South Australia has the largest uranium deposit in the world, which it digs up to sell to other countries to make electricity. It also has lots of sun and wind and empty space. If any state can make solar and wind power work, surely it’s there.
And renewables are working for SA, working to put it in top place for Global Electricity Bills.
South Australia power prices to rise to highest in the world on Saturday, energy expert warns
South Australia will overtake Denmark as having the world’s most expensive electricity when the country’s major energy retailers jack up their prices this Saturday.
AGL, EnergyAustralia and Origin Energy will all increase their electricity prices from July 1, adding hundreds of dollars to annual household bills. Residential customers will see an average rise of 18 per cent under AGL, 19.9 per cent from EnergyAustralia, 16.1 per cent with Origin Energy. Bruce Mountain, the head of a private energy consultancy firm, said the increases would see South Australia take the lead on world power prices — but for all the wrong reasons.
“After taxes, the [typical] household in South Australia will be paying slightly more than the [typical] household in Denmark, which currently has the highest prices in the world,” Mr Mountain said.
Naturally, though both Denmark, and SA have the highest percentage of “renewable” energy in the world, this has nothing to do with them also being number one and two for Global High Cost Electricity. It’s just really bad luck that there is no country anywhere in the world which has both wind and solar and cheap electricity.
Michael McClaren, interviews Bruce Mountain, expert:
From commenter Pat: “…he exonerates wind and solar early in the piece, but it’s enough to listen from 11 mins in where he says (paraphrasing) – “…renewables have nothing to do with electricity price rises. wind & solar now cheaper at an average cost than coal or gas. transformation in energy, old world vs new world (of renewables). Mountain finally admits he doesn’t know if the total cost of the new world is higher than the total cost of the old world, but simply saying wind & solar are driving up our costs is not right.
AUDIO: 13mins29secs: 29 Jun: 2GB: Michael McClaren: Power prices highest in the world
Poor governance and market oversight is to blame for power prices soaring out of control, says energy expert Bruce Mountain. http://www.2gb.com/podcast/power-prices-highest-in-the-world/
Bruce Mountain blames bad governance, which is also surely true, but alas, a confounding problem. Which state with a free market in electricity could also have a high uptake of wind and solar? Mountain thinks it’s worth mentioning that the marginal cost of wind and solar when they are producing is zero (as if the aim of an electricity grid was to provide random spikes of electricity “as the wind blows”. He doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning the 24 hours demand for spinning inertia to stabilize the grid, which coal and gas provide “for free”).
He argues that the zero cost nature of wind and solar depresses the wholesale price of electricity, and then people play a lot of games with electricity pricing (which I’m sure is true). He doesn’t say that in the old electricity market, there were less games, because it was a lot less complicated, and it didn’t need so much “governance” and “regulation”.
Ignoring the extra grid costs, transmission lines, and the devastating effect the intermittency and instability of wind and solar power Mountain claims a lot of wind and solar has a cheaper average cost than coal or gas. Yet even he has to concede that he “doesn’t know if the total cost of the new world is higher than the cost of the old world”.
Given that grid scale electricity is so difficult to estimate costs for surely the only marker that counts is the actual consumer price (plus taxpayer subsidies). If solar and wind are so cheap where is the key observation — the wealthy state running on wind and solar that attracts new businesses because of its cheap electricity?
How often do you clean your solar panels? Spare a thought for the poor sods in the Middle East, India and China, where migratory dust coats solar panels and hangs around in the air, blocking incoming sunlight. Researchers in India who cleaned their panels every few weeks and discovered that they got a 50% jump in efficiency each time. If the cleanings happened every two months, the total losses were 25 to 35 percent.
The article very much blames human pollution for half the capacity loss, but in the detail, the press release admits that 92% of the dust on each panel was natural. Apparently human made particles are smaller and stickier which makes the 8% human-emitted-dust equivalent to the 92% of other dust.
Either way, real pollution and natural dust will slow the clean-green-energy future in India and China until we get auto-cleaning panels or roof slaves. Unfortunately, cleaning panels also risks damaging them, so the price of solar power really needs to include the cost of windscreen-wipers/slaves, electricity losses, damage to panels, and damage to the panel cleaners too.
But solar panels will definitely power all the other parts of the world that are near enough to the equator and not in the path of flying dust, pollution, or under too many clouds, and especially those with electricity demand that peaks at 12 noon daily, which no modern country does.
South Australia’s sky-high electricity prices have forced an Adelaide plastics recycling business to shut its doors, costing 35 workers their jobs, its managing director says. Plastics Granulating Services (PGS), based in Kilburn in Adelaide’s inner-north, said it had seen its monthly power bills increase from $80,000 to $180,000 over the past 18 months.
Managing director Stephen Scherer said the high cost of power had crippled his business of 38 years and plans for expansion, and had led to his company being placed in liquidation. “I hate to think of how many hours I’ve wasted on the AEMO website with tools to monitor spot pricing, to assess the implications of power, the trends of power and the future costs of power.
The SA Government is still in denial:
SA Environment Minister Ian Hunter said it was disappointing the facility was shutting down, but he said the pain of high electricity prices was being felt across the country. Mr Hunter said help was available through the State Government’s energy efficiency programs.
“Green Industries and Zero Waste have quite a bit of expertise in this area [and] they’ve worked with other companies and other industry sectors,” he said. “If that help is not required then that’s up to him, but that’s the offer I can make.”
“Having high power prices … is a reality,” he said.
“That’s why the Government has introduced its state plan for energy in South Australia.
Commenter Bulldust:
“It’s a shame most Greens supporters don’t get irony.
U.S.-based CFACT, along with its Australian partners, is hosting a showing of its new groundbreaking documentary, Climate Hustle, and you’re invited! Following each event, join film director CFACT Executive Director, Craig Rucker and film host and publisher of ClimateDepot.com Marc Morano, for a question and answer session. Get the behind the scenes scoop on both the film and the US’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
July 12- Melbourne, Australia
Village Roadshow Theatrette- State Library of Victoria
Doors open at 5:30 PM, film to start at 6:00 PM
Reception and Q/A session to follow Get Melbourne TICKETS here
July 15- Brisbane, Australia
Sponsored by the Australian Institute for Progress
New Farm Cinema
Doors open at 4:30 PM Get Brisbane TICKETS here
FILM DESCRIPTION:
Scorching temperatures. Melting ice caps. Killer hurricanes and tornadoes. Disappearing polar bears. The end of civilization as we know it!
Are emissions from our cars, factories, and farms causing catastrophic climate change? Is there a genuine scientific consensus? Or is man-made “global warming” an overheated environmental myth being used to push for drastic government control and a radical “Green” energy agenda? This film, hosted by award-winning journalist Marc Morano of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, features interviews and comments from no fewer than 30 renowned and well-regarded scientists and experts.
These include a number of individuals who were former global warming believers or came from the political Left but were compelled to speak out after reexamining the evidence or watching the debate about global warming degenerate into absurd political demagoguery. These are people like: Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania; Former Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Patrick Moore; UN IPCC lead author and economist Dr. Richard Tol of the Netherlands; and the late Dr. Bob Carter of James Cook University.
Viewers of Climate Hustle will get an informative and entertaining look at the media hype stoking the climate fires, along with the science refuting the outlandish claims of activists and alarmists who want to blame every strange weather event – and bizarre societal evil – on man-made global warming.
“We climate change skeptics have long needed a film to counter An Inconvenient Truth. This may be it. I was honored to be asked to record the introduction of the movie for its May 2nd debut at 400 theaters, so I was provided a preview of the entire film. It is not made for scientists and political activists. It is designed to reach the general public including teenagers. It is my hope that in the years to come it will be shown just before or after Al Gore’s sci-fi epic in every school. I the meantime I will buy tickets and attend the showing at the nearest theater to my new home in Las Vegas. I hope it draws a crowd and holds and pleases the audience.”
“The film’s strength is it’s wickedly effective use of slapstick humor, and making use of the words and deeds of alarmists to make you laugh at them. Climate Hustle is a brilliant use of their own ammunition against them… Monday May 2nd will be an historic night, since there’s never been a skeptic film like this before. So if you haven’t already, invite a friend who thinks the world is going to hell in a hand-basket due to climate change to sit back and take in the reality with some popcorn. Get a large bucket, you’ll need it.”
“While the former VP Gore lectured us on what will happen in a warming world, Morano uses his genial personality and effective talking points to underscore the debate was never over. The perfect antidote to An Inconvenient Truth’s hectoring host, Morano not only challenges the viewer with pesky facts, but he also engages us with historical precedents….The effervescent narrator gently guides you through a millennia of scientific misdeeds, consensus science, and green zealotry. Morano talks to over a dozen climatologists, a bevy of scientists, meteorologists, a couple of Nobel winners, all the while interspersing archival footage that will shock and infuriate you.
It’s difficult not to connect the delays to climate change….
It’s difficult not to blame climate change, after a generation of brainwashing.
So Phoenix got to 48.9C which made it nearly as hot as Marble Bar, Australia, last year (when it was 49C). After 80 years of deadly global warming both towns were nearly as hot as Marble Bar was in 1922.
As the world continues to warm, such plane delays will become more common, says Camilo Mora, an associate geography professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And that’s just the beginning.
And imagine what associate professors of geology might forecast on flight patterns circa 2080? You’ll never know if you read Fortune, where anyone can forecast climate bad-news, but prize-winning atmospheric scientists remain invisible if they stick to things they know, like the failure rate of climate models.
Horror part II: You will spend all summer locked indoors and You Might Die
According to a study co-authored by Mora, if carbon emissions aren’t reduced, by 2100 New York City will experience about 50 days per year of heat and humidity conditions that has resulted in death (up from about two days now).
Meanwhile, in cities such as Orlando and Houston, this threshold will be crossed for the entire summer, making it unsafe to go outside for extended periods of time.
“We’ll become prisoners of our houses,” says Mora.
Mora is doing what he was paid to do. Apparently his role is to take predictions from broken climate models, extrapolate that failure for decades, and turn that bad news into a press release. What almost no one is paid to do is check the assumptions on failing GCM’s or find natural causes of climate change. Thus proving that evolution works in science funding, grants support research that supports more grants.
Horror part III: Power failures will kill you
Unlike the other predictions, this one may actually happen, but the deadly force is renewable subsidies:
Power outages, like the one that swept through Northeast and the Midwest in 2003 — leaving 50 million people without electricity—will no longer be an inconvenience, but a national emergency.
Horror Part IV: Roads and train tracks will melt and buckle under the heat.
Like chocolate, asphalt can grow mushy under the blazing sun. As the temperatures becomes more extreme in the summers, highways will “start to melt,” says Mora.
Do people in the US not know that asphalt and bitumen go soft in the high 40s? Did we need a study to see that?
Fortune subscribers like to hear that other people are more stupid than they are?
The Global Smugness is strong with Laura Entis and Assoc Prof Mona:
Unfortunately, as a species, “we suffer from short-term memory,” he says. When, earlier this week, a heat wave hit the Southwestern states, climate change was in the news. But “next week, when the heat wave is gone, everyone will be talking about something else.”
Instead of putting your head in the sand, Mora urges action, even if it’s minor: “consume less,” he says. Try to drive less, turn down your thermostat, or reduce your meat intake.
Why would people pay to be told they have memory loss, are short term, probably mentally deficient, selfish sods with their heads in the sand? Surely this patronizing preachy dictat is not written to convince the unwashed masses. So who wants to buy this — could it be the patsies who think that eating Tofu, catching a bus, and staying cold at home will help to improve the weather for their children’s children? Could be. People who hold those improbable notions might enjoy hearing how stupid everyone else is. This is self-congratulation as form of subscription driver.
I predict that Fortune subscriptions will be trending lower…
Al Gore’s new move is to wrap the global warming religion in with a bucket-list of “moral movements”, evidently targeting the naive souls who seek an Instant Life’s Mission, and / or approval from sorority girls:
The fight against global warming is one of humanity’s great moral movements, alongside the abolition of slavery, the defeat of apartheid, votes for women and gay rights, according to the former US vice-president and climate campaigner, Al Gore.
He forgets to add the defeat of Hitler and eradication of small pox. Though he gets points for finding a way to quote Martin Luther King Jnr: “No lie can live forever”.
Gore piles on the “industrial revolution” — apparently confusing actual working steam engines that move twenty thousand tons with solar cars whose weight is measured in kilograms and whose load bearing capacity is not even mentioned:
The battle to halt climate change can be won, he said, because the green revolution delivering clean energy is both bigger than the industrial revolution and happening faster than the digital revolution.
But he mixes up the exponential theoretical prospects of renewables with the exponential rising price of electricity.
He appears to be launching a new advertising theme for the climate change movement now that “the science” meme is wearing out:
“The climate movement should be seen in the context of the great moral causes that have transformed and improved the outlook for humanity,” he told the Ashden green energy awards ceremony.
Prophet Gore speaks to disciples:
“When the central issue was thus framed in stark relief because of who we are as human beings, the outcome became foreordained,” Gore said.
And Thus and Verily did the people come forth to hold back tides, stop storms and generally felt Very Self Important, fulfilled, and full of Global Smugness.
Let’s get Australia out of the pointless Paris Agreement which will cost trillions, hurt the poor, send Australian manufacturing overseas, kill birds, bats, whales, raise electricity prices, and not change global temperatures by any measurable amount. This is a very well reasoned petition written by someone very familiar with the details of IPCC proceedings. It is an official petition, and alas, needs to be limited to Australian signatories.
To the Hon. Speaker of the House of Representatives and Members of the House of Representatives
Certain citizens of Australia
(a) The damage and impairment to the Australian economy and the financial pain inflicted on our citizens and residents caused by inflated energy costs will be very significant and are very likely to be increased in future.
(b) Australian greenhouse gas emissions are insignificant and have no measurable influence on global average temperature, meaning that Australia’s involvement is merely a political gesture.
(c) The ratification of the Agreement seems to have ignored the following statements of IPCC’s Fifth Climate Assessment Report (5AR) of 2013:
(i) atmospheric carbon dioxide increased over the 15 years prior to the report,
(ii) there was no statistical certainty that average global temperature increased over that time and
(iii) 111 of 114 climate model runs predicted greater warming over that period than the temperature observations indicate. These statements undermine the notion of significant manmade warming and undermine the credibility of claims based on the output of climate models.
(d) The ratification appears to have ignored the detail of the Agreement, specifically “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. The Agreement gives no indication of when “pre-industrial” refers to, no indication of how global average temperatures at that time were determined or of how the current average global temperature will be calculated for the purposes of the Agreement.
Australia to follow the lead of the USA and immediately withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Point (a) argues against Australian suffering rises in energy cost as a consequence of the Agreement and the likely increased suffering as the terms of the Paris Agreement are increased in future. (Even the UNFCCC admits that Paris was only a start.)
Point (b) argues that Australia’s contribution to total greenhouse gases is negligible and we’d be making a lot of effort but achieving virtually nothing.
Points in (c) are based on extracts from the 2013 IPCC Climate Assessment Report (5AR). The data on CO2 levels is from figure 2.1 (chapter 2, pg 167) and the other two points are from :
“… the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to 0.15] °C per decade) …” [WG I SPM, page 5, section B.1, bullet point 3, and in full Synthesis Report on page SYR-6]
“… an analysis of the full suite of CMIP5 historical simulations (…) reveals that 111 out of 114 realisations show a GMST trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend ensemble ….” [WGI contribution, chapter 9, text box 9.2, page 769, and in full Synthesis Report on page SYR-8]
POWER prices are set to rocket after three major retailers announced increases of up to 20 per cent and $600 a year for the average customer in some states.
Origin, EnergyAustralia and AGL have all announced price increases for electricity and gas starting from July 1.
Small businesses may be the hardest hit, especially Origin customers in South Australia, which will see prices rise by a whopping $1453 a year when increases to gas and electricity bills are combined.
The biggest increase for residential customers will be for AGL customers in ACT, who will pay an extra $579 a year for a combined electricity and gas rise.
In NSW, residential EnergyAustralia customers will see electricity prices increase by up to 19.6 per cent. Origin Energy customers will get a 16.1 per cent rise.
The price hikes will take effect from July 1.
Many are blaming a “failure of energy policy”, but miss the point entirely — this is not failure but success. The aim of those energy policies was to close down coal fired stations and it worked. The Renewable Energy Target, the carbon tax, and other anti “carbon” policies did what they were supposed to do and forced the closure of both the Port Augusta power stations and Hazelwood (which supplied as much as 5% of Australia’s electricity). That left us dependent on gas instead of having the flexibility to ignore the current gas price outlandish cost.
Don’t tell me that cold is nice and the climate was ever ideal
A few scientists thought that the climate was stable and well behaved during the Holocene until we invented coal power and the Ford Model T and everything fell apart “unprecedentedly”.
But 8200 years ago things apparently got pretty wild. See the GISP graph below where there was a three degree fall in temperatures suddenly (circled in red below). A new study found that at the same time China and California also cooled. Strangely, this cooling effect probably did not produce calm, happy days for the Californians at the time. Instead it looks like they got 150 years of intense winter storms and a lot of wet weather.
UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the LIA. Obviously that red line would continue up further if it was drawn to the present.
Looks like real climate change….
The reason for the sudden snap is possibly that a couple of massive glaciallakes in North East America collapsed and suddenly drained out into the Atlantic, dumping a bucketload of freshwater there. That is said to have changed a few oceanic currents and raised the seas by 2 – 10 feet. (1 – 3m). The effects appear to have been found around the world, also weakening the monsoons in Asia, and strengthening them in South America, while increasing drought in Africa.
And since we have stalagmites in Australia, hopefully someone can study our caves and tell us something about our own, largely unknown paleohistory. We may not have many deciduous trees to get nice tree rings from , but we certainly have caves.
Wet and stormy weather lashed California coast…8,200 years ago
The weather report for California 8,200 years ago was exceptionally wet and stormy.
That is the conclusion of a paleoclimate study that analyzed stalagmite records from White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains published online Jun. 20 in Nature Scientific Reports.
It’s like an Easter Island moment for an advanced economy: somehow “cheap” energy can’t compete in a free market without government subsidy. A Nation of Serfs have forgotten what a free market is. Will cheap desirable stuff sell itself, or not?
The contradictions mount. Electricity and gas prices are hitting escape velocity:
The wholesale electricity spot prices was about $35 a megawatt hour during 2011, rose to $58 after the carbon tax was introduced and is now about $130 as gas prices push up energy generator costs.
Not surprisingly 70% of Australians want cheaper, more reliable electricity. Only one person in four would rather cut emissions than cut the bill. Yet the agitprop telling people that renewables are “cheap” has been so pervasive that fully 38% of Australians think the government should raise the renewable energy target, and 23% think it should stay the same. It follows that around 4 in 10 Australians apparently hold the bizarre idea that wind and solar are cheap and yet in need of government support, as if there are no investors willing to put money into supplying something that 100% of people want at a price cheaper than what they currently pay. So screwed is our national commentary that a large slab of the nation think a cheap and highly desired product can’t profit without complex schemes and assistance.
Message to Australia, if renewables were cheap they wouldn’t need a RET, LET or CET scheme. People would just buy them!
No wonder there is policy gridlock. The situation won’t be resolved until the propaganda bubble pops and the national debate advances to the point where people know how expensive renewables are. Find me one country in the world running on wind and solar that has cheap electricity and no interconnector supplying coal or nuclear powered electrons. Exactly.
The answer for the Liberal-conservatives is clear, unless they get the message out that renewables are a hideously expensive deadweight burning a hole in our wallets they can’t possibly win this debate. As long as the nation blindly drinks from the Kool-aid-Cauldron the Conservatives are on a hiding to nothing — locked into endless cycles of “uncertainty” and hip-pocket pain.
Welcome to the clean green future — pack the whole family under one electric blanket while boat loads of our cheap coal set sail for China.
A few weeks ago I received a pamphlet from the ACT government on energy-saving tips. For winter it featured a picture of a family all in overcoats and beanies, huddled under an electric blanket.
Welcome to your clean green future huddled under an electric blanket, and reverting to wood fires to keep the house warm.
The Finkel report aims to provide incentives for all energy sources that produce electricity with lower greenhouse gas emissions, but the suggested benchmark means a high-efficiency, low-emissions power plant with carbon capture and storage would not qualify. That is why plenty of people think this is a backdoor attempt to block coal and even gas with an effective “tax on coal”.
The crisis has arisen because of the over-reliance on wind and solar power. In South Australia, combined with the closure of two coal-fired power plants, one in SA and one in Victoria, it has destabilised the whole grid. Added to that is the shortage of gas and the lack of storage for renewables.
Meanwhile, despite the domestic opposition to coal, we send our coal to Japan and China to be used in high-efficiency, low-emissions coal-fired generators to produce cleaner and cheaper power where people don’t have to sit inside wearing beanies under an electric blanket.
What is the sound of a dying planet? Translating hard facts into feeling is the issue of our age – and it is the task Climate Symphony have appointed themselves. A collective of artists and scientists, the London-based team are inspiring action by transforming climate change data into music.
Wait til you see what it can do. This is a pretty powerful tool:
“Climate Symphony has developed a side-project – calling out lies in politics.”
“We want to create a formal record,” she says, “A method of fact-checking the things Trump is saying, of finding distortions. It’s revealing. You’re looking at it, and listening to it, and you find that it’s distorted. It’s all distorted.”
Musikiness could replace the US GAO. (Who needs auditors). But I worry about what happens if they use the wrong key.
Finally, twenty years late, EcoWorriers care about transparency and “hard facts”:
“…it isn’t just background noise… music is the data. “These are still hard facts – that’s the beauty of it.”
The data used is derived from a range of sources, all with the emphasis on transparency.
Climate data has been accumulated from NOAA and Nasa (sic)…
But what if the symphony is using adjusted data and it’s wrong — It’s not the sound of a dying planet, but a homogenized one?
I bet raw data would sound better. (Do you want to tell them or should I?)
Still, this may be the tool the Goddard Institute of Space has been waiting for to make their climate models work.
Borromeo and her team at Climate Symphony, including co-director Katharine Round and composer Jamie Perera, chart this data across musical notation, working with meteorologists, conservationists, sound artists and investigative journalists. Every bar of music in Climate Symphony is equivalent to one year of scientific data – with recordings amassing a total of 20 years from 1994 to 2014.
That’s a lot of “experts”. (Wonder who paid for them.)
Climate change is an area of politics in which facts are all-too-often purported as fiction.
In this case the facts are purporting to be “music”.
With these concern about transparency in politics, Borromeo stresses that Climate Symphony is committed to peer-reviewed science.
Yes, because all good artists are committed to supporting the grant-machine, sorry, establishment.
I’m glad these people are not building our bridges.
From public rallies to government legislation, Borromeo hopes that “any and all of these things” can arise from the project. Her message is simple: “Existence is resistance.”
Existence is resistance? It takes so little effort to be a reactionary these days — just keep breathing.
The warmists now want to transpose,
Climate data into work they compose,
For alarmists and greens,
As homogenized, means,
In their symphony, anything goes.
So things don’t look so good, no matter where we look. Yes, the victims in the animal world include scary apex predators that pose obvious threats to humans, like lions, whose numbers have dropped from 1 million at the time of Jesus to 450,000 in the 1940s to 20,000 today—a decline of 98 percent. But also included have been unexpected victims, like butterflies and moths, which have declined in abundance by 35 percent since the 1970s.
Is this a mini extinction?
…the only reason we know about mass extinctions in the first place is from the record of this incredibly abundant, durable, and diverse world of marine invertebrates, not the big, charismatic, and rare stuff like dinosaurs.“
So you can ask, ‘Okay, well, how many geographically widespread, abundant, durably skeletonized marine taxa have gone extinct thus far?’ And the answer is, pretty close to zero,” Erwin pointed out. In fact, of the best-assessed groups of modern animals—like stony corals, amphibians, birds and mammals—somewhere between 0 and 1 percent of species have gone extinct in recent human history. By comparison, the hellscape of End-Permian mass extinction claimed upwards of 90 percent of all species on earth.
When mass extinctions hit, they don’t just take out big charismatic megafauna, like elephants, or niche ecosystems, like cloud forests. They take out hardy and ubiquitous organisms as well—things like clams and plants and insects. This is incredibly hard to do. But once you go over the edge and flip into mass extinction mode, nothing is safe. Mass extinctions kill almost everything on the planet.
Demand enough renewables and you might as well ban coal
There’s a lesson Australia needs to learn from South Australia. When intermittent renewables reach a certain percentage of daily average supply they make baseload power unfeasible. The situation develops into an impossible dead end that can only be solved with container-ships of cash.
The intermittent supply of wind and solar is the immoveable problem. It eats into the daily chart of the cheapest stable electricity supply — which is coal fired. Coal can’t be ramped in and out in minutes. It is a creature that runs best non-stop, efficiently, smoothly, at a high capacity factor (meaning it works best when it is producing around 90% of it’s design limit continuously).
Tom Quirk points out that sometime after these intermittent renewables hit 30% of the average daily supply, as they have in South Australia — locally sourced coal power becomes uneconomic. There are times during the daily cycle when renewables are providing almost all the demand. There is little demand left for the massive coal turbines to supply, so they spin on pointlessly, but costs remain, and profits are zero.
In SA, the owner of the last coal fired station was still willing to pour in money, but even large cash injections didn’t change the daily bad news cycle, and the coal station was closed.
If the electricity markets were left to run free, and compete purely on price, coal would provide the baseload (unless we had nukes) and obviously, electricity would be cheaper. But no amount of word mangling can dress up the situation. The insistence on having a large slab of intermittent power forces coal out of the system, and that forces prices up.
— Jo
The Levellers
Guest post by Tom Quirk
The claim that there is an opportunity for coal burning power stations depends on the extent of renewable energy sources.
The Blueprint target of 42% renewables destroys the opportunity to build baseload coal burning power stations independent of the choice of technologies.
This is because the Blueprint analysis uses the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE). LCOE is the net present value of the unit-cost of electricity over the lifetime of a generating plant using a particular technology. It is often taken as a proxy for the average price that the plant must receive in a market to break even over its lifetime.
A key factor in calculating the levelised costs is the utilisation of the plant expressed as the capacity factor. Levelised costs are referred to in the Blueprint. In particular an appendix shows a comparison of levelised costs for a wind farm and an ultra-super-critical coal burning plant having similar levelised costs. This is misleading,
There is a good illustration of the difficulty of levelised cost comparisons from the Energy Information Agency (EIA) in the United State[1] where assumptions are made about plant utilisation expressed as the capacity factor. These are based on regional analysis. This is shown below in Table 1, extracted from the EIA report on levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) for new generation resources for 2022.The comparison with Australian states shows very different values for capacity factors and the comparison shows the importance of analyzing the particular electricity system and not a regional average.
Table 1. Estimated and measured Capacity Factors
Plant type
Capacity factors
Dispatchable Technologies
EIA*
2022
Victoria
2012
South Australia
2012
Conventional Coal
77.5%
33.2%
Conventional Coal with 30-90% CO2 sequestration
85%
Natural Gas-fired
Conventional Gas-fired Thermal
?
29.0%
Conventional Combined Cycle Gas Turbine
87%
14.2%
Conventional Combustion Turbine
30%
Hydro
16.0%
0.0%
Non-Dispatchable Technologies
Wind
41%
38.0%
33.1%
Solar PV
25%
14.2%
Hydro
60%
*Energy Information Agency (United States)
The difference in the capacity factors for coal fired plant is that demand in Victoria was 85% coal fired supply but only 2.5% wind while for South Australia coal supplied 17.1%, wind 26.6% and solar PV 3.8% of demand.
So the claim that there is an opportunity for coal burning power stations depends on the extent of renewable energy sources in the region being examined. It is clear that there is no opportunity for base load power in South Australia. A 33% capacity factor for 1203 MW of wind farms in 2012 gives variations from 0 to 1200 MW. But with average demand of 1493 MW and demand variations during the day from 1000 MW to 1800 MW wind farms can drive out baseload supply.
The Blueprint target of 42% renewables therefore destroys the opportunity to build baseload coal burning power stations independent of the choice of technologies.
More than 20 Coalition MPs spoke against the Finkel report last night, including Tony Abbott, all concerned that the priority is for cutting emissions and not electricity prices.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott was a sharp critic of the clean energy target and made interjections throughout the discussions.
“He was the most sceptical about it — he said it wasn’t going to cut prices or provide certainty for consumers,” one Liberal said.
“He was probably the strongest critic throughout the whole meeting.”
One of the senior Liberal figures who took notes on the meeting said last night that about 32 people spoke and about one-third of them were not in favour of the Finkel proposal, while one-third supported the clean energy target and another third asked questions or had suggestions for changes. Victorian Liberal MP Russell Broadbent, who has held his marginal electorate against determined assaults from Labor, was one MP who argued fiercely for a policy outcome that focused on affordability.
People keep hoping bipartisanship will finally solve the climate question, but this is a neverending loop as long anyone is talking about using windmills to change the climate. How many reruns of the same pointless dilemma will we do before we find the Ship called Bipartisan is docked in a town where no one uses a solar panel to prevent droughts, cause rain, or “save Greenland” from being … green?
Commenter Sophocles asks: Whenever you’re told a reform is going to be `cheaper’ start demanding proof. Loudly. Numbers.
In one of the most massaged spin-doctor sales messages in Australian history, the Finkel Report is here to “take the politics out” and solve our energy instability and out-of-control prices. But it’s actually an aggressive green-left weather-control program where cost and stability are secondary to the unspoken but main aim which is to slow storms in 2100. If Finkel were really aiming for stability and price control he’d let the free market run, get the government out of our electricity grid and look at the evidence that shows that solar-panels and wind farms don’t, won’t and can’t work as global air-conditioners for us or our grandchildren.
Australians, read this line and weep:
“Modelling for the Review estimates that by 2030, 42 per cent of electricity demand will be met by renewable generation.”
This is where South Australia is currently at, but it has a lifeline to coal power in Victoria whenever it needs it. What happens when the whole National Grid needs a lifeline? Pull out your wallet…
How much does an undersea cable to New Zealand cost? It’s only 2,000km.
Solving our energy stability is really easy and very cheap and if that was his aim, Finkel is not-even-trying. Government efforts to control the planetary climate have created the blackouts and driven cheap electricity providers out of business. Finkel’s “solution” is more of the same but in a different flavor. It’s all things to all people, “finally here” and we’ll all get free icecream, but please, nobody ask how much electricity would cost if the Government got out of the way. Nobody mention that wholesale coal-fired volts are 4c per kilowatt hour.
If you like your coal you can keep it (under the ground)
Technology Neutral. My Foot!
Importantly, the scheme would be technology neutral — that is, all forms of electricity generation would be eligible, including coal with carbon capture and storage or gas — provided they are below the emissions intensity threshold.
Finkel has nothing against coal, as long as people meet conditions that defy laws of chemistry. Supposedly coal fired stations must stuff a massive volume of a beneficial aerial fertilizer into small hot hole underground. New “carbon capture” coal plants would cost something like 60% more to build yet waste around 40% of all the energy they generate. Carbon capture is a secret code for “death to coal plants”, and not surprisingly, in real life, they crash and burn in financial fireballs.
What do you call “paying a lot more”? That’s your “reward”
Finkel-spin says that electricity will be cheaper than a hypothetical worst case scenario:
Consumers will be financially rewarded if they agree to manage their demand and share their resources such as solar panels and battery storage. Prices for all consumers, not just those who own solar panels or batteries, will be lower than they would otherwise be;
Welcome to your renewable future — managing demand means not having the air-con on when it’s really hot and you really need it. And what kind of prices are “lower than they otherwise would be”? Any kind. Theoretically any infinitely high price is still lower than it otherwise would be compared to an infinitely-plus-one-plan. It all depends on the modeling.
If you believe your annual electricity bill will fall by $90 every year for the next decade, you will believe anything.
This politically attractive forecast of falling electricity prices mirrors the equally ridiculous modelling result that emerged from the Warburton review of the renewable energy target released in 2015. We were asked to believe wholesale electricity prices would actually fall if the RET were retained in its then current form, with a target of 41,000 gigawatt hours by 2020. (This was adjusted to 33,000GWh.) That’s right — electricity prices were going to fall between 2015 and 2020.
But take a look at what has happened to wholesale electricity prices — and, with a lag, retail prices — in the context of the ongoing RET, an outcome completely divergent from the one the modellers assured us would occur.
Wholesale electricity prices have soared from $50 a megawatt hour on average to about $150. Retail prices are being raised across a number of states by between 15 per cent and 30 per cent. A household facing an annual electricity bill of $2000 a year easily could be slugged another $400 to $600.
Fake News is everywhere — no sensible word left unspun
The Finkel Review supposedly puts “energy security and stability centre stage“. Ask any electrical engineer how to do that and they’ll tell you to increase spinning inertia — meaning coal, gas, nukes, and hydro — these, especially coal, are the cheap, easy masters of security and stability. Instead Finkel puts “emissions reductions” under everything and “stability” is just the secondary billion-dollar-ball-and-chain, dragged along in the hunt for the sacred weather controlling electron.
At the ABC the report is improbably “taking the politics out” by adopting a green left option that Australian voters have rejected.
If perchance, you don’t think we should be forced to buy expensive electricity in order to change the weather the ABC won’t call you “sensible”, “pragmatic” or “sane”, you’re “pro-coal”. In ABC-land politicians don’t criticize the report, instead pro-coal backbenchers “undermine it”. It’s a nuance thing. Luckily the ABC are full of national energy-grid geniuses, so they can tell the difference.
Not surprisingly, there is rebellion in the ranks
— some Coalition backbenchers are warning that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull could, once again, be confronted with open rebellion on climate policy.
Yes, well. We’ve been there before. How many political careers shall we break on the carbon wheel?
The daft threat politicians convey,
Is that ‘carbon’ will cause a doomsday,
So expect for electric,
Whether warmist or skeptic,
All exorbitant increases pay.
Tomorrow Chief Scientist Alan Finkel is delivering a report that could potentially split the Liberal Party. Turnbull was tossed out by the party in 2009 because he supported the bank-friendly emissions trading scheme. Now the debate is back again in a different guise — called a LET scheme (low emissions target), or a CET scheme (Clean Energy Target). Details are scant at the moment. On the plus side, it appears it’s not necessarily a trading scheme (code for banker driver fiat currency) and it’s aimed at “emissions” directly instead of “renewables” (which makes it slightly more direct and gives the market a tiny bit more freedom, except of course, the market can’t choose “Nukes”.). On the downside, it’s still a pointless waste of billions of dollars in a futile attempt to slow storms for our grandchildren. If it succeeds in reducing emissions, it will reduce airborne plant fertilizer.
Tony Abbott has warned the federal government it would be making a big mistake if it adopted a low emissions target that made it hard to build new, more efficient coal-fired power stations. The former prime minister expressed his “anxiety” around reports concerning chief scientist Alan Finkel’s review of the national energy sector. His worry is that the Finkel report, due to be delivered on Friday, will recommend a scenario whereby renewable energy is at 70 per cent by 2030.
The nation’s biggest coal-fired power stations will have to give at least three years notice of any plans to shut down, as part of a strict new rule that seeks to avoid the sudden closure of vital electricity supplies. … will recommend the tough new rules in order to avoid a repeat of closures that have hurt the national electricity market.
Will companies that start losing money want to stick around and spend more to try to fix them, or just give up sooner? Will investors in Australian electricity “price in that risk” and pay less for electricity assets from now on? Perhaps companies will notify the market they are closing, then “see what happens” and not close — we could have the certainty of long standing constant closure orders so that companies retain the right to say at any time — “It’s over, and we gave you three years warning”.
Libs pick up an election losing Labor-type policy, Labor says “that’s OK”
Labor is offering to keep an open mind about the Liberals adopting long Labor policy. How “generous”.
The Labor leader has written to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to promise the opposition will approach Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s review recommendations with an open mind, reports AAP.
The answer is always a scheme that costs us money and makes an unmeasurable difference to the climate:
Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel, will hand down his long-awaited energy reform report to the Council of Australian Governments tomorrow, which is likely to favour a low emissions target scheme (LET).
Will they repeal all the other schemes, or quadruple-up the complexity?
The two major parties are closer than ever to agreeing on the LET, with Bill Shorten this week writing to the Prime Minister conceding that he would be willing to accept a LET, despite advocating for a tougher emissions intensity scheme (EIS).
Mr Butler said he hoped Mr Shorten’s “olive branch” would mark the end of the political dispute over climate change.
What “olive branch”? It looks like the Libs adopting a policy that helped the Labor Party lose the last two elections:
“We’ve heard very clearly from the business community that they’re concerned about the energy crisis emerging,” Mr Butler told ABC’s RN program this morning.
The energy crisis is the creation of crazy regulation to use power sources to change the climate. The answer is the free market.
“Expert after expert is telling us that there is a lack of certainty around energy policy so we have to do all we can to sit down and resolve that with the government”.
The “lack of certainty” is solved if the government gets out of the energy market, not by playing more politics with it.
The fakery includes describing what voters rejected, as “the centre”:
According to Mr Butler, the party’s offer to move to centre on climate change would come with conditions.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has proved a staunch opponent of an LET, warning yesterday that the policy would eliminate high-efficiency coal-fired power stations.
“The Liberal Party has to be the party of cheap power, let Labor be the party of expensive power,” he told 2GB radio yesterday.
Repeat after me. Wholesale coal fired electricity is 3 to 4c a KWhr. Why is it illegal for coal fired power to be sold in a free market to Australians who want it?
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