You might think we’d know whether a solar PV system produced energy before we installed 1,000 Megawatts of it. But it’s hard to even know after the fact. Dr John Constable points us at an interesting new paper that discusses the odd creature called EROEI. This stands for energy return on energy invested. If you get back less than “one”, it sucks.
That sounds like a fine idea except everyone seems to get different answers to the same question. Solar PV in Switzerland achieves either a tenfold return or it costs a fifth of your energy. Plan your national policy with a Ouija Board?
Constable comes to the conclusion that the whole calculation is so uncertain it’s useless. There are so many subjective estimates on the “energy invested side” that the answer is almost irrelevant. Constable points out that what we really need to know is how the whole system responds to the addition of a new generator –but the whole grid analysis is even harder than just the EROEI to calculate.
His conclusion, it that we really need something more like a neural net to calculate the costs. Luckily we have one — us — and the contractual free market. It’s just the government keeps getting in the way of it working.
ENERGY RETURN AND ECONOMIC PLANNING
Date: 22/02/17 Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor
Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report. It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral.
The UK tribes can thank chief Huhne (Energy and Climate secretary) for the 7.5 million tonnes of dead trees otherwise known as biomass — which mostly come all the way from the US and Canada.
Naturally, doing something this improbable takes a lot of money.
Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets.
Curiously, there are over 200 trillion cubic feet of dead trees stored under Lancashire. They may have been very very small trees, like algae sized, but nonetheless, 4,999 kilometers closer. Apparently when all the trees of Canada and the US are used up, and the UK moves out of the Wood Age, it will have some spare gas to heat UK homes for the next 1,200 years.
The climate debate has now moved on to arguing whether trees are renewable. There’s a kind of death-spiral bickering between different varieties of “renewables” beasts. If it takes 200 years to grow a tree back, and you believe the models that are 97% wrong, oceans might boil before the carbon is back in the tree.This is just another carbon accounting bun-fight.
The report author, Mr Bracks, calls the subsidies ridiculous, but only because the money could have gone to “zero carbon” wind or solar instead. Shame he didn’t point that out then, when he was the special advisor to Chris Huhne.
Having poured countless millions into Biomass, by a remarkable coincidence, three months after Huhne got out of jail for lying about speeding fines, he was appointed European Director of a company called Zilkha Biomass.
He is not the only one to follow this gravy laden career path:
Several other former energy ministers have gone on to lucrative jobs in the sector. Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem who replaced Mr Huhne as energy and climate secretary but lost his seat in 2015, advises three companies on low-carbon energy projects. Lord Barker of Battle, the Tory former energy minister, took up posts advising a renewable heat business and a solar panel company. The appointments of both were approved by Acoba.
Pretending to save the world can be a lucrative career.
They claim to reduce greenhouse gases, From mulched trees as burnt bio masses, By importing wood pellets, The renewable zealots, Are behaving like right silly asses.
There are probably more solar panels in QLD than anywhere else in the world. Back in February last year, the boss of the Queensland state power company announced the awkward result that households with solar panels were using more electricity than those without. Apparently people without solar were turning off the air conditioner because electricity cost too much, but the solar users didn’t have to worry about the cost so much.
Feb 2016: Solar-powered homes in south-east Queensland, which boasts the world’s highest concentration of rooftop panels, have begun consuming on average more electricity from the grid than those without solar, the network operator has found.
Terry Effeney, the chief executive of state-owned power distributor Energex, said the trend – which belied the “green agenda” presumed to drive those customers – was among the challenges facing a region that nevertheless stood the best chance globally of making solar the cornerstone of its electricity network.
From October 2014 in Queensland, the average grid electricity use of solar homes started to exceed the average use of people without solar power and stayed higher for the at least the next 18 months (when this story appeared).
In other words, subsidized solar panels could mean that the people who pay the subsidies use less electricity than the people who get the subsidy and the panels. It also means the poor, who can’t pay for panels, have to go without more often.
Playing God with markets doesn’t have to be this hard. If the price of electricity is the largest influence on behaviour, the government could have just slapped on a bigger electricity tax, and that would have cut electricity use across the board. Thousands of people wouldn’t have wasted millions of dollars installing solar panels. The money would have helped the state government provide a service that was more useful than weather-unchanging-electronic-panels. Queensland could have had more healthcare, more holidays or less debt, instead they changed the color of their electrons.
Former Republican congressman Bob Inglis says he knows it sounds improbable to say the US president would impose a carbon price, but he thinks reality will force Mr Trump’s hand.
“Donald Trump said climate change is a Chinese hoax and conspiracy – but he couldn’t possibly believe that,” Mr Inglis told the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.
Obviously it’s impossible for Inglis to believe Inglis Could Be Wrong.
In the five stages of grief, he’s stuck at number one…
Watch the contortions to fit that worldview into a round hole:
He laments the tribalism of the debate, saying there’s such fear among conservatives about being seen as weak in the face of the environmental left they refuse to hear anything.
He frames the question to conservatives as not whether they believe in climate change, but if they think free enterprise can solve it.
“We’ve got to build the confidence of the right so that they can send the tribal leaders down to the river to meet with the other tribe’s leaders,” Mr Inglis said.
Free enterprize has solved it. When people are free to choose, 98% don’t buy carbon credits.
Corals survived through four hundred million years of climate change. Despite that, corals still surprise survivors of four years of academia with their ability to keep dealing with climate change.
It’s been known for years that after corals bleach in warmer water, they acclimatize.
Here one shiny young researcher shows her carbonnointed worldview. She asks a really interesting question:
In one study of corals, for instance, she exposed adults to increased temperature and acidification, then exposed their offspring to the same conditions to see if they are more successful because of their parents’ previous experience.
Then sees the answer through AlGoreEyes:
“Interestingly, we found that there is potential for beneficial acclimatization because of parental history,” she said. “There is a more positive metabolic response and ecological response, greater survivorship and growth if their parents have been preconditioned to future scenarios.”
What’s the difference: “Preconditioned to future scenarios” or “Evolved to survive past ones”?
Not a reference
University of Rhode Island. “Professor examines effects of climate change on coral reefs, shellfish.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 February 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170221082101.htm>
Those who say they want a “free market” in carbon still don’t understand what a free market is.
RET’s or Renewable Energy Targets are screwed (in the head): If Tony Abbotts Direct Action plan was useless, RETS are five times more useless.
In Australia the Renewable Energy Target (RET) in theory, helps wind and solar, so we lower CO2 emissions and cool the world, slow storms, things like that. But Tom Quirk calculates it costs $57 a ton (at best) for those “savings”. Since the Direct Action plan cost $11 a ton, we could reduce five times as much CO2 if we blew up the RET scheme.
The secret is that the Abbott plan tackled CO2 directly rather than picking winners (see “competition”,
“free markets” that sort of thing). Predictably, the Greens hated it — who needs CO2 reduction if you can support big-government-loving industries instead? (Especially the kind who lobby for the side of politics that wants more bureaucrats, more handouts, and less independent competition?)
Those who say they want a “free market” in carbon still don’t understand what a free market is. It’s pretty simple, if they want a reduction in CO2, they need to pay for a reduction in CO2. That’s not the same as paying the wind industry. When a subsidy is applied to a secondary, indirect factor, it has perverse effects other than the supposed original aim. Quirk shows that we are not just paying a bit more to reduce CO2 this way (like 500% more), but quixotically we effectively pay more to displace gas emissions rather than brown coal.
The other perverse effect is that by insisting we take wind and solar “whenever” — these generators are not competing in the wholesale market at all, they simply bypass it and head straight to the retail level. Effectively, they take a chunk out of the demand side of the wholesale market which would be useful at peak load times,
The RET started at 2%, is now 12.5% and is climbing to 25%.
In Table 2 we see that utilization (or capacity factor) is very low for all the generation types in SA. A great deal of infrastructure and capital is just lounging around drinking pina coladas or something. Ironically, the whole free market idea is so botched up that SA has an oversupply of electricity, yet pays more for electricity and suffers more blackouts. Tom Quirk calculates that the RET currently adds 2.15c for wind power and 0.26c for solar to power bills in SA. This does not include the cost of state based schemes, nor the diabolical effect of having an excess of supply at the wrong times and perverse subsidies: price spikes and volatility. The real cost is o-so-much higher…
Jo
____________________
States of confusion
Guest Post by Tom Quirk
The Renewal Energy Target (RET) scheme is a splendid example of the growth of a policy cancer that if not checked will do substantial economic damage. The scheme was introduced during the time of the Howard government with a target of 2% contribution from renewable sources of electricity and has grown tenfold within the federal government jurisdiction and has spread to state governments that aim to double the present federal target of some 25% renewable energy contribution by 2030.
Sometimes an idea comes along that adds another chapter to the Book of Stupid. You might think windmills on land are an indulgent, pointless fantasy, but take that idea and make it worse:
A team at Arizona State University has proposed building 10 million wind-powered pumps to draw up water and spill it out onto the surface of the ice, where it will freeze faster. Doing so would be complicated and expensive — it’s estimated to cost a cool $500 billion, and right now the proposal is only theoretical.
It’s not like we have anything better to do with half a trillion dollars. Should we cure cancer or refrigerate one of the coldest places on Earth? Should we teach our kids about the fall of civilizations, or teach them to bow before prophets who keep predicting the end of the Arctic and getting it wrong?
Tristan Hopper explains the beefed up plan would absorb the “entire steel production of the United States”, “half the worlds container fleet”, and cost about the same as the “GDP of Japan”. It would also make 163 million tonnes of CO2. He’s serious, and so are the ivory tower guys:
“… the researchers from Arizona State University call the cost “economically achievable” and the environmental impact “negligible.””
We could fund it all by giving up on universities right now. When it comes to the Tertiary Sector — just say “No”.
Mech-madness
The giant water pumps would sit on buoys floating in the Arctic Sea. They would take up water from beneath the ice, store it in a tank and then spray the water on top of the ice.
The machines would be powered by the wind, which is plentiful in the Arctic, in a similar way to windmills you see creating power on farms.
Yes, it’ll be just like windmills on farms, except they float on water, are subject to extreme weather, and produces nothing that any human needs within a 3,000km radius.
The team estimates in the paper that 10 million devices could add a meter of sea ice onto the current level of ice over the course of a winter. That’s a meter of ice on each tenth of a square kilometer.
“That’s a significant change,” said Desch. The sea ice only grows two to three meters in thickness during the winter.
To make a dent in the loss of ice, you would need to cover about 10% of the Arctic, which adds up to 10 million machines, he said.
What could possibly go wrong? The noise from ten million wind turbines might drive ten thousand whales crazy and destroy the sleep of a million polar bears.
I’m happy to help a few dedicated skeptics and sane candidates with the gumption to try to improve the system from within. So this is a quick note for residents of the Central Wheatbelt WA. Check out Bill Crabtree, the no-till farming expert running for the Liberal Party at the State election in three weeks, he’s as honest and hardworking as they get. I know Bill personally, and he’s just the kind of guy I’d want in Parliament. A real farmer, not a career politician.
Meet him tomorrow: Sunday 4pm-8pm, Northam Country Club, 15 Wood Drive Northam.
In 1854 [James Harrison of Geelong] invented a commercial ice-making machine. He expanded it into a vapour compression refrigeration system, the basis for modern refrigeration.
“That’s right – an Aussie invented the fridge and it’s first real use was making beer,” remarked the US technology website Gizmodo. “You have to love this country.”
And one more big coal generator shuts down soon in Victoria:
In the next few weeks 4 per cent of Australia’s power supply will vanish when Victoria’s big Hazelwood power station shuts down, clapped out after 50 years of turning coal into electricity. It’ll be the ninth coal-fired power station to close in the past five years. New solar and wind plants are being built, but they are intermittent, and that means they are unreliable.
“Taking out Hazelwood is taking out a big buffer,” says Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute policy research centre in Melbourne. And, as we’ve just witnessed, Australia’s power system lacks buffers. “Managing intermittency is an increasing problem.”
Not only has South Australia suffered three major power failures in the last half-year, NSW last week ordered industry to cut power usage so that households could turn on their airconditioners on a hot day. The chief executive of the Tomago aluminium smelter, Matt Howell, who was ordered to cut electricity usage but is entitled to no compensation, says that “it’s fair to say the way the energy system is working at the moment is dysfunctional.” He told the Financial Review that last Friday was “a genuine system security risk.”
In Australia, for the moment, the national debate about climate change is taking a back seat to the debate about electricity security. The Libs seems to have finally realized they can win votes by keeping the lights on and costs down. The media is covering blackout stories as if they were real news outlets. It’s nice to see an SMH article that isn’t an advert for renewables.
But both the Libs and the media ignored the warnings for years. We didn’t have to waste billions.
AEMO (Grid market managers) thought they’d have more wind power. It fell to only 2% of “total output.”
There was a computer glitch which “load shed” more people than necessary. Oops. SA Power Network apologized today.
Demand was higher than expected.
The gas plant generators at Port Lincoln were ““not available due to a communications system problem”. (Whatever that means.) That was 73MW out of action.
One turbine at Torrens Gas plant was out for maintenance (120MW gone). Another was running 50MW low because of the heat. (Seriously, these machines operate at hundreds of degrees and work at 35C but not so well at 42C? (Or whatever it was). Color me skeptical. Perhaps some grid engineers can comment and tell us if this is normal?
So in a modern renewable grid we have variations in supply and demand that are of the order of the average grid load and at the whim of The Wind. What could possibly go wrong?
Opposition Leader Steven Marshall said on Friday the Government must do everything it could to “press the pause button” on the demolition of Port Augusta’s Northern Power Station and take nothing off the table in its quest for energy security.
“Maybe the infrastructure at Port Augusta can be used for new technology, what we’re saying is don’t take anything off the table,” he said.
The SA Energy Minister is still promising “dramatic intervention” but not saying what that will be.
The SA Premier is blaming AEMO – the market operator.
“Mr Weatherill said on Thursday he had concluded the state had been abandoned by the national electricity market and he was preparing plans for SA “to take control of our own future”.”
The Solution?
The word is the solution might be an interconnector (hands up who has a spare billion dollars?) but the SA gov is still hoping for a a new gas plant and has offered the carrot of a bulk deal with the public sector for who ever wins that tender.
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon said the State Government must underwrite a new gas power station to deliver energy security and lower prices for consumers.
Why should taxpayers have to pay for the energy and also pay for the investment risk? It doesn’t have to be this way. Gradually the complex, fragile grid “needs” more and more centralized control. Pretty soon the government will set supply, demand, pay for generation (and compensate for non-generation), and underwrite the investments — it’s that creeping communist-style takeover of our energy.
Weatherill talks about “controlling their own future” but even Malcolm Turnbull can see the absurdity of that. SA is more dependent than ever on brown coal in Victoria.
The new marketing move by Kelloggs to insult half its customers doesn’t seem to be working out too well. Last year Kelloggs jumped into politics by loudly cancelling advertising on Breitbart saying the new media outlet didn’t fit their values. It was an attempt to punish the big winner in the new media for reporting politically incorrect news. Breitbart responded with the DumpKelloggs petition, and 436,000 people pledged never to buy Kelloggs again.
To get some idea of the depth of the goodwill crater left by the Kelloggs political bomb, check out Chiefio’s Bye Bye Kelloggs flaming rant last December. He won’t give a trigger warning, but tells people who need one to “get out now”. I’ve picked a tamer paragraph:
Dear Kellogg’s:
We, the Average Joe and Average Jane have put up with this Protest Shit to the absolute limit, and we were pushed past that. It’s now broken. That means full on war. Yes, you have a pissed Germanic-Celt in your grill. I’ll “forgive and forget” in about 20 years.
When I Die.
In one simple stupid move, you have alienated about 1/2 of the country….
In Marketing 101, Kelloggs will be the star example of How to Trash A Century of Good Branding.
There are lots of reasons a company can lose money. But social media polling nosedived 75% in the weeks after Kelloggs started selling political cereal:
“There is definitely what you would call ‘climate fatigue’ on the part of scientists,” said Dr Andrew Glikson, from the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology.
“There were hundreds of scientists there, and my impression is while we continue to do the science as best we can, there is a fatigue when it comes to arguing in public.
“You can explain to them as long as you like but if they don’t wish to understand, they won’t.”
The only solution that stops the sadness is for unskeptical scientists to meet reality. Then at least they won’t have to worry the planet is going to hell. Though they will have to start thinking about the demise of science and the way the research industry has become a cheap political tool full of B-graders who don’t even know the basics of Aristotelian reasoning and the most important parts of the Scientific Method.
Dr Glikson is one of Australia’s leading voices on climate change and last year penned an open letter to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, signed by more than 150 scientists, demanding more action be taken to ease greenhouse gas emissions.
Andrew Glickson and I had a long debate once. A rare thing. It started here, lasted five long rounds and he asked if I’d publish his sixth reply which I said I’d be happy to, in full and with every reference and graph he wanted.
This coming May it’ll be seven years later and we’re still waiting.
James Burnham, 1941 foresaw so much in “The Managerial Revolution. It’s a book that George Orwell used for inspiration.
According to Burnham, the civil democracies of the second half of the 20th century would – more or less gradually – be overgrown with backroom bureaucratic networks that make the actual decisions, all far away from the electorate and public debate.
He predicted that separate nation states would still exist, but as their sovereignty was gradually absorbed into a superstate, the nation states would become just administrative subdivisions.
Elections will also remain in place; they will provide managers valuable insights into the preferences of the consumer-citizen, while at the same time functioning as an exhaust valve to possible opposition forces. Burnham predicted a form of political theatre in the guise of sham elections between candidates who happen to be like-minded on every fundamental subject, who are paid to debate in front of clueless spectators in mock parliaments, while the results were known in advance – after all, the actual decisions have already been made.
Like a rachet, power gets centralized gradually, step by step:
These Eurocrats label their strategy as “functionalism“, behind which the idea is that due to the so-called “spillover effect“, inevitably, ever more power ends up being centralised. One ‘function’ automatically forces another ‘function’. So: you sell open borders as a nice convenience, and after a while, you act surprised when they force you to adopt a centralised immigration policy. You present a monetary union as a facilitator of trade without having to hand over national sovereignty; and when the (inevitable) credit crisis presents itself, your push through a centralised budgetary system.
David Rose and the Daily Mail let rip, telling the world that retired NOAA insider, John Bates, was blowing the whistle on how global warming was being exaggerated by scientists to score political points. The hallowed pause-buster paper (Karl et al) broke practically every rule: it was based on misleading “unverified” data processed with a highly experimental, unstable program. There were bugs in the software, the results changed with every run, the data wasn’t archived, and no one could repeat it. They tripled the previous rate of warming by using old-bad-data to adjust better but still-not-very-good-data. They ignored the much better data from ARGO buoys and the satellites (see below) which showed they were wrong. (Rose didn’t even mention that the error bars on the magical adjustment were 17 times larger than the adjustment itself. Too many errors….)
It’s hard oo believe it could be worse, but then the one sole computer holding the program broke, and apparently (what bad luck) none of the eight authors had their own copy either. Nor did the reviewers. The Planet is going to hell, but no one thought to back up the data.
It all got a bit much for Dr Bates when he heard melodramatic news reports that a few triggered scientists feared Trump might trash their climate data.
The NOAA scientists have nothing to hide (especially not data since it’s gone) but when the subpoenas came for their emails, they refused to hand them over.
The black line of best fit is for the same period, and shows a warming trend that is essentially zero (0.01 C per decade). That is, satellites say it didn’t warm from 2000 to 2014 — the exact same period that the NOAA team refer too.
Yet here is the graph that NOAA presented to Obama and Congress, saying “the rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than that seen during the latter half of the 20th Century.” Sure.
Oroville Dam erosion on the emergency spillway. The road washed away.
Oroville Dam Spillway erosion (the arrow points at the people inspecting one part of the erosion which was headed for the spillway wall.
A close up of the erosion looking down from over the spillway wall. We can see just how much ground disappeared on the weekend.
UPDATE #1: For the moment the dire threat is lessening as water has been successfully released, but the evacuation order remains in place, and around 130,000 people are or have been moved. They are even evacuating some baby fish.
Flows over the auxiliary spillway have ceased. 100,000 cfs continue down the main spillway. @ButteSheriff
_________________________________
A remarkable situation in California is taking place where tens of thousands of people and animals are being shifted away from Oroville Dam as a precaution.
“EVACUATION ORDER. Use of the auxiliary spillway has lead to severe erosion that could lead to a failure of the structure. “
RAW: Chopper Footage Of Damaged Auxiliary Spillway In Danger Of Failing
If you thought seas were constant 6,000 years ago…
Microatolls are apparently very accurate proxy for sea levels, giving a higher resolution estimate of sea levels. But the extra data suggests more natural oscillations in seas than the experts used to think. Six thousand years ago, near Indonesia, seas apparently rose and fell twice by as much as 60 centimeters in a 250 year period. A similar pattern happened 2,600km away in SE China. Seas were changing so fast researchers estimate the shift occurred at 13mm per year and comment that these regional changes are “unprecedented in modern times.” (Or unrepeated, perhaps?) At the first peak 6,750 years ago, seas were 1m higher than today. The current rate of sea level change is 1mm a year in hundreds of tide gauges and 3mm in “adjusted” satellite data).
From the paper I gather that sea levels in this region change a lot even now. ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole slop the oceans back and forward. Meltzner et al don’t know why the seas around asia changed so much in the holocene, nor do they know if this is a global phenomenon. They talk about other studies on the Great Barrier Reef and …suggest that oscillations may be more common than previously appreciated,.. (but they don’t have the resolution yet to know. )
You and I might think this shows that the climate changes all by itself (and CO2 was irrelevant). You might also think that it shows climate models are incomplete because they have no idea what caused this. But sieve your brain through the Global Worrier Cult and you will come to realize that a sea level event that we don’t understand, and can’t predict, means we should worry even more about CO2. Because why? Because, who knows, bad stuff might happen again. This is what Meltzner et al conclude. Perhaps it’s a “safe caveat” so Nature will still publish their inconvenient results, but they do go on in the paper a bit.
If they’d found no swings, presumably the press release would tell us how the modern 1mm a year rises are unprecedented. There is a relentless progression of papers showing past climate was wilder than we thought, and natural climate change is more important. Whatever they find, the press release message ends up being “panic more”. Trite.
— Jo
PS: For perspective, sea levels around Australia in the Holocene peak 7,000 ya were 1 – 2m higher and have been falling since then. (But notice the resolution on those Australian graphs at that link are nowhere near as good as this new study). Further back in the past, sea levels were 9m higher around Kalbarri Western Australia circa 120,000 ya.
[ScienceDaily] For the 100 million people who live within 3 feet of sea level in East and Southeast Asia, the news that sea level in their region fluctuated wildly more than 6,000 years ago is important, according to research published by a team of ocean scientists and statisticians, including Rutgers professors Benjamin Horton and Robert Kopp and Rutgers Ph.D. student Erica Ashe. That’s because those fluctuations occurred without the assistance of human-influenced climate change.
Mid holocene sea level estimated at three sites: (a) TBAT; (b) TKUB; and (c) Leizhou Peninsula17.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, Horton, Kopp, Ashe, lead author Aron Meltzner and others report that the relative sea level around Belitung Island in Indonesia rose twice just under 2 feet in the period from 6,850 years ago to 6,500 years ago. That this oscillation took place without any human-assisted climate change suggests to Kopp, Horton and their co-authors that such a change in sea level could happen again now, on top of the rise in sea level that is already projected to result from climate change. This could be catastrophic for people living so close to the sea.
“This research is a very important piece of work that illustrates the potential rates of sea-level rise that can happen from natural variability alone,” says Horton, professor of marine and coastal sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “If a similar oscillation were to occur in East and Southeast Asia in the next two centuries, it could impact tens of millions of people and associated ecosystems.”
What this study shows is that we need to figure out what really drives climate change (like something on the Sun, perhaps?)
The plans are “advanced” but they apparently don’t know what that intervention is. It could be a script for “Yes Minister”:
Premier Jay Weatherill said the plans were well advanced, and all options remained on the table.
“One option is to completely nationalise the system,” Mr Weatherill said.
“That’s an extraordinary option. It would involve breaking contracts and exposing us to sovereign risk and the South Australian taxpayers to extraordinary sums of money. “It’s not a preferred option but we’re ruling nothing out at this point.”
Even if there were no more blackouts in SA, how much stress is added by not knowing if the electricity will be cut off without warning? How many people are preemptively running air conditioners early or all day?
The situation has changed so much that even Malcolm Turnbull, the man who fell on his sword for a carbon tax in 2009, is now scathing about renewables:
“What they did in a lazy and complacent way is they just assumed they could suck more and more energy from Victoria from those very emissions-intensive brown coal generators in the Latrobe valley,” he said.
Which is quite unfair. SA was not lazy. It took real effort and a lot of money to create this much instability.
Malcolm-come-lately’s warning to SA might have been more useful had he said this before they drove their last coal fired plant out of business. The “stunning Turnbull turnaround” on renewables is being received with dismay by some at the ABC. (Shame the ABC doesn’t allow comments on that story).
Is it a “state of emergency”?
The Federal Minister thinks so, the state Minister doesn’t:
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