning “sustainable biomass”. This is part of a huge finance package of one billion pounds to get the biomass green tick, earn renewable energy subsidies, and avoid the need to buy carbon credits.
Where do they plan to get the “sustainable biomass”? Each year 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips will be imported from North American forests to replace 4.5 Mt of coal.
How much land does it take to sustainably generate electricity?
The document names cricket as the sport that will be hardest hit by climate change in England, stating that “wetter winters and more intense summer downpours are disrupting the game at every level”.
God forbid. This is a death spiral:
.. Glamorgan Head of Operations, Dan Cherry, …warned that climate change could “fundamentally change the game”.
“The less cricket we play, the fewer people will watch it, the less they will come to the ground and pay to enter, the less chance there is for young people to be inspired,” said Cherry.
This change, it seems, has already begun.
Wait til you see the evidence:
In international cricket, 27 percent of England’s home one-day internationals since 2000 have been played with reduced overs because of rain delays. The rate of rain-affected matches has more than doubled since 2011, with five percent of matches abandoned completely.
By crikey. That is a six year weather trend. Statistical significance p < 1 ( ± 4 or 6! ).
Hmm. Strange clue here in the first paragraph of this story:
Cricket has always been a sport at the mercy of the weather. In the 1930s, county cricket clubs in England were headed for financial ruin after a succession of wet summers. Twenty years later, persistent rain saw desperate clubs experiment with blankets, rubber mats and suction pumps.
So wet summers happened before, CO2 didn’t do it, and cricket survived. Hmm?
Claiming fans would not buy a ticket,
To support their own team at cricket,
Because rain on the day,
Could have postponed the play,
Is a climate-change real sticky wicket.
–Ruairi
Hope to see you in Sydney the weekend after next!
I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer at the ATA Friedman18 conference. It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner. Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18. Bookings close this Sunday.
A Pew survey exposed a stark gap between younger and older Republican voters on global warming and energy policy.
Neuhauser doesn’t mention it but the implications are pretty dire — look how long it takes to recover from school:
Republican millennials – people roughly ages 22 to 37 – are far less likely than older generations to support the use of coal, oil and other fossil fuel sources. By one count, while three-quarters of Republican baby boomers and older generations supported more offshore oil and gas drilling, fewer than half of millennial Republicans felt the same way.
At least most Republicans grow up:
Among [young and old] Democrats, by contrast, there was only a small divide.
If half the population is shifting in the same direction as they age, this suggests… something… what could it be?
There can be a tendency for younger voters to become more conservative as they age. The divide on energy and climate is so broad, however, that experts expect it’s one that will not significantly narrow.
So young believers will not grow up to be old skeptics?
“I’m not aware of any evidence that they’ll become more like the 65-plus types now and adopt their worldview,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
It’s research like that that gets you to Yale.
For a democrat journalist there is always hope:
But even with a president occupying the White House who has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax,” the findings may also be a sign of a shift to come within the party: Millennials are set to overtake baby boomers as the largest generation of Americans eligible to vote.
Good luck with that theory.
Here come the excuses. I mean reasons:
As with those other policy areas, the results in the Pew survey may reflect the different experiences and far greater access to information that younger voters have enjoyed, experts say.
Yup. Young people have more info because old people live in shoeboxes.
And when it comes to experiences — old people just built companies, raised kids, and paid off houses, but young people have built entire civilizations in MineCraft TM.
Hear them roar:
“I am a millennial – we grew up at a time when the air has been relatively clean and Earth Day existed and the general idea that the planet as a resource that should be preserved is not uncommon,” says Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. “Millennials also didn’t directly experience things like the fuel crisis in the 1970s, so there’s no hangover from there being fuel controls and other issues like there were for boomers and other folks.”
Old folk are obviously hungover because they’ve been through tough times. But since the real world is a fluffy buttercup, young naive people are so much better placed to understand it.
Note how the experiences of millenials that help them are the experiences they didn’t experience.
This process of growing up and getting wise is now a “fault line”:
The results are the latest to highlight fault lines within the Republican Party, which – even with control of the White House, both houses of Congress and a majority of state legislatures – has struggled to find common ground amid what can seem an ever more fractious caucus.
The fault line in the GOP is that the representatives keep lining up with the young and gullible instead of the old and wise.
The fault line in the Democrats is just between them and the real world.
The subsidy that flows whatever the weather | by Josh.
How do you know when an industry is a loser? When even repowering old turbines, which were put in the best spots, is not worth the trouble unless they get a subsidy, I mean, even more subsidies.
Remember the days when subsidies were needed to get a project going?
Maintenance is not an option
Europe is full of old windfarms. The original subsidies have run out and there’s not much appetite for new ones. Without more free money from taxpayers the most economic option for older turbines is to run them into the ground and give up on them. Maintenance costs are the silent plague. But so too is red tape and legal approval. The age of the European turbines is reaching the point where half of the entire fleet is facing do or die decisions.
John Constable of the GWPF wonders if the wind industry in Europe may be on the point of collapse.
And Europe’s fleet is old:
By 2020, 41% of the currently installed capacity in Germany will be over 15 years old, 44% in Spain, and 57% in Denmark.
John Constable is responding to a renewables policy cheerleaders, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), who recently released the hopeful vested fantasy study: Repower to the People. But the days of ripe subsidies are over, so even the industry sympathizers have to admit that owners of old turbines face a set of no-fun decisions.
Sites with existing wind farms are often impossible to repower due to lack of availability of the site, legal consent, changes in subsidies, environmental protection, public acceptance, or insufficient wind conditions. (p. 1265)
And there’s not much empty space to allow for new and larger gaps between turbines and houses. Residents have wised up to the price of living to close to them:
…the state of Bavaria has even “introduced in 2014 a regulation that sets a new minimum distance of ten times the tip-height between a wind turbine and the closest residential areas” (L. Ziegler et al.). A modern machine can be upwards of 120 metres (nearly 400 feet) to tip, so this implies a separation of over three quarters of a mile, and would rule out many existing onshore wind farms in the UK, particularly in England, where at present there is no formally required separation distance.
No wonder our national electricity grid is in deep. Audrey Zibelman is the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). The former New York based woman is a lawyer with an MBA who thinks we can change the weather with our power supply. She was appointed in March 2017. Thank Malcolm Turnbull. Apparently in 2016 she was a favourite for the future Team Hillary in the US.
Audrey the activist
Just to make her motivation clear. Her words last year:
The manager of our electricity market thinks wind and solar are actually competitive:
And the good thing is that technology has evolved so that we don’t have to worry about sacrificing economics for good environmental policy.”
Notably, what she isn’t dreaming of is cheap electricity:
Her dream is of a grid dominated not by big power suppliers and their fossil-fuel generators, but rather a system of “distributed energy” that delivers better supply security by storing solar and wind power in batteries for later use. She wants a market that better rewards people with rooftop solar panels and other renewables; with incentives for more efficient power use in peak times; that harnesses idle energy, instead of building more large power stations for short periods of peak demand in hotter months.
You might think the Australian national grid should be providing electricity rather than being a tool to reward people for buying uneconomic equipment in the hope of stopping Antarctica from melting. Silly you.
Oops? How do you mistake a 100% artificially forced transition with a natural one
Zilbelman talks about the energy transition as if it is some natural change thrust upon us, instead of an artificial bubble, like a giant marshmallow man, inflated entirely and pumped relentlessly by government dollars to keep it from collapse:
“This is not a judgement about anything. It’s just the reality that the economics have changed, and technology has changed, and resisting this change is a little like trying to resist the internet. It’s just going to happen because of where technology is going.”
Her husband, Phil Harris, is the chief executive officer of Tres Amigas, a New Mexico-based company that is seeking to raise more than $1 billion to connect the nation’s electric grids and allow for greater growth of clean energy.
Which raised other questions in 2015. Journalists asked about potential conflicts of interest with her then role as head of the NY Public Service Commission. After that, she recused herself. h/t Beachside at Catallaxy.
June 16, 2015: ALBANY—As New York’s top energy regulator, Audrey Zibelman is in a position to influence a market worth billions of dollars and help set the policy that governs it. At the same time, Zibelman, who worked in the private sector before Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed her chairwoman of the state Public Service Commission in 2013, has unusually close ties to energy companies vying for work in New York.
The issue is “not technology” says the non-technologist
Storage, price, efficiency, frequency stability? Wave a magic wand, other people who understand these things will definitely absolutely solve this and with other people’s money.
Zibelman also believes she is in the best place to solve them. “The issue is not so much the technology; technology is happening,” she said. “It’s the regulatory regimes and the market regimes that need to be adapted to the future power system.”
It’s all just a question of rules. If we change the system and don’t worry about how much it costs, anything can be solved. We just need to use the right language when we talk to baby electrons.
Zibelman was apparently on Hillary Clinton’s hot-list:
One of Hillary Clinton’s hot picks to lead the United States Department of Energy has been appointed as chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator, as part of the political and corporate exodus in the wake of Donald Trump’s upset election victory.
No surprise then, that she was so appealing to Turnbull who is on the same side of politics as Hillary.
For the record, AEMO is 60% owned by taxpayers
Just so we all know who is ultimately responsible for the AEMO:
AEMO is a public private partnership between government, which owns 60% and industry members (including generators, transmission companies, retail and distribution businesses, resource companies, and investment companies) who own 40%. AEMO operates on a cost recovery basis as a company limited by guarantee under the Corporations Act (2001). AEMO fully recovers its operating costs through fees paid by participants.
Are you feeling stressed about imaginary man-made climate change that hasn’t even happened yet? Thanks to taxpayer funds, there is a virtual reality event that may help you (or not). The Bureau of Meteoranxiety is on in Melbourne this week. This experimental, untested technique doesn’t look like it gets to the nub of the problem.
If victims spent 45 minutes with a friendly skeptic instead, they could be cured for life. Where is the grant for that?
Image credit: Michael Tartaglia
Are you feeling stressed about the end of the world? If yes, you might want head to this Next Wave event. An immersive live art experience incorporating VR technology, Bureau of Meteoranxiety by Perth-based artists Alex Tate and Olivia Tartaglia will allow participants to work through their fears of climate change by exposing them to “experimental visual therapies and sensory remedies” and providing “new language and coping strategies to help stay above the metaphorical and literal flood line”.
Participants in the bureau’s “wellness trial” start by filling out a questionnaire to assess their level of “meteoranxiety”.
They then watch a video from Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term meteoranxiety as “the specific anxiety that people feel when their climate and the weather … becomes so abnormal as to give them a sense of foreboding that the future is going to be more difficult than the present; that the next storm is going to wipe them out”.
But the bureau’s proposed treatments may seem a little counterintuitive. There’s a guided meditation that starts off soothingly and escalates into an unusual weather event; an AI chatbot called Gail, who delivers online counselling; a shared online journal to help patients feel less alone with their meteoranxiety; and a three-minute virtual reality simulation of a rainforest which eventually leads the patient to touch a 3D-printed log, giving them a therapeutic dose of “nature”.
“There is a satirical element to the work,” says Tartaglia.
It’s good to know there is one. If anyone spots that lone satirical element, let us know.
Art as good as this couldn’t survive without forced payments coerced from taxpayers:
Olivia Tartaglia recieved $14,953 from the WA Dept of Culture and the Arts.
To support the presentation of “Bureau of Meteoranxiety”, a multi-room pseudo-agency dealing with the pre-traumatic effects of climate change. The presentation will combine sculpture, performance, and digital and virtual reality technology. The presentation will be part of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival.
For the last year everyone has been calling Tasmania the “Battery of the Nation” — Turnbull, Hydro Tasmania, government departments, the ever hopeful green press. It’s an official plan. The bright idea is to add “Pumped Hydro Storage” to the large dams already on the island state, boosting the only reliable renewable type of energy. But right now, as far as mainland Australia goes, Tassie is a No-Volt Battery.
Even Hydro Tasmania is calling itself the “Battery of the Nation”
The dirty secret is just how fragile the link is. Not only did it break for six spectacular months in 2016 — leaving the “green” state flying in squads of diesels — but its now quietly out of action again and it’s projected to be out for two months all up. The 290 km undersea cable known as Basslink is the second longest of its type in the world. It broke on 24 March 2018. It is not expected back in action til May 31. It was an accident of routine maintenance at one end.
“The equipment was damaged by a third-party contractor during routine works. There is no damage to the cable itself.”
““Tasmania is uniquely placed to help lead Australia through its challenging transition towards cleaner sources of energy. Battery of the Nation offers a future that’s clean, reliable and affordable.”
– Steve Davy, Hydro Tasmania CEO”
Which is all true apparently, except it’s not so clean nor reliable and costs billions. But apart from that….
The Tasmanian government-owned hydro electricity monopoly will unveil a report next month saying preliminary studies have identified 4000 megawatts to 5000 MW of potential pumped hydro storage sites across more than a dozen sites that can be delivered at a cost of $1 million to $1.5 million per MW.
And where is the report that was due in April? There’s no press release yet. I guess no one wants to mention the Battery of the Nation while it is effectively dead — including the lefty-lobbying-media. If a coal plant was out of action for two months, there would be a headline every week in the Fairfax press. The Australians for Big Government (ABC) mentioned the disconnect on March 28th, and played it down a few weeks later as the fault problem was extended — “it’s no threat to power security”. Of course, if the dams were empty, it would be.
The Tasmanian Labor opposition policy is now aiming for a 120% renewable target. If the cable breaks again, perhaps they can post those extra electrons in shoe boxes.
“We’ve seen what South Australia has done, Tasmania could have been been leading the charge here,” Ms White said.
In 2016, Hydro Tasmania had run their dams too low out of greed — collecting carbon credits by exporting renewable hydro power to Victoria –even as an El Nino was forecast which meant dry conditions were coming. Things reached high farce when Hydro Tas attempted the world first of generating electricity by the not-so-renewable option of cloud seeding. The icing on the Farce-Cake was that they tried this in the face of a major storm front that caused flooding rain.
Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.
A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.
Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.
Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as much. But most of their confusion, as usual, starts with their assumptions. Firstly, they assume that there is some connection between our global climate and plastic bags — as if people really believe that by using a cloth bag or buying organic tomatoes that they will cool the planet. If we surveyed the reasons people use cloth bags, its probably to reduce plastic in landfill and to stop dolphins getting strangled. Nobody thinks a cloth bag will slow storms and reduce droughts.
The researchers didn’t stand a chance: set up to fail with their choice of words. “Climate change” and “pollution” are muddy ambiguous terms that mean different things to different people. Language is the main investigative tool we have — but it’s been blunted to mush by spinmeisters. No great gems of truth will be found while mining rocks with ripe bananas.
What the study shows is that skeptics are more diligent and conscientious about reducing their own environmental footprint.
Are skeptics dumb robots or are believers social climbing patsies:
These results suggest that different groups may prefer different strategies for addressing climate change.
You don’t say.
Thus, belief in climate change does not appear to be a necessary or sufficient condition for pro-environmental behavior, indicating that changing skeptical Americans’ minds need not be a top priority for climate policymakers.
In your dreams believer-academics. The biggest message in this study was that skeptics don’t even want climate policymakers, full stop.
It’s as if skeptics are dumb robots behaving to “save the climate” by catching a train, without even believing the climate needs saving. Maybe the deplorables don’t believe in “climate change” but can’t afford the car? Seriously guys.
It would be just as fair to conclude that if what you want to get people on public transport, using cloth shopping bags and buying eco-friendly products, then convert the masses to skeptics.
If anything the study suggests that believers don’t care much about shopping bags and starving whales. Why do they profess belief? It might not be moral licensing, so much as moral vanity — where belonging to the right tribe is more important than “saving the planet”. But in a democracy, if you want voters to support parasitic gravy trains and inefficient subsidies, you still need to persuade the voters that these things are worth doing.
The alternative — the dishonest Turnbull approach is to hide the carbon trading schemes within meaningless names like “the Safeguard Mechanism” or the National Energy Guarantee. Works for a while, but the public is waking up. So far he has lost 14 seats at the last election and 30 newspolls since.
As for “pro-environmental behaviour” — Hall et al equate catching a bus with supporting a wind farm as if people have a pro-environment button that activates everything Hall and Lewis think of as being “pro-environment”. Instead people pick and choose each action separately.
Tick the Stereotype – believers are young, white and naive
The old and wise don’t believe everything they read. Believers do:
Overall, participants who belonged to belief clusters that endorsed the existence of climate change and expressed concern were more likely to: be young; White/Caucasian; see climate change as anthropogenic; perceive climate change as harmful to humans around the world, soon; and be trusting of scientific and media communications about climate science.
The Skeptics got more skeptical
Interestingly, after repeated surveys, the worriers kept worrying at a constant level, but skeptics got more skeptical.
….
Could it be that the act of repeatedly asking people about their skeptical views helped to solidify their opinion? The skeptical group is the only group that doesn’t get to discuss their opinion in politically correct society. Possibly the more they thought about it, the more sure they became.
Researchers are baffled:
Despite these findings about climate change beliefs, self reported behaviors, and policy support, we were unable to explain why the “Skeptical” low-believers were more likely to self report more pro-environmental behavior than high-believers. For instance, the “Skeptical” did not report greater identity fit with environmentalism, did not endorse greater beliefs in individual and political efficacy to reduce climate change, and were not associated with logical demographic factors (e.g., political ideology, income, education). One possibility is that our findings generalize only to Americans on MTurk who tend to lean to the political left. Although we cannot rule out this possibility until this study is replicated with other samples, the current sample contained enough conservatives to test for ideology effects; furthermore, other research has documented that conservatives on MTurk are dispositionally similar to conservatives in well-respected nationally representative samples (e.g., American National Election Study; Clifford, Jewell, & Waggoner, 2015). However, it is also possible that we did not measure partisanship or ideology with enough granularity to detect nuanced differences in climate change beliefs. Indeed, research published after we collected our data found that “Tea Party” Republicans have the most distinct environmental views (Hamilton & Saito, 2015), whereas conventional Democratic/ Republican divides (our measure of partisanship) do not sufficiently capture diverse environmental views in the U.S …
Perhaps our “Skeptical” participants had more libertarian leanings, leading them to report engaging in individual level behavior over endorsing federal government climate change policies. Or, the “Skeptical” might have been motivated to report behaving pro-environmentally for other reasons that they did not associate with climate change, such as reducing pollution or waste accumulation. Other possibilities for these results involve the “Highly Concerned”: Perhaps they engaged in moral licensing (Merritt, Effron, & Monin, 2010), whereby their concern about climate change psychologically liberated them from engaging in (and reporting) pro-environmental behavior. Or, perhaps the “Highly Concerned” felt that federal policies were the more effective means of addressing climate change (vs. individual pro-environmental behaviors).
Hall makes a careless but important error in the first line of the introduction:
Although 97 percent of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al., 2013), not all Americans agree;
depending on the study, only 54–65% of Americans believe in climate change (Hornsey, Harris, Bain, & Fielding, 2016;
Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, & Hmielowski, 2012; Saad, 2017a).
There is a big difference between 97% of all scientists and 97% of a micro niche subset called “climate scientists”. Hall and Lewis don’t realize that there is no mismatch between scientists and the public — almost half of meteorologists (2013) (half of meteorologists in 2017) — fergoodnesssake — are skeptics, survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, and most readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments^) have hard science degrees.
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.
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). Presumably the banks were the ones selling solar panels as if they were a get rich quick scheme.
Our whole nation has been fooled by a solar scheme. Just call us patsies-downunder.
When investors cry for certainty, what they really want is “no risks” and “your money”
The renewables industry only exists because of government largess. What the government giveth, so can it sucketh.
Now that the bountiful wheel of the Turnbull government is turning slightly toward other beneficiaries, the Australian renewables industry are holding crisis meetings. Feel the entitlement! Sophie Vorrath reports in RenewEconomy on the green industry disappointment with the NEG — (the theoretical new Australian plan for Weather-Management-with-Socialist-Electricity-Grids.)
The government is still picking winners, it’s just different winners:
Yates said that setting emissions compliance cost on a path to zero could “pull the carpet out” from under existing solar and wind energy investments and actually stop future investments. “This is very bad for our industry and very bad for the nation as a whole, as this orderly investment and orderly transition towards using new generation assets is required.”
And – “as a banker” – Yates also warned against the mentality that the NEG could be legislated now, and tweaked later, under a future Labor government, or a more enlightened Coalition.
“It is impossible to invest on the assumption of election results,” he said.
Dear Oliver, coal investors and everyone else, have been doing it for decades. It’s called “risk”.
“You cannot explain to your board, when you’re asking them to put money into a transaction, that the structural price of power could bounce around wildly, depending upon the outcomes of various state or federal election campaigns.”
The problem is not that governments and voters may change their minds, it’s that they should never have been messing with this market in the first place.
There is more than one path to “certainty”
Yates again:
“The only way that we can get certainty… is if the federal emissions level set within the NEG is around 50 per cent for the electricity sector.
No. No and double No. We get far more certainty with the free market where the price, demand and need for green electrons is zero, and the certain profits are nothin’. Since the effect of CO2 has been minimal for the last 500 million years, the price of CO2 will trend toward its true value. This is the kind of certainty that will last until the Sun goes supernova. We’ve got the next billion electoral cycles covered. How long will your bubble last?
Shovel it on with a spade:
“I can ensure you that no investor ever anticipated that the electricity sector would only reduce its emissions between 26-28 per cent by 2030.
Then, shovel it on with a Front End Loader:
“That outcome, that little level of emissions reduction will be a shock to the financial markets, and actually it’s a shock to many of us who are concerned, deeply, about climate change.
PS: If you are a sophisticated investor who does understand risk, and can see a great opportunity coming by helping to capitalize on snowflake investors who face some reality shocks, check out Cool Futures. Things are steaming ahead with an international team coming together. I’ll need to update the info I posted previously. David and I have an interest and are involved in this — see the Risk, Disclosure and Disclaimer on that post.
Obviously, if you are a thirsty solar panel, Australia is the place to be. We have ready-made irrigated high quality agricultural land set to be covered with an uneconomic and unreliable solar panels.
Only collective-coerced taxpayers are stupid enough to pay for this.
It’s so silly, groups of unconnected farmers of all different kinds are rallying together to oppose the flagrant waste.
Residents near Shepparton are concerned that farmland the Victorian Government has invested in under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will be lost to agriculture as the state undergoes a solar farm boom.
Four applications for solar farms in the Greater Shepparton region that could produce up to 243 megawatts of electricity have been proposed for Tatura, Tallygaroopna, Lemnos and Congupna, and have been ‘called in’ by the Victorian planning minister.
Critics say there has been no thought put to where the solar farms are being placed and how much prime agricultural land is being lost, and while there is suitable, more arid land available close by.
At least two of the solar farms have recently been the subject of a massive investment under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Tens of thousands of dollars were invested to install new irrigation gates — which can cost an estimated $50,000 to install — and century-old irrigation channels were upgraded to bring the farms into the 21st century.
It is rare to get orchardists, dairy farmers, livestock producers, retirees and residents to agree on anything in a small farming community, but this group does not want a 100MW, $175 million solar farm built on prime agricultural farm land.
If the world cools, which will we want more: food or green electrons?
UPDATE #1: It’s no accident that solar “farms” will be built over prime agricultural land rather than arid desert. They need to be near transmission lines to make the investment viable (even a subsidized one). Obviously there are more transmission lines near populated productive land than out in the desert. h/t Pat who found other examples near Warwick in Queensland and WesleyVale in Tasmania. El Gordo names another in the Hunter Valley.
UPDATE #2:TonyfromOz calculates that this 100MW plant costing $175m will produce one hundredth of the power of Bayswater coal fired station. Since the lifetime of a solar plant is half of a coal station, it would take 200 of these plants to replace Bayswater’s yearly output in the long run (and that is ignoring the need for backup and battery storage for the solar option). The starting cost of replacing Bayswater with solar is thus $35billion (and then some).
Volcano, lava spreads across road, Hawaii, May 2018.
The lava has reached Leilani estates. Rock and ash are being thrown into the air. Evacuations are underway. There has been some warning. Small earthquakes have been occurring. Cracks appearing in roads.
CFACT has a report from a 40 year career meteorologist who alleges that skeptics are silenced through intimidation and threats at the National Weather Service (NWS). He also says data is “altered for political purposes” and that he was advised nearly forty years ago that he could find fame and fortune with CO2.
““When I was a graduate student I had a professor come up to me, and he said in the late 1970s ‘If you want to make a name in the field, want to be famous, CO₂ is the place to go.’ There is a lot of money to be made, authority and control over people’s lives at stake.””
A whole generation of meteorologists and climate scientists have been raised with these incentives, and a culture of fear:
Meteorologist allegedly assaulted by NWS Director Uccellini
Adam Howser, CFACT
“I was giving a talk to fellow NWS staff about the jet stream flow in the upper atmosphere [in 2014]. What it showed was large amplitude waves in both the northern and southern hemispheres. I explained that the only way the jet stream could get to be high amplitude is if the atmosphere was actually cooling.”
“Right at the bathroom break, the Director of NWS, Louis Uccellini, put a hand on my chest and pushed me up against the wall and said ‘Don’t ever mention the word cooling again.’ He did not mean it in a ‘joking’ way, he absolutely violated my personal space and was dead serious.”
The whistleblower, who spoke to CFACT on the condition of anonymity, described a culture of fear and ostracism at NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) against those who dissent from the “global warming” narrative.
The accused NWS Director Uccellini, has responded through a spokeswoman, and claims that “this alleged incident never happened”, and that Uccellini “encourages open discussion on all science issues…”. The whistleblower disagrees saying that the incident described above was not isolated and according to CFACT “describes a culture of fear at the agency in which experts are silenced through intimidation“.
“One coworker who is a fellow ‘skeptic’ and I have to be careful about what we talk about at our desks or the break room,” the NWS employee explained. “We can’t let the word get out that we aren’t buying into the whole ‘the climate is warming’ narrative.”
“It is an almost Orwellian, nasty-type society.”
Read all of it at CFACT –– the meteorologist also describes problems with climate models, says the NWS and NOAA is a “well oiled propaganda machine”. He referred to a study that took ocean buoy data and recalibrated it with measurements taken in ship engine intakes, even though everyone knew that the ocean bouys were more accurate.
During this time, satellite images show that 24% of our beaches shrank, while 28% grew. Thus we can say that thanks to the carbon apocalypse there are 3,660 sq kms more global beaches now than there were thirty years ago. Yes. It’s that bad.
The encroachment of beaches would mean there is less ocean for fishes. Thankfully sea levels have risen too, so it looks like it will all work out.
This study also produced a handy map of where the sandiest beaches are. Clearly Africa wins (unless you prefer rocks and cliffs).
Sandy beaches (yellow) versus Rocky beaches (black). Percentages indicate the proportion of sandy beaches. Source
Presumbly the paradox of how seas can rise unprecedentedly fast at the same time as beaches are growing will be explained through global currents shifting ominously due to rising CO2 levels. Either that, or the paradox and the study will vanish into a subterranean library — like the deeper Asthenosphere Archive, where they will be converted to magma.
Seriously, though, this study appears to be the first to use automated detection with satellite images (nearly 2 million of them) to assess global beaches. Previous studies did things manually, or just interviewed people.
A few outlets have reported this, mainly with the predictable focus on the disappearing beaches and prophecies that “good beaches can’t last”.
When beaches shrink it is climate change, but if they grow, it’s due to nature or activists.
Marine protected areas are also causing “serious concern”, said the report, with the majority of their shorelines are being eroded.
Apparently, Marine Reserves are a threat to beaches.
Projects to maintain and protect coastal areas in countries such as the Netherlands or reclaim land in Dubai, China and Singapore, have contributed to a 3,660 sq kms increase in the world’s beaches over the past three decades. In Namibia, some beaches were growing at rate of 8 meters per year after diamond miners built undersea embankments, said the researchers.
Some beach areas are also growing naturally, with rivers in China taking sand to the coast, and huge dunes migrating towards the sea in Mauritania and Madagascar. However, the US is home to four of the seven fastest eroding beaches, with some coastal areas in Texas and Louisiana receding by up to 15 meters a year, with Mississippi river damming affecting the amount of sand reaching the coast.
Bad stuff is always just about to hit:
But while reclaiming land from the sea might be one factor helping boost beaches overall, around 70,000km of sandy coastlines are being washed away and erosion in marine reserves may point to a bleaker future for beach lovers.
A quarter of the world’s beaches are being eroded at a rate of more than half a meter (20 inches) a year, said the researchers, who found beaches make up around 30% of the world’s coastline. Some 6,000 kms of beaches are retreating at an even faster rate of 5 meters per year, said Luijendijk, who also works at Deltares, a research institute based in the Netherlands.
However, the United States is home to four of the seven fastest eroding beaches, with some coastal areas in Texas and Louisiana receding by up to 15 metres a year, with Mississippi river damming affecting the amount of sand reaching the coast.
Will Earth run out of sand….
“The main question for the future is whether there will be enough sand available to maintain all beaches,” said a statement from Deltares on the report. — SBS (AAP)
Not my “main” question.
You might not hear about this on CNN or the ABC/BBC/CBC.
Chinese Bitcoin miners are reopening the Hunter Valley coal power station called Redbank in NSW. They have a deal that gets around our gargantuan, mismanaged grid by buying coal power direct for 8c/kWh, while Australians in the same place pay 28c/kWh.
This is exactly the nightmare the head of the Australian Energy Management Organisation (AEMO) spoke of just last week — that “big players could abandon the grid”. That’s a degenerate spiral leaving a shrinking pool of suckers to pay for the inefficient, bird-killing, blackout prone, witchdoctor grid.
Bitcoin mining’s growing demand for cheap energy revived a shuttered coal mine
Ashat Rathi, Quartz
Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and thus, presumably, avoiding the costs of using—the grid. (Quartz has reached out to Hunter Energy for a comment.)
This tells everyone all they need to know about “cheap” renewables. Eight cents is the big-commercial retail rate of coal powered reliable electricity in Australia, and anything else is nuts.
The cheap deal will mainly apply to those close to the plant (near Singleton) because building long transmission lines is too expensive. Any day now, the large smelters in NSW will start adding up the cost of either relocating or building a transmission line.
It’s not surprising that this comes from crypto industry first. It must be one of the most transportable high-electricity-need industries there is.
Three messages here:
The free market can solve Australian electricity price hell in a flash.
Coal power is cheap, cheap, cheap, and even small coal plants are viable and valuable. (This one is only 150MW)
Wind and solar are not competitive. Subsidized renewables are the major thing making our grid expensive.
We could run again as a nation using coal for our entire baseload — with some gas to power the peaks. The only thing stopping us is our desire to change the global climate.
Please, someone add up the total octopus-costs of bizarre weather-changing policies.
The Turnbull government will surely try to ban this or tax it to oblivion.
Big implications – 130MW of cheap electricity suddenly available in the Hunter Valley
Here’s a “disrupter” Audrey Zibelman (the AEMO head) didn’t see coming. The Australian market is begging for cheap electricity and right now one place, ONE, can offer it at a third of the price that everyone else pays:
Hunter Energy says cryptocurrency mining will only consume, at most 20 megawatts (MW) of the coal plant’s 150MW capacity. The region “needs more baseload power,” Hunter Energy’s CEO Jim Myatt told the Age. Baseload power is industry jargon for the ability to provide power on demand, which is something solar and wind power cannot do because they are beholden to the vagaries of nature.
Suddenly the land and buildings near Redbank just stepped up in valuation. If you run a small business (or big one) where electricity is a large part of your costs, and you can move to tap into that, why not?
How about our other recently closed coal plants in Australia? What other towns and areas would be reincarnated as cheap manufacturing or “mining” zones? Imagine what this could do for the LaTrobe Valley? Collie in WA? Liddell?
h/t to Peter Rees for this list. Which of these can be reopened, and which have been blown up.?
CLOSED COAL PLANTS
Year
Name
State
MW
Company
2011
Munmorah
NSW
1400
Delta electricity
2012
Colllinsville
QLD
190
Ratch-Australia
Playford B
SA
240
Alinta energy
Swanbank B
QLD
480
CS energy
2014
Morwell
VIC
189
Energy Aust.
Redbank
NSW
151
Redbank energy
Wallerawang
NSW
1000
Energy Australia
2015
Anglesea
VIC
160
Alcoa
2016
Northern
SA
520
Alinta Energy
2017
Hazelwood
VIC
1600
Engie
5930
I’ve suggested this scenario on the blog before — in a free market people would band together to fund their own coal power. I wondered if large miners could do it, but I assumed it would be illegal.
Redbank, small, “carbon polluting” and newish coal plant
According to Wikipedia — Redbank is a small coal plant commissioned in 2001. It used coal tailings, was theoretically the least efficient most greenhouse gas generating plant in Australia, was (maybe) hurt by carbon taxing policies, closed in 2014 and will be reopened in early 2019.
Redbank was fuelled by beneficiated, dewatered tailings from the Mount Thorley Warkworth mine at Warkworth, delivered by conveyor. In lay terms this is the part of the coal waste which would otherwise not be utilised, and simply buried as the mines progress.
(Note that no data from the actual plant, operator or Australian Government is actually used to base these approximate assumptions on. CARMA uses a statistical model that predicts CO2 emissions given the size, age, fuel type, estimated capacity utilization, and engineering specifications of individual plants.)
Like all NSW coal plants Redback was hard hit by the carbon tax:
The state-owned power generator has cut asset values by more than a third, to $1.1 billion from $1.86 billion, by booking a heavy $700 million write-off in the first such big financial hit due to the looming carbon tax introduction. As the nation’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, Macquarie Generation faces a direct annual tax of $460 million, which will flow into the government’s coffers, if it maintains electricity output at present levels….
Victoria has dirtier coal-fired power stations as they use brown coal, which emits more carbon dioxide. As a result, its generators will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the federal government, which will allow them to continue polluting.
The only NSW power station to receive support from the federal government is a small producer, Redbank, which is to receive just $8.8 million. ”This loss of value is a direct hit to New South Wales as a result of federal Labor’s carbon tax,” said NSW Finance Minister and Acting Treasurer Greg Pearce.
Victorian brown coal plants received $2b in compensation for the carbon tax. Many of these were owned by foreign companies. The NSW government owned Macquarie and got almost nothing.
In any case, why give compensation for a tax designed to put the same businesses out of business? Insanity.
There are 741 million people in the EU. For years, their supranational government has been spending one fifth of their entire budget (!) on attempts to change the weather. Since that didn’t work, they are going to spend more. What was 20% is rising to 25%.
While Europe’s political priorities are changing, the EU wants to continue leading global efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for heating up the planet, and seeks to cut dependence on fossil fuels, shifting to cleaner renewable energy sources. The bloc aims to lower carbon emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and to boost the share of renewables to at least 27 percent of energy consumption.
— Bloomberg
In the past, this kind of ludicrous total has appeared to be mere accounting hocus — where money that was going to be spent on something just gets rebadged as “climate action”. But back in 2013 this still equated to €180 billion on climate stuff between then and 2020. Even if most of it is “rebadged”, the mere breadcrumb trail it leaves would feed ten thousand activists.
A billion here, a billion there — pretty soon we’ll be talking about money for jam for the Green Blob.
The only real surprise is that the EU thinks this is something worth bragging about. Historians will have a field day with this.
The E.U.’s most profligate plan,
Is to spend every cent that it can,
Not on social welfare,
Or more medical care,
But to try and change climate by man.
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