It’s a very well written article: Bonackers vs. Big Wind by Robert Bryce. h/t Andrew. The good news is that opponents of wind power are having a lot of success onshore. The bad news is that the renewables industry is pushing offshore instead, but fishermen don’t want them either, and families that have been fishing the same areas for 300 years are up in arms.
“The South Fork fishermen are fighting to preserve their access to some of the most productive fisheries in the world.”
Some eye-opening numbers:
Obama set a target of 10GW of offshore wind power by 2020. But right now there is only 30 MW. It’s 9,970MW short. The offshore push is on.
To replace a single nuclear generator will take 45 offshore wind plants.
Offshore generation costs as much as three times what gas power costs per KWh.
They face big money renewables proponents — not just rich beachfront homeowners, but large corporations who want tax credits worth millions, and groups like Norwegian oil giant Statoil ASA, plus the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Governor Andrew Cuomo has a goal of “producing 50 percent of the state’s electricity from renewables by 2030.” But to do it, bills will go up for the poor.
The backlash on land:
“The backlash against Big Wind is evident in the numbers: since 2015, about 160 government entities, from Maine to California, have rejected or restricted wind projects. One recent example: on May 2, voters in three Michigan counties went to the polls to vote on wind-related ballot initiatives. Big Wind lost on every initiative.
An analysis of media stories shows that, over the past decade or so, about 40 New York communities have shot down or curbed wind projects.”
Onshore wind is becoming unviable due to opposition. So New York Governor wants it offshore. But fishermen don’t want wind power either.
“Alex. Beckwith traces his family’s roots in the region back more than 300 years. “I’m totally opposed” to the wind project, he said. “It’s going to be a hazard to navigation.”
Expanding offshore wind to the 2.4 gigawatts that Cuomo has pledged will require covering about 300 square miles of offshore territory with turbines.
… fishermen are facing “permanent denial” of their labor in the areas in and around the proposed projects. “We can’t go anywhere else,” she tells me. Asked about the politics of offshore wind, Paul Farnham, who owns the Montauk Fish Dock, which packs fish for shipment and sale (on consignment) to the New Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point in the Bronx, replies: “I’ll guarantee you, 90 percent or more of all these fishermen voted for Trump. It wasn’t because they liked him. It was because they wanted less regulation.”
Professor Peter Ridd has made the mistake of putting scientific standards ahead of collegial comfort. What was he thinking? He seems to feel he should serve the people of the Queensland instead of helping the careers of co-workers and admin staff.
Ridd is being accused of “Not acting in a collegial way” (or something like that, no one is allowed to say for sure) and is now under investigation for serious misconduct.
The federal government is set to spend more than $1 billion on the Great Barrier Reef in the next few years to mitigate the effects of climate change, based largely on research that is claimed not to have been subjected to proper scrutiny.
James Cook University physics professor Peter Ridd writes in a new book that the credibility of key research papers driving investments in the reef rest on “a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process’’.
Professor Ridd argues for the establishment of a properly funded group of scientists whose sole job is to find fault in the science “upon which we are basing expensive public policy decisions regarding the Great Barrier Reef’’.
Ridd wants to get the Barrier Reef science (and policy) right:
“It’s [the Great Barrier Reef policy] affecting the sugar industry, the cattle industry, the mining industry, the tourism industry…”
“there is a certain duty of care on scientists to make sure they get it right. I don’t think they are..”
…in other areas of science when they do proper checking about half of it is wrong, so why aren’t they trying to check it.
They want to shoot the messenger…”
Peer review is a cursory look at the science, they don’t review the data, but if you are going to spend a billion dollars…
As Jennifer Marohasy says:
Rather than James Cook University sacking Peter Ridd for having the courage to speak out, it would be good if they would get behind him, and his calls for urgent reform.
The question is whether JCU care about getting the answers right?
Peter Ridd writes a lot more in his chapter in the new book Climate Change: The Facts 2017. Co-authors include yours truly, Clive James, Matt Ridley, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and Anthony Watts. Pre-order your copy now, the first edition, released last week, has sold out.
h/t Jennifer M
Of professors, there are only a few,
Who dare challenge or doubt peer-review,
Of all topics climatic,
Which is so problematic,
For alarmists who think it taboo.
Remember the Electrical Eclipse-Fear? For months, people were coached to use less electricity during the eclipse for fear that the grid might fall over as marvelous new-revolution-solar stopped working. The media were selling the message that we might not cope without solar. I figured this would be as big a threat as a cloudy day (but easier to prepare for.).
So after all the spin, what happened? Electricity was massively oversupplied, and spot prices went negative.
Apparently people went outside to watch the sky. (At least that’s Southwest Power’s excuse.)
Most of the groups that hyped the fear don’t seem to have mentioned the failure so much:
Grid operators and traders thought they were totally prepped for the historic U.S. solar eclipse. There was just this one thing they didn’t completely factor in: “irregular human-behavior patterns.”
That’s the technical definition, from the folks who manage the electricity network at the Southwest Power Pool, for the conduct of millions of Americans who were outdoors ogling the moon shadowing the sun instead of cranking up the A/C in homes and offices.
This was a bummer for traders who’d bet prices would jump as a whole load of solar-produced megawatts faded to black.
Spot power in California fell to negative levels as the eclipse wiped out and restarted thousands of megawatts of solar power, and they also dipped from Texas to New York.
Then at 11:50 a.m. local time — as the sun started to reappear from behind the moon — the ramp-up in solar power sent prices to a low of minus $15.97.
…the next total eclipse in the U.S.: April 8, 2024.
The normal unpredictable variation of solar and wind power is far harder to deal with than the predictable dips from a solar eclipse.
Justin Gillis, writer for The New York Times used the recent eclipse to sell something I’d call Sciencemagic. Essentially, if some Scientists™ can calculate orbital mechanics to a fine art, it follows, ipso nonfacto, that all people who use the same job title are also always right.
Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.
If Scientists™ say that solar panels will stop malaria, then buy some! Save lives in Ghana. (What are you waiting for?)
The implications stretch far. Clearly, we can chuck out the whole research thing (labs, who needs em?) Why test predictions, if Scientists™ are 100% accurate? We’ve been wasting money. We don’t need more large hadron colliders, we just need to survey more particle physicists.
This idea that job titles have a kind of truth-telling power is not much different to astrology where truth comes from birthdates.
Preacher-Gillis struggles with cause and effect:
So what predictions has climate science made, and have they come true?
The earliest, made by a Swede named Svante Arrhenius in 1897, was simply that the Earth would heat up in response to emissions. That has been proved: The global average temperature has risen more than 1 degree Celsius, or almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit, a substantial change for a whole planet.
It’s the most tritely obvious thing that any cause of warming would cause… warming. Was it CO2, or solar spectral changes, solar magnetic effects, or solar particle flows? Gillis seems to think that warming itself is evidence that CO2 is the problem. It’s magical short-term thinking. But turning points, dammit, tell another story. If CO2 was the major driver there wouldn’t be major turning points that we can’t explain. For half the decades since Arrhenius made that prediction, global temperatures have been not-behaving as Arrhenius predicted – CO2 was on the rise, and global temperatures weren’t.
Hadley Global Temperature Graph with Phil Jones trends annotated on top.
Gillis provides a cherry picked random-hits list (Not only are these signs of any warming but if you make forty predictions — some will work out, it’s quite difficult to fail on all forty):
The scientists told us that the Arctic would warm especially fast. They told us to expect heavier rainstorms. They told us heat waves would soar. They told us that the oceans would rise. All of those things have come to pass.
Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.
The globe has two poles, and the Arctic warmed but the Antarctic did the opposite. On a yes-no question, a 50% success rate is not “success” but random luck.
As evidence, Gillis links to model predictions of “heatwaves” that haven’t even happened yet. For “heavier rain” he links to a story from 2014 that he wrote that is almost cut n paste identical to the current story — same cause and effect problem. Hello Justin — what kind of warming will not cause water to evaporate from the ocean leading to more rain? (What goes up must come down). If the solar dynamo was warming Earth, we’d see these exact same events. The only difference is that solar theories explain more of the turning points, and far more of the history.
Then there is the old warming-troposphere-cooling-stratosphere fingerprint which shows that CO2 is increasing (which we already knew from measurements) but not that CO2 causes global warming:
By the 1960s and ’70s, climate scientists were making more detailed predictions. They said that as the surface of the Earth warmed, the temperature in the highest reaches of the atmosphere would fall. That is exactly what happened.
Applying exact tests, inexactly:
If the science were brand new, that might make sense, but climate scientists have been making predictions since the end of the 19th century. This is the acid test of any scientific theory: Does it make predictions that ultimately come true?
What kind of “acid test” is not an acid test? The Gillis kind:
Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.
That does not mean it is perfect, nor that every single prediction is correct. While climate scientists have forecast the long-term rise of global temperatures pretty accurately, they have not been as good — yet — about predicting the short-term jitters.
In other fields, we do not demand absolute certainty from our scientists, because that is an impossible standard.
The acid test used to separate gold from base metals, it gave a definitive answer, but in Gillis-world copper is gold is nickel. Who cares? This is sloppy language — so sloppy it’s meaningless. If a salesman spoke like this we’d call it deceptive marketing.
There are no Gods of Science
Lots of eminent and otherwise sensible scientists still say things that are wrong:
Gillis would protest that I miss the point. Individual scientists can be wrong, but this is a C.o.n.s.e.n.s.u.s. as if group thinking crosses some magical line into truth. Despite all the evidence that experts get things wrong and for decades, Gillis helps to propagate those mistakes by being an apologist for B-grade thinking, asking no hard questions, doing no investigation and pandering to unscientific excuses.
The Andrews government this morning unveiled a new renewable energy target with a commitment to power up to 25 per cent of the state from renewables by 2020 and 40 per cent by 2025.
The government has backed the construction of two large scale solar farms in regional Victoria which will provide another 140MW to the state’s supply, and has set up a reverse energy auction system to bring forward an additional 650MW to the state’s supply.
Victorian households will allegedly each save around $30 annually on power bills under the new plan, while medium sized businesses have been projected to save up to $2400 a year under the legislation which will be introduced to parliament today.
It’s almost like Victoria plans to make electricity from legislation (hey, it’s renewable, and will never run out). By making electricity shockingly expensive, Government ministers can talk of “savings”, even though prices will be far higher than the average price of electricity for the last twenty years.
Do the maths. A few months ago, a major Victorian coal generator shut down. Hazelwood provided 1,600 megawatts, 22% of the state’s electricity at $30/MWhr. South Australia just signed a deal for solar power averaging a price of $70-plus-per-megawatt-hour (plus RET scheme, government loans, and who knows what other subsidies).
This is Soviet-style electricity management:
The plan would deliver an increase to the state’s energy supply because it gives investors the certainty they need commit to large-scale renewable energy projects, according to Energy and Climate Change Minister Lily D’Ambrosio.
The word certainty is code for guaranteed profits from forced customers who are not permitted to buy the cheaper alternative.
Strangely coal investors don’t seem to need “certainty” from legislation (governments and investors are building 1600 new plants in 62 countries, but not one in Australia.) Coal power investors get certainty by selling a product that they know freely consenting adults will always want to buy. One version of certainty is driven by the free market, the other by government dictat.
There was no Medieval Warm Period in China. No little ice age either. Not warm in Roman times either.
Obviously CO2 controls this climate.
(Click to enlarge)
Quansheng et al show that weather is lumpy, that modern warming is a lot like past warming. They go so far as to say that there are regular cycles and hint that sun might have something to do with it, and volcanoes.
“…centenial variation is significantly correlated with long-term changes in solar radiation—especially cold periods, which correspond approximately to sunspot minima, as well as the frequency of large volcanic eruptions.”
They go on to say that rate of warming was about half a degree per century lately. It may have been the fastest rate, but then again, it may not. It was hard to tell with the error bars being so wide. It was all done with proxies and has a ten year resolution. Obviously it is in need of having homogenadjustoided thermometer data added after 1960 as is the custom in climate science.
Grid operators, utilities and electricity generators are bracing for more than 12,000 megawatts of solar power to start falling offline as the moon blocks out the sun across a 70-mile-wide (113-kilometer) corridor stretching from Oregon to South Carolina.
This is the first major test of the power grid since America started bringing large amounts of intermittent solar and wind resources onto the system. It comes just as the grid is undergoing an unprecedented transformation whereby flexible resources such as battery storage will complement growing supplies of solar and wind.
Reader Andrew writes: “The path of totality is trivially narrow although the partial eclipse is quite wide. But they mustn’t have clouds in the US.”
Indeed.
Looks like it is being marketed as some kind of dummy run to “prove” intermittent energy will not hurt the grid when it “takes over”?
The celestial event provides an opportunity to test plants, software and markets refined in recent years in anticipation of the day when renewable energy becomes the dominant source of power.
Or perhaps it’s just the faithful reassuring themselves that the eclipse won’t end up being another disastrous blackout other people can blame on renewables. Look at how much trouble they have to go to:
California, home to more solar power than any other state, will tap into its network of hydropower generators and gas plants that can ramp up quickly to fill a 6,000-megawatt gap in solar energy. The state also embarked upon a public relations campaign to convince residents to conserve energy to minimize greenhouse-gas emissions while solar plants are down.
These stories of fear of a grid breakdown or “whiplash” have been going on for months:
The Australian National grid deals with about 3,500MW of wind power coming and going all the time and without 3 months to plan for it. Surely California can cope with 6,000?
I predict happy stories tomorrow of how the-solar-grid survived the test.
Wind-farms and solar thermal plants will prey,
On birds of every size who fly their way.
The public, to pay less per kilowatt hour,
Must vote to drive the zealot Greens from power.
Australia’s constitution has a flaw,
When politicians wish to change the law,
By referendum, have the flaw corrected,
That very flaw will rule their wish rejected.
Bad-tempered glass can have a snap eruption,
Like children’s tantrums cause a quick disruption.
This used to be black glass, now it’s a sinkless, shattered crazed basin and bench.
Who knew tempered glass could suddenly fracture and in some cases explosively?
We have a bathroom basin and countertop of moulded thick black glass. For about five years it was happy, then late one night this week, for no reason, it shattered — the sink fractured into 100 pieces and fell into the towels below. The countertop crazed from end to end even tossing a few cubes of cracked glass up to two meters away. Luckily no one was in the room. The new white dusty look was created by the crazing pattern, which slowly continued for the next few hours. We could hear the odd crackling noise every now and again as the last of the tempered tension in the glass ebbed away. Even far corners — away from the sink — broke off. It turns out this is a natural, rare phenomenon.
Exploding shower-screens, shelves, sinks, car windows, and patio tables?
One four year old needed hospital care after a shower screen shattered, though luckily, people rarely get hurt, but it is disconcerting, and it’s easy to imagine how this could end very badly, especially in glass towers far above the ground.
Many people report that it sounds like a gunshot or car backfiring. So some people thought their house was being invaded (rather terrifying, I would think), others feared someone shot at them, or they were victims of a stray bullet. Some hunt for spent bullets, and a quite a few other poor sods got very spooked, wondering if their house was being occupied by angry spirits. Think poltergeists and ghosts. The most common words posted were “I’m so glad I found this thread.”
Tempered glass and the rare Nickel Sulphide intrusion
The best explanation is that a manufacturing defect leaves tiny traces of nickel-sulfide as an intrusion. The problem has been known about since the 1940s. The flaw can trigger any time without warning, though most events occur in the earlier years. There is an excellent discussion at The Achilles heel of toughened glass by Dr John Barry:
Ross Clark, journalist, met Al Gore to interview him about his favourite topic. But Ross broke the rules; he did some research. Clark even talked to a professor about the scenes of Florida being flooded. The prof explained that it’s not so much that the seas were rising fast, but that the land under Miami is sinking — and by an amazing 16-24cm in the last 80 years. (No wonder some residents are seeing water inundate new areas.)
When I put all this to Al Gore and ask him whether his film would be stronger if it acknowledged the complexities of sea level rise — why it is rising in some places and not in others — I am expecting him to bat it away, saying that it doesn’t counter his central point and that there is a limit to what you can put into a film pitched at a mass audience, but his reaction surprises me. As soon as I mention Professor Wdowinski’s name, he counters: ‘Never heard of him — is he a denier?’ Then, as I continue to make the point, he starts to answer before directing it at me: ‘Are you a denier?’ When I say I am sure that climate change is a problem, but how big a one I don’t know, he jumps in: ‘You are a denier.’
That is a strange interpretation of the word ‘deny’, I try to say. But his PR team moves in and declares ‘Time’s up’, and I am left feeling like the guy in Monty Python who paid for a five-minute argument and was allowed only 30 seconds. On the way out, a frosty PR woman says to me: ‘Can I have a word with you?’ I wasn’t supposed to ask difficult questions, she says, because ‘this is a film junket, to promote the film’.
Surely if you are going to make a film claiming climate change to be a grave threat to the world, you ought to be prepared to answer detailed questions about it. — The Spectator
Perhaps he just needs more time? Give him another 20 years and Gore may get the hang of the scientific points.
Exposure to climate-denial, “shocking”
It was the same thing a few weeks ago when Nigel Lawson talked about climate change at the BBC. Gore was practically speechless (certainly he ran out of words):
Mr Gore told LBC: “It’s shocking how the BBC is engaged in climate denial, isn’t it?
“I had a personal experience with it this morning. It’s really shocking.”
The way climate denial is referred to — it is almost like the BBC was spreading anthrax or engaged in child abuse. And that’s the message, not that Gore can debate Lawson’s points, just that anyone who asks those questions is such a toxic evil person, so beyond the pale, that even if they were Chancellor of the Exchequer of one of the worlds top economies they don’t deserve to be interviewed. (If only Lawson had come second in a US presidential race.)
Gore is trying to scare listeners who found Lawson interesting. His message is both to BBC journalists (how dare you) and to people listening who might be tempted to go to work or dinners and talk about the Lawson interview. Gore wants to keep “climate denial” in the taboo camp by pouring indignant scorn and outrage at the mere idea of a conversation– but he can’t do this forever.
When people lose their fear of asking what their friends think about Lawson (or any skeptic) the infection will spread rampantly.
For foreign readers, the Australian Parliament is undergoing the most extraordinary spectacle at the moment. Politicians have resigned after discovering that they were dual citizens of Australia and some other country — such as Britain, Canada, or New Zealand — which is a clear breach of the constitution. But this is going far beyond people who held two passports. The constitutional affliction is spreading, as more and more politicians get caught up in what will now become High Court cases. Some renounced citizenship in writing before the election but their unwanted sovereign-alternate nation didn’t necessarily acknowledge that for months (that was Malcolm Roberts case). Others never knew their mother applied for them to become a dual citizen. Some claim ignorance or inheritance may be no excuse.
Bizarrely, this could theoretically escalate to involve pretty much the entire parliamentary body.
The stakes are pretty high, given that our current government holds power by just one seat. Already the endangered list includes some ministers. People are resigning from the Senate and being replaced. In the House, no one has left yet but their continued stay will depend on the High Court. By-elections may have to be called, and government may change hands to the Labor Party.
Section 44(i) of the nation’s founding document disqualifies someone from office if that person:
…is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power…
How to remove every politician in Australia
Last week, David Evans (my other half) pointed out a simple method for a foreign power to get rid of any Australian politician they didn’t like. What if Kim Jong Un, say, granted selected politicians citizenship, or voting rights, or “free health care,” or the rights to some benefits in North Korea? Non-rescindable. Nothing the Australian politicians can do about it. Wouldn’t this disqualify every politician to whom this was granted? The blackmail potential is excellent, obviously.
But it gets worse. Apparently New Zealand has already neutralized the Australian Parliament. Now the only people who can run for Parliament are Australian citizens who are not Australian citizens. Figure that…
Much closer to home, under recent and little-noticed changes to New Zealand law, Australian citizens now don’t need a visa to live, study or work in the Land of the Long White Cloud. That’s right: Any Australian citizen is entitled to live, study and work there.
That means we’re ALL entitled to the rights and privileges of a subject of New Zealand — not a citizen, with the attached rights and privileges such as voting — but to be a subject of that country, living there, subject to New Zealand law, working or studying. And there’s no doubt that New Zealand is a “foreign power” — you only have to watch the All Blacks do the haka to realise that.
What does this mean?
New Zealand law has made every Australian citizen incapable of being elected to, or serving in, the Australian Parliament. It’s not just Barnaby Joyce: It’s everyone!
UPDATE: Seems this is not likely at all. From Tim Andrews (Australian Taxpayers Alliance)
The High Court dealt with this in Sykes v Cleary and in fact in his concurrent judgement Barwick called it “absurd” :
“To take an extreme example, if a foreign power were mischievously to confer its nationality on members of the Parliament so as to disqualify them all, it would be absurd to recognize the foreign law conferring foreign nationality. “
It appears to be a bit of a historical anomaly — one Queen, many countries, that sort of thing.
At the time the constitution was enacted, only Senator Canavan’s Italian citizenship would have triggered the disqualification in section 44(i). Being born in Britain, Canada or New Zealand would have simply made a person a subject of Queen Victoria and therefore not a citizen of a foreign power.
The High Court decided in 1999, however, that at least since 1986, Britain is a foreign power for the purposes of section 44. Canada and New Zealand fall into the same category.
The constitution can only be changed by a referendum, but a referendum can only be initiated by legislation passed by the Australian Parliament. If the New Zealand angle is correct, then all our current politicians are ineligible to be in Parliament and therefore cannot pass the legislation needed to initiate the referendum. No new politicians can be elected without a change to the constitution by a referendum. Checkmate, Australian Government.
South Australian households are paying the highest prices in the world at 47.13¢ per kilowatt hour, more than Germany, Denmark and Italy which heavily tax energy, after the huge increases on July 1, Carbon + Energy Markets’ MarkIntell data service says.
When the eastern states’ National Electricity Market was formed in the late 1990s, Australia had the lowest retail prices in the world along with the United States and Canada, CME director Bruce Mountain said.
The Markintell report graph:
…
Hmm — odd coincidence of Price with Wind Energy Penetration:
Wind energy is “free” but countries with the most wind power are also the most likely to get to the top of the Prize Pool for exorbitant electricity. Wind energy penetration is highest in Denmark (1st), Portugul (8th), Ireland (6th), Spain (11th), Germany (3rd). Conversely, renewable energy penetration is low in places at the tail end of the price curve like Luxemburg 6%, Estonia 15%, Hungary 7%, Lithuania 15.5%. In the low mid price range is France with 80% nuclear generation, and Finland which is 47% Nukes and Hydro.
Could be a message there?
If South Australia were on the graph of wind penetration below it would be equal second at 30%.
…
The end cost of electricity is not just decided by the amount of wind power as a percentage of the grid. Australia as a whole is a stand out – despite having wildly expensive electricity, it only has (as a whole) 5% wind. using 83% fossil fuel sources, it In NSW, Victoria and Queensland, most electricity is generated from fossil fuels. Nor is the cost of electricity due to “renewables” alone, because hydropower is low cost. Countries with a lot of hydropower like Norway have high renewables but low prices. What we can’t find though is a single country with high wind and solar generation that also has cheap electricity.
The Nobel Peace Prize leads to the Nobel Price Price.
Read on to find out (some) of why Australia is such an odd fish.
It’s not just renewables in Australia, the National Electricity Market is a bureaucratic nightmare
The NEM operates one of the world’s longest interconnected power system. It covers a total distance of about 5000km from Port Douglas in Queensland to Port Lincoln in South Australia, with 40,000km of transmission lines.
But herein lies one of the NEM’s weaknesses: it is a very long, weakly connected system which does not provide the ideal underlying conditions for the efficient and transparent operation of the market for electricity. The penetration of renewables, as well as their preferential access to the NEM, has made this weakness even more apparent.
The NEM is not a free market, it’s so over-regulated with state and federal layers and counter committees to undo or outdo each other that any normal price signal is lost.
If we look at the operation of the NEM, one standout feature is the proliferation of regulatory agencies. There is the Australian Energy Market Commission, the Australian Energy Regulator, the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Clean Energy Regulator. And just because we don’t have an enough empire building in the electricity space, the government will add yet another agency: the Energy Security Board, one of the many unfounded recommendations of the Finkel review of the security of the electricity system.
The market used to have a reliable supply with intermittent demand, now both sides of that equation are volatile. The forced uptake of intermittent renewables must surely make the whole system a much more complex beast, and the generators are gaming that volatility. In this case, even the Queensland government is in on the act:
The Queensland government is also attempting to destroy the NEM by instructing one of its generators, but not the other, to bid low at peak times. Mind you, that government has been more than happy to reap the excessive dividends produced by the gaming of the system by these generators.
The customers get screwed by everyone in this:
Some of the bigger [private] players are behaving in duplicitous and self-serving ways, the most egregious example being AGL. All that marketing tosh about being committed to renewables while coal and gas make up 93 per cent of its output of electricity.
The other problem is complexity and customers being unwilling to shift
“…big retailers are content to let customers slip off the deep discounts they attracted them with after a year or two, and onto a costly standing offer or a much smaller discount.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said last week he wanted to help consumers find better offers and lower barriers to new entrants to curtail the market power of AGL, Origin Energy, EnergyAustralia and Queensland’s state owned power duopoly.”
Mr Mountain said power bills are constructed in such a complex way that ordinary customers without sophisticated spreadsheet and analytical skills have little hope of analysing competing offers to work out which offers them the best deal.
Private comparison websites do not include all market offers and charge retailers for switching customers, while the websites offered by the Australian Energy Regulator and the Victorian government do not provide the tools customers need to discriminate among offers.
There is no free market for electricity in Australia. If a group just built a coal fired plant and lined up free and consenting customers willing to pay for 100% fossil fuel based electrons, it would be breaking the law. If customers can buy “clean energy” why can’t they choose “fertilizing energy”?
BACKGROUND: As a whole the EU uses about 50% thermal, 25% nuclear, 12% hydro, 10% wind, and 4% “others”. The breakdown by generation source is graphed (awkwardly) here.
Crescent Dunes, Solar Thermal Plant, USA. | Wikimedia Author, Amble.
A company called SolarReserve is planning to build the new Aurora 150MW solar thermal plant at Port Augusta, which is apparently a copy of their Crescent Dunes plant in the US. But that project has been offline for most of the time since last October. The whole SA government is meant to be running 24/7 off “solar power”, which allegedly only has about 8 hours of energy stored up (as heat in the molten salt block). So an 8 month break will be a bit of problem for the SA government (except of course, we all know that the real baseload backup here at 4 or 5am everyday, and most of the day in winter, is ultimately the very fossilized gas and coal.) Since the project only began working in Sept 2015 it managed to operate for all of one year and one month before it went offline for 8 months due to a leak. The SA State Energy Minister is not concerned saying it was a construction issue and SolarReserve “have learnt from that”.
The 150MW myth: most of the time it will be less, a lot less
Here’s an ominous number: Crescent Dunes has worked at an average capacity factor of only 16%. That would mean an average generation of just 24MW of power from the 150MW plant. Theoretically, they are aiming for a capacity factor of 51.9%. (Yes, according to Wikipedia, it is not 51.8%, or 52%, but 51.9%. Very specific spin then?) — Thanks to Graeme No 3 and AndrewWA in comments for their help. And from TonyfromOz who says: “Everything about this SouthAus plant is the hyped to the max best case scenario that NO plant on Planet Earth has achieved yet…”
Should they close their Solar-Parliament each winter?
The South Australian government might want to switch their summer holidays to winter, because Crescent Dunes production in summer was three times as high as their best winter month. (30GWh in Sept 2016 compared to 9GWh in February 2016). SA may well be better off if Parliament has to shut down for winter, but how do you run hospitals and schools on one-third of the power?
Not low-cost:
State Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis is not a man you want negotiating your deals:
“This deal is an incredible outcome for South Australians. It locks in low-cost power for our schools, hospitals and trams while also boosting supply to the broader market in order to reduce power bills for households and businesses.”
This genius deal is so good, Premier Jay Weatherill is going to waste $2.6 million to sell it to South Australians.
Premier Jay Weatherill has defended allocating $2.6 million to an advertising budget to spruik the plan.
He argued the advertising was necessary to “ensure” investors understood that SA has “a secure energy future” and to protect the state’s reputation against people “seeking to essentially characterise South Australia as having an insecure and unstable energy system”.
Given the likely capacity factor, and the governments use, how many megawatts exactly will be left to spare?
Jay Weatherill has promised a $50 cut to the average household power bill when a $650 million solar thermal power plant is running, even as experts warn that the technology is in its infancy and largely untested anywhere.
The South Australian Premier yesterday visited the proposed site of the world’s largest solar thermal project, 30km north of Port Augusta, hailing the new 150-megawatt plant as a “game-changer … (that) signals the death knell for coal-fired power stations in this nation”.
Coal is dead sayth Mr Weatherill
Being anti-coal is a religious badge of honor. Here’s a line history will not be kind to:
Mr Weatherill said no form of coal-fired electricity generation, which includes new high-efficiency, low-emission options, were considered during the tender process.
“There’s going to be no more coal-fired generation,” he said. “Coal is dead”
The solar thermal plant, to be built by US company SolarReserve in the state’s mid-north, was “by far the lowest-cost option of the shortlisted bids”, he said.
“The government will pay no more than $78MWh for our power. By way of comparison, you can’t build a coal-fired power station for less than $100MWh,” Mr Weatherill said, hailing the technology as “the future for the world”.
Weatherill knows coal is more expensive even though he didn’t consider it. All the other world leaders building 1600 coal plants in 62 countries must be kicking themselves.
As for $100MWh coal power — Weatherill could have paid $30m to keep the 520MW coal plant going.
Possibly people can come watch birds fry in the sky:
Birds combust in mid-air at Ivanpah, Solar Thermal Plant, USA. | (Click to watch the video – how much fun can you have?).
h/t David Maddison for the youtube link.
Not the largest solar thermal project
Being the biggest in a new immature and rarely used field is not that exciting, but Aurora is not the biggest bar perhaps in a minor technical sense. Everything about this is hyped — spot the weasel words “of its kind”:
It’s possibly the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world, some as high as 4km and we didn’t even know these existed til recently. Despite that overwhelming ignorance, we’re 97.00% certain that all the warming in Antarctica is due to your car and airconditioner. Robin McKie, The Guardian writer, talks about the recent discovery of so many volcanoes under the ice. Not surprisingly, we have no data on how active these volcanoes are. However because we *know* climate change is definitely wrecking Antarctica, it follows that your car, air conditioner and pet dog could melt more ice, take the pressure off the tectonic plate and set one off. Then things will really get out of hand.
Anyhow, it’s just a coincidence that all the warming in Antarctica is where the volcanoes are.
Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.
The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland.
Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa’s volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.
These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 metres. All are covered in ice, which sometimes lies in layers that are more than 4km thick in the region. These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system, which stretches 3,500km from Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.
UPDATE: More details are coming in: The SA govt is effectively covering all its own electricity use with this one plant, which is about 5% of the whole state’s demand. The plant will have 8 hours of battery storage (theoretically). The word I hear is that this is not an outright purchase of $650m, but an offtake agreement for around 70-78/MWh — which means the government will buy nearly all the production available (125Mw of 150MW) each year, but won’t own the plant. [Text edited and substantial additions below.]
Not long back, Port Augusta had a thirty-one year old coal plant generating 520MW. The Premier could have spent $30 million to keep it going through this anti-coal political era. Instead he blew it up and is spending millions to buy electricity at twice the price, under contract for 20 years. The $650 million Aurora Solar Plant will produce 150MW of solar power (on a good day). Per megawatt, this solar power is twice the price of coal fired power. (The old Hazelwood coal plant supplied electricity at around $30MWh.) Per degree Celsius, it will buy global coolness by some number starting with three decimal places of zero.
Solar power is supposed to be competitive with coal, but no private company seems to keen to do this. In this case, the company is getting a signed up buyer for around 80% of its product, and for 20 years. Of the 150MW of sacred solar electrons, 125MW will go to the government itself and just 25MW will be left over for non-government customers. If South Australians wanted to vote for cheaper electricity, this is another 5% that out-of-reach.
To put this in perspective $650 million dollars is around $400 per man, woman and child in SA, over the next ten or twenty years, to appease the climate Gods. The exact cost is hard to calculate at this stage. But the government of SA will be the one sole major customer, effectively paying off the solar farm, but won’t own it in the end.
The original Northern Coal Power station employed 250 people. The new solar one will give 700 people a pointless but paid position for three years, after which, only 50 people will have a job at the solar plant, and countless others will be out of work as more businesses close down in South Australia due to the price of electricity.
Praise flows in:
The Australian Services Union hailed Mr Weatherill as “the unequivocal international leader for clean energy generation”.
Independent SA senator Nick Xenophon and Pt. Augusta Mayor Sam Johnson said the deal will be “transformational”.
It will be “transformational” like a dose of Dengue Fever.
Will South Australia ever recover?
The project is underpinned with a $110m concessional equity loan that Senator Xenophon negotiated earlier this year as part of the talks over the federal government’s company tax cuts legislation.
Time for WA to secede and cut the financial lifeline that makes these kinds of decisions possible.
Put it in your diary, Malcolm Turnbull gets something right:
The announcement comes after Malcolm Turnbull told the South Australian Liberal Party annual meeting on Saturday that the state’s strong focus on renewable energy was equal parts “ideology and idiocy”.
The Prime Minister said Mr Weatherill’s energy policies were an “experiment’ that should have been conducted in private, not inflicted on an entire state”.
TonyfromOz in Comments: This is not nor has it ever been baseload power
Nick Xenophon said this: (my bolding here)
“This will make a difference in the South Australia energy market. It will secure the grid and mean more baseload power than intermittent power,” he said.
The Base Load for South Australia is at around 4AM every morning, every morning, and averages around 1100MW. The total amount of power that will be generated and delivered by this Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant at 4AM on ANY morning, even at the height of Summer will be …..
ZERO MEGAWATTS
There is not one plant of 150MW Nameplate on Planet Earth which has EVER generated 24 hour power, and this plant will not be the first to do it. If you want some facts on CSP, you only need to see how poorly it works in Spain, and I have some information on just that at the link below. This is just another joke from a Government that has no idea at all.
South Australia won’t need too much cable,
With less power, very dear and unstable,
And must learn to cast lots,
For the few megawatts,
Of crumbs from the Great Leader’s table.
— Ruairi
EDITED: The original headline was: SA Premier hailed “leader”: spends 20 times more to make one third of the electricity with solar — based on a comparison of spending $30m to keep Northern Coal running, or $650m to build a solar plant. With an offtake agreement, the unknown extra cost is spread over 20 years, and must end up being more than $650m in total. The SA government is buying most of the product; the Aurora project investors will expect some profits, plus there will be interest payments on the loans — all of which needs to be covered. Last year the SA government was asking for a tender for 480GW of electricity per year for government sites (but it’s not clear if this was the total demand). Hypothetically, if it was, the bill for getting that at a cost that was $40MWhr higher is about $20m extra dollars per year (please check my maths). Partly this is also funded by a federal govt concessional equity loan ($110m), not just funded straight up by SA taxpayers.
OK, a wind farm isn’t making sausages, but it’s also not a farm.
Nothing about this makes sense, unless you follow-the-money.
John Constable and Matt Ridley outline the absolute rort that Scottish wind generators are screwing out of British electricity customers. Scotland already has 750 industrial wind plants (the scammers) in their best moments making a total of 5,700 MW which is more than the peak demand of the whole Scottish grid. This is, at times, not just more than Scotland can use, but even more than it can safely absorb, so UK slaves were forced to spend £1.8 billion on giant interconnectors partly to send the excess down to England and whatnot, otherwise the profits of the unprofitable might suffer, and the weather might not be as nice in 2100 (or not).
If that’s not bad enough, these protected industrial plants sometimes produce a product when nobody wants it, and they still get paid. When it would be unsafe to dump it on the market. The geniuses who set this up promised the wind-generators that they would still be paid. And not only are they paid, but as Ridley and Constable document, before 2011 they were paid on average, four times what they would have lost, and one farm, 20 times as much. After that was exposed, the payments were trimmed to merely being 50-100% more than the loss. Nice work if you can get it, and even better if you can’t.
No free market here
In a free market, buyers connect with sellers. In a socialist-planet-saving-scam the buyers go to jail if they don’t pay for a product they didn’t use and don’t want, and the sellers connect with politicians who only represent 10% of the buyers. The people deciding whether to build or approve or invest in building most unneeded, unwanted, bird killing windmills are not the ones who pay for the product. Every new windmill is an automatic feeder off British forced consumers. So it’s in the Scottish governments interests to milk this situation for all it’s worth and approve every tower. What will stop them turning the whole of Scotland into a giant welfare windmill? Maybe only a hard Brexit with Scotland left behind.
Bear in mind some poor Scots have to put up with these towers, and they’re protesting, but drowned out by the river of gravy pumped from the south.
The layers of stupid don’t end there. Some corporates may be scamming both sides of the border. There are companies wanting to build even more towers in Scotland, but on the south side of the equation, they may be the same ones being paid high rates to rush in and fill in the missing supply at the last minute when the Scottish wind turbines are told to switch off. There is a unseen price for the volatility of wind power.
The Scottish wind-power racket
By John Constable and Matt Ridley
Imagine a sausage factory – the luckiest, most profitable sausage factory in the world. Its machines crank out their sausages, and lorries carry them to supermarkets. So far, so normal.
But this particular factory makes as many sausages as the management and staff choose. If they feel like taking the day off, the lorries and shelves stay empty. If they want to go a bit wild, they sometimes make so many sausages that there aren’t enough lorries to take them away. Or they carry on cranking out sausages even if the shelves are already full.
And here’s the really amazing thing: even when the lorries can’t cope or there is no demand for sausages, the factory gets paid. Indeed, they get paid more for not sending the sausages to the shops than for sending them. This is such great business that the factory is actually building an extension, so it can threaten to make even more unwanted sausages.
Does all that sound completely mad? Of course it does. But it’s what happens in the British electricity industry – where the blackmailing, money-printing sausage factory is a wind farm in Scotland.
It took 12 “researchers” to discover that the best way you, personally, can change the future global climate is to avoid having kids. If you do have kids, you can make up a bit, apparently, by all going vegetarian. If that’s too hard, consider swapping your dog for a hamster. But if you have to have kids, dogs, and eat meat, at the very least, assuage your green guilt for living in the easiest, most bountiful time and place on Earth, by feeding your dog some sweet potatoes occasionally instead of Chum.
Got that? How many tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds did it take to discover this while not ever once google searching for “reasons climate models are wrong/skillless/barking fairy failures?
Marvel at the Washington Times sentence construction — this study comes with cows?
The study comes with livestock, notably cows, already targeted by the environmental movement for their prodigious methane production, prompting calls for people to reduce their beef consumption in order to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
This news is popular with all vegetarian, childless, dogless, lizard owners:
His study, which found that dogs and cats have a significant impact on carbon emissions as a result of their meat-based diets, met with howls from pet owners and a lukewarm reception even from some environmentalists who also happen to love dogs.
So did the study calculate how many degrees forgoing all dogs in the US would cool the planet by? It doesn’t seem to say…
In his paper published last week, UCLA professor Gregory S. Okin found that meat-eating dogs and cats create the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide per year based on the energy consumption required to produce their food, or the same impact as driving 13.6 million cars.
There is great care to package this message as the height of reasonableness, as if the people suggesting the climate changing effects of dogs were all amicable flexibility and sense. Readers can find an option that suits their level of penance: everything from not having kids at all down to occasional sweet potato snacks for your 250 pound mastiff. (Remember its not the outcome that matters when it comes to the planet, it’s the intent…)
“I like dogs and cats, and I’m definitely not recommending that people get rid of their pets or put them on a vegetarian diet, which would be unhealthy,” Mr. Okin said in a statement. “But I do think we should consider all the impacts that pets have so we can have an honest conversation about them. Pets have many benefits but also a huge environmental impact.”
What they are really afraid of, is that the Chinese will get as many pets-per-capita as the US:
“Americans are the largest pet owners in the world, but the tradition of pet ownership in the U.S. has considerable costs,” Mr. Okin said in his Aug. 2 paper, published in PLOS One. “As pet ownership increases in some developing countries, especially China, and trends continue in pet food toward higher content and quality of meat, globally, pet ownership will compound the environmental impacts of human dietary choices.”
It’s only the Earth at stake, so don’t put yourself out too much:
What’s the answer? Mr. Okin suggested making the transition from dogs and cats to smaller animals including hamsters, reptiles and birds, or herbivores such as horses.
For a moment I had an image of him studying dogs that are bigger than horses.
Lastly, listen to the committed environmentalist — so committed to saving the Earth that he runs a digital media company called One Green Planet. Not committed enough to give up his dog:
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