Climate Worriers have the most terrible luck. All the runes were lined up for Solar power — it is nearly free, pours from heaven, and millions of people seem to need energy “pretty often”. Plus universities and governments have gifted twenty years of free advertising about its Glorious Wonderfulness. Solar power is also used by the Celebrity Saints of Gaia thus filling fashionable, spiritual, and tribal needs. On a good day, it fills some megawatt needs too.
Despite all this, without forced payments from unwilling and unwitting non-users of solar power, investors are fleeing and the solar industry in Germany is collapsing. How can that be?!
After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, the industry nose-dived. By this year, virtually every major German solar producer had gone under as new capacity declined by 90 per cent and new investment by 92 per cent. Some 80,000 workers — 70 per cent of the solar workforce — lost their jobs. Solar power’s market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without being replaced.
Wind power faces a similar fate. Germany has some 29,000 wind turbines, almost all of which have been benefitting from a 20-year subsidy program that began in 2000. Starting in 2020, when subsidies run out for some 5,700 wind turbines, thousands of them each year will lose government support, making the continued operation of most of them uneconomic based on current market prices. To make matters worse, with many of the turbines failing and becoming uneconomic to maintain, they represent an environmental liability and pose the possibility of abandonment. No funds have been set aside to dispose of the blades, which are unrecyclable, or to remove the turbines’ 3,000-tonne reinforced concrete bases, which reach depths of 20 metres, making them a hazard to the aquifers they pierce.
On the plus side, 80,000 Germans can now do something productive.
Funny thing, something similar happened in Australia in July 2014:
We’re told “clean” energy is a viable and cost effective. But cut the government subsidies, and 97 percent of investors vanish (in Australia it’s collapsed from $2.6b annually to $80m).
In Australia this brief lapse into something resembling a free market was due to policy “uncertainty” at the time. The dead hand of Government Certainty has since returned to pick the loser winners.
New research looking at three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals showed the very unshocking result that people are happiest on sunny clear days around 25C. Facebook and Twitter comments on those days used more positive, fun terms. Days below 20, above 30, that were cloudy or had a humidity above 80% put people in a less happy mood. So did terrorist events, and the effects of weather were pretty comparable. Temperatures that are below freezing put a real dampener on expressions of positive sentiment. (The next ice age is going to be no fun.)
Peak positive occurs in the mid to high twenties and on days with zero mm of rain.
The effect of temperature and rain on Facebook and Twitter moods in the US.
Some people have a sunny disposition, others have cloudy faces and everyone over two knows what those expressions mean.
If our aim is to maximize human happiness and productivity, shouldn’t the UN Weather Control Committee (IPCC) be aiming to reduce freezing days and maximize the zone of 25C days on areas with the highest population density?
Judging by this awesome Hedonometer graph, during the hottest ever year of 2016, people were pretty happy.
…Hedonometer, Happiness, Twitter, graph.
Just cross checking that with the ENSO effect, perhaps we should also be working to increase El Nino years?
As for terrorism, conditions that were below freezing were comparable to the Sept 11 anniversary (in the US) and actual attacks, floods and earthquakes were even worse. Clearly, Daylight Savings time should only start, and never end. We all need the extra hour of sleep.
…
But keep in mind the y axis scale on the top graph. We’re talking about 2 percent less “happy thoughts” on a zero degree day. It sounds tiny, though on a national scale I expect it would translate to slightly higher cortisol levels, more stress, less health, and lower productivity.
Alan Martin at Alphr warns us about the heat: High temperatures make us hotheads: Study finds the weather impacts how we “talk” on Twitter and Facebook. “Blame it on the sunshine”.
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.
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 world).
As the planet warms, East Africa’s seasonal rains are expected to become much more unpredictable. … One study led by the European Commission found that declining rainfall over the past century may have reduced GDP across Africa by 15-40% compared with the rest of the developing world.
The evidence from East Africa is that no single factor can fully explain conflict and the displacement of people. Instead, conflict seems to be linked primarily to long-term population growth, short-term economic recessions and extreme political instability.
If they had compared human CO2 emissions as well, they’d probably find that CO2 causes peace. Since CO2 emissions are linked to higher GDPs (especially in poor nations) it’s not much of a leap to say that in Africa, producing CO2 would probably lead to better economies (more economic development) and less conflict.
As CO2 rose, life expectancy increased too. (Perhaps they can study that in their next paper?).
Does climate change cause refugees?
“As for refugees, over 90% can be explained by PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] lagged by 1 year was significant, population growth lagged by 10 years, economic growth lagged by a year and political stability lagged by 2 years.”
The land of the sunburnt country finds that the rapid uptake of solar is a headache, disrupting the grid, adding variability, making management more complicated. Read right through. The head of the AEMO gives an upbeat talk, but the ominous message is that solar panels are flooding in, there are lots of problems, and not only are baseload generators leaving the market, but there may come a day when things are so ludicrously expensive that big energy customers leave to generate their own too. Is that what the death of a grid looks like?
Audrey Zibelman is the head of the AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – which has the responsibility of managing the electricity and gas market and grid stability for all Australians. To hear her, you’d think the future is renewable, the transition is not being artificially forced on the market, and there is no alternative to alternative energy.
Zibelman tosses out pat free-market lines with a straight face, saying at 17:20 that we never really want governments to “pick a technology”, ignoring that this whole transition, all of it, is only happening because governments “picked a technology”.
Listen at 21:30 to get an idea of the diabolical complexity of trying to craft new price signals to make up for the damage done by dumb artificial price signals. This octopus of conflicting price signals would never occur in a real free market. If players could do the deals they wanted, they would pay for forward contracts on cheap electricity that they could guarantee next week, next year, every hour and every day. The other ten people in Australia that wanted to buy weather-changing-electrons would be free to pay ten times as much. I say “let them!”. That’s what freedom means.
I’d like to be free not to buy solar panels, and free not to pay for everyone else’s.
This is all spun as a world-leading success along the lines that disruption is a mark of success — mobile phones worked, so solar panels will. Hello? The government didn’t force us to pay $600 a household for other people’s “transition” iphones.
Glenda Korporaal, The Australian:
“Australia has the biggest pick-up of roof top solar anywhere,” Ms Zibelman said in a speech to the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. “We are seeing the equivalent of a power plant being built every season with people putting on more and more rooftop solar.”
She said the increasing role of solar power in Australia meant the energy market could suddenly lose 200-300 megawatts of power if the sky clouded over in a major city.
Too much solar power doesn’t just make supply more unpredictable, it means demand is more variable too. The peaks are steeper and the troughs are lower.
In the past there was a gradual increase in demand for energy during the day, but with the increasing role of solar power there were now often spikes in demand in the evenings.
“It is a very variable system that we have to manage which is very different than before,” she said. “It’s a big disrupter.”
So let’s add 20GW of headaches and complexity and see what happens?
Wrap your head around these numbers. Apparently right now the AEMO are dealing with requests to consider adding another 20,000MW of unreliable, intermittent, subsidy-sucking energy to the Australian grid. This is the same grid that has a total peak summer demand in the order of 35,000MW. The total generation capacity of the grid is 54,000MW, which already includes more wind and solar than any nation built on a coal-gas-and-uranium quarry needs. How are any unsubsidized sensible baseload providers going to survive in this socialist market where crazy-brave squads of new entrants are still being drawn to fill gaps that aren’t there, weren’t there, and aren’t projected to open up soon? To everyone who says that renewables are nearly competitive (so sayeth Audrey), I say axe the next twelve years of Renewable Energy Targets then.
Windpower doesn’t make electricity cheap or reliable, so lets do more of it?
Sometimes one high pressure cell crashes our whole wind generation:
Wind power generation in Australia dropping off every week or two.
Sometimes a high pressure cell crashes our wind generation.
Sometimes clouds crash our solar power:
Sometimes clouds blocks 1000MW of solar power across Australia. Satellite image.
Likewise, adding more solar probably won’t add more hours of sunlight, nor change the clouds. But then, I could be wrong.
Not all of those new 20,000 disruptive megawatts will be built. Phew!
As Zibelman says at one point — (to paraphrase) when demand was 1000MW during the day, solar has reduced that demand to 500MW. But if your coal power station is more than 500MW, how do you keep that in business? Indeed. The answer is — with uber-complex government regulated pricing schemes apparently.
Worked for the USSR.
It’s so bad, big-players may abandon the grid
Ms Zibelman says we need to send the right “provide the right price signals” and the “market will respond”. The bad news is that the market is already responding, the price signals are a dog’s breakfast, and even diesel looks like the fuel of the future now.
Her big fear now is that the big players might get so fed up they go “off grid”. Oh No. No more cash cows:
Ms Zibelman said one of her biggest worries was the potential for “uneconomic bypass” in Australia, where major energy users could start leaving the existing energy system because they found it too expensive, instead using their own energy supply systems. — [Listen at 36:30]
The “uneconomic bypass” has already happened — it was back when Australian governments thought it was a good idea to use our power stations to change global temperatures. Now our whole grid is an uneconomic bypass.
Things could spiral downhill:
She said this could lead to the cost of electricity having to be borne by a decreasing number of customers.
–it’s a good thing for the individual when they disconnect. Horrible for the rest of us…
Zibelman talks of free markets but doesn’t seem to realize the market she runs is so unfree it has been screwed inside out. For the last hundred years people were not “better off” if they left the grid. Other customers didn’t care if big players left to do their own thing (more supply, less demand, lower costs, right?). Big players stayed because mass electricity production in centralized generators was so bountifully, beautifully cheap that nothing else could beat it.
Australians are putting panels on their roofs in desperation
She didn’t say that because electricity is obscenely expensive, even subsidized, uncompetitive renewables look appealing to bleeding customers.
Think of solar panels on roof tops as a form of palliative care for a dying grid.
Watching Zibelman, you might also think that complexity has no price, simplicity has no value, and the Bureau of Meteorology has an important role in driving our energy policy.
A new paper finds that there is already enough genetic variety spread across the Great Barrier Reef to adapt to the imagined “unprecedented” warming coming in the next two centuries. We don’t need to rely on random mutations or consider fantasy solutions of man-made oceanic sunscreens, mass sunshades, or giant reef fans. Corals already have a major immigration program running pretty effectively to juggle 200 million years of genetic material and then spread the successes far and wide. Meddling humans can help things (maybe) by moving a few bits of coral around. That’s it. Cancel the scare please.
Skeptics have been saying this for years — who needs a computer model to predict that the Barrier Reef will adapt? How bad could global warming be? The global oceans span a 32C range and corals prefer the hottest five degrees of that. Indeed, there is a five degree temperature range from one end of the Great Barrier Reef to the other, and corals are clearly, obviously pretty happy about it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is warming at a mere tenth of a degree per decade. Then there is the well known phenomenon that corals spawn in vast clouds that are so big they can be seen from space and there is a whole new generation of corals every five years. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to figure out that survivors from some parts of the reef will reseed other parts, as they have done for eons. Half of the coral genera around today have been around since the Oligocene (23-34 million years ago).
Corals also adapt to heatwaves by chucking out the algal symbionts that don’t thrive in higher temperatures. So on top of their own genetic adaptability, they can “gear up” in different ways too. In the unlikely event that IPCC climate models are right for the first time in history, corals will cope.
Climate change just shifts this large range slightly south. So what?
Corals are already happy coping across a five degree range of water temperature.
If the water gets warmer to the South, Great Barrier Reef corals will probably spread further.
Keppel Island at the far south end has quite a different population:
(A) Locations of sampled populations where mean midsummer month sea surface temperature differed by up to ~3°C. (B) Principal component analysis of water quality and temperature parameters at the sampled locations. Winter.T—10% quantile of winter temperature, Summer.T– 90% quantile of summer temperature, Daily.T– 90% quantile of daily temperature range, Phos–total dissolved phosphorus, Chl–chlorophyll, NO3 –nitrate, Secchi–Secchi depth (water clarity). Locations are colored according to summer temperature as in panel A. (C) Principal component analysis of genome-wide genetic variation (inset–Acropora millepora). Centroid labels are initial letters of population names as in panel A. (D) ADMIXTURE plot of ancestry proportions with K = 2 (the lowest cross-validation error was observed with K = 1). Analyses on panels C and D were based on 11,426 SNPs spaced at least 2.5 kb apart and not including FST outliers.
Note the paper does not suggest we need to set up a carbon trading scheme to improve coral genetic fitness. We might consider picking up a few bits of coral and spreading them around:
Implications for Reef Management
We found that genetic diversity of Acropora millepora was not yet strongly affected by climate change and that the migration patterns were well positioned to facilitate persistence of the GBR metapopulation for a century or more. Our results underscore the pivotal role of standing genetic variation and migrant exchange in the future metapopulation persistence, suggesting management interventions such as assisted gene flow [41] by moving adult reproductively active colonies or by outplanting lab-reared offspring produced by crossing corals from different populations. With the estimated natural migration rates on the order of 0.1–1% (10–100) migrants per generation, human-assisted genotype exchange could appreciably contribute to the genetic rescue without risking disruption of the natural local adaptation patterns [42]
The authors stress that they underestimated the adaptability of the coral populations in most of their estimates. The only bad news part of their model analysis was that populations might become more sensitive to random heatwaves. Given that this relies on IPCC model forecasts of ocean temperatures, I remain unconcerned.
Despite this capacity for adaptation, our model predicts that coral populations would become increasingly sensitive to random thermal fluctuations such as ENSO cycles or heat waves, which corresponds well with the recent increase in frequency of catastrophic coral bleaching events.
What recent increase in “catastrophic” coral bleaching events? We have no long term good data on historic bleaching events, the extent of bleaching is hotly contested, and corals are already recovering. If there was mass coral bleaching in 1066, and corals didn’t recover til 1086, how would we know?
What destroys a grid faster than than a socialist electricity system? A semi-socialist system that pretends to be a free market.
This hybrid monster combines the worst of both socialism and capitalism at the same time. Socialists get the power to destroy, then capitalists can use self serving interest to make it happen faster.
The socialist managers can pick loser options (wind and solar), rig the market, and also conveniently blame the market when things go wrong. In a pure socialist system, at least the public know who created the mess.
What socialism created — socialism can partly solve
In a free market Liddell’s cheap coal power would not be closing in 2022. Since we have no free market, and can’t suddenly create one, the only band-aid option is to buy the damn asset back:
If someone suggested that $3 billion in consumer-funded subsidies be paid to one energy source every year for the next 12 years, and if that one energy source was guaranteed significant market share for every one of those years, and if there were hundreds of millions of dollars available in grants and concessional loans to projects limited to that one energy source, would that policy approach qualify as a technology-neutral?
The millstone around the neck of Australia’s energy policy is the renewable energy target. It is a remarkably generous gift to wind and solar energy, and one that will keep on giving until 2030. It is impossible to debate energy policy sensibly without reference to the gold-plated pipeline of tens of billions of dollars of consumer and taxpayer-funded subsidies to the renewable sector.
Socialists cry “socialism” to stop government buying up coal asset (where were they when the government started forcing us to buy wind power?). Ron Boswell again:
Some have likened the option to socialism. Rubbish. The energy market was socialised by intervention a long time ago. A $45bn subsidy and guaranteed market share for renewables is not socialism? Would the car market be a real market if the government said 23 per cent of cars sold had to be a Tesla and that Tesla would receive a subsidy of $30,000 for every car sold?
The government’s cornerstone energy policy has passed its latest hurdle, with a commitment from states and territories to continue detailed design work. It gives ministers who identified concerns with aspects of the National Energy Guarantee a four month reprieve to push for changes before the federal government’s deadline for a decision in August.
So we get the “shock” result that no state in Australia wanted to secede, and State Ministers are happy to keep attending meetings.
So Greenland hasn’t been showing signs of warming since man made CO2 started rapidly rising after World War II. Indeed Greenland has been not responding to CO2 for 140 years or maybe a million.
Serious researchers have known this for years. It’s not like a flat trend suddenly popped up to surprise us.
Hat tip to Bob FJ for sending graphs and links of earlier studies last year. Even far back in 2004, it was obvious Greenland was not warming like it was supposed to. That hasn’t stopped flocks of researchers and journalists from not mentioning it. This story is just as much about the media as it is about Greenland.
Figure 1 shows the IPCC near-surface air temperature record for Greenland, which includes a highly statistically significant cooling of 0.11°C (0.20°F) per decade over the past 64 years!
If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.
The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.
The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.
Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?
The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.
India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are estimated at 61 billion tonnes. India accounts for about seven percent of the world’s total proved coal reserves.
Perhaps there was some other cause, or mental health issue and the man would have taken his life somehow, someway and left a different note. But if we take him at his word, this was a desperate end. He was chasing the impossible wisp — planetary climate control through CO2. Destined to fail, overwhelmed with the futility, he apparently saw his life as worth more dead than alive, perhaps as some inspirational saint.
Alas, true saints may sacrifice themselves for a greater cause, but they don’t issue press releases. They don’t pick the time and place.
There is a desperately hollow emptiness about trying to inspire people through suicide PR.It’s not like you want children to grow up to copy you. (The danger is — some might).
Mr. Buckel left a note in a shopping cart not far from his body and also emailed it to several news media outlets, including The New York Times.
“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote in the email sent to The Times. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
In his note, which was received by The Times at 5:55 a.m., Mr. Buckel discussed the difficulty of improving the world even for those who make vigorous efforts to do so.
Privilege, he said, was derived from the suffering of others.
“Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help,” Mr. Buckel wrote, adding that donating to organizations was not enough.
Noting that he was privileged with “good health to the final moment,” Mr. Buckel said he wanted his death to lead to increased action. “Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death,” he wrote.
There is no honor in choosing unnecessary death, as a kind of global billboard, only tragedy.
The one sided blind media chant painted a quandry — the science was settled and obvious yet most of the world didn’t care, wouldn’t act, were selfish or stupid. That’s not much of a world to live for.
It is all so pointless. If wall-to-wall catastrophe reporting didn’t persuade the crowd, why would a suicide? “We’re all gonna drown, who cares?A guy killed himself with fossil fuels — time to give up the SUV and catch a train?”
This photo is patched together from the SBS news pan across the crowd in the centre of the largest city in Australia.
The turnout was so small, journalists didn’t even try to make up a number. They just said “demonstrators” plural, “rallied in eight cities across Australia”. So there were at least two people at each city. “Congrats”.
The Sydney rally even had Triple J celebrity, Adam Spencer. They presumably also had free advertising on the ABC beforehand. It didn’t help much.
Science without debate is just propaganda, it’s no wonder no one cares
Having taken all the public passion, controversy and competition out of science, the masters of Groupthink have destroyed it as a spectator sport. Who wants to watch a football game where the result is fixed and everyone knows it? Public interest in science was settled in 1990 — at zero.
If the Academy of Science wanted to make science a million times more popular it would arrange real televised debates, with the best from both sides on actual important controversial issues. That would inspire debates in schools. Kids would learn more about the scientific method in one hour of debate than in thirty years of approved consensus litany.
In Melbourne, apparently the biggest threat to the planet looks like steak and eggs.
March for Science, Melbourne.
Unkind impartial commentators might have described these protests as small fringe groups, with far lower than expected numbers and a disappointing turnout. Though there were no unkind commentators at SBS, and there was no aerial crowd shot either.
Despite that, with cameras kept at half mast, the lackluster event was still used as an excuse to rerun the agitprop message on prime time news and share how one random firefighty person is sure fires are different now. More free advertising for the importance of Big Government by a Big-Government broadcaster. (SBS is our baby ABC).
If it had been skeptics instead, that got less than 100 people to a major event, TV cameras would have turned up to tell the world how dismal it was.
Group-thinkers on science should stop,
And ask why their rallies all flop,
And try to relate,
To a reasoned debate,
Perhaps then, the penny would drop.
Just when you think headlines can’t be that stupid:
Baby fish may not find their way home as the level of CO2 in the ocean rises, study finds
— ABC Isabel Dayman
Baby fish may lose their ability to find their way home in the future due to rising CO2 levels in the ocean, a marine ecology expert has found.
What the study found was that fish larvae were not paying attention to the right noises.
The researchers put the larvae in a tank and bubbled CO2 through it constantly. They appear to forget that CO2 changes naturally every night on reefs all over the world. Fish are not just used to having a daily shift, they prefer it.
In shallow water, ocean acidification happens at 7pm daily, and after 400 million years, somehow, fish have adapted.
As far as adapting to long term climate change, fish carry around hundreds of millions of years of assorted junk genes in the gene-pool, which help them cope when things change. (Remember the fish that adapted from salt-water to fresh-water in just fifty years?) Tools from past disasters may well linger on in a small proportion of the population. Natural selection can find that and amplify.
Barramundi have 32 million babies to lose at a time:
It’s gloom and doom on the ABC:
“When we raised these larvae under elevated CO2, we saw that those larvae were no longer attracted — and worse, they were deterred by — the natural sounds of their natural habitat,” he said.
And that will have devastating consequences because there will be no “recruitment”, or returning larvae, Professor Nagelkerken explained.
“The question is, what proportion of species will show this response — is it 10 of the fish species? Is it 50 per cent or 80 per cent?” he said.
If it half the babies are wiped out, Barramundi numbers will drop temporarily — then five or six years later the new generation will be better adapted to higher CO2. One hundred years allows 20 generations of adaption. Like the salt-water fish stuck in a fresh-water pool, natural selection is crushingly brutal but effective. Spread over a century, fish will make it…
What’s next: CO2 causes bald kittens, and confused dogs?
REFERENCE
Rossi et al, (2017) On the wrong track: ocean acidification attracts larval fish to irrelevant environmental cues, Nature journal, Scientific Reports. You can read the whole paper. (Lucky you)
Former PM Tony Abbott and a team of conservative pollies suggested the government should forcibly acquire the old coal plant Liddell to keep it running and save our grid.
Our current PM called this idea “socialist”:
This drew immediate criticism from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who accused Mr Abbott of suggesting that the Coalition adopt socialists policies of nationalising the means of production.
Our energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, suddenly remembered how conservative governments support free markets:
The Energy Minister ….[said] there will be no subsidies for coal-fired power plants under a Turnbull government and [claims]that right-wing ideology has no place in the energy debate.
Who’re the socialists here?
Turnbull and Frydenberg are the same team who preside over a system which takes billions from some electricity generators to reward others and is intended to drive the former out of business. They bought the giant Snowy Hydro generator for $6b, and are planning to spend $4.5b to build a hydro storage “battery” that is only needed in order to stop their pick-the-winner favourite new generators from destroying the grid or the household budget, whichever comes first.
Apparently nationalizing a hydro generator is not “socialist” but nationalizing a coal one is. Find me a dictionary that can defend that one and I’ll show you a politically correct chock for the boat trailer.
The ideological people in this debate are the ones that are destroying coal businesses to change the weather.
What Abbott and co are suggesting is the only pragmatic option left in a semi-socialist and screwed electrical network. The government shouldn’t be buying coal plants, but when the government destroys the free market, grid efficiency and reliability — buying an old coal plant is the only sane icing left on this cake.
Obviously the free market answer is to get the heck out of messing up our grid in order to hold back the tide. Which is exactly what Tony Abbott has been trying to do for years. Abbott tried to shut the Renewable Energy Target, close the GONGOs and QUANGOs and get the government out of meddling and futile weather-controlling policies. Since the socialists wouldn’t let him, the only bandaid solution left is to buy up the parts the government hath baked and broke.
Where were Frydenberg and Turnbull’s cheers for the “free market” when Abbott was trying to recreate one?
Just another hidden cost — intermittent generators are vandals on our baseload suppliers. Wind power needs gas, but gas doesn’t need the wind. When the two are paired together it makes the wind energy “reliable” but adds nearly $30/MWh to the cost of the energy from gas. Right now that cost will be added to the gas plant, but in a free market, it should be paid by the wind farm investors.
Stacy and Taylor compared the cost of running a Closed Cycle Gas plant (CC Gas) on its own or combined with a wind farm. The combination produces reliable electricity “on demand” and uses less gas to do it. The sole benefits to this odd industrial couple are a smaller gas bill and lower emissions of a fertilizing gas (CO2). All the capital and labor costs of running a gas plant are the same, but now it sits idle more often, pointlessly waiting like a spare wheel til the wind slows and gas power is needed again. About the only thing we can predict about the wind farm is that it can be relied on for almost nothing, so the gas plant must be almost as large whether or not it is chained to a wind generator.
Here’s a detailed estimate of some of the hidden costs of adding an intermittent power source to a reliable one. The figures are based on US data and came out a couple of years ago.
The idealized extra cost of adding wind to gas is $15/MWh, but the cost using real world capacity factors is $30/MWh.
Notice the “Nameplate capacity” on the right. Look at all the extra capital infrastructure required to generate the same amount of electricity. All that extra blood, sweat, tears and investment sitting around doing nothing most of the time.
Renewable energy saves fossil fuel, but wastes infrastructure, land, labor and resources.
Click to enlarge.
Here’s how you can use 1.8 times as much infrastructure to achieve no extra electricity
In the lowest cost scenario a 1MW gas plant works at 87% capacity. If it is paired with an equal nameplate capacity wind farm, the gas plant needs to be almost as large because wind power can only be relied on to produce 2.7% of its full capacity all the time. Hence rather than building a 1MW gas plant, we need to build a 0.97MW gas plant, only a tiny bit smaller, and 0.87MW of wind. The wind+gas combo will work together in synchrony to create the same amount of electricity as the 1MW wind. But it’s obviously a horrible deal — it requires a lot more capital outlay and infrastructure to build, then a lot of the time either the gas plant or the wind plant is sitting idle. The new gas capacity factor falls from 87% down to 58%.
The imposed cost of generating a MW from gas rises by at least $15/MWh when the gas plant is chained to a wind plant. This is the best case capacity factor, but real world capacity factors are lower. Using the real world data the capacity factor for gas on its own starts at 47% and falls to 32% when combined with a wind plant. The capacity factor of wind is 33%. In the real world scenario the cost imposed on the gas plant is $30/MWh.
The cost of running a gas plant on its own (LCOE) is $73 /MWh
The cost of running a new wind farm (plus the imposed cost on the gas plant) = $113 /MWh.
Renewables are not just a waste of space, they’re like anti-matter on the grid, damaging everything around them.
You may have thought that solar panels were designed to collect sunlight and convert it to electricity. But obviously the real aim of solar industrial plants is to attract government handouts and convert them into yachts.
Energy producers were encouraged to start solar farms with generous handouts funded by a ‘green levy’ on taxpayers’ bills.
But many of them now make the majority of their cash from the subsidy – instead of the electricity they produce.
This was part of the £5.6billion subsidy paid to green energy producers, which critics say inflates household energy bills.
Owl Hatch is the largest solar subsidy farm in the UK, harvesting £3.8million from captive UK taxpayers which allowed it to sell £2.5million of electricity. Supposedly, it can provide enough clean energy to power around 12,600 average UK homes. The 49.9MW Owls Hatch Solar Farm was constructed in just 12 weeks, showing just how fast subsidy sucking infrastructure can be created.
Owl’s Hatch Solar park collected 65% more money from subsidies than from sales of solar energy. (Another government “winning pick”). Owl’s Hatch only has to increase revenue from solar energy by 250% in order to legitimately earn the same total income as “sales plus subsidy” currently bring in.
The idea of subsidies was to help the new industries find their feet. Solar feet apparently take 15 – 20 years to find, as that’s how long the subsidies were guaranteed for.
Councillors were ultimately swayed by the conditions attached to the permission – including that the farm be dismantled after 25 years and that council officers be satisfied that concerns about flooding were properly addressed.
Is there a penalty if the farms ends the same year that the subsidies do?
The world has record high CO2 levels, which supposedly warms us in winter but apparently not as well as cheap electricity does. As the long winter is set to drag on, Brits are being advised to heat one room as well as they can and live there. This is “progress”…
After a brief mild spell, temperatures are set to dip again in April after the chilliest March in 21 years.
It is estimated that 20,275 Brits more than average died between December 1 and March
That includes nearly 5,000 Brits under the age of 65 whose lives may have been cut short.
According to the Office of National Statistics, one in 10 cold weather deaths are among under-65s, one in 10 among 65-75s and eight in 10 among over-75s.
The Department of Health also said cold conditions worsen winter killers including flu, chest diseases, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.
It doesn’t matter where you live — more people die in winter than summer all over the world. It’s not outdoor temperatures that matter — it’s the indoor climate that kills.
Save the world, burn fossil fuels. Make CO2 and cheap electricity. We need more of both…
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