The large Hazelwood Coal Units closed a year ago, so the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme has been working hard to fill the holes in the unreliable generation that replaced it. And they’ve been collecting tidy profits from earning RET certificates too.
What could possibly go wrong?
This — levels of Lake Eucumbene have fallen to 24%. This is the lowest since 2010. It’s not the lowest ever (so that’s alright then).
The rain will just fill it right up, unless there is an El Nino. Don’t look now… Odds are “above average”.
Lake Eucumbene is now at its lowest level since 2010 and on its way to a repeat of 2007 when electricity generation had to be stopped in favour of a heavily polluting fossil-fuel generator in Victoria.
The Hydro chief said they had been generating more to “take advantage of tight market conditions.” And we all know what that means.
This is tough for fishermen and tourists.
Alan Basford, who has been at Anglers Reach Caravan Park on the shores of Lake Eucumbene for 50 years, said things were becoming desperate.
“We have been very concerned for a long while,” Mr Basford told The Australian.He stopped pumping water for the park three months ago and said what usually was a 3km stretch of water out the front of his property was now “just a river”.
The fishing is still good but visitors can no longer get to the water. “We haven’t had any rain for a long time but it’s going down like mad because they are generating electricity,” Mr Basford said.
“They are generating all the time and using water like it is going out of style.”
What about that rainfall?
Heavy rains are required to replenish the Eucumbene reservoir, but the Bureau of Meteorology winter outlook is for below-average rainfall for NSW, South Australia, northern Victoria…
Look at what happened to Q2 prices on the NEM the last time we had a major hydro drought?
See that big bump years ago? That was it. Across all eastern states.
…..
We pay $1b a year to genius investigators at the ABC to help us have a national conversation to avoid these blindingly obvious risks. Find that discussion…
The ACCC is a powerful body created to protect consumers in Australia. Now, after ten years of poor people being forced to pay for middle and upper class solar panels in a kind of semi-secret subsidy-tax, NOW, it says maybe it is time to stop?
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s electricity affordability report reveals the huge cost of environmental schemes across the National Energy Market, including the large-scale renewable energy target, the small-scale renewable energy scheme and solar feed-in tariffs.
The schemes add a combined $170 to household energy bills in South Australia, $155 in Tasmania, $109 in NSW, $93 in Victoria and $76 in Queensland.
The ACCC waffles some reasons:
The ACCC said the costs associated with the LRET were expected to fall significantly after 2020, and did not recommend any action to wind up the scheme before its 2030 end date. But it said the SRES, which cost $130 million in 2016-17, should be wound down and abolished by 2021, almost a decade ahead of schedule, to reduce costs for consumers.
When did the ACCC ask what value non-solar customers were getting from this deal?
Solar installers must be starting to panic….
Western Sydney Solar owner Rod Grono said he was worried that abolishing the rooftop solar subsidy would lead to a plunge in solar installations.
And the truth about the return on investment becomes clearer:
“Confidence will fall. For a $10,000, 5.2kW job, (small-scale technology certificates) are about $3300. That means a four-year payback becomes a seven or eight-year payback. That might tip people over,” Mr Grono said.
Solar is competitive if you give it a one third head start:
Modelling suggested the SRES would fund about 32 per cent of the cost of a 5kW system by 202
I’ll have a lot more to say on this. Sadly am crook. Thanks to TDeF, Robber, ROM for help. Watch this space….
*Why is the burden on non solar homes? Because some with solar panels got paid above market rates for green electrons, and other solar homes got the use of subsidized equipment so they just didn’t have to buy so much electricity.
Britain is suddenly very interesting (for the eight hundredth time in the History of Western Civilization). It’s a defining moment. Fans of the establishment didn’t want Brexit, so they tried a scare campaign, which failed. They tried on a second vote and legal means, and namecalling “xenophobic isolationist” — all the usual. Anything but a polite list of good reasons to stay in (something to counter the brilliant Daniel Hannan’s points, not to mention the happy existence of Switzerland and Norway). Now they wear the cloak and try the Remain By Stealth option (like our Carbon Tax by Stealth). Call it Brexit but make the reality the same. It is an absolute scandal for the working class and poor in the UK. Hence the string of resignations…
The peasants don’t want people in Brussels deciding what kind of hair dryer and vacuum cleaner they may buy.
We’re planning to spend $5,000 million on something to smooth out the bumps from unreliable generators. It is entirely unnecessary in a system where coal supplies the baseload and we have not created artificial rules forcing people to use green electrons in preference over stable and predictable ones. Most estimates of costs from wind and solar ignore the hidden costs — the destructive effect on the whole grid.
Energy project financier David Carland — the executive director of Australian Resources Development Limited — argues that once the Snowy Hydro project is operating it will provide only partial back-up energy at a high cost.
Using Snowy Hydro’s modelling assumptions, Dr Carland’s calculations show the “levelised cost of energy” — or unit-cost of electricity over the lifetime of an asset — will deliver power significantly in excess of $90/MWh, after allowing for the cost of storage, cycle losses and the initial cost of buying energy at off-peak prices.
The effect of “cycle losses” means Snowy 2.0 will have to buy around 30 per cent more power in order to pump water uphill than it can generate when water is released from the upper storage.
“Snowy 2.0 is a pump storage operation that is a net user of energy and therefore cannot resolve the longer-term issues of the lack of baseload supply in the national electricity market,” Dr Carland told The Australian. “Based on Snowy Hydro’s own modelling the scenario in which Snowy 2.0 prospers is a world in which average power prices continue to rise.”
Costs are never coming back down
Kiss goodbye to the old $30/MWh average cost of the NEM wholesale electricity market.
….
Why is the NSW old average $50/MWh? I think that’s artificially high. Retail prices fell from 1955-1980 and then held stable for decades. They ominously started rising faster than inflation from 2005 which was when intermittent generation began to build on the grid. There was also a major drought in 2007.
NSW (dark purple). QLD (light purple), SA (red), Vic (grey) and Tas (green)
Those days are gone unless we save our old coal plants and stop favouring green electrons.
The government doesn’t need to build coal plants, it needs to abandon the RET and all pagan attempts to change the weather with our generators.
The market will sort the problem out if the government gets out of the way.
Scientists wondered whether climate change was affecting super high clouds that people rarely see and there is virtually no data on. So they used models which fail on clouds and water vapor only ten kilometers above the Earth and tried to predict what happened to both way up at 80 kilometers up and 150 years ago. They “found” (their phrase, not mine) the increase was man made. So once again, your car exhaust and dinner steak are to blame for changing these night-shining clouds.
How could it be any other way?
This is pure crystal ball science that starts with errors and ends with extrapolations. Researchers are fooling themselves using words like “results”, “indicator” and “significant” as if this was an actual experiment.
PUBLIC RELEASE:
Climate change is making night-shining clouds more visible
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
WASHINGTON — Increased water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere due to human activities is making shimmering high-altitude clouds more visible, a new study finds. The results suggest these strange but increasingly common clouds seen only on summer nights are an indicator of human-caused climate change, according to the study’s authors.
Noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere. They form in the middle atmosphere, or mesosphere, roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) above Earth’s surface. The clouds form when water vapor freezes around specks of dust from incoming meteors. Watch a video about noctilucent clouds here. [Or not, there is no link? – Jo]
Humans first observed noctilucent clouds in 1885, after the eruption of Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia spewed massive amounts of water vapor in the air. Sightings of the clouds became more common during the 20th century, and in the 1990s scientists began to wonder whether climate change was making them more visible.
Or was it just that there were six billion more people to notice the noctilucents? Who can tell?
In a new study, researchers used satellite observations and climate models to simulate how the effects of increased greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels have contributed to noctilucent cloud formation over the past 150 years. Extracting and burning fossil fuels delivers carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor into the atmosphere, all of which are greenhouse gases.
Why bother with satellites, we can just simulate space and history…
In the new study, Lübken and colleagues ran computer simulations to model the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere and noctilucent clouds from 1871 to 2008. They wanted to simulate the effects of increased greenhouse gases, including water vapor, on noctilucent cloud formation over this time period.
Who needs observations?
“We speculate that the clouds have always been there, but the chance to see one was very, very poor, in historical times,” said Franz-Josef Lübken, an atmospheric scientist at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The researchers found the presence of noctilucent clouds fluctuates from year to year and even from decade to decade, depending on atmospheric conditions and the solar cycle. But over the whole study period, the clouds have become significantly more visible.
Over the whole study period? Meaning during the last ten minutes…
Read the introduction of the paper. “Little is known”, “observations are rather challenging” but there is a consensus…
Everyone is talking about the NEG (National Energy Guarantee) which will supposedly attain the mythical trifecta of cheap, reliable, and planet cooling electricity. In terms of meeting our Paris “commitment” Tom Quirk wondered how we are doing in other sectors, like farms, cars, rubbish — and whether we had cut emissions there. Well, ho, ho, here’s that report. Thank you, Tom. Looks like a lot of cows and sheep will have to go. Still, we want to stop storms don’t we?
Key points:
The NEG is not enough on its own to reduce Australian emissions from 608Mt to 444Mt.
Most of our reductions so far have come from just two sectors: the electricity sector and from changes to land-clearing.
We’ve “achieved” nothing in other sectors like agriculture, transport, waste and industry.
Methane emissions from sheep and cattle amount to 60Mt. Trashing the live-export trade may help reduce
With enough bad luck, and poor management, plus some sacrificial lambs on the altar, we might be the only country on Earth that meets its Paris agreement. Rejoice.
This is assuming that our population stops growing and Australia blocks all immigration tomorrow. That’s right, Tom Quirk has not made any allowance for the 250,000 immigrants arriving presently.
These are optimistic best case numbers.
Jo
___________________________________
Will Australia make it to Paris 2030?
Guest post by Tom Quirk
In 2005 Australia emitted 608 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 – equivalent greenhouse gases. To achieve a 26 to 28% reduction we must cut emissions to an average of 444 Mt.
Due to accounting changes to land use and forestry, Australia could claim a fall of 104 Mt of CO2 from 2005 to 2012. The emissions from cutting down trees were no longer to be accounted immediately but could be written off over longer periods of years. A most interesting change was for forest fires to be treated as Acts of God and not counted in national emissions. An external issue is whether God is anthropogenic.
Forest and peat fires are a major source of atmospheric CO2. Consider that during the 1997 – 98 El Nino, Indonesia alone was estimated to have produced the equivalent of between 13 – 40% of the annual global fossil fuel emissions and the total estimate for the El Nino was 50% from forest and peat fires.
The changes for Australia are shown in Figure 1 along with the emissions from agriculture. The emissions from agriculture show no changes over the years of land use changes. This may be the result of enteric emissions of methane being some 90% of the agriculture CO2 equivalent emissions.
Figure 1: Emissions for changes in land use and forestry and from agriculture.
The changes in land use and forestry appear to have plateaued from 2012 to 2017. So for this analysis no changes are assumed after 2017. A reassessment would be necessary if there are new government regulations on land use.
The Hockeystick graph rewrote history and was used to justify billions of dollars of expenditure. The people who created it were public servants dedicated to science and writing businesslike emails to each other — which is why they fought tooth and nail and with hundreds of thousands of dollars for 1,763 days to stop you reading them.
Marvel that after 1,000 years of working as thermometers, trees suddenly decalibrated in 1961 just as our national networks of adjistimongered-thermometers were established. See that red line rise…
Arizona Appellate Court Decides Hockey Stick Emails Must Be Released Despite the University’s Appeal.
One thousand seven hundred and sixty-three days ago, on behalf of its client, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC (FME Law) asked the University of Arizona to hand over public records that would expose to the world the genesis of what some consider the most influential scientific publication of that decade – the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick.
The University refused. …
“This decision by the Appellate Court is much more than a small procedural action,” said Dr. David Schnare, the member-manager of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC, who is prosecuting this case. “We asked for the full history of the hockey stick graph and much more. We sought the history of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report and the discussions among the scientists as they discussed climate papers and the then burgeoning antagonism between climate scientists not of like mind.” Chaim Mandelbaum, Executive Director of FME Law explains, “This case is not over, but we appear to be at the beginning of the end.”
Nine years ago the Australian Liberals were on the verge of splitting. Turnbull was about to give the Labor Party a free pass on the Emissions Trading Scheme and sell Australia out to the EU. Climategate broke (thank you FOIA) and the party rebelled and tossed out Turnbull. Now, after three elections where the people voted No to carbon taxes every time they could, we have an emissions trading scheme, a Renewable Energy Target, and one of the most crippling Paris targets of any nation. This is despite our rapidly growing population, huge distances and massive resources and the failure of almost every other nation to even achieve their Paris goals. We are The Global Patsy, obediently sacrificing competitive advantage, GDP, and lifestyle – all so Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull get invited to the right parties. Economic carnage in a glorious quest to make the weather nicer.
Delivering his most strident attack to date on his government’s own energy policy, the former prime minister has warned Liberal colleagues they risk a repeat of a split that almost destroyed the party a decade ago.
Less than four weeks before five critical by-elections, Mr Abbott has sought to escalate the internal campaign against the national energy guarantee ahead of a pivotal August meeting of COAG in which the government will seek support from Labor states.
“Does the Liberal Party nine years on realise the wheel has turned full circle and we are back to where we were in late 2009, with Malcolm Turnbull trying to do a deal with the Labor Party on emissions reduction,” Mr Abbott told The Australian, ahead of a speech tonight to the climate sceptic-think tank, the Australian Environment Foundation.
It’s a fight, not a negotiation because there is no negotiating with witchcraft. Abbott is spot on:
“It’s not a circle you can square with the Labor Party … it is a fight that has to be won. There can be no consensus on climate change … you either win or lose … and at the moment we are losing.”
Abbott is discussing scientific points. This is rare from a politician — he’s not just debating the dismal economics, he’s confident, and right, about science. This is good. We want a science debate every bit as much as they don’t want one:
Latika Bourke, Sydney Morning Herald
He said despite the rate of carbon in the atmosphere increasing from 300 to 400 parts per million there had been no “dramatic consequences” on the climate.
“Storms are not more severe; droughts are not more prolonged; floods are not greater; and fires are not more intense than a century ago – despite hyperventilating reportage and over-the-top claims from Green politicians,” the former prime minister said…
“Sea levels have hardly risen and temperatures are still below those of the medieval warm period.
“Over time, temperature change seems to correlate rather more with sun spot activity than with carbon dioxide levels,” he claimed…
Unlike other politicians Abbott is unloading the past, cleaning the slate
The former PM now says he never anticipated the climate change reduction targets he signed up would be binding. ..
Mr Abbott said both he and John Howard had been in the dark about the full implications of their own climate change mitigation policies including the renewable energy target and the international emissions reductions pledges.
“I’m not sure that the Howard government fully anticipated where the renewable energy target would lead when it first made the decision to impose one,” he said.
When Abbott was PM he worked to get his direct action plan implemented (a cheap auction system that actually works to reduce carbon for bargain prices like $14/ton). Then up pops the macabre combo of Clive Palmer and Al Gore, and Palmer was got at. The coal miner suddenly “had” to have a seemingly empty clause leaving the door open for an emissions trading plan. The clause would only came into effect if all the other major world economies acted together which everyone knew would never happen. But that clause was the thin edge of the wedge, and when the Paris Agreement was crafted, all those big nations (India, China) agreed to do nothing, but officially, they agreed to do it together. The Paris deal was meaningless but they signed it, triggering sub clauses in domestic legislation in Australia, and probably in other Patsy Nations too.
When he was prime minister, Mr Abbott signed Australia up to reducing emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030. But he said on Tuesday that was only ever intended to be an aspiration.
“I certainly didn’t anticipate, as prime minister, how the aspirational targets we agreed to at Paris would, in different hands, become binding commitments,” he said.
The word trickery had paved the way for Turnbull to claim he was sticking to Abbott’s plan even as Turnbull did the exact opposite of the spirit of everything Abbott had gone to the election with. He sold the nation out. He has to go.
h/t Pat
Australia tried too hard to please,
The U.N., the E.U. and appease,
The Green beast that roared,
Which should now be ignored,
And begin to rise up off its knees.
Climate protestors put their best argument forward:
It’s taken thirty years and $100 billion in scientific research to get here.
They think they can stop droughts.
Now we know that the best thing about climate protestors is their cardboard.
Australians will surely now poke,
Fun at each bare-bottomed bloke,
Who sought coal-mining closure,
By their rear end exposure,
With each now the butt of a joke.
–Ruairi
I don’t think these guys realize the upper tropospheric hot spot is missing. They are going to feel pretty silly when they find out someone tricked them into standing naked in the main street of Melbourne.
As reported by EchonetDaily (whoever they are, they don’t appear to be a satirical site). This weekend in Melbourne …. sometime when it was very very dark and there were no pedestrians. (Or maybe it was photoshopped and they were never there at all?)
Coal is a dying industry, but luckily for the Australian economy, the rest of the world is not as smart as The Australian Greens and Labor Party and they are still buying it.
The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science figures show total coal exports are forecast to reach $58.1 billion in 2018-19, overtaking iron ore ($57.7bn) for the first time in almost a decade.
The big question, do we open up more coal mines now and rake in the dough, or try to make the weather nicer in one thousand years time? Tricky…
Resources Minister Matthew Canavan said new export forecasts strengthened the investment case for Adani’s proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coalmine and the development of Queensland’s Galilee Basin, which federal Labor has opposed. “Opening up the Galilee would generate 16,000 direct mining jobs and tens of billions in taxes.”
What do Australia’s big four banks do — ask Greenpeace for investment advice
In 2015, the National Australia Bank and Commonwealth bank announced they were refusing to finance Adani’s Carmichael Coal Mine. Then the ANZ agreed, and finally Westpac jumped on the anti-coal bandwagon too. Apparently, “Australian coal is an unbankable deposit”, at least according to Daid Holmes, Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies. But what would he know? About as much as our four biggest bankers.
So none of our big banks would finance a major project in our largest export industry.
Last Chance to Book for Tony Abbott Lecture: Melbourne, 3 July 2018
…
The place to be on Tuesday night.
“Climate Change & Restraining Greenhouse Gas Emissions“
Last days to book your tickets for the Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture given by the Hon. Tony Abbott—the former PM and current MHR for Warringah in NSW—on 3 July 2018.
Tickets: Book them through Eventbrite. Tickets:$35 for AEF members and $42 for others.
What costs $1,500m, makes no electricity, but “saves money”?
South Australia has used federal subsidies to build more wind power than it can use. They’ve spent half a billion already on diesel powered jet engines and a battery that can power the state for “minutes”. For 139 hours last year the state produced so much wind power it supplied 100% of the states electricity needs and then some, and the problem of excess electricity is only getting worse as wind generation keeps increasing and solar PV uptake is rampant.
When government rules and regs have created an inefficient, expensive problem, what do we do? More of it. A new report suggests that South Australia needs a direct transmission line to NSW which will cost $1.5b. We could spend that on a reliable generator instead, or get the government out of the way and let the private sector do it for us, but instead we need to pay for another transmission line to connect up different zones-of-subsidy-rent seekers and hope we get $30 off the bill? It’s a savings in the statistic margin of error…
South Australia didn’t even have an interconnector til 1990. Now with decentralized and renewable power they need two?
It’s another hidden cost of unreliable power. Put the interconnector on the “Renewables Tab”. It appears to be the direct line from the wind farms that are supposed to change the weather to the proposed Hydro 2.0 scheme we didn’t need.
Consumers will save up to $30 on their power bills if a new interconnector between NSW and South Australia is built, electricity transmission company ElectraNet says in a draft report into the Marshall government’s proposal.
The report, released by ElectraNet today, finds a new electricity transmission link “would deliver substantial economic benefits”.
ElectraNet chief executive Steve Masters said net market benefits were estimated to be around $1 billion over 21 years. But on current estimates, Mr Masters said a new interconnector would cost $1.5bn across both states. The link would be operational between 2022 and 2024.
From Anero.id we can see why SA now wants an interconnector that it didn’t need.
The total demand in SA is around 2,000MW, so we can appreciate the fun the guys must be having in the control rooms of the SA network as 1,400MW comes and mostly goes. (Graph below).
The megawatt mayhem in South Australia was backed up with Victorian brown coal. Now that Hazelwood is shut, they need coal power from Queensland, or if there is any to spare, from NSW. SA has excess renewable power to sell (sometimes) to collect those renewable forced RET payments from too.
SA Wind power, graph, June 2018
As TonyfromOz says on THIRTEEN occasions this month (so far), the ENTIRE 1800+ MW wind turbine capacity in SA failed to generate 50 MW of electricity.
South Australia already has more renewable power than it can use
All up SA has 1,806MW of wind power and then there is 781MW of rooftop solar meaning on a sunny, windy day at midday SA needs to dump some excess on other states. This works like mosquito repellent for any reliable baseload generator, effectively sucking all the fun out of owning a billion dollar resource.
Wind penetration was over 100% [in SA] for 139 hours across the 2016–17 year, on 30 separate days across the year. On these occasions, South Australia could have supplied its local demand entirely from wind generation, with surplus wind generation available to export to Victoria.
This excess power is spread over 30 separate days, usually isn’t during peak loads (when it might be useful), it creates volatility in the pricing, and helps to drive out the cheapest baseload players.The excess unreliable power is forecast to increase as even more wind and solar projects come into play.
“Over the next year, the 220MW Bungala solar project and the 212MW Lincoln Gap wind farm, both near Port Augusta, will also come on line, taking the state up towards 65 per cent renewables, and there are numerous other projects said to be near the point of financial close.
“AEMO also expects the amount of rooftop solar capacity in South Australia to double and reach over 1500 MW by 2025, by which time the state’s minimum demand could on occasions be met entirely by rooftop solar…” — Renew Economy
At all times the wind and solar power need almost complete back up standing by at the ready. Wind power is constrained if there is not enough back up sitting around waiting to spring into action.
The entire point of all this extra infrastructure is to reduce CO2 emissions and change the climate for our grandchildren. The electricity it produces is virtually always surplus to what existing infrastructure could produce.
Thought of the day
Through some freak of nature, even though South Australia has the *cheapest* electricity generators known to mankind, it also has the most expensive electricity in the world.
This is serious. The World Cup cometh, and the United Kingdom is running out of beer.
The UK emits over one million tons of CO2 each day but bottles of flood-drought-n-coral-killing CO2 are in short supply.
Trade journal Gas World, which first revealed there was a problem last week, said it was the “worst supply situation to hit the European carbon dioxide business in decades”.
Carbon capture is the way of the future, which is a shame. If it worked now, people wouldn’t be running out of beer, bacon, coke and even crumpets.
We spend billions to take pollution out of the sky and stuff it into deep holes. Then we pay people to generate the same pollution and put it in our food. Someone, join the dots. Cut out the middle man and move Heineken next to Drax!
As much of Germany’s nearly 30,000 strong fleet of wind turbines approach 20 or more years in age, the list of catastrophic collapses is growing more rapidly. The turbines are now being viewed by technical experts as “ticking time bombs”.
According to a commentary by Daniel Wetzel of online German Daily ‘Die Welt’, the aging rickety wind turbines are poorly inspected and maintained and thus are now posing a huge risk.
Over the past months alone there’s been a flurry of reports over wind turbines failing catastrophically and collapsing to the ground, e.g. see here, here and here.
Industrial systems in Germany need to get technical inspections and safety approvals, but wind turbines don’t…
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t at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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