What’s the word for competitive-but-needs-a-subsidy? Broke…
One hundred solar PV companies are forecast to collapse in Japan this year alone.
Up to 100 solar PV firms in Japan could face bankruptcy this year, with more than double the number of firms going bust in the first half of this year than the same period in 2016.
According to corporate credit research company Teikoku Databank, which surveys companies across various industries and has produced its third report on solar PV company bankruptcies, 50 companies in Japan’s solar sector have already gone out of business in the first six months of 2017.
While the market overall has rapidly expanded from the launch of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in July 2012, Teikoku Databank acknowledged that there has been a slowdown in deployment in the past couple of years as the government successively made cuts of 10% or more on an annual basis to the premium prices paid for solar energy fed into the grid.
Bankruptcies have doubled in the industry since last year.
Current operating coal fired plants in Japan, 2017.
Current operating coal fired plants in Japan, 2017.
Coal seems to be doing just fine.
h/t Marvin.
PS: The EndCoal Tracker is published by “CoalSwarm“. Where the global EndSolarSubsidies Tracker? All that fossil fuel funding, and no activist group to track the parasites?
Some 3,200 people lost their lives to disasters between January and June, the German group found — well short of the 10-year average of 47,000 for the period or the 5,100 deaths in the first half of 2016.
April floods and landslides in Colombia that claimed 329 lives were the deadliest single event.
Elsewhere, an April-June heatwave in India killed 264 people, while floods, landslides and avalanches claimed around 200 lives in Sri Lanka, 200 in Afghanistan and 200 Bangladesh.
In terms of costs — that’s 60 billion “saved” this year:
Disasters inflicted a financial cost of around $41 billion in the first six months, Munich Re reported.
That was less than half of the $111 billion toll in the same period last year, or the average of $102 billion over the past 10 years.
The most costly single event was flooding in Peru between January and March, which killed 113 people and inflicted damage worth around $3.1 billion, followed by Cyclone Debbie’s toll of 12 lives and $2.7 billion in Australia.
No one is suggesting one-year stats and ten year averages are meaningful. Unless you are Al Gore, then you need even less.
In Australia, there may be less rain overall but much more in these big storm events.
A couple of months ago, there was a 1 in 500 year flood in NZ and similar in Brisbane a couple of years ago. Last week in Lagos Nigeria, this (slide) was in my state just two months ago and another 1 in 1000 years.
I was in Houston Texas last year training climate activists , there was 240b gallons came down, equivalent of 3 days of Niagara Falls flowing right into the middle of Houston. In one calendar year they had two 1 in 500 years and one in one 1000 years. [Footage of flood slides from Quebec, Guatemale, Columbia, Rio, Lima, Chile, Bangladesh, Guangzhou, UK, Spain, Madagascar].
Gore and others are using events that are happening anyway to imply that every flood/drought/storm/landslide/sticky-road is worse than it would have been unless we buy his snake oil. Where’s the ACCC when you need them?
Hearts go out to the actual victims of these events.
Wouldn’t it be something if we had models that worked that could predict them?
___________________________________________
*ACCC: Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ie consumer rights in Australia)
As long as “climate change” is on the agenda in Western politics it will keep tearing the right-conservative side of politics apart. Because it is built on a mistake, the only stability for the right (and eventually the left) will be resolute skepticism. Truth will out in the end. Til then, the right side hobbles along with the exception of a few like Abbott, then moreso, Trump. Trump is the only politician to laugh at the snake oil salesmen and he won the most powerful democratic battle on Earth. When will other non-leftie politicans get the message?
The legacy media keep telling us “the science” is all one way so they are baffled that so many in politics don’t get it. What the media hide from themselves is that skeptical scientists vastly outnumber and outrank the believers, and that most of the public doesn’t buy the message either (see these climate polls). If politicans truly represented the public on this, over half would be skeptical.
John Roskam, the executive director of the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, said he hadn’t conducted a formal count but found most Liberal politicians shared his doubts about what many experts say is the greatest global threat to mankind.
“More than 50 per cent are solid sceptics and more than 50 per cent feel they need to be seen to do something,” he said in an interview. “The science is not settled.”
Journalist Aaron Patrick drops the usual line in about “climate scientists” as the gospel:
The overwhelming majority of climate change scientists accept the atmosphere is warming and humans are responsible.
What he probably has no idea of, is how that small sub branch of science has failed utterly to convince any other branch of it’s central thesis. Surely if climate scientists were right, the first people to recognise that would be meteorologists, followed by engineers, geologists, chemists, etc.
The fact is (and any genuine reporter would find this out easily) almost half of meteorologists — fergoodnesssake — are skeptics, survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, and most readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments^) have hard science degrees. Of the twelve astronauts who ever walked on the moon, three are outspoken skeptics (Harrison Schmidt, Buzz Aldrin, and Charles Duke). Not to mention that some skeptics have Nobel prizes (the real kind in Physics, not “Peace”). If we had to name a list of skeptics versus believers, the skeptics number 31,000, yet there is no list of named scientists who believe that comes close — let alone a list of 300,000 which would imply some truth to the statement that the science is settled, and the world’s scientists agree.
The one sided reporting leaves us open to these kinds of myths — as if a large part of conservative politics disagrees with “science”:
But many right-wing politicians, commentators and voters aren’t convinced the scientists are correct, or suspect the consequences of global warming are being exaggerated for ideological or economic reasons. Some Liberals unenthusiastically support climate change policies in the hope scientific opinion will shift in future years, Mr Roskam said.
Top marks to Peta Credlin
The Coalition backbench is “deeply sceptical about climate theology,” the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin, wrote in the Daily Telegraph last week.
“Make no mistake, even his strongest supporters in Cabinet understand that climate change remains Malcolm Turnbull’s kryptonite,” Ms Credlin wrote.
Nick Cater is brilliant, when asked what his think tanks climate position was he said “Should we have one?”
CNN is “freaking out” about the latest large iceberg. But John Sutter doesn’t mention that there was an iceberg twice its size in the year 2000 which was 11,000km2, and that as long ago as 1967, two other icebergs of a similar size were recorded. Thanks to John McLean for the links.
UPDATE #2: Monster bergs are everywhere. Lazzara lists two other massive icebergs as well as B15 that occurred in just 18 months: A38 in Oct 1998 was 7,600km2 and A43 in May 2000 was almost as big as B15, being 9,250km2. h/t WS All three of these were larger than the current “freak”.
When it comes to long term trends in iceberg sizes, the only scientific answer is “who knows”. Satellite records are so short, if a bigger iceberg broke off in say, 1811, how the heck would we find out? Not much is left of an iceberg 100 years later. What kind of proxy could show it ever existed — ancient stone carvings of satellite pics from ancient Greece?
Swithinbank (1969), basing on analysis of the ESSA-3 satellite imageries, reports that in 1967—68 two giant icebergs were seen in the eastern part of the Weddell Sea, measuring 70 by 100 km, and 45 by 100 km respectively, with total area of about 11.000 km.
— Birkenmajer, 1980
Apparently the smaller of these two was called “Trolltunga” and floated around til 1978. (See the map far below). Sadly, the real Trolltunga was pre-youtube, no photos I can find, except of the region in question.
This is the Trolltunga region. The little iceberg on the left is not “Trolltunga 1967” which was around 45km x 100km.
But an even larger iceberg apparently was B15 — nearly 11,000 square kilometers in the year 2000:
B-15 iceberg, largest satellite recorded iceberg, photo.
If I read this correctly, we are talking about ice that takes a century or even 2,000 years to go from the “grounding line” to the front. The Grounding line is the last point that the ice sheet touches land. The part beyond that is hanging out over the ocean:
We were mainly interested in the differences of residence times dependent on the density of surface patterns on the 15 km strip along the ice front. In case of very dense patterns we found that the ice needs between 78 and 968 years to move from the grounding line to the ice front. For less dense patterns we obtained a range between 140 and 2,764 years. — Wesche 2013
In Table 3 of Wesche, there are ten potential calving fronts greater than 200km wide spread over four sectors of Antarctica. It’s just a matter of time before another big berg breaks off.
For the curious, Encycploedia Britannica has this map and path of Trolltunga, which bounced around near the Antarctic coast for years before heading into the Atlantic Ocean, where it still took a year to melt. Strangely Encyclopedia Britannica has no article any more.
Lazzara, M.A.; Jezek, K.C.; Scambos, T.A.; MacAyeal, D.R.; van der Veen, C.J. On the recent calving of icebergs from the Ross ice shelf. Polar Geogr 2008, 31, 15–26.
Some are scoffing at the idea that rising heating costs will kill people. But check out the number-one temperature-killer in 74 million deaths across 13 countries. It’s not the extremes that we need to worry about, the deadly phrase is “mildly suboptimal temperatures”. Look at the blue finger of death in the graph below, starkly showing how irrelevant “extreme heat”, or any other ambient temperature zone, is.
Do you need an excuse to turn the heater on in winter? Low ambient room temperatures will thicken your blood.
Moderate cold accounted for as many as 6.6% of all deaths. Extreme temperatures (either cold or hot) were responsible for only 0·86%.
Join the dots — will we save more lives by:
a) making homes cold now in the hope that lower “carbon” emissions will,
b) mean less deaths from heat in 90 years time despite people probably having better access to heaters and air conditioners?
Would you sacrifice ten years of your life…
Note the big killer “moderate cold” | Click to enlarge
Cold is more likely to kill you in Sydney than in Sweden
Check out the curves below. As a percentage of the population, there are more deaths in Sydney than in Bejing at 5C.
Australian houses are not designed to be warm. Sweden’s are.
Figure 1 shows overall cumulative exposure-response curves (best linear unbiased predictions) for 13 cities selected to represent each country, with the corresponding minimum mortality temperature and the cutoff s to defi ne extreme temperatures. |. Click to enlarge
Professor Adrian Barnett, a researcher based at the Queensland University of Technology, has studied death rates associated with abnormal weather conditions plus occupant access to heating and cooling, and has established a link to the quality of housing in Australia and a corresponding increase in death rates during cold spells.
Professor Barnett’s studies have concluded that Australia’s death rate due to cold weather, which at 6.5% is almost double that of Sweden’s at 3.9%, is almost entirely due to the poor quality to which we build our homes.
Swedish homes are designed and built to stay comfortable during all weather conditions, whereas comfort in Australian homes is often an afterthought, usually covered by an oversized air conditioner which continually battles poorly insulated walls, leaky doors and windows. Australian homes are referred to as “glorified tents” due to this phenomenon, which particularly affects less affluent homeowners and of course, renters.
The internal temperatures of Federation or Queenslander style homes in winter often drop well below 17°C, while Swedish homes usually remain at a stable 22-23°C whatever the weather. According to Barnett, “Many Australian homes are just glorified tents and we expose ourselves to far colder temperatures than the Scandinavians do.”
In the Energy + Illawarra program the University of Wollongong’s Sustainable Buildings Research Centre team recently identified surprisingly cold living conditions in 158 households across the Illawarra, Shoalhaven & Wingecarribee regions of NSW. Researchers found that approximately half of all households studied were experiencing extended periods (>25% of the time) when the living room temperatures were well below 16°C.In fact some houses did not exceed 14°C throughout a number of days, some occupants reported being too anxious to turn heating on due to the cost of energy and ‘bill anxiety’.
Save carbon emissions and raise your blood pressure
In the cold, the naked ape suffers from thickened blood, local inflammation, weakened immunity, bronchoconstriction:
The biological processes that underlie cold-related mortality mainly have cardio vascular and respiratory effects. Exposure to cold has been associated with cardiovascular stress by aff ecting factors such as blood pressure and plasma fibrinogen, vasoconstriction and blood viscosity, and inflammatory responses. Similarly, cold induces bronchoconstriction and suppresses mucociliary defences and other immunological reactions, resulting in local inflammation and increased risk of respiratory infections. These physiological responses can persist for longer than those attributed to heat, and seem to produce mortality risks that follow a smooth, close-to-linear response, with most of the attributable risk occurring in moderately cold days.
I wrote about this enormous study, on 74 million deaths across Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK & USA: Cold weather kills 20 times more than heat does. But the paper is now fully available with more detail, and hardly any politician seems to have got the message the first time around. Hence the revisit.
The benefits we can derive,
From warming, helps keep us alive,
While our true foe is cold,
Killing both young and old,
Who with warming would otherwise thrive.
Thanks to CFACT I was lucky enough to get to see Al Gore in Melbourne yesterday (and even luckier to see Climate Hustle the night before and meet some great people!). Gore wanted everyone to spread the word, but banned anyone recording him. (The staff actively patrolled for wayward cameras. We’d love to have helped share Gore’s message, but we would have been kicked out for doing so).
What I saw was nearly a whole hour of primal weather-porn – gratuitous, non-stop, scenes from the apocalypse, glowing clouds boiled about incandescent forests, and giant drains in the sky emptied massive clouds in a flash. Glaciers crumbled before our eyes. Poor victims were stuck in boiling tar on hot roads, they crawled out of mud slides, and were dragged in spectacular rescues from cars being swallowed by turbulent floods. Biblical is the word.
Gullible, naïve devotees gushed, awed, and murmured collective fear as Al spun a story of record doom and disaster with a google hit-list of extreme weather snaps. Al offered almost no graphs, long term data, or paleostudies. Few in the audience seemed to realize it was just a grab bag of the latest disaster-fest, and if a million people had had mobile phones in 10,000BC, the footage from then might have looked exactly the same or even worse, as Gore milked pretty much every weather event in the news to sell the salvation of renewables. Few seemed to wonder how Gore could know that floods were not worse in 1598, or that droughts were not longer and nastier in, say, 1174, or during the summer of 2 million BC. But the all-seeing, all-knowing Al knew.
Through tricky double-negative convoluted sentences Al effectively sends the message that fossil fuels cause extreme weather (but whatever you do, don’t quote him):
Scientists used to say you cannot attribute any single extreme weather event to the climate crisis. But you have to say the odds of extremes increase, but now they are saying it very differently …
If you have a complex system causing a lot of consequences and you radically change it, every one of the consequences is different. With all this extra water vapour in the sky and all the extra heat energy in the atmosphere, every storm is different now.
And they are making advances in how much to attribute to the climate crisis but increasingly more of it is directly contributed.
This is what the reinsurance industry measures with climate related extreme weather events. The only plausible explanation of course is the climate crisis. —
Following in the footsteps of a million years of witchdoctors, the message was that the weather is worse than ever and he know how to stop it. His only effort to scientifically connect those dots was to quote a few scientists opinions, while ignoring thousands of others, most historical accounts and 2 billion years of paleohistory. Cherry-picked extremes.
The long tenous chain of cause and effect was glossed over repeatedly with handwaving. The system was the most complex on earth, yet somehow scientists know what causes what. The chain of influence goes like this: fossil fuels make CO2, CO2 makes heat, heat causes droughts and more humidity, which in turn causes floods, intense rain, nastier storms, stickier roads, sliding mud, rising seas, etc etc blah-de-blah.
Has there ever been a year on Earth when there wasn’t a drought somewhere and a flood somewhere else? This is a never ending game for Gore. Until we get perfect weather on Earth, on all 150 million square kilometers terra firma, he will always be able to say “boo”.
This video was typical of the scientific depth — “drowning dogs can be saved”:
I think the message here is that if you use petrol you cause women and dogs to be trapped in sinking cars.
If only she had driven a hybrid.
Roads are melting in India!
NDTV shows a video where this man’s shoes stick to the hot road and fall off. (Watch the video at the link). Call me a skeptic. I’ve bounded across searing bitumen roads here in Australia, and this man is not behaving as if the pavement is blisteringly hot. Would you put your hand down?
Note the “Highlights” in the NDTV story: “Tar on roads melts in Valsad, Gujarat, temperature was only 36 degrees”.
Most likely the melting roads are due to sloppy road construction and cheap materials instead of our fossil fuel emissions. Tar was melting at just 40C in India, according to the Times of India, due to “improper mixing of bituminous” materials.
“According to the UK-based Road Surfaces Treatment Association, most roads will start melting at a temperature of 50 degrees celsius. Roads in the United Arab Emirates are made of special “polymer modified binders“ which keep them solid up until around 80 degrees celsius.”
Watch as floods wash away cars in Spain!
I bet that didn’t happen 300 years ago.
Gore has a talent for finding spectacular footage and uses it to argue for renewable power (because mudslides are not about building codes or land management, and preindustrial mudslides were much nicer, right.)
Remember one piece of extreme-weather he couldn’t get? Gore asked for the Firenado footage of a mini-tornado sucking up a bushfire, but photographer Chris Tangney wouldn’t give him a licence to use it. Thank you Chris.
There was a spirit of salvation.
All ye peasants gather hither, for ye are the leaders, the chosen ones who see the light, only you can save the poor and downtrodden from the evils of fossil fuels. Unless we build enough windfarms we will never stop mudslides. Hail for a mudslide-free-future!
Your house will be washed away, unless you give up air-conditioning.
Gore had so many images, the onslaught ran at subliminal pace. He spoke of storm surges north of Sydney. I’m pretty sure I saw the infamous lost swimming pool at Collaroy.
Collaroy 2016, a storm surge washes away houses in NSW. | ABC News
The speech finished by telling the world how renewables are cheap, competitive, and are taking over, which, if it were true, pretty much neutralizes the need for Al to do these tours, right? And who need subsidies.
Gore made much of closing coal fired stations, but unlike yours truly who showed the same maps, Gore didn’t show the massive number of new coal stations to his audience. The lies by omission tell you all you need to know about his interest in the climate.
Gore argues that renewables creates jobs, but Jo asks whether we want our electricity grids to provide electricity instead. If the aim was “jobs” first, we would create more if we shut down all the renewables, let industry “go wild” with cheap electricity and then use the savings to bury bottles of cash for the unemployed to dig up.
h/t Craig, Marc, Chris, Tony and Debbie, what a great trip.
I was taken by the way Chiefio slices away the clutter to leave bare the most pertinent point. From day to day, the sun, the latitude, our orbit, and the CO2 levels are the same as the day before, yet the temperature can swing wildly. Over a whole month, most variables are constant, yet one obviously dominates the monthly average, a factor we don’t even have good data one in the long run.
Now the one big thing I can add to the graph itself is simple. I watched the sky during that time, closely. The cool days were cloudy to overcast. The hot days were clear blue sky. Temperature directly matched to degree of clouds. Cloudy days are cool. Clear days are hot.
During these three weeks of data, there is nearly zero change of any of the Milankovitch parameters. Insolation is a functional constant to a large number of decimal places. Our latitude and longitude and distance to water do not change. All manner of variables in this complex soup are held constant by the nature of their 1000s of year rate of change. On the scale of a couple of weeks, geologic time scale events ARE constants.
Even the slow rise of CO2 on a decadal scale is a constant and the seasonal change similarly near zero. CO2 is also a functional constant.
NONE of these temperature changes can be attributed to anything solar, celestial, gas composition changes, volcanic, etc. etc. What changed was the clouds, as observed.
So where is CO2 in all this? Nowhere to be found. It didn’t change the clouds. It didn’t change the sun. It didn’t change the light on the ground. It didn’t change anything. So IF we have a 20 degrees F to 30 degrees F change of temperatures from clouds, and then ignore changes in clouds, how can we say ANYTHING about CO2? If we average all those daily temperatures for this month, it tells us about clouds, not about CO2.
Then, given such a daily Average Of Global Temperatures is driven by clouds, how can one assert that changes over years, of a fraction of the daily changes of temperature, can not also be entirely explained by changes of cloud cover (that is poorly tracked at all, and completely ignored in vast areas of the planet)? Hmmm?
Cloud levels and precipitation are shown to control temperature ranges in the short run, so averages of them over long runs will also be dominant. Yet we do NOT have good data for changes of clouds or precipitation over time…
Ergodan does his own climate maths — decides that the most significant inflatable cash cow has disappeared from the sky. The global climate suddenly looks clearer, and so Turkey pulls back from Paris accord:
(Reuters) The U.S. decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement means Turkey is less inclined to ratify the deal because the U.S. move jeopardizes compensation promised to developing countries, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.
“Therefore, after this step taken by the United States, our position steers a course towards not passing this from the parliament,” he said. (link)
Turkey, saving the planet, one bank account at a time.
How many other nations do the same maths but are aren’t quite so, ahem, honest?
There are two main groups that use essentially the same NASA and NOAA satellites to estimate global temperatures. In the last year, they’ve both made adjustments, one down, and one up, getting further apart in their estimates. In ClimateWorld this is a big deal. Believers are excited that now a satellite set agrees a bit better with the maligned “hot” surface thermometers. But UAH still agrees more with millions of weather balloons. The debate continues. Here’s my short synopsis of the Roy Spencer (and John Christy) from the “Comments on the new RSS lower tropospheric temperature set.” (If something is wrong here, blame me).
The Bottom Line:
1. Both data-sets show far less warming than what climate models estimate. UAH shows +0.12 C/decade, the new RSS trend is up to +0.17 C/decade. But climate models estimate +0.27 C/decade in the lower troposphere.
2. The headline suggesting that the RSS revisions found “140% faster warming since 1998” is the usual hype. The warming trend was tiny to start with. The headlines didn’t tell us that RSS is now warming a few hundreds of a degree per decade faster, because “who cares”?
Five reasons UAH is different to RSS
UAH agrees with millions of calibrated weather balloons released around the world. RSS now agrees more with surface data from equipment placed near airports, concrete, airconditioners and which is itself wildly adjusted.
In the latest adjustments UAH uses empirical comparisons from satellites that aren’t affected by diurnal drift to estimate the errors of those that are. RSS starts with model estimates instead.
Two particular satellites disagree with each other (NOAA-14 and 15). The UAH team remove the one they think is incorrect. RSS keeps both inconsistent measurements.
Diurnal drift probably created artificial warming in the RSS set prior to 2002, but created artificial cooling after that. The new version of RSS keeps the warming error before 2002, but fixes the error after then. The upshot is a warmer overall trend.
UAH uses a more advanced method with three channels. RSS is still using the original method Roy Spencer and JohnChristy developed with only one channel (which is viewed from three angles).
The Future — more good data will be adjusted to match bad data
In January Roy Spencer predicted that RSS would be revised upwards, that he and John Christy would not be asked to review the paper (despite them being the longest running experts in this area), it would sail through peer review quickly, and would have multiple authors. Roy was right on almost all of that. h/t to Tony Heller at RealClimateScience.
Roy now predicts that the radiosondes will be adjusted to “agree” with the RSS version. This pattern of good data series being adjusted to agree with bad ones is a continuation of what happened to surface thermometers, where the worst sites are not removed from the series, but used to adjust the better sites.
By 2050, the size of fish could shrink by 10 – 20 per cent, Dr William Cheung, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia, Canada, forecast.
Dr Cheung, who gave a keynote address at the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles at Exeter University this week, said some fish in the North Sea, including haddock, were already getting smaller.
Some might say the shrinking Haddock might have more to do with over-fishing.
He predicted the trend would continue with common species such as cod shrinking by up to a fifth within our lifetime.
Climate change will extinguish Life on Earth but if that doesn’t scare you, let me tell you about your shrinking food. Kiddie meals are coming!
The marine ecologist said fish are shrinking because climate change is reducing the oxygen in the seas available for fish to breath.
The marine ecologist went on to say that because oceans are warming, fish that swim around Portugal and Spain will call the UK home.
Right now the ocean around the UK is 17C — at least three degrees colder than the water off Portugal. The ARGO buoys estimate the ocean is warming at 0.005°C per year (plus or minus 0.5° C, don’t laugh now.) So only 600 years to go at this rate, give or take 60,000 years.
How much is oxygen actually declining?
The rise in ocean temperature is reducing the oxygen in the waters for fish to breathe, while increasing fish’s need for oxygen simultaneously. Fish are more easily ‘short-of-breath’ as they grow bigger.
As the temperature of the surface of the oceans increases, the water holds less oxygen for fish to breathe. This is exacerbated because, as the seas warm up, oxygen from the depths of the ocean does not mix with the surface water as readily. In addition, water does not circulate as swiftly, which means the deep ocean is not as well ventilated.
I’d like to see some measurements on those falling oxygen levels before I stock up on frozen codfish.
Dr Cheong seems to be mixing up atmospheric warming with ocean warming:
In the last few decades the surface oceans have warmed up by less than a degree celcius. Dr Cheung, a former lead author in the Working Group II of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), projected that achieving the Paris Agreement of the 1.5 – 2.0 oC global warming targets will substantially reduce impacts. But if emissions are not reduced, there could be 3.5 – 4.0 oC warming, by the end of the century.
Something very “seismic” has happened to our electricity prices.
Paul McArdle of WattClarity goes through each state looking at quarterly trends and prices, and remarks that things are going “off the chart”. We had some electricity crises in Australia in the last 12 months, and 2016 was a significantly more expensive than all previous years bar the major drought year of 2007. But ominously, prices haven’t come down in what should be a “normal” quarter. In Tasmania there was a crisis last year when dams ran dry, and the undersea Bass cable broke. But this quarter, prices are only $3.20/MWh lower than the crisis levels of Q2 2016 despite water in dams and a working cable to Victoria. Something has gone seriously wrong with our electrical grid and market. In both Victoria and South Australia prices are higher on average than any previous April-June quarter in the 19 year history of the National Electricity Market. In Queensland and New South Wales, prices are at the “second highest”.
McArdle goes to some length to explain that this is not “one factor”, which seems obvious and fair — Its the combination of the closure of Hazelwood and Port Augusta coal generators; the extremely high gas-prices; the lack of wind; the increase of intermittent renewables; and the way electricity generators game the market. But what McArdle doesn’t mention is that these factors are not independent. If there was more coal fired power there wouldn’t be such high gas prices, and if there weren’t intermittent, highly subsidized generators, there wouldn’t be as much room to “game” the market. If there is some ominous leap in electricity prices, we know from years of experience that a grid with a lower renewables input provides cheaper time-weighted average prices even though for some isolated, miraculous moments every day, using a cherry picked description, and ignoring costs of transmission lines and auxiliary services (like “stability”) we could say we are getting “free electricity”.
A grid is a complicated animal, and people studying small separate parts of it can make accurate but totally contradictory statements. What matters is the total cost of electricity over all, after the wash, the games, the crises and the subsidies are played out. The high gas prices have other causes beyond coal and renewables, but there’s no question that Australia had a cheap backup, it could always use coal, which would mean the high gas prices wouldn’t have to hurt so much. The renewables subsidies are pushing the cheapest electricity source out of business. There is an Easy and Obvious way to let the market fix this problem that the government hath engendered, but there is no easy and obvious way to run a grid off wind and solar and no easy way to control our climate in 2100 using electrical power stations in 2017.
In Victoria, we see , we see the average price for the Quarter break $100/MWh (up at $104.92/MWh) – a gut-wrenching level for the vast majority of energy users in what has traditionally been one of the more “boring” quarters.
In Victoria, we see that average Q2 prices have never been higher, across all 19 years of NEM history.
Saving (in this case) the worst for last, we then step over to South Australia where the time-weighted average price for the quarter reached a staggering $115.93/MWh, … it is clearly the highest Q2 average price South Australia has seen over the 19 year history of the NEM.
….
In the same vein as last year, the most important take-aways from this analysis should be:
1. That the outcome for Q2 2017 was even more remarkable than Q2 2016; and
2. That it appears that we’re entering a new environment that’s distinctly different from the years that preceded; and
3. That this affects everyone, right across the NEM ; and finally that
4. Those pre-disposed to draw overly simplistic “it was due to … [this one factor]” conclusion are unlikely to be correct, and could be dangerously misleading.
The BOM got caught this week auto-adjusting cold extremes to be less cold. Lance Pidgeon of the unofficial BOM audit team noticed that the thermometer at Goulburn airport recorded – 10.4°C at 6.17am on Sunday morning, but the official BOM climate records said it was -10.0°C. (What’s the point of that decimal place?) Either way this was a new record for Goulburn in July. (The previous coldest ever July morning was -9.1°C. The oldest day in Goulburn was in August 1994 when it reached -10.9°C).
Apparently this was an automated event where the thermometer recorded something beyond a set limit, and the value put into the official database was the artificial limit. Since colder temperatures have already been recorded in Goulburn, who thought it was a good idea to trim all future minus-ten-point-somethings as if they were automatically “spurious”?
Yesterday, the BOM have acknowledged the error and at first deleted the -10.0 figure, replacing it with a blank space. Then today, after Jennifer Marohasy’s post, they’ve corrected it.
You might think a half degree between friends is not that significant, but this opens a whole can of worms in so many ways — what are these “limits”, do they apply equally to the high side records, who set them, how long has this being going on, and where are they published? Are the limits on the high temperatures set this close to previously recorded temperatures? How many times have raw records been automatically truncated?
This raises questions about what is “raw” data?
Perhaps most importantly, Jennifer Marohasy, I and the whole BOM audit team had been told that the Climate Data Online (CDO) represented real raw temperatures. Now apparently it does not. Raw is not necessarily raw it seems, but pre-adjusted and possibly by unpublished, unknown methods? The CDO data is the only data that matters for long term climate studies. To a scientist, shouldn’t the real raw data be kind of sacred?
Who knew that they had set up “limits” on thermometer readings to filter out the “spurious” extremes?
This is yet another way to bias the long term so-called “raw” climate data. Thanks to a belief in Man-Made-Global-Warming, researchers might have a mindset that temperatures can only naturally break records on the high side, so they may have set asymmetrical high and low limits. There’s no way to know until the BOM provides the details. But if the if the top-end limit is set at 52C, while the bottom end limit is set at -10 — a temperature that have already been recorded in recent history — this would be, yet another, artificial bias. High end noise might be considered “real” while low end real data might be considered “spurious”.
Where are these methods published, or is it another secret process?
The wind fizzled out over the South East slab of Australia during June. Predictably, that meant the wind industry lost millions, and wholesale electricity prices went up. When the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was asked where the wind had gone, Darren Ray, expert climatologist, said it was due to a high pressure system over the bight, which, he explained, was linked to “climate change”. Thus, as the world warms, wind farms will be progressively more useless in South Australia. Perhaps the BOM should have mentioned that before SA became dependent on wind farms? I don’t think he had thought this one through.
Perhaps the BOM is hoping that the masochistic sacrifice of South Australia will stop global warming before global warming stops the wind farms?
You might think that if the global climate models could see this coming they would have suggested that wind farms weren’t a good idea. Or maybe, since climate models predict every equal and opposite outcome in unison, the models are always right post hoc, but not so useful in projections?
Climate models predict climate change causes faster and slower winds over Australia
WIND speeds in Australia have increased by about 14 per cent over the past two decades”
“We think the overall increase is caused by the widening of the tropical belt, due to climate change,” he said.
In 2011, CSIRO predicted that climate change would help wind farms:
“The findings were significant for wind-farm developers as they meant increased productivity….”
Although the CSIRO’s research on wind speeds is good news for wind-power development, supportive government policies will continue to provide the strongest incentive for the industry.
There’s a lesson for investors there about climate models.
Note that the “NEM” data is not just about South Australia. It means the whole damn National Electricity Market — including Victoria, NSW, Tasmania, and Qld.
“….we have to go back to April 2012 (just over 5 years ago) to see a lower aggregate production from wind. That’s truly astonishing. Considering that there have been many new wind farms commissioned in the 5 year period (like Hornsdale in July 2016 and Ararat in August 2016), it does beg two questions:
1) More academically, on a like-for-like basis,has the aggregate wind output ever been lower?
2) More practically (and very importantly), where has the wind gone, and why?
“The drop in wind supply pushed average South Australian prices for the June quarter to $116 per MWh, up from $81 in the previous June quarter.
The Wind industry companies are losing millions:
Last week, New Zealand wind power company Tilt Energy, which owns the Snowtown 1 and Snowtown 2 wind farms in South Australia, issued a $10 million-$12m pre-tax profit downgrade because of the lack of wind.
It followed a $9m-$12m downgrade for the same reason the previous week by Sydney-based Infigen Energy.
“Production from Australian assets for June will represent the lowest month of production since the full commissioning of these assets in 2008 and 2014 respectively,” Tilt said…
The BOM blame Climate Change:
Darren Ray, a senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the low winds had been caused by a high pressure system over the Bight. … Global warming was making the high pressure systems more common.
“There is a long-term trend linking it (high pressure systems in the Bight) to climate change,” Mr Ray said.
“The tropics expand as the planet warms and that sees high pressure systems staying throughout the south longer than they used to.”
Paul McArdle adds in a PS. There have been some of the lowest wind speeds recorded for many-a-year.
He also notes that there may be other factors at work too, like technical problems with rotor bearings reducing output at one “farm” in NSW. Yes, well, but that is another problem isn’t it? Collecting low density wind energy requires massive infrastructure, subject to extreme conditions, and that will always be prone to problems.
There seems to be a strong correlation between closing coal fired power stations and a fall in wind speeds. The evidence is clear. Anyone who doesn’t believe the correlation is a coal powered wind denialist. In order to avert this problem we need to subsidise the construction of coal fired power stations.
The last, last word to Ruairi:
In winter, high pressure brings chill,
Hard frosts, with the atmosphere still,
Just when people most need,
An electrical feed,
Not a watt from any windmill.
“End-Coal” Global Coal Tracker does a magnificent job of showing how essential coal is around the world, and which countries are pathetically backwards in developing new coal plants. It’s probably not what the “CoalSwarm” team was hoping to achieve, but this map is a real asset to those of us who want to show how tiny Australia’s coal fired assets are compared to the rest of the world. The site itself is a fancy-pants high gloss major database and website that also shows how much money is in the “anti-coal” movement. Oh, that skeptics should have even 2% of these funds. Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald, which created the maps, calls it a “cycle of coal dependency”. Normal people call it “freedom and wealth”.
These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.
Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.
“Even today, new countries are being brought into the cycle of coal dependency,” said Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald.
Coal plants operating and planned for China and Japan
This map undersells the enormity of Chinese coal. Look at the number of turbines in some circles, 46, 56, 77, 167!
Operating or new coal fired plants in China and Japan (Click to Enlarge)
Coal plants operating and planned for USA and Canada
The largest number of turbines in one place is 28.
Operating or new coal fired plants in USA and Canada (Click to Enlarge)
Closed or cancelled coal fired power in the USA and Canada
Closed or cancelled coal fired power in the USA and Canada (click to enlarge)
Coal plants operating and planned for Australia and New Zealand
The two in SA are in Whyalla (not Port Augusta). But the 18 in Victoria include Hazelwood’s turbines, so the map is not entirely up to date. Tell us again how shutting down coal stations in Australia will change storms, floods and cyclones in 2099?
Operating or new coal fired plants in SE Asia (Click to Enlarge)
Coal plants operating and planned for Africa
The saddest map of all. The total population of the whole of the 58 African countries is at 1.15 Billion people, and probably close to 600 Million people or even more have no access whatsoever to any electrical power. TonyfromOz shows how 22 African nations don’t even use as much electricity as the small town of Dubbo (pop. 40,000) in Australia.
Operating or new coal fired plants in Africa (Click to Enlarge)
Coal plants operating and planned for Latin America
Operating or new coal fired plants in Latin America (Click to Enlarge)
Tricky maths in Australia. Should we save $800 million dollars and get stable cheap modern electric power or give that money to renewables giants to help them compete with our fifty year old coal fleet and get us 0.0001% better weather in 2100*? Hmm. What to do?!
A new HELE Coal plant (also known as an Ultra Super Critical — USC– coal generator) would cost $2.2 billion. We currently pay $3b a year in renewables subsidies. A modern coal plant would make 1,000MW of electricity 24 hours a day (and stabilize the grid for free). Renewables subsidies get us free electricity at random moments which we may or may not need, they need expensive gas back up, and add enormous costs to stabilize the grid.
USC coal plants are the lowest cost generation option at $40-$78 per MWh in (2017 prices) on a long run marginal cost basis.
Other synchronous generation had higher wholesale costs, including combined cycle gas at $69-$115 per MWh and open cycle gas at $179-$430 per MWh.
Variable renewable energy (VRE), which is not available 24 hours a day, also has higher costs, including solar at $90-$171 per MWh and wind at $64-$115 per MWh.
….
…
Like Australia, the USA coal fleet is old and cold:
“Among the top 100 most efficient plants in the United States, the initial operating years range from 1967 to 2012. In China, the oldest plant on the top 100 list was commissioned in 2006, and the youngest was commissioned in 2015,” GreenTechMedia
If we cared about emissions intensity, these figures look wildly impressive — is that an 85% reduction in emissions intensity?:
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is important and replacing the existing coal fleet with HELE technology would save 44.2 million tonnes of CO2 or over 25 per cent of National Electricity Market coal generation emissions. At an individual power station level, with the future adoption of CCS, emissions intensity of USC plants would fall from 0.773 to 0.106 tonnes CO2/MWh.
So having some solar waste panels lying around is not exactly like having a second-hand nuclear fuel rod in the basement, but there will be Gigatons-to-Go, the volume is spectacular, and we can’t eat cadmium for breakfast. There will literally be a mountain of toxic garbage — and only Europe, apparently, has a rule about solar manufacturers having to collect and figure out what to do with the solar waste. (And with a 25 year lifespan, how much, exactly, is even that worth? Just say “Solyndra“.)
A new study from a group called Environmental Progress shows that solar panels make 300 times more volume of toxic waste per megajoule as nukes do. All estimates like these are based on assumptions and guesses, so perhaps it’s not that bad. The study might be exaggerated, and maybe solar panels are only 100 times larger in volume than nukes eh? Where’s the Green outcry.
Discarded solar panels, piling up around the world, are detrimental to the environment, according to a new study by Environmental Progress.
And carcinogenic.
And teratogenic.
While environmentalist have warned for decades of the hazard of nuclear power, solar panels produce 300 times more toxic waste per unity of energy than nuclear power plants, warns Berkeley, California-based EP.
Discarded solar panels not only contain lead, but chromium and cadmium – both of which are carcinogenic.
Last November, Japan’s Environment Ministry issued a stark warning: the amount of solar panel waste Japan produces every year will rise from 10,000 to 800,000 tons by 2040, and the nation has no plan for safely disposing of it.
A recent report found that it would take 19 years for Toshiba Environmental Solutions to finish recycling all of the solar waste Japan produced by 2020. By 2034, the annual waste production will be 70 – 80 times larger than that of 2020.
Environmental Progress investigated the problem to see how the problem compared to the much more high-profile issue of nuclear waste.
We found:
Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.
If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).
In countries like China, India, and Ghana, communities living near e-waste dumps often burn the waste in order to salvage the valuable copper wires for resale. Since this process requires burning off the plastic, the resulting smoke contains toxic fumes that are carcinogenic and teratogenic (birth defect-causing) when inhaled.
If you wonder about the validity of the assumptions (fair enough) check out the Environmental Progress blog. There are some pretty aggressive critics, and some very informed replies (and more in that chain). Look for responses from Michael Shellenberger and Jemin Desai and Mark Nelson (the latter two are the authors).
The government has contracted privately owned South Australian electricity distribution company SA Power Networks to obtain and install 200 megawatts of back-up generation across the state before summer. But despite promising a “detailed costing” would be provided in last week’s state budget, Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis did not offer any such details.
The opposition said the budget had allocated $114m for operational costs in 2017-18 from the $550m energy plan, “indicating the diesel generators are going to be very expensive”.
This $106m sacrifice is expected to reduce global temperature by 0.000C, but will save the premier from being called a climate denier at dinner parties:
“Eighteen months ago the Tasmanian government spent $64m in leasing, site establishment and operational costs for 220MW of diesel generation for three months when a combination of drought and repairs to the Basslink left it short of electricity,” energy spokesman Dan van Holst Pellekaan said. “Rather than spend $8m a year to keep the (coal-fired) Northern Power Station operating, Jay Weatherill has chosen to spend up to $100m a year on diesel generation until the government turns on its promised new gas generator in two years’ time.”
— The Australian, Michael Green.
SA will be building a new gas generator in two years time to take advantage of obscenely high gas prices.
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