Strangely, the more free, clean, green energy we get the more household incomes fail to keep up with inflation. Who would have thought that using inefficient energy in an artificial government-picks-the-winner market could possibly reduce our living standards?
Of course, this is not all due to electricity efficiency and pricing. Bill Shock only affects things that need to heat, cool or move.
Australians have endured their longest period of falling living standards in more than a quarter of a century as growth in costs outstripped earnings for the fifth consecutive quarter, leaving households worse off than they were six years ago.
After allowing for inflation, taxes and interest costs, average household incomes dropped 1.6 per cent in the year to September, capping a sustained fall in living standards that has not been seen since the 1990-91 recession.
Economists say more than half the cost increases for households are being driven by electricity, rent, health, new housing and tobacco, while modest wage rises are being partially absorbed by workers being pushed into higher tax brackets.
Energy prices feed into every other cost. Even the value of a house depends on the capacity people have to pay off their mortgage. Higher electricity bills means more expensive food, smaller profit margins, reduced consumer spending, and fewer jobs.
The energy transition we-didn’t need-to-have has a hidden price.
PS: Can anyone find or create a graph of employment in the renewables energy industry in Australia that is up to date?
*The Kyoto Agreement date is just a marker, and indicator of a new government that put “climate change” as a much higher priority. All subsequent governments largely shared that priority. The RET has become increasingly important as the percentage of renewables required to meet the target has risen every year. Rudd was elected in Nov 2007. March 2008 was the point when electricity prices started rising faster than inflation.
” The Bomb Cyclone isn’t a winter hurricane — just a bad storm with good branding” — Vox
A “Bombcyclone” off the East Coast of the USA is verging on, or has broken a record for the fastest drops in pressure. It’s now at 965mb. It’s not a bomb, nor a cyclone, just a common winter storm. Though this one is a bad one which has already dumped snow on Florida– “most snow in three decades”. The hastag #BombCyclone is exploding.
Also known as a Blizzard, the National Weather Service forecasting winds as high as 70 miles per hour (113 km per hour), and more than 3,300 flights have been cancelled. — Reuters
BombCyclone, NE USA, Jan 4th.
Record breaking?
Rarely do you get to see such perfection w/ the structure of a winter storm. Running out of adjectives for this one. Our blizzard has dropped 54 mb’s in 24 hours, making it not only a “meteorological bomb,” but one of the fastest stengthening winter storms in modern history. — @WeatherOptics
Roy Spencer explains the Bomb term:
The term “bomb” was coined by meteorologist Fred Sanders in 1980 to refer to a non-tropical low pressure area that intensifies at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. They happen every year, and are usually centered offshore in the winter where cold continental air masses meet warm oceanic air masses, providing maximum energy to the intensification process.
Bombcyclones are more common than real cyclones, @RyanMaue:
Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.
See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.
Clearly, solar power will take over the world.
…
In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.
Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
It’s a shame Australia’s billion-dollar-ABC apparently can’t afford a Wall St Journal subscription. In long coverage of the Iranian unrest ABC prime time news tonight said the protesters “wanted the government to create jobs”. (Sounds like an Australian election) But The Wall St Journal, puts it differently. Farnaz Fassihi describes the slogans being chanted:
“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, we don’t want it, we don’t want it.”
“They are using Islam as an excuse to drive people crazy.
Despite the threats of physical violence, women in the Islamic republic have used the opportunity to call out for more personal freedom and a relaxation of strict Islamic rule and sharia law:
I’m just letting people know there is another side. Best wishes for the brave people seeking freedom.
There is an epic battle going on, with lives of workers and families at stake, and the only subheader the ABC can find is” ‘Trump should focus on America’.
Absolutely best possible reduction in global temperature because of the latest announcement of a Australian carbon mitigation surplus.
Other countries are failing to meet their targets, but we’re not only achieving them, we’re overdoing it. And this is despite our obvious handicaps: like that we have rapid population growth, are further from everywhere and anywhere* except for Antarctica, and we’re the largest coal exporter in the world.
Emissions are now the lowest on a per capita and GDP basis in 28 years, having fallen 34 per cent and 58 per cent respectively since 1990. Just as Australia beat its first Kyoto target by 128 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, we are on track to easily surpass our 2020 target.
The latest data indicates we will overachieve by 294 million tonnes, a 30 per cent improvement on the year prior. When one considers one million tonnes of carbon abatement is equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road for a year, this is substantial.
Substantial?- Don’t undersell this — that’s like taking 88 million cars off the road! Holy hat! That’s 7% of the global fleet.
In the war of Big Numbers, let’s fight back with Very Small Ones.
Two hundred and ninety-four million tonnes sounds so impressive. But read the fine-print (so fine it isn’t usually printed) and it’s spread over eight years, not one, so it’s really a 37 million tonne a year “saving”. Even if the IPCC were right, and CO2 mattered, even if we wanted things to get colder, and we ignore that half of what we emit goes straight to Davy Jones Locker, even then that’s all of two ten-thousandths of a degree.
See the calculations by Dr David Evans below. If miracles happen, we just made the world 0.0002C cooler. Which is zero degrees C if we round that number to the nearest thousandth of a degree.
Was that $8 billion dollars good value?
Minister Frydenburg is still bragging about how much he’s spent. Hasn’t he learnt?
The Turnbull Government is also supporting innovation which is driving down technology costs. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has made more than $4 billion in investment commitments, around $3.5 billion under the Coalition, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has made more than $1 billion of grants, around half under the Coalition. There is much work to be done, but it is clear policy measures are working.
As a curious aside, actual emissions from Australia are the same in 2000 as in 2020. There are some allowances for bits n pieces in there which means that 551 mt in 2020 is a “reduction” from 551 in the year 2000. See this table in the Fin Review:
There is a deep asymmetry in science. Don’t take it from me, take it from the former President of American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a current Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program. Marshall Sheppard would know, he has written over “80 peer reviewed papers” which gives him secret weather knowledge. It’s a kind of smarts that people who analyze MRI scans, design aerofoils or find minerals 3,000m underground can only aspire to.
He’s worried that people are mocking climate change, just because snap-frozen sharks are washing up on the beach, and it’s hitting minus 50C in Canada. In the last twenty years mankind has put out more than a third of all the CO2 homo sapiens has ever made since Homo Erectus lit their last fire. Despite that whole extra blanket on the planet, the last time it was this cold was, like 1917.
The neat-o graph covers a whole 24 hour period. Don’t look now, but according to Sheppard that’s meaningless weather. See Step Two, or not.
The global pause, on the other hand, lasted for years. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. Sheppard doesn’t seem to want to discuss that kind of climate right now. Next time there is a heatwave, lets send a graph of anomalies to Sheppard so he can tell the world why heatwaves don’t matter.
Step Two: Weather is not climate
This, we can all agree with (in a sort of vague “statisticky” way over an undefined period):
Weekly or daily weather patterns tell you nothing about longer-term climate change (and that goes for the warm days too). Climate is defined as the statistical properties of the atmosphere: averages, extremes, frequency of occurrence, deviations from normal, and so forth.
What we are seeing right now in the United States is just,………well……wait for it……”winter”…..
And name one occasion Marshall Sheppard, when you said:
What we are seeing right now in the United States is just,………well……wait for it……”SUMMER“…..
How many journalists and scientists have you corrected?
Likewise, if this is true:
The other thing to point out is that because one part of the world is cold (in that valley), there is likely another part of the world experiencing abnormally warm conditions (in the hill part of the wave pattern).
Tell us which heat wave you claimed the mirror converse for. Swap the warm for cold. Which heatwaves did you warn people were being used to distract us with “pesky climate communication” when the warm peaks were only the random bumps?
A distracting narrative is emerging. There have certainly been some misinformed tweets, posts, and innuendo about the cold weather and the global warming narrative. One thing that I have observed is a narrative in certain circles that some people are being hypocrites by pointing out that cold weather doesn’t refute climate change but not making a similar point during the warm season.
Don’t cringe now, but these are not equal and symmetrical. Saying that a hot spell “may contain climate change DNA” is not the same as saying “cold spells are weather”. If a hot spell could contain DNA, (we molecular biologists don’t think so) then so can a cold one. If hot DNA can spell “manmade global warming”, then cold DNA can spell “the models are wrong”.
Sheppard creates a diversion: Don’t look here!
The question he can’t answer is apparently the wrong question to ask.
Sheppard says:
I pointed out this cliche dance that often plays out in social media,
Person X: “This event is clearly caused by climate change…..blah blah blah”…..Person Y: “See they say every extreme event is caused by climate change, but the climate changes naturally and there were always extreme events…..blah blah blah”
is important to discuss events from the proper perspective. “Was that event caused by climate change?” is an ill-posed question because natural variability almost always plays some role. However, this does not mean that an anthropogenic signal is not sitting on top of the natural variability.
An anthropogenic signal can be “sitting on top of natural variability”. And natural variability could equally be sitting on top of the anthropogenic signal and crushing it flat.
The question ” “Was that event caused by climate change?”” is not ill-posed, it is mindless, undefined agitprop with an ambiguous vocabulary, loaded meanings and no role in a scientific conversation.
Step Three: Pretend Models are Reality
Marshall goes on to claim that peer reviewed studies calculate the percentage of attribution:
So consistency “has to be applied” everywhere except for in situations where scientists can draw four-color graphs claiming otherwise.
Sheppards inconsistent use of cold and warm imply that cold is not just a lack of heat, it’s something fundamentally different. Heat, after all, can prove human attribution, but cold cannot prove the opposite.
Giant pairs of whirlpools travel across the ocean for months in a bizarre pair.
These large paired whirlpools, hundreds of kilometers across, travel eastward at something like 10-20cm per second. This is one pair crossing from Tasmania to NewZealand. This was there in our satellite data but “invisible” til recently. As David Evans says “I wonder what else we are observing but not seeing?”
The pair of whirlpools called Modon E travelling eastward from Tasmania to NZ.
The ocean becomes connected at two distant points as the Modon-E whirlpool pair travels from Tasmania to NZ in 2010-2011
In the mini-pool version, these rolling whirlpools are connected in a U shape under water.
Wow. PhysicsGirl shows how to make these by pushing a plate through the water, and adding food coloring. Switch on your science nerd, show the kids! (send me your photos :- ))
The two vortexes spin in opposite directions but are connected as a pair underwater. This was created by PhysicsGirl using a plate in a pool and two different food colorings.
Twin giant ocean whirlpools travel for months winding their way across oceans
Peter Dockrill reports on an interview published in Popular Science
For the first time, scientists have recorded a bizarre phenomenon in fluid dynamics, which up until now had only ever been theoretically predicted, but never observed in the wild.
“Ocean eddies almost always head to the west, but by pairing up they can move to the east and travel ten times as fast as a normal eddy, so they carry water in unusual directions across the ocean,” explains oceanographer Chris Hughes from the University of Liverpool in the UK.
“What we found was a pair of eddies spinning in opposite directions and linked to each other so that they travel together all the way across the Tasman Sea, taking six months to do it.”
Since 1993, satellites have recorded nine of these pairs (called Modons). Eight of nine that have been found were around Australia. (Perhaps Australian-NZ oceanography is special, but I suspect other modons just haven’t been identified yet). From the paper:
The nine modons we have identified are probably the clearest. There is no sharp cutoff to what could be considered a modon, and there are many other temporary associations of pairs of vortices, particularly to the southwest and south of Australia, and in the region of formation of Agulhas ring eddies. There are hints of acomplex eddy regime in the Pacific off the southern tip of South America, but the relatively small amplitudes and length scales here make interpretation ambiguous. There may also be brief pairings in the Gulf of Alaska and eddies shed from the southern tip of Madagascar certainly interact (de Ruijter et al., 2005, 2004), but clear evidence of modons is not seen. Movies showing modon propagation are given in the supporting information of this paper.
h/t to David E
Watch Physics Girl do some extremely cool pool tricks.
I’ve seen 99% of the hands-on science tricks out there but this was totally new to me. Oogle away. The twin vortices leave pairs of shadows on the pool floor. They travel right across the pool, but vanish sometimes unpredictably, or are destroyed easily by any interference.
….
Notice the red ink whirlpool reaches over and envelops the blue one. The colors stay separate.
Businesses are closing, customers are cutting back spending, company bosses are all suddenly spot trading experts in the energy market, or planning to become their own electricity supplier. Meanwhile scouts from the US have arrived to poach companies who want cheaper energy (and tax cuts).
Happy New Year Australia. These are all headlines and stories in The Australian from yesterday and today.
Australia’s competition regulator, Rod Sims, who has been tasked with finding ways to cut power bills, has warned that high energy costs will force more plant closures and job losses as prices continue to increase.
“Energy affordability is Australia’s largest economic challenge,” the chief executive of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission told The Weekend Australian.
“We have already seen jobs lost, investment reduced, plant closures (because of high energy prices). Unfortunately, we are going to see quite a bit more.”
Some businesses will be OK – like those that are not involved with fertilizer, paper, glass, steel, bricks, telecommunications or refrigeration:
He said the biggest pressure would be on manufacturing companies that used gas, including those involved in making fertiliser, paper, glass, steel and bricks. High energy prices were affecting sectors such as telecommunications companies, services that used refrigeration and farmers using irrigation.
They were also affecting retailers, whose customers’ budgets were hit by rising electricity costs.
Other businesses that will be OK are those that don’t need customers:
The executive director of the Australian Retailers Association, Russell Zimmerman, this week blamed the high cost of energy as a factor in holding consumers back from spending in the post-Christmas sales period.
As 2017 closes it will be remembered as one of the worst years for the $300 billion retail sector, which was hammered by a long line of high-profile collapses — including Topshop, Rhodes & Beckett, David Lawrence and Oroton — driven by the lowest growth in household income for decades, mortgage stress and rising energy bills.
“Weak wages, flat house prices and a smaller fall of the household savings rate suggests weak consumption ahead,’’ warns UBS economist George Tharenou. [He] said household cash flow collapsed to a record low in 2017, with discretionary retail spending “taking the hit”.
…the country’s biggest department store, Myer, issued a profit warning on the back of worsening sales ahead of Christmas.
A funny thing happened to the growth of consumption spending as the RET percentage rose.
…
It appears the RET (Renewables Energy Target) takes money from customers and gives it to solar and wind power investors instead.
Manufacturing company Qenos is being forced to lay off 15 per cent of its 700-strong workforce as it battles to cope with higher energy prices, chief executive Stephen Bell said yesterday.
Mr Bell said Qenos, which has polyethylene plants in Altona in Melbourne and Port Botany in Sydney, had been battling hard to boost productivity following increases of up to $60 million a year in its gas and electricity expenses, but was now being forced to lay off staff.
Years ago, [Rod] Sims says, most chief executives did not know much about energy. “Now you find when you are talking to company executives, all of a sudden you are talking to energy experts.” Some of them are now buying electricity and gas off the spot market,” he said… “You will be chatting with them and they have half an eye to their phone, looking at what the price is doing.”
And we all know how live spot-trading-in-a-volatile-market helps soothe, relax, and hone the focus and creativity of our business leaders. Why didn’t we ask CEOs to do this before? Will Australian companies lead the world or what! And the answer is or what, or maybe watts.
The rising prices of electricity and gas have become such a worry for some of Australia’s major companies they are having to take the situation in their own hands. An increasing number, Sims says, are looking at ways to generate some of their own electricity or “self-supply” as he calls it. “I have spoken to at least 50 companies recently on the subject of electricity and I can’t remember one which didn’t talk about self-supply,” he says. “It’s quite extraordinary.”
Too bad Australian companies don’t have many choices. They can take the subsidies and go solar, buy a diesel, or build a nuclear plant (as if). But they can’t band together and build a coal station to supply themselves without also paying the RET.
The state of Pennsylvania has sought to poach Australian companies with a promise of “abundant’’ energy, sparking renewed warnings from Australian business leaders that the nation risks losing jobs to offshore rivals unless it tackles its energy problems. A high-powered delegation from the Pennsylvanian government, headed by Dennis Davin, the state’s Secretary for Community and Economic Development, visited Australia seeking out large and medium Australian businesses and plugging his state’s energy advantages.
The week-long trip early this month, with stops in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth,…
The Pennsylvanian delegation has fanned fears that Australian firms are considered “ripe for targeting’’ by offshore rivals with offers of low-cost, reliable power.
The actual price of electricity in Pennsylvania isn’t cheap. Presumably they are expecting ours to go higher, or theirs lower, or both.
The average price of electricity per megawatt ranged from $76 to $123 in 2016-17 in Australia while the average commercial electricity rate in Pennsylvania was advertised at about $121.90 a megawatt ($US94.40).
However, I bet gas is a lot cheaper in the US. Still, some companies might prefer to pay high gas prices, and feel good because they live in a state that bans gas exploration.
UPDATE: Record breaking snow falling in upstate New York. Pennsylvania.
The airport in Erie, Pennsylvania, has had a whopping 65.1 inches of snow from this lake effect event — the highest snowfall total from any event on record in Erie. (Heavy lake effect snow is produced by cold Arctic air moving over relatively mild water temperatures in the Great Lakes.) — World News, ABC (US) News
40,000 people in Cleveland lost power overnight.
New York City may have coldest New Year’s Eve since 1960s… — ABC News
In freak conditions, Canadians (and many people in the US too) are getting a chance to enjoy record cold for the last time before climate change makes winters unbearably mild.
Temperatures observed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport bottomed out at -22 C [-7.7F] this morning. The previous record for this date was set in 1960, when it hit -18.9 C. [-2F]
Tristan Hopper does some first class bragging about the cold:
Vancouver is as cold as Moscow, Toronto is colder than CFS Alert and a piece of the country roughly the size of Europe was under an extreme cold warning
It’s colder in Winnipeg than it has ever been in Scotland (ever)
The coldest ever in Scotland was apparently only – 27C. (-16.6F). And for southerners, “CFS Alert” is the worlds most northern inhabited place, deep into the Arctic, and beyond even where Inuits would live. Today, by the way, in midsummer the South Pole warmed up to -18C.
Alberta’s warmest place was almost as cold as Mars
This means that, for a few minutes, all of Alberta was about as cold as Mars’ Gale Crater, the home of the Curiosity rover. Mars is subject to pretty violent temperatures shifts, and Curiosity regularly encounters temperatures below -80 C….this week, the highest temperature experienced by the rover were -23 C. A Calgary Boxing Day shopper, therefore, might have found themselves getting into a car that was literally colder than a Martian spacecraft.
People in Whitby are presumably making the most of the cold at the moment:
Check out these “cloud streets” over the #GreatLakes, seen by the #SuomiNPP satellite’s #VIIRS instrument. These parallel rows of clouds are what’s behind the heavy lake effect #snow hitting parts of PA, MI and upstate NY. More imagery: http://goo.gl/eEwncX
To cut smog and PM 2.5 pollution the Chinese government banned coal fired heating in 28 cities in Northern China and ordered them to convert to gas. But things aren’t going too well:
Public anger boiled over after China Youth Daily published video images of children at a primary school in Hebei province’s Quyang county who were forced to sit outside in the winter sun because their classrooms were too cold.
The Ministry of Education demanded “immediate” action to provide heating after students at another primary school showed signs of frostbite, the official English-language China Daily said.
It seemed like such a good idea at the time:
A joint government and municipal action plan for the 28 cities was released as far back as last March, calling for Beijing, Tianjin, Langfang and Baoding to ban small coal- fired furnaces by the end of October, among a host of other measures for the region.
“Areas in these cities will be declared completely ‘coal free,'” the official Xinhua news agency reported on March 31.
Communism fails for the 300th time:
Despite efforts to shift the blame, responsibility for the poor policy coordination seemed to fall squarely on the NDRC and the central government.
Coal futures at record highs:
The impact on gas supplies has already driven coal prices to new highs. On Dec. 11, coal futures hit a record of 689.8 yuan (U.S. $104.86) per metric ton, Reuters said.
Small coal burners are inefficient, so a gas transition could be a good thing, but sometimes when bureaucrats click fingers, kids lose them.
Cypto currencies are killing the world and saving it at the same time
It’s the battle of the cryptos. Bitcoin is set to destroy the global climate due to exponential electricity consumption. Mining for bitcoins consumes the same electricity as 159 countries (probably more now), and by 2020, the world. I suspect we’ll be saved by reality — transactions now take hours and cost $20, $40, $50 (depends on the day) — making bitcoin not useful for buying a beer. But Michael Kile has found a competing cypto which will save the world — bound to relieve climate believers of their normal cash while offering them gold-hopey-hyper-cubits which may evaporate at a moments notice. Don’t mock it, in people with the right brain, these may briefly increase oxytocin and reduce cortisol.
So say hello to the saviour ClimateCoin. It wants to be an “exponential environmental organisation…” (because linear ones are achieving so much, and the square of zero could do so much more right?) They are not even pretending to produce anything real. Their mission is to “create a symbol for the common man to be able to participate in the struggle against climate change…” No uncommon people need apply. No weather need be changed.
This record breaking video below has more hot-net-keywords than you have ever seen in one 6 minute 19 second youtube video since the dawn of civilization.
Buy now, hurry, invest, send them your money. Or not.
There’s another interview here with CryptoCurrently which may win the prize for the longest uninterrupted hype without describing any real object or outcome. Or maybe they did, and I just missed it. You too can “merge blockchain and climate change“, though when I do I get a blockchange, or a chain of climates and I’m not sure what to do with them.
Futures in bitcoins make a short selling crash possible (maybe quite appealling to some)
Ten days ago I asked maths brain (and other half) Dr David Evans what he thought of BitCoin. He said:
A futures exchange in New York will start to trade Bitcoin starting Monday [on Dec 19]. For the first time, people will be able to bet on Bitcoin, both up and down (long and short), using US dollars. That is, you can bet on the price of Bitcoin to go up, or to go down, without ever having to own any.
This is important because the introduction of futures markets has previously coincided with the end of upward movement in several commodities, such as uranium in 2007.
Now suppose you were part of a bunch of profit-seeking money men looking to make a serious killing. Perhaps you are at an influential global player like Goldman-Sachs. Along comes Bitcoin, a few years ago. Would the following scheme appeal?
Buy bitcoin and plant favorable stories in the media to move the price up.
As the price moves up, momentum sucks in hordes of investors.
Open an exchange for futures contracts on Bitcoin.
Take out a large short position on Bitcoin, by buying short contracts at the futures exchange (the kind that increase in value when the price of Bitcoin goes down). Should be easy to find people to take the other side of the contracts, because nearly all of the public are going long, expecting the price to go up.
When set, sell all your bitcoins and buy more short contracts aggressively and quickly, in order to smash the price down on the futures exchange. Simultaneously, use your influence with governments around the world to “protect their currencies” by issuing regulations that make it difficult or illegal to use Bitcoin.
The public, seeing the price of Bitcoin now going down and staying down, urgently want to sell. The price is routed.
Cash in your futures contacts. The short positions you held will have gone up enormously (a hundred fold? a thousand?) in value as the Bitcoin price collapsed.
Contemplate how the whole price movement, first up then down, simply transferred cash in government currencies from some people to others, while nothing useful was made or created.
Since he said that the price has gone from up to $19k, down to $15k. Not that that is unusual in cryptoworld. Bitcoin has crashed over 30% in every quarter since it began. So this fall is not out of the ordinary.
So, should you be concerned that your funds could be caught in a carbon portal, become bogged in a blockchain, or otherwise impeded or delayed, have a chat with your financial advisor, climate consultant and any person or deity you know who can look into the seeds of time and tell you which cryptocurrency will grow and which will not, including Lord Bull and Bear.
Homes and businesses are so afraid of blackouts in Australia that some retailers are selling four times as many generators as normal. Mygenerator.com.au reports a 425% increase year on year. The strongest growth has been in South Australia, Victoria and western Sydney.
According to Channel Ten, Energy companies across Australia have sent letters to their customers to warn customers to be prepared in case there is a blackout. But one company says it’s just a precaution they are required to do every year. (Does anyone ever remember getting a letter like that?)
Once, the renewables industry just wanted “certainty” for business (as in certainty of taxpayer funded subsidies). Now “certainty” means a diesel generator.
WASHINGTON — More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
This is 700 of 15,000 employees. The cuts started under Obama (“blame” Republicans) and is just the start:
The cuts deepen a downward trend at the agency that began under the Obama administration in response to Republican-led budget constraints that left the agency with about 15,000 employees at the end of his term.
…the administration is well on its way to achieving its goal of cutting 3,200 positions from the E.P.A., about 20 percent of the agency’s work force.
After skeptical scientists have been sacked, exiled and subject to RICO threats, NOW they worry about “silencing” scientists?
Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.
Let’s talk about real silencing. Out of thousands of workers, how many vocal skeptical scientists do the EPA employ? Anyone?
This is a deep-state agency, which was being used to bypass American voters and Congress.
The EPA is effectively no longer under the control of the US Congress; its allegiance is to the UN and implementation of the policies of Sustainable Development via Agenda 21.
No tears lost:
The junk science of the Endangerment Finding was in turn responsible for Obama’s monumentally destructive Clean Power Plan, which drove up energy prices, hit U.S. economic competitiveness and killed jobs.
Anyone who thinks it’s sad that 700 EPA officials have lost their jobs should maybe consider the 50,000 workers in the U.S. coal industry alone who lost their jobs as a result the EPA-enforced Clean Power Plan.
Oops, please. The bank balance is trending to zero, and I must pay attention. Can you can spare the equivalent of a beer, a steak, or a month of bandwidth ($100) for 2018? I, we, will be ever so grateful.
We can do this thanks to philanthropists like you. It’s a testament to the fantastic readers here that nine years, 2,863 posts and 450,000 comments later, this blog is still going and somehow a family of five just gets by. Long live the internet! Details on how to help below:
How much fun can you have living in a global experiment? In Australia, peak summer is about to hit in a post-Hazelwood-electricity-grid. There’s a suite of committee reports as summer ramps up. Everyday there’s another Grid story in the press, and a major effort going on to avoid a meltdown. Minister Josh Frydenberg announced today that “we’ve done everything possible to prevent mass blackouts”. Or as he calls it, a repeat of the South Australian Horror Show. Politicians are so afraid of another SA-style-system-black that they are throwing money: The “Snowy Hydro Battery” will be another $2 billion. Whatever. It’s other people’s money.
This is what they are afraid of:
The red bars mean “Reserve Shortfall”. The dark blue matter is “Generation”. The graph covers two years (sorry about the quality) so the two red bursts are summer 2018 and summer 2019.
SA Medium Term Forecast, Outlook, AEMO, Nov 16th 2017, South Australia.
Oddly we are headed for a critical time, but this’s the most recent graph I can find — thanks to Wattclarity — from November 16th, 2017. (Here’s an earlier version from March 2017. and from Dec 2016). Perhaps there is a newer kinder forecast, but curiously the AEMO Medium Term Outloook page isn’t working “til early 2018”. Hmm? Odd time to take it down.
The words in that top box (rewritten below*) indicate they do a new outlook every two weeks, but I can’t find one on the Wayback Machine, or Google Cache. Perhaps you can? Please let me know.
Australian electricity prices forecast to rise and fall at the same time
The Australian Energy Market Commission (AMEC) said the price drop will happen as variable wind and solar generation comes online, which is paid for by the Government’s Renewable Energy Target.
Notice how in the government funded ABC, “the Government” appears to pay for many things, almost like it generates income? More accurately, the Government’s Renewable Energy Target forces customers to pay more for electricity from coal and gas producers, which in turn, give that to the intermittent generators.
Nationally, prices rose almost 11 per cent this year, but with the extra supply from wind and solar, the commission predicts that will be offset by a 12 per cent fall over the following two years.
Eleven percent? Twelve percent? Praise the error bars!
Always, always, the cheap electricity is coming. Soon.
The world is full of paradoxes. Everyone is paying more for electricity yet the cheapest generators are going out of business
Wholesale electricity prices in Australia are higher than ever and headed for the sun, averaging in the $100/MWh range. Yet the AMEC report somehow found “that over time, low wholesale prices contributed to the closure of coal-fired plants”. Could it be that the gap between the reality of the wholesale prices the retailers pay and the wholesale prices the coal plants receive has something to do with the LRET (Renewable Energy Target) which is currently around $85MW/h?
While government groups are forecasting cheaper prices, the people betting on future prices and markets are forecasting more profits ahead and higher prices. Who to believe?
Ten days ago a Goldman Sachs report warned that people are underestimating the future price rises coming in Australia.
NSW and Victorian wholesale power prices are set to rise as much as 50 per cent in coming years, boosting profits at energy giants AGL and Origin, as peaking power that requires high prices to start is increasingly required to back up renewables.
This is the view of analysts at investment bank Goldman Sachs, who say a recent softening in electricity futures prices is underestimating a coming price shock by 20-30 per cent, even if the National Energy Guarantee is put in place. “We forecast wholesale electricity prices will rebound towards a new peak of between $120 and $130 per megawatt hour,” Goldman Sachs analyst Baden Moore said in a note to clients.
In South Australia, prices are forecast to average $150, while in Queensland, which has state-owned coal generators, prices are forecast to fall to about $50. — Matt Chambers, The Australian, December 12th, 2017
GoldMan upgraded the profit forecast for AGL and Origin.
Forecast prices on the Australian National Grid
StopTheseThings argues that Australia’s Energy Transition is leaving 42,000 families in Abject Energy Poverty. (Despite that suffering, it must be reassuring to know that thanks to the energy “transition”, storms will be slower in 2100. )
Sydneysiders are being warned of chaos, unprepared for a blackout
Up to 10,000 Sydney commuters on underground trains would have to be evacuated, surface roads would be gridlocked and ferries may have to move people out of the CBD in the event of a “black’’ power event of the type that hit South Australia last year. — Sid Maher, The Australian
Meanwhile, public hospitals only have six hours worth of fuel in their back-up diesel generators, the report found. — news.com.au
The NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin says a lblack system event is highly unlikely because the last one occurred in 1964:
Mr Harwin played down the possibility of a black event. “NSW has not been subject to a black event for 53 years — so it is highly unlikely that such an event will occur.
Are you feeling reassured?
That’s possibly 9 – 15 hours without power in a city of five million people:
It [the Energy Security Taskforce report] said anecdotal evidence suggested that in a black system Sydney would be without power for at least nine to 15 hours, probably longer, and would be one of the last parts of the state to have power restored to customers. This was because the Sydney CBD physically lay at the edges of the network in relation to the main generators.
The same article goes on to point out that there are no planned communications mechanisms for a black system, though the RBA, ASX, and banks would cope because they “had structured their communications platforms so that they were not reliant on the National Broadband Network [NBN] and would still be operational during a blackout.”
Our newspapers are going into the gory detail of blackouts in our largest city:
NBN equipment would not operate in a blackout but customers with fibre to the premises and a power supply with battery pack-up would be able to operate their devices for approximately five hours. Houses with fibre to the node, fibre to the building, cable and fixed wireless would not have operable internet or phones. The report said public hospitals in NSW had back-up diesel generators but fuel would need to be delivered within six hours.
Perhaps someone can explain to me again why we are spending $74 billion on the NBN? And if you are admitted to hospital in Sydney, perhaps bring some diesel with you — just in case the backup trucks don’t get there in time.
One way to hopefully prevent a blackout is to manually load shed. Which is the nice term for deliberate blackouts –but note the costs:
There were “significant gaps in knowledge, preparation and planning for black system event in NSW’’ and costs could be as much as $136 million for every 200MW of load shed in the CBD for four hours.
The NSW Grid uses around 9,000MW (or more). The $136m cost mentioned above is for 200MW for four hours. If things really go pear-shaped, open the vault doors and watch money exit at light speed.
Toss another $4b at the problem created by renewables?
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s much-hyped ‘Snowy 2.0’ expansion has been given the green light, however the scheme could cost 125 per cent more than first thought and won’t be switched on for at least six years.
The expansion had a tentative price tag of $2 billion, however new documents show the cost could actually end up as high as $4.5 billion – not including the estimated $2 billion also needed to upgrade transmissions lines from the mountains into Sydney and Melbourne.
For this kind of money we could start talking about actual generators like USC coal plants or nuclear plants, things that Indonesia already has or is planning to get. The Snowy pumped battery uses energy to push water uphill, so it can get some of that energy back later. (That’s another story for another day).
It was one of the most spectacular debacles in the world of modern electrical grids. Basslink is the underwater interconnector between Tasmania (home of Hydropower) and Victoria (former Brown Coal king of Australia, but “transitioning” to unreliables fast). When the cable broke in December 2015, it cost Tasmanians $560m, took 5 months to repair. They had ran their low dams down to get rich selling “low carbon” electricity to Victoria, but shut their last gas plant only a few months before. An El Nino was running, so their low dams weren’t restocked until May or June. In the meantime they flew diesel engines across en masse to keep the lights on. The whole episode was capped off by the incident where Tas Hydro saw a major storm coming, with flood warnings and decided it was a good time to try cloud seeding. Greed anyone?
The Basslink Cable was supposed to allow 630MW of energy to go back and forth, but according to Tas Hydro can only deal with 500MW.
We’re trying to control the weather by limiting a universal molecule intrinsic to life on Earth. What could possibly go wrong? Loopholes, for starters. Only this isn’t a loophole — it’s an obvious outcome of “carbon neutrality”. The only thing that could have stopped wood from replacing coal is if the tidal-windy-solar idea had been competitive, reliable and batteries were really cheap. Or, if we all went nuclear.
The forests of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — as well as those in Europe — are being destroyed to sustain a European fantasy about renewable energy…
Wood burning is booming from Britain to Romania. Much of the timber is sourced locally…
But Drax’s giant wood-burning boilers are fueled almost entirely by 6.5 million tons of wood pellets shipped annually across the Atlantic.
Drax Power, UK emits 23 million tons of “good” neutral carbon which used to be trees:
About 23 million tons of carbon dioxide goes up its stacks each year. But because new trees will be planted in the cut forests, the company says the Drax plant is carbon-neutral.
The Drax plant IS carbon neutral. It just destroys forests too
Evidently being carbon neutral is not always enough.
Peter Sabo of Wolf, an NGO … estimates from Slovakian government data that 10 million cubic meters of wood is logged in the country each year, against a sustainable yield of 6 million cubic meters. The difference is almost entirely accounted for by the 3.5 million cubic metres burned for Slovakia’s energy and heating. Yet nowhere do the carbon emissions from this burning turn up in the carbon accounts of Slovakia or the EU.
Neodymium turbines are “renewable” but forests are not:
Theoretically, the clean green plan wasn’t meant to raze trees a meter across, it was only supposed to burn the woodchip offcuts. But, given enough incentive the free market found a way to define whole trees as a woodchip.
Some EU officials estimate that while forests are increasing in Europe overall (thanks partly to CO2) about a third of the new forest will be fed to power furnaces.
Too bad about the homeless squirrels and nestless birdies. Nevermind.
Dang unintended consequences.
We can’t have a free market in a ubiquitous molecule central to all life on Earth.
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