The Arctic is the most sensitive place to man-made emissions on Earth, which is why it has barely warmed since 1944? Well, it makes sense if CO2 is largely irrelevant. Humans have made 90% of all their CO2 in the last 70 years and nothing much happened in the place where it was supposed to hurt the most.
The WMO apparently missed the first 30 years of data. But Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt are here to help them out. : -)
Area weighted Arctic (70-90N) monthly surface air temperature anomalies (HadCRUT4) since 1920 in relation to the WMO normal period 1961-1990. Fig. 2: Arctic temperature since 1920. Data: HadCRUT4, Chart: Climate4You.
These heat waves look a lot like the last heat waves.
Read it all thanks to Pierre Gosselins translation:
Before we move on to your new partnership, let us think about Scott Morrison’s words:
“Governments must do no harm”.
As a political thinker he is “out there”, our Scotty isn’t he Gentlemen?
Perhaps we need him on the home team in the energy market do you think?
National Electricity Market Grid 4th April 2017 (Click to enlarge)
The solid basis on which the Turnbull/Andrews partnership needs to be formed has to originate with the achievements you have both made so far. Let’s list them:
Through your deliberate actions (and failure to act) of shutting Hazelwood, you have reduced mankind’s contribution of CO2 by a factor of 0.0002. That reduction, when compared with the CO2 produced by animals consuming vegetation and microbes consuming vegetation is a ratio of 0.000025. Hmmmm……..
You have just put at least 1,000 people out of work in the Latrobe Valley.
You will bankrupt many businesses in the Latrobe Valley and devastate a whole slab of the Nation’s economy.
You have placed the viability of every single manufacturing business in Eastern and South Australia under threat – with the certainty of unemployment for hundreds of thousands of people if the madness continues. These businesses are now less able to compete with imports and less able to compete when exporting.
You have caused power prices for every single Eastern and South Australian to rise by a ridiculous amount – because the forced removal of a marginal 1600Mw makes a massive difference to the price of a commodity in short supply.
You have introduced a new unprecedented level of risk of blackouts to 89% of the Australian population. Look at the attached AEMO record for this evidence.
You have caused an unprecedented rise in the price of east Australian gas by pushing 1600 Mw of generation away from coal and on to our dwindling gas supply.
Your initiative of closing Hazelwood has increased the probability of gas supply shortages for 89% of our population.
You have increased our farmers’ costs which also makes them less able to compete with imports and less able to export. After some of them have weathered a few previous frontal assaults from Coles, Woolworths, the Chinese Government and Murray Goulburn, your increased power prices to run milking machines, pumps and chilling equipment are just what a struggling dairy farmer needs.
You have made the large gas supply companies and power generating companies – and those with a finger in the renewables honey-pot – an absolute fortune for their shareholders. You could be forgiven for thinking that the Australian Federal Government and the Victorian Government actually exist to benefit shareholders of those companies – and not your own constituents!!
Gentlemen, even a compliant media will not save you from what is going to happen soon.
Click to enlarge to read.
Your choices are simple:
Wait for a single interconnector trip or other unplanned event to black out a whole slab of Eastern Australia and then receive an absolute flogging over Hazelwood and be forced into an embarrassing re-start of the Station.
Have some initiative, form a strong home team together and get the Station fired up again without delay.
You have both seen that the Weatherillesque technique of blaming everyone else for his own failures – even with a fully compliant S.A. media on side – wears a bit thin when the lights go out and voters get ready to reach for baseball bats – so it is time for you to form a partnership and start doing the right thing Gentlemen.
You will both be congratulated for putting childish Politics to one side and behaving like true leaders.
Originally, intersectionality referred to the discrimination faced by black women that is not only sexism and racism, but an experience that is more than the sum of its parts (now referred to as “misogynoir” in black feminist and womanist circles). Intersectionality has since been expanded to include the analysis of discrimination faced by anyone who identifies with the multiple social, biological, and cultural groups that are not favored in a patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist society.
i.e. translated: Intersectionality is the study of discrimination which discriminates against older white men.
Science used to be about measurements and observations. Seemed to work.
For a long time it was thought the first people arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago. Jacques Cinq-Marc found a set of caves in the Yukon called the Bluefish Caves laden with bones marked with cuts from human butchering. They were radiocarbon dated as 24,000 years old. Cinq-Marcs published a series of papers between 1979-2001.
This is a topic that doesn’t have a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry riding on it. No political careers are made or broken if humans arrived in the Americas millenia earlier. Yet still, the smug scoffing of the consensus slowed progress in science for decades.
Cinq-Mars… work at Bluefish Caves suggested that Asian hunters roamed northern Yukon at least 11,000 years before the arrival of the Clovis people. And other research projects lent some support to the idea. At a small scattering of sites, from Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania to Monte Verde in Chile, archaeologists had unearthed hearths, stone tools and butchered animal remains that pointed to an earlier migration to the Americas. But rather than launching a major new search for more early evidence, the finds stirred fierce opposition and a bitter debate, “one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science,” noted the journal Nature.
But relatively few of Cinq-Mars’s peers shared his confidence. And as I began regularly attending archaeological conferences in the years following that trip to Bluefish Caves, I saw what Cinq-Mars was up against. Sitting in halls with Canadian and American researchers, I witnessed what happened when archaeologists presented data that contradicted the Clovis first model. Often a polite bemusement spread through the room, as if the audience was dealing with some crackpot uncle, or the atmosphere grew testy and tense as someone began grilling the presenter. But once or twice, the mask of professional respect slipped completely; I heard laughter and snickering in the room. Tom Dillehay remembers such conferences well. “Some Clovis first people had a suffocating air of defiance and superiority at times,” he says.
Stung as he was by the criticism, Cinq-Mars refused to back down. None of the explanations for splintered bones, he noted, could account for the complex chain of steps that produced the mammoth-bone flake tool his team found. But by then, serious doubts about the Bluefish Caves evidence had been sown, taking firm root in the archaeological community: Hardly anyone was listening. Cinq-Mars couldn’t believe it. At one presentation he gave, “they laughed at me,” he says angrily today. “They found me cute.” Embittered by the response, he stopped attending conferences, and gave up defending the site publicly. What was the point? To Cinq-Mars, the Clovis first supporters seemed almost brainwashed.
For Mackie and others, the protracted battle over the Clovis first model now stands as a cautionary tale for archaeologists. Notes Mackie, “Clovis first will, I believe, go down as a classic example of a paradigm shift, in which the evidence for the collapse of an old model is present for many years before it actually collapses, producing a sort of zombie model that won’t die.”
Fantastic to finally see real scientists get a voice in a considered, official forum. This should have happened 20 years ago. I expect only climate-tragics will watch a 2 hour dry Congressional testimony, but it is so very rare that both sides of the debate get questioned in the same forum and almost never that skeptical scientists outnumber the unskeptical ones. Michael Mann has little more than namecalling, unscientific social speculation, allusions about “motivations” and political labels. Improbably, Mann the media-climate-celebrity tries to make out he is the victim of bullying and silencing. At 1:10 Mann twists, exaggerates and abuses like a Greenpeace activist and Congressman Lamar Smith pulls him up…
Judith Curry talks about why she changed her mind starting at 20 minutes, and why she resigned.
“… I realized the premature consensus was harming the progress of science”
“Scientists who demonize opponents are behaving in a way that is antithetical to the scientific process. These are the tactics for enforcing a premature theory for political purpose.”
“Those people who are not in agreement with opponents (of climate change) may not be at all silly,” Putin replied via an interpreter.
With 10% of the Russian GDP dependent on the Arctic, he also said:
“Climate change brings in more favorable conditions and improves the economic potential of this region,”…
We can’t have that then.
Mr. Putin thinks skeptics are right,
To reject the fake warmist fight,
As a great waste of time,
When a mild Arctic clime,
Makes the future in every way bright.
The unravelling of the climate religion continues:Graham Richardson is an old-school Australian Labor powerbroker and former senior minister, and yesterday he was bagging out Adam Bandt, the Greens MP, for his atrocious timing, and “meanness of spirit” in using cyclone Debbie to score political points about climate policy “while hundreds of thousands of people are wondering what they will have left.”
What’s remarkable is how flat out unapologetic, no-pussy-footing plain and clear he is, and how much he is making the same points that sensible skeptics have been saying. Is this the first sign of a shift in the ranks of the Labor Party?
Richardson, 2015 was determined to fight for carbon pricing:
You need not worry, dear readers. This fearless correspondent will continue to wage war on this issue even when all my comrades have surrendered.
Graham Richardson 2017:
It is becoming increasingly difficult to remain a hard-core supporter of climate change belief. The entry into the debate this week of zany zealot Adam Bandt was horribly wrong on several fronts.
He [Bandt] made the staggering claim that Malcolm Turnbull would have “blood on his hands” if he supported the building of coal-fired power stations, exclaiming that these stations would cause even more cyclones to hit the coast.
There is no evidence upon which to base this claim. In fact, over the past three or four years, far north Queensland has had almost no cyclones and experienced wet season failures in each of these years. The dam in Townsville is at a miserable 18 per cent because of those failures.
Sounds like a true skeptic:
Cyclones have been around forever and the advent of coal-fired power stations has neither increased nor decreased their frequency.
You would think this bloke would have learned a real lesson from Tim Flannery’s attempts…
Richardson goes on to mention failed predictions, and how Flannery got it “spectacularly wrong” and even how Arctic ice is melting, but Antarctic ice is stable. It’s not news to us, but to hear from a Labor guy is. And Richardson was one of the ones leading Labor into the Enviro-green mould nearly 30 years ago. Fitting then, if all these years later, he is leading them out of it:
As far back as 1989, I was the minister who took a submission to cabinet on global warming, as this phenomenon was then called. I am not prepared to dump my core belief, but like the sceptics, my view has gradually changed and so should theirs.
To get some idea of just how far he has come, here’s what he said nearly two years ago:
“Labor vacated the arena of argument. The sceptics and deniers have turned the 70 per cent-plus belief in climate change into a minority because no one has engaged them.” – Graham Richardson, May 2015
With a budget of nothing we’re winning. Why? We have nature on our side.
Reading Richardson’s comments in 2015, he might argue that he was bagging out the Greens then, and he still believes in climate change now, the difference is that now, he sounds more and more like a skeptic and has gone in hard to mock the prophets of doom.
Richardson 2015:
I am starting to feel like the lone Japanese soldier stranded on a long-forgotten Pacific island still fighting a war for a lost cause. I am still a believer in climate change. I am not hysterical about it and don’t believe our cities and towns are about to be inundated by some permanent tsunami caused by human activity. I do believe our rainfall patterns will be interrupted and some areas will be drier, others wetter. It would be wonderful if we could focus on what those changes might be.
The Labor Party need more sensible voices like Richardson. To Richardson, when he says skeptics should be willing to change their views, I say, absolutely. My views are still open to change, and in the last ten years they’ve changed, I’ve become more and more skeptical.
The SA blackout cost around half a billion, and building a new gas plant (with a $170b in green bribes) adds another half. It’s now emerged that Alinta offered Jay Weatherill a deal to keep the Port Augusta power plant running which he turned down. If he had paid just $30m to keep the Northern coal fired station in business, there might have been no statewide blackout, and no need for regular load shedding. Wholesale electricity contracts in SA have risen from 8c per KWhr to 14c since mid last year.
The owner of the now-defunct Port Augusta power station made a secret offer to keep generating electricity until mid-2018 in return for $25 million from the State Government — 22 times less than its $550 million power plan.
In the six-page letter supplied to The Advertiser by the Liberals, Alinta warns of significant risk to the security of South Australia’s power supply and a surge in electricity prices — costing the state $56 million to $112 million a year — if the power station and associated Leigh Creek brown coal mine were to close.
Other sources have told The Advertiser that Alinta made another bid for $30 million to the government, which made a rejected counter-offer of only $8 million. Alinta then announced in June 2015 that it would close the station.
WHAT ALINTA WARNED
Closure of Port Augusta power plant would trigger:
■ Significant risk generally to SA’s power supply security.
■ Likely increase in wholesale cost of electricity, between $4-8 per megawatt hour. This would cost SA economy $56-$112 million a year.
■ $150 million of regional gross domestic product is cut.
■ $4.5 million lost revenue in foregone coal royalties in payroll tax.
Businesses across the state took an estimated $450 million hit because of the statewide blackout and mining giant BHP Billiton has said that outages at Olympic Dam cost it $137 million.
Having knocked back such a sensible offer, the SA government did what any self-serving government would, and kept the offer hidden, even after FOI requests. Weatherill cited a confidentiality clause. Nonetheless, the Libs have the whole document, and now so does everyone else.
Presumably Weatherill could not bring himself to “subsidize” coal power — how the Greens would have howled. But how screwed up is the free market when the cheapest form of electricity needs subsidies to compete with other subsidies offered one of the most expensive competitors. All Weatherill would have been doing is giving back some of what Big-Government had taken. Alinta closed the cheapest power source in SA because it was forecast to lose as much as $10m a year by 2020.
Weatherill made a billion dollar mistake presumably to stop people like Sarah Hanson Young calling him names. How much more will the people of SA have to pay for Weatherills ideological zealotry?
The Final AEMO Report on the big-SA Blackout deals up some hard truths, and contradicts its earlier claim that the “energy mix” didn’t matter. The key theme here is about the system inertia. The Blackout on Sept 28 last year was an accident waiting to happen, and it wasn’t storm damage to lines that caused it. The blackout would not have happened if wind power had not been so dominant.
The transition to a 35% wind powered system left the SA grid very vulnerable. On Sept 28 last year, the safety settings on wind turbines were overly sensitive and when voltages “bumped” the turbines shut off suddenly, but those shutoffs hit the system too fast, and that caused the interconnector to shut off too, sacrificing SA to protect the rest of the national grid. The settings themselves are not the main issue — because they can be changed to prevent a repeat. It is a fixable problem — what is harder to fix, is the lack of inertia, and the sheer complexity. These are the biggest challenges of any renewables grid. We can fix even those problems, but at what cost in order to change the weather 100 years from now?
The AEMO report mentions that the “intermittency” of wind power was not a problem, but that’s a strawman. It is true on the blistering scale that a grid crisis unfolds at, that intermittency is not an issue. (The graph in Figure 14 covers just five hundreths of a second). But on a longer scale the-intermittency-problem set the scene. Intermittency is a problem for the pricing, the market, and in the long run, it, and the subsidies to compensate for it, was what made cheap coal powered stations unviable.
But in every other instance, the system stayed alive.
“The key differentiator between the 28 September 2016 event and the other three events is that there was significantly lower inertia in SA in the most recent event, due to a lower number of on-line synchronous generators,” the report said.
“This resulted in a substantially faster rate of change of frequency compared to the other events, exceeding the ability of the under-frequency load-shedding scheme to arrest the frequency fall before it dropped below 47Hz.”
The independent review blames synchronous inertia:
– The system inertia on the SA side was not sufficient to maintain the frequency drop (once the Haywood interconnector tripped) and to make the under frequency load shedding (UFLS) effective. This is a key point. This is illustrative from Table 11.
The Heywood Interconnector has suffered a “complete loss” before. This time the system had more asynchronous (i.e. mostly renewable) generators.
The state with “must run” renewables will need to have “must run” thermal generation:
– The system inertia requirements must be carefully evaluated to ensure system stability in the event of extreme disturbances as the one that led to the black system. This is identified in the report. ‘Must run’ thermal generation may have to be identified. Synchronous condensers may be investigated as a potential solution if the thermal generation dispatch is expected to be low under specific load conditions. Generation mix is identified mentioned throughout the report as an important consideration from a power system security perspective.
More renewables means the whole grid system needs to be redesigned:
For sheer weather voyerism (forgive me people of Ayr-to-Mackay): at the BOM satellite animation watch night befall the nation and notice how the the clouds appear for-all-the-world like river rapids flowing over rocks. Up close in the darkness, the clouds roil and churn like a wave smashing over a beach. (I’m sure if someone could capture some cropped video it would be impossible to tell if it were clouds or waves, see the “white-water” above Antarctica. See the two waves collide explosively into each other over the Pilbara in NW WA).
TonyFromOz reports that the first generator at Hazelwood Power Station has stopped after 53 years of operation.
If only the Victorian government saw value in keeping an old cheap power generator going. Marvel that even though this plant can sell wholesale electricity at 3 or 4 cents per KWhr it is unable to make a profit. There is no free market in electricity in Australia, only the illusion of it. Hands up who thinks a million households would buy direct from Hazelwood and keep it going, if there was no government intervention to stop them? — Jo
Hazelwood Power Station, closes, March 2017. Photo David Maddison.
_____________________
Hazelwood Update – The shutdown has started
At 1.51AM Monday 27th March, Unit 8 was the first Unit at Hazelwood to shut down. It reduced power at around 3.45PM on Sunday afternoon from around 170MW to between 128MW and 134MW, trying vainly to stay operational for as long as possible. At 11.05PM Sunday night, power started falling even more, leading me to believe it was starting the shutdown process, which took almost three hours. Power fell off over the next almost three hours and finally, it stopped generating at 1.51AM on Monday morning.
At the end of Sunday, Hazelwood had generated 14.8% more power than every wind plant in Australia over the last 28 days. That extra 14.8% amounted to 129.696GWH, enough power to supply the 24 hour needs for 265,000 Australian homes for those 28 days.
I don’t expect we will see any particular crisis or price spike this week, but I know people are very interested in this process. The system will continue on just fine until it doesn’t…
PS: Dont’ forget the shutdown will mean death to barramundi and cichlids in the artificially warmed lake next to it. But then cooling is supposed to be a good thing isn’t it? h/t David M
EXCLUSIVE/ European Union countries exploited loopholes in United Nations forestry rules to pocket carbon credits worth €600 million and the equivalent of global-warming emissions from 114 million cars.
You will not believe, governments overstated their logging targets then claimed credits for the forests they didn’t cut down, and the EU paid them for it.
Just saving the world, one lie at a time.
The document said that leaving the loophole open risked 133 million tonnes of unearned carbon credits falling into governments hands.
133 million tonnes is worth €665 million at today’s carbon price and is equivalent to 127 million cars on the road.
It’s a market based on intentions instead of a product. What could possibly go wrong?
After the 2009 peak of Copenhagen-fever and ClimateGate, media coverage dropped precipitously. Then there’s been a kind of dead cat bounce as the extreme voodoo climate meme was pumped and every hot afternoon became a front page headline. But media interest has plummeted — and in a US election year. To some extent this was coming as the crowd was tired of the hottest year after the hottest year, the tipping points came and went, the apocalypse didn’t happen but the fatigue did. But there is more to that crash that just weariness. Looks like Trump just killed climate news…
Climate broadcast coverage was already over the peak before the election year, but the crushing collapse in a “hottest ever massive El Nino year” says a lot. Trumps mockery of the topic was something the media news broadcasters couldn’t handle. It wasn’t a case of Any News Is Good News as the cliche goes, if Trump or the Deplorables had been given any real airtime the whole rent-seeking fantasy gravy train would have run off the rails.
The Boy Who Cried Warming had blamed climate change for droughts, storms, snow, lost cows, and “wrong” voters. There is nothing left. Every shade of near and far apocalypse has been done to death, and then Trump called their bluff so they ran away. They had used mockery and namecalling to silence critics for years, but when Trump owned their mockery and threw it back, they had no ammo left. They had not won the debate through reason and argument but through ridicule. He just turned their main weapon back at them.
Righto. It’s time to blame climate change for causing British voters to vote against German rule of Britain. Back when the climate was ideal, the Brits would’ve been fine with that.
Instead, even though the world has not warmed for 80% of the history of the EU, the EU is breaking up because of climate change.
It’s not like Al Gore to draw conclusions from a long nebulous chain of dubious reasoning, but here’s how it goes: Coal gives off CO2, which causes droughts according to models that don’t work, and that made Syrians migrate. Everyone got unhappy and voted for Brexit.
Brexit was caused in part by climate change, former US Vice-President Al Gore has said, warning that extreme weather is creating political instability “the world will find extremely difficult to deal with”.
Really, it’s all about coal, cars and plastic bags. If the EU had only put in more wind farms, the UK would have voted to stay in.
If it weren’t for a lack of rain in the middle east, the British Isles would want to leave decisions about immigration, fishing and light bulbs to their friends in Europe. What were they thinking when they voted to save billions and make those choices for themselves?
Mr Gore, speaking at an event in which he previewed a sequel to his landmark 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, said the “principal” cause of the Syrian Civil War had been the worst drought in 900 years, which forced 1.5 million people to move from the countryside to the cities. There they met a similar number of Iraqis who had fled the conflict in their homeland, creating powder keg conditions that Syrian government officials privately feared would explode.
Let’s not forget that for the last thousand years when the weather was preindustrially perfect, the French, Germans and Spanish got along super well with the Brits. It’s not like there was ten centuries of warfare until the climate warmed and peace ripped across the land. (Climate change also causes peace in Europe. How bad can it get?).
Gore’s evidence amounts to saying that there was a bad drought in this multivariate intercontinental geopolitical mess, plus Wikileaks shows someone in Syria saying “there is going to be a social explosion” just before there was one. Well, that does it for me…
Robert Gottleibsen in The Australian a couple of days ago has investigated our energy crisis, and discovered our old centralized grid design is quite likely to fall over next summer in an incredibly expensive way. It’s nice that he did some research and even talked to engineers:
The looming crisis is much worse than I expected. Three state governments, Victoria NSW and South Australia, have vandalised our total energy system. The Premiers of each state clearly had no idea what they were doing and did not sit down with top engineers outside the government advisers to work out the best way to achieve their objectives — whether that be an increase in renewables or gas restrictions.
I have been alerted that in the 1995 Federal Criminal Code under Section 137.1 in Chapter 7 there is a section entitled ‘Good administration of government’.
Me? I remain a cynic (not that I’m a lawyer). The legislation has been there since 1995, threatens 12 months in prison for “misleading information”. It can’t be this simple.
Still it would be good if politicians were scared into doing the right thing (keep Hazelwood running, explore for gas, talk about nuclear):
I can’t prejudge the courts but there appears to be no statute of limitation in the legislation so every statement made by any politician may be available to be examined by the courts to see if it is false or misleading. If we get damaging blackouts or gas shortages then my guess is that any politicians and advisors who are charged will face the next five to 10 years defending themselves in the courts. The government of the day will decide whether they should have legal aid.
This legislation is about promoting public service and political honesty. If Hazelwood is closed the Victorian government needs to tell the people that there is a good chance of blackouts but, (if it’s true), say that they are bringing in the best experts from around the world to lessen the chance. Maybe the Commonwealth should bring in the experts but they too must tell the people the truth.
The 12th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-12) will take place on Thursday and Friday, March 23–24 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC, thanks to the Heartland Institute. Watch and hear the scientists, economists, engineers, and policy experts who persuaded President Donald Trump that man-made global warming is not a crisis, and therefore Barack Obama’s war on fossil fuels must be ended.
The total fossil fuel output compared to total wind power generation, NEM, Australian electricity market, 21 March 2017
One old coal plant makes more electricity than all the wind farms
Guest Post by TonyfromOZ and Jo Nova
I’ve been watching the output of all eight generators at Hazelwood closely all month and comparing it to the total wind farm generation across the National Electricity Market (NEM). The old warhorse is a remarkable engineering and economic success.
I’ve kept a total of the power output each day from midnight to midnight and a running cumulative total. So far, the running total output from Hazelwood has always stayed ahead of the total from wind farms. So this 53 year old coal fired plant that is being shut down next week has produced more energy than the 43 wind plants on the National Energy Market. Even if we could store the energy from the wind farms, it still doesn’t add up to the same as one very ancient coal plant. The shut down starts in three days time on Friday March 24th.
Over the first 18 days of this month the old coal workhorse still made 7% more power than all the windfarms in the National Energy Market (which is everywhere bar WA and the NT). Hazelwood has delivered 561GWH over these 18 days and wind, 521GWH. The extra 40GWH of energy means an extra 2,211,111KWH per day, and if the average home consumes 17.5KW per day, then that means the extra delivered by Hazelwood is enough to supply 126,350 homes, and for the full 24 hours of those 18 days.
In the Australian NEM grid, there are 43 wind plants, and around 2400 turbines on poles, and for 14 years they’ve been building them. Despite that, they’re still not delivering enough power to replace a 53 year old tired worn out coal fired plant that can still manage to get all its generators working. See my post for all the details as I track the closure of this large piece of infrastructure: Hazelwood Power Plant Closing 31st March – Currently Delivering More Power Than Every Wind Plant In Australia.
Renewables can’t even keep a small state running
South Australia only consumes 6% of Australia’s total power consumption, the second lowest in Australia, only marginally higher than Tasmania’s 4.5%. If they cannot make renewables work on such a tiny scale, what does that say for Victoria, Queensland and NSW, and Australia as a whole? The wind industry began around the year 2000 in Australia. So, here we are, now 17 years later, and they still don’t generate enough power to replace one ancient power plant slated for closure. You tell me how good wind power is now.
I’ve been watching the output of the old coal generators closely. Here’s a typical example — at 3:20PM today.
In NSW:
Bayswater – all four units running – 2494MW – 30 years old
Liddell – three of four units running – 750MW – 46 years old
Eraring – all four units running – 2340MW – 35 years old
Vales Point – both units running – 11130MW – 40 years old
In Victoria:
Loy Yang – five of six units running – 2580MW – 32 years old
Yallourn – two of two units running – 680MW – 44 years old
Wind energy output
Total in the NEM in Australia varied from 200MW up to 2000MW this month. (Total nameplate capacity: 3900MW)
Most of the wind farms operate on a 30% capacity factor, even though they are a lot newer. Hazelwood is 53 years old, and is not generating its original Nameplate of 1600MW, but it can still make 86% of that total, which is pretty astonishing after 53 years. One of the oldest wind farms runs on just a 16% capacity factor. Challicum Hills in Victoria opened in 2003 with 35 turbines and a Nameplate of 52.5MW. Even on the best of windy days, the maximum power generation is only 40MW, so that’s 10.5MW short of the maximum, or 7 turbines possibly not even working at all.
When Hazelwood was new it ran at around a 90% Capacity Factor, and even now, after 53 years that has only dropped to around 60%, so effectively over its whole life it has managed (typical for large scale coal fired power) a capacity factor of around 70% lifetime. So, after 53 years, Hazelwood has generated 520.4 TWH of power, and I only expressed it that way because in MWH it’s a very long number: 520,349,760MWH
It has been delivering that power for around $30/MWH give or take, that’s 3c per KWhr and those prices are in today’s dollars.
So, from the sale of electricity alone, that comes in at $15.6 billion worth of electricity which is around $295 Million a year.
Here’s a graph comparing wind power across the entire NEM with the 1360MW provided by Hazelwood alone. Most of the time Hazelwood is outdoing all 43 wind farms. Only during peaks (yellow) does production climb above the total of this old power station.
Wind farm outout, March 2017, graph, National Electricity Market, NEM, Australia.
This is what old coal reliability looks like:
The output of the eight generating turbines at Hazelwood today March 21, 2017.
Are the engineers at Hazelwood defiantly showing off?
There appears to be some defiance going on from the people who work there, wanting to thumb their noses at the people who clamor for its closure. They’ve fixed one turbine this month and brought it back to speed when they didn’t need too.
One of the Units (Unit 8) was taken off line eight days back now. As I have explained, there are a lot of processes in the chain of power generation, and any one of them could be at fault. However, if the plant is scheduled to close at the end of the month, then there’s no real need to fix the problem. Just concentrate on the other units. However, yesterday at around 8AM, Unit 8 started to come back on line. It took 4 hours to reach full power delivery, but now it’s just humming along, just like the other seven units.
And then, just as senselessly as our grief began, it ended. For no particular reason, the expected bad baby news never arrived and now the complexity of having an imagined child will become a concrete ethical entanglement.
Exactly. And many a climate model operates with all the same clarity and insight.
But sincere congratulations to Sophie Lewis. We hope her good news brings her years of joy.
We also pray she escapes the climate bubble soon. Because by golly, she’s in deep.
Lewis reveals the paroxysms of irreconcilable guilt — where the evolutionary drive conflicts with the climate religion:
Older climate scientists speak widely about their worries for their grandchildren and the world they have provided them. While such concerns must weigh on older minds, younger climate scientists’ future concerns require active deliberation. Should we have children? And if we do, how do we raise them in a world of change and inequity? Can I reconcile my care and concern for the future with such an active and deliberate pursuit of a child?
Put simply, I can’t. Nowadays, the pitter-patter of tiny feet is inevitably the pitter-patter of giant carbon footprints. Reusable nappies, a bike trailer and secondhand jumpsuits might make me feel like I’m taking individual action but they will achieve little. A child born today is inevitably a consumer and, most significantly, is a consumer of greenhouse gases.
Warning. Pure climate-princess material coming — The climate battle is like World War II:
Living in and starting a family in volatile and uncertain times are not unique experiences. My grandmother fled Europe in the early 1950s for a better life in Australia. A German Jew, her family had been scattered, with herself interned in Britain, her sister lost in Auschwitz and her family’s desperate flight rebuffed by an indifferent world. Years of horror, combined with strict rations and economic uncertainty drove her to strike out bravely for a new life in Australia with her young babies.
But there was icing on the cake of the abject horror then — No such luck now:
Climate change is a critically different problem. In my grandmother’s time of abject horror, good people were empowered – to varying degrees – to do good. After the war ended, the actions of just a few were recognised as having salvaged the honour of all our humanity. Nowadays, the very act of living in Australia, regardless of concern for our climate future, is detrimental.
Now there are no heroes, just climate prophets (who can’t seem to predict anything useful) and whose bodily existence, like everyone else, including babies “is detrimental”
Indeed, to paraphase her baby announcement:
And then, just as senselessly as our grief began, it ended. For no particular reason, the expected bad climate news never arrived and now the complexity of having an imagined climatehas become a concrete ethical entanglement.
Those warmists who fear that a child,
Could leave our green planet defiled,
Or that one baby primate,
Could change Earth’s whole climate,
Are by climate-change hot air beguiled.
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