Despite 20 years of non-stop propaganda and belligerent namecalling, strangely, expert green policies have achieved exactly nothing of what they said they aimed for. Coal provided 38% of our power in 1998 and it is still the same 38% in 2017. The non-fossil fuel sector has actually declined slightly as nukes decrease.
We spent billions doing exactly what was asked. Perhaps following the advice of people who think the debate is over and “denier” is a scientific term might not be the best national energy policy?
Fuel shares in global power generation for the last 20 years | BP Energy Review, 2018.
Global demand for coal and gas to generate electricity was back on the rise last year …
Most striking had been the failure of renewable energy to make an impact on the fossil fuels share of power generation, BP group chief economist Spencer Dale said.
“Despite the extraordinary (global) growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years,” he said.
The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38 per cent, exactly the same as 2017.
“The share of non-fossil fuel in 2017 is actually a little lower than it was 20 years ago, as the growth of renewables hasn’t offset the declining share of nuclear,” Mr Dale said.
h/t Pat.
Engineers and other skeptics predicted this would happen. At this point, honest Greens who care about CO2 emissions would be asking for help. Since they aren’t, we can assume the expert green policies are achieving what the Greens want, they just aren’t being honest.
Make no mistake, renewables policies are achieving “Green” aims
Policies pretending to reduce CO2 have shrunk the role of the free market, turned a fifth of all homes in Australia into subsidized generators, and increased government control of our energy as a larger sector becomes dependent on handouts. They’ve demonized independent energy producers, created a crisis and are using that crisis to blame “privatization” and the free market. They’ve polluted the concept of a free market to the point where people came to think that a fake market where the government entirely and artificially fixed supply and demand was “free”. They’ve polluted the word pollution…
If the Greens/Labor really cared about CO2 they’d be doing something different.
BP toes the line of the Ruling Class perfectly
Why wouldn’t BP? It profits from it – gas sales increase with more unreliable wind and solar generation, plus pandering holds the bullies at bay.
Spencer Dale, Group Chief Economist at BP gnashes teeth, “Oh Woe”
The power sector really matters. It’s by far the single biggest market for energy: absorbing over 40% of primary energy last year. And it’s at the leading edge of the energy transition, as renewables grow and the world electrifies. This year’s Statistical Review for the first time includes comprehensive data on the fuel mix within the power sector, aiding our understanding of this key sector.
Global power generation increased by 2.8% in 2017 close to its 10-year average. Almost all that growth came from the developing world. OECD demand edged up slightly, but essentially the decoupling of economic growth and power demand in the OECD seen over the past 10 years continued, with OECD power broadly flat over the past decade.
Spot a problem: half the growth in total power generation and yet only making 8% of total power?
The increase in global power generation was driven by strong expansion in renewable energy, led by wind (17%, 163 TWh) and solar (35%, 114 TWh), which accounted for almost half of the total growth in power generation, despite accounting for only 8% of total generation. Although wind continued in its role of the bigger, more established, elder cousin, it was solar energy that made all the waves.
This is striking and worrying, and we recommend …doing more of the same.
Standing back from the detail of what happened last year, the most striking – and worrying – chart in the whole of this Statistical Review is the trends in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years.
Striking: because despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years. The share of coal in the power sector in 1998 was 38% – exactly the same as in 2017 – with the slight edging down in recent years simply reversing the drift up in the early 2000s associated with China’s rapid expansion. The share of non-fossil in 2017 is actually a little lower than it was 20 years ago, as the growth of renewables hasn’t offset the declining share of nuclear. I had no idea that so little progress had been made until I looked at these data.
Worrying: because the power sector is the single most important source of carbon emissions from energy consumption, accounting for over a third of those emissions in 2017. To have any chance of getting on a path consistent with meeting the Paris climate goals there will need to be significant improvements in the power sector. But this is one area where at the global level we haven’t even taken one step forward, we have stood still: perfectly still for the past 20 years. This chart should serve as a wake-up call for all of us.
Keep calm and keep doing what we’re doing
Conclusion: Global energy markets in 2017 took a backward step in terms of the transition to a lower carbon energy system: growth in energy demand, coal consumption and carbon emissions all increased. But that should be seen in the context of the exceptional outcomes recorded in the previous three years. Some backsliding was almost inevitable. The road to meeting the Paris climate goals is likely to long and challenging, with many twists and turns, forward lurches and backward stumbles. To navigate our progress will require timely, comprehensive and relevant data. That’s the role of BP’s Statistical Review.
Academic Freedom in Australia: Academics are free to use hotmail at work
For the first time in months the ABC suddenly finds time to mention Professor Peter Ridd — but not because he got sacked for an email with the illegal line “for your amusement”. That new development in academic freedom was not newsworthy on the billion dollar ABC site. Nor did the-blob’s-ABC feel Australians needed to know that the international outcry over his sacking was so strong that Ridd raised $160,000 in donations in a mere couple of days. However now things are apparently “serious”: other academics at JCU have given up using the official email network, hiding their thoughts on hotmail and gmail instead. Finally, 27 days after he was sacked, the ABC have arrived…
Management of JCU insists Ridd’s sacking was not about academic freedom. But everyone at JCU acts otherwise. Staff at JCU now know exactly how free they are — if they say something the management doesn’t like, they too could be victims of a personalized email trawl. Anyone could lose their job at any time for falling foul of a selectively enforced and unknowable “code of conduct”.
A leading Great Barrier Reef researcher says academic staff at James Cook University (JCU) are avoiding using their staff emails in the wake of the sacking of climate change sceptic Peter Ridd. “They’re using G-mail, Hotmail and Yahoo instead,” Jon Brodie from the University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies told 7.30.
Professor Brodie was the target of some of Peter Ridd’s criticisms, but he still feels the search of the outspoken academic’s emails sends a “terrible signal” to the rest of JCU’s academic staff. “A lot of people will be thinking about what they wrote in email they thought were private to the people they were sent to,” he told 7.30. “We know already lots of people are now not using the JCU email system, it’s happening now.
“If they wanted, they (JCU) could go back through anybody’s emails and find what they said…”
So they have academic freedom to write emails to colleagues through external email systems. And the public who pay their salaries while they sit at work using hotmail have the right to see none of that. So much for transparency. So much for integrity. Bravo JCU.
As I said at the time: “This taints all research James Cook University puts out. We know all reports will be pre-filtered or self censored.”
If staff don’t even feel they can write freely in an email, we know for sure they won’t put it in a peer reviewed paper.
Give me a reason taxpayers should send one more dollar to this institution.
The new paper has zero mentions of the word. But other scientists have published plenty of papers describing how the West Antarctic zone is being warmed from below by 1200 degrees of magma. According to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co, it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1]His words. Thwaites Glacier,, smack in the middle of the warming is being melted from below by geothermal heat. Then there is the large blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. The researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”…. Capping it off, only last year 91 new volcanoes were discovered 2km underneath the West Antarctic Rift. That’s new, as in, we didn’t know they were there.
Follow the reasoning, either a trace gas 10 kilometers up is causing some spots of Antarctica to warm and other parts to cool, or hot magma at 1,200C is. What’s more likely?
Antarctic ice is warming in West Antarctica and the Peninsula, but not over most of East Antarctica.
From the new paper we get the same old pattern. The biggest part of Antarctica is East Antarctica and it’s not melting — even in this alarming new paper.
I thought there was CO2 there as well?
…
The battle of Big Meaningless Numbers
From the abstract we find tiny fractions are written up as big numbers of small units with no real context. Then they extrapolate a 6 year trend on an ice mass that’s been around for millions of years. Adding up the losses, in this “worst of the worst” scenarios Antarctica might be losing 187 billion tonnes of ice per year (give or take a lot). That’s 187 cubic kilometers of ice, which sounds like a lot until we look at the size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (29 million kilometers cubed). At this new “accelerated” rate the total loss is one 155,00oth of the total mass. Expressed another way, it’s 0.0006%. At this rate Antarctica will be entirely melted 155,000 years from now.
The Solar Wind is a torrent of space weather cruising past at 500 — 800 kilometers per second which is around 1.5 million miles per hour or, if you prefer, Mach 2,000.* It’s so powerful it erodes rocks on Mars, ejects particles up high and creates a kind of atmosphere of tiny rock particles which we can study. Then it blows that Martian atmosphere away.
In this new research people realized it was not just the rain of tiny high-speed protons fritzing Mars at 800 km per second that were carving up the rocks — the main role was from the heavy and highly charged He2+. (Now there’s a molecule you don’t see too often).
You might think that a variable torrent of charged particles that are constantly changing speed and direction might have an impact on our atmosphere, but you’d be wrong (or at least, politically incorrect). On Earth the solar wind “just causes the northern lights”. How do we know? We’ve got climate models. In all known GCMs the total global forcing for solar wind is “zero”. Must be true.
Thus and verily the IPCC can conclude that a flow of high speed charged particles *definitely* doesn’t change jet streams or affect ozone in any way, nor does it change cloud cover. Don’t bother looking. CO2 can cause droughts, floods, volcanoes and belly fat, but the solar wind is just a trace gas, I mean, a magnetized plasma. Whatever.
In IPCC “Science” our magnetic field and dense atmosphere protects us from the solar wind like a perfect Level 3 Containment field — see the USS Enterprise, Stardate 2369.Obviously.
But anyhow — for the astrochemistry buffs – another example of a model gone wrong:
The true power of the solar wind
The planets and moons of our solar system are continuously being bombarded by particles hurled away from the sun. On Earth this has hardly any effect, apart from the fascinating northern lights, because the dense atmosphere and the magnetic field of the Earth protect us from these solar wind particles. But on the Moon or on Mercury things are different: There, the uppermost layer of rock is gradually eroded by the impact of sun particles.
An Exosphere of Shattered Rock
“The solar wind consists of charged particles — mainly hydrogen and helium ions, but heavier atoms up to iron also play a role,” explains Prof. Friedrich Aumayr from the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien. These particles hit the surface rocks at a speed of 400 to 800 km per second and the impact can eject numerous other atoms. These particles can rise high before they fall back to the surface, creating an “exosphere” around the Moon or Mercury — an extremely thin atmosphere of atoms sputtered from the surface rocks by solar wind bombardment.
This exosphere is of great interest for space research because its composition allows scientists to deduce the chemical composition of the rock surface — and it is much easier to analyse the exosphere than to land a spacecraft on the surface.
Forgot the charge — it’s only physics:
Charge matters
However, this requires a precise understanding of the effects of the solar wind on the rock surfaces, and this is precisely where decisive gaps in knowledge still exist. Therefore, the TU Wien investigated the effect of ion bombardment on wollastonite, a typical moon rock. “Up to now it was assumed that the kinetic energy of the fast particles is primarily responsible for atomization of the rock surface,” says Paul Szabo, PhD student in Friedrich Aumayr’s team and first author of the current publication. “But this is only half the truth: we were able to show that the high electrical charge of the particles plays a decisive role. It is the reason that the particles on the surface can do much more damage than previously thought.”
They forgot the ol’ double-plus-helium
When the particles of the solar wind are multiply charged, i.e. when they lack several electrons, they carry a large amount of energy which is released in a flash on impact. “If this is not taken into account, the effects of the solar wind on various rocks are misjudged,” says Paul Szabo. Therefore, it is not possible to draw exact conclusions about the surface rocks with an incorrect model from the composition of the exosphere.
Protons make up by far the largest part of the solar wind, and so it was previously thought that they had the strongest influence on the rock. But as it turns out, helium actually plays the main role because, unlike protons, it can be charged twice as positively. And the contribution of heavier ions with an even greater electrical charge must not be neglected either.
After half a billion million years of climate change, I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that life on Earth (and specifically corals) have so many ways to cope with the climate changing. After all, it’s natural (if you are trained by Greenpeace) to assume that corals can only survive in a world with one constant stable temperature just like they never had.
One more tool in the coral-reef-workshop
Corals don’t just have a tool-box, they have a Home Depot Warehouse. h/t to GWPF
We already knew corals chuck out the symbionts that don’t work so well and pick up better partners. Plus, evolution left a stack of genes lying around that were honed in a world that was warmer, and natural selection has a way of amplifying better combinations as conditions shift. Then there is the way corals can be reseeded from safe sites, far away. Now we find out that corals can use epigenetics too.
Epigenetics is that kind of spooky effect where people can inherit the exact same DNA code yet it works or doesn’t work depending on whether it was Dad’s copy, or Mum’s, or whether parents were starved, fearful or stressed. It’s weird, see more on that below.
It’s an extra layer of information above and beyond the DNA code which is strictly just A, C, G’s and T’s in a four letter alphabet. Each section of DNA can also be compressed, zipped, or tagged with a methyl group so it is “archived” but not readily available. For example, we’ve got a copy of every gene in every cell, but obviously a liver cell has a bunch of genes that are “switched on” that are different to the suite of ones turned on in, say, skin cells. So it is with corals. During a heat wave, they switch on some inactive genes, and when hit with another heatwave soon after, they cope much better in the second round. People wondered if corals could do the epigenetic tricks which animals and plants do, and surprise, evidently, they can. We still haven’t confirmed whether those changes are inherited (which is pretty important, since the definition of “epigenetics” has itself evolved to mean “heritable”, at least in the rest of the animal kingdom). Since baby corals can evidently learn from lessons that happened to mummy corals I presume that epigenetics in corals is inherited and finding evidence of that is just a matter of time.
Anyhow, bowl me over, after millions of years of evolution in a turbulent ocean where temperatures and pH can vary by degrees in a single day and in every season, corals can cope with a smaller change, spread over a century.
They [Liew et al] placed colonies of the smooth cauliflower coral, Stylophora pistillata, in seawater aquariums with varying acidity levels for two years. Ocean acidification is a consequence of climate change and hinders the ability of corals to produce the calcium carbonate skeleton they need to maintain their structures. The researchers hypothesized that DNA methylation might allow corals to mitigate these effects by changing the way they grow.
After two years, the team sequenced the genomes of the corals and determined changes in methylation patterns.
“We noticed that corals grown under more acidic conditions had higher levels of DNA methylation,” says geneticist Yi Jin Liew. “Genes with increased methylation were related to cell growth and stress response, but not to calcification as we initially proposed,” he says.
The team next plans to investigate whether these epigenetic changes can be passed down to future generations. “The idea is fairly revolutionary,” says Liew.
As many as 74 genes are activated or archived under hot conditions
In the Samoan corals, for example, out of 16,728 genes investigated, the activity of 74 changed significantly when placed in elevated temperatures. Although many have unknown functions, some produce so-called heat shock proteins that stabilise vital chemical processes, binding to other proteins that have been misshapen by stress and bending them back into working order. “They’re like protein chiropractors,” says Palumbi.
Heat-shock proteins are good for us too. They are handy weapons I’ll be talking about more soon. They may help us live longer.
If the activity of 74 genes is changed under heat, that is a pretty complex response. That raises the question: if epigenetics controls the genes, what controls the epigenetics? How does a cell know to activate or archive the right 74 genes?
Here’s an interesting video if you want to know more about epigenetics:
Hungry boys are more likely to go on to have grandchildren with less heart disease?
In the Överkalix study, paternal (but not maternal) grandsons of Swedish men who were exposed during preadolescence to famine in the 19th century were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease. If food was plentiful, then diabetes mortality in the grandchildren increased, suggesting that this was a transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.The opposite effect was observed for females—the paternal (but not maternal) granddaughters of women who experienced famine while in the womb (and therefore while their eggs were being formed) lived shorter lives on average.
Freaky weird — can a phobia be inherited?
Fear conditioning
Studies on mice have shown that certain conditional fears can be inherited from either parent. In one example, mice were conditioned to fear a strong scent, acetophenone, by accompanying the smell with an electric shock. Consequently, the mice learned to fear the scent of acetophenone alone. It was discovered that this fear could be passed down to the mice offspring. Despite the offspring never experiencing the electric shock themselves the mice still display a fear of the acetophenone scent, because they inherited the fear epigenetically by site-specific DNA methylation. These epigenetic changes lasted up to two generations without reintroducing the shock.[143]
Even twins can drift in epigenetics – archiving different genes as they age:
In this case, only healthy twin pairs were studied, but a wide range of ages was represented, between 3 and 74 years. One of the major conclusions from this study was that there is an age-dependent accumulation of epigenetic differences between the two siblings of twin pairs. This accumulation suggests the existence of epigenetic “drift”. Epigenetic drift is the term given to epigenetic modifications as they occur as a direct function with age.
REFERENCES
Liew, Y.J. Zoccola, D., Li, Y., Tambutté, E., Venn, A.A., Michell, C.T. Cui, G., Deutekom, E.S., Kaandorp, J.A., Voolstra, C.R., Forêt, S., Allemand, D., Tambutté, S. & Aranda, M. Epigenome-associated phenotypic acclimatization to ocean acidification in a reef-building coral. Science Advances4, eaar8028 (2018).| http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar8028Press release.
NSW has been hit by clouds and a lack of reliable coal power. Prices are soaring. In NSW the Tomago Aluminium Smelter consumes about 10% of the state’s electricity. It has been forced to switch off three times in the last week because there was not enough reserve power on the grid.
“This is not summer with extreme demand. This is the likely future of our energy grid as once reliable baseload generators exit the [NEM] and are mostly replaced with intermittent wind and solar projects with no practical storage to speak of,” Mr Howell said. “Our energy debate should not advocate either renewables or conventional thermal,” he said.
— SMH, Peter Hannam,
Aluminum pot lines can only sit idle for a few hours before they cool too far and the damage becomes permanent and wildly expensive as the aluminum becomes solid.
Renewables-fans blame the emergency on the unreliability of coal
See @TheAustraliaInstitute. Suddenly Australia is the only western nation on Earth with coal resources that can’t maintain its coal plants. We did it for decades, but now the economics for coal is pathetically inadequate — thanks to government interference destroying the free market. So coal infrastructure, worth billions in any other nation, is being run into the ground.
Tomago said it had been forced to halt each of three potlines this week – one on Tuesday and two on Thursday – because of a lack of reserve across the grid serving eastern states.
Matt Howell, Tomago’s chief executive, told Fairfax Media on Friday lunchtime, the company was concerned it may face another curtailment of operations later in the day. Just before 6.30 pm, he said the company had probably “dodged a bullet”, with the demand peak over.
AEMO said this was partly due to heavier than expected cloud cover which reduced the output from solar rooftop generation, resulting in increased demand from the grid.
Dang Clouds
On Friday, solar power had one of its worst days so far this year hitting a peak of just 2,000MW. The normal June solar PV output of the entire east coast 40,000km network is over 3,500MW, so fully 1,500MW was missing.
Strap yourself in! This is more useless infrastructure than anywhere else on planet Earth. The only time solar PV panels provide something we might need is at afternoon tea time in summer when airconditioners are on. So for three quarters of the year they provide electricity when we don’t need it, and for three quarters of every day they don’t even work. The rest of the time they burn capital, increase the blackout and fire risk and sit there collecting dust and hail stones.
Electricity at the wrong time is not just wasted, it’s a burden
Too much electricity bumps up the grid frequency and voltage, potentially damaging equipment and risking blackouts. Obviously we have to “manage” this flood of green electrons. Your money or your lights.
If you like your computer, you can keep your computer. But hand over your job, the economy and your quality of life.
Welcome to the Duck Curve
Each year as more solar power arrives when we don’t need it in the middle of the day, the belly of the load curve swings lower and lower. Then as the sun fades and the peak need of the day arrives after dark the demand ramps up, and so must the supply. This peak is the ducks head. The neck of the duck is when generators must ramp up steeply to take over from the failing sun. It’s often when prices spike.
The tail of the duck is the secondary peak at breakfast. The belly of the duck is noon, when otherwise profitable cheap baseload electricity infrastructure sits around and burns cash. The middle of the day is “theoretically cheap” but the rest of the day gets more expensive.
If we add more storage, we just toss more money in the pit in an attempt to flatten a curve that we created in the quest for greener electrons.
The solution, just stop, stop already!
The commentariat below are saying that at best we switch our hot water systems to “soak” up electricity we didn’t need, or buy electric cars we don’t want. Or we need fancy-pants switches to disconnect the panels, or we need to pay millions for batteries or billions for pumped hydro. Pay now, pay later, pay, pray and pay!
I say, just stop. Stop installing infrastructure we don’t need, stop subsidizing it, stop pretending we need green electrons. Stop pretending we need “storage” to solve a problem we never had. Stop buying electricity at inflated prices from generators which don’t make it when we need it. People wanting to make money selling solar power can pay for the batteries themselves.
Start spreading the costs of this pointless experiment as fairly as we can instead of dumping it on electricity consumers who don’t have solar and on taxpayers who voted against a carbon tax.
Call it a “solar spill” — doesn’t sound so bad
Everyone seems to think this is just an unlucky accident happening because of an inevitable transition. Instead this is a slow motion train wreck — utterly predictable:
“Solar spill”, when high levels of energy are generated by rooftop installations in the middle of the day when demand is low, is becoming a problem for Australia’s electricity networks, according to Andrew Dillon, the head of the grid representative body Energy Networks Australia.
“If this goes badly, one of three things is going to happen,” he said at an Energy Networks 2018 event on Wednesday.
“Either we get voltage and frequency issues at the local level or even localised blackouts and things tripping off.”
Or rooftop solar would have to be stopped from coming into the grid or, he said, the networks would have to spend a fortune to have the capacity to deal with it.
Energy companies are becoming concerned about excess solar power in grid
Residential solar panels feed extra electricity into grid which can overload it
Electricty experts say residential battery packs are needed to stop blackouts
The best solution to soak up the excess energy and stop it from coming into the grid is by installing battery packs.
‘We have to soak up the energy somehow, battery storage is an efficient way of doing this; we can get energy recoveries of around 90 per cent,’ energy service company Greensync’s chief executive Phil Blythe said.
At the ABC this is a “success” for renewables, where Queensland is a “world leader”.
And the solutions are smart and involve the government spending even more of your money:
Mr Dillon said if the issue was not addressed, problems could occur.
“The first one is we start to get voltage and frequency issues, which can damage equipment or even localise outages,” he said.
“The second one is we have networks saying to customers wanting to connect solar, ‘No you can’t do it because we’re full’.”
Or, he said, the networks may end up having to spend a fortune to upgrade their facilities.
Some call this profligate emergency patch for our grid — “future proofing”:
Queensland Energy Minister Dr Anthony Lynham said the Government had introduced several measures to future-proof the network. “We have to move the peak that we’re seeing during the middle of the day when we have solar, to that night time cooking peak, and we’re doing that,” Dr Lynham said. “The big thing we’re doing obviously is the pumped hydro, the big Wivenhoe pumped hydro storage solution. That’s 570 megawatts … that’s a coal-fired power station.
Queensland Energy Minister Dr Anthony Lynham said the Government had introduced several measures to future-proof the network.
“We have to move the peak that we’re seeing during the middle of the day when we have solar, to that night time cooking peak, and we’re doing that,” Dr Lynham said. “So during the middle of the day when all the solar panels on roofs are working, we’re storing energy through pumping water up the top of the hill at Wivenhoe and at night time we’re driving it back down.”
Dr Lynham said the Government was taking a smart approach to the issue.
“We’re bringing on an interest-free loan scheme for batteries later on this year,” he said. “Instead of peaking your hot water at night when power used to be cheap, you peak your hot water during the day, you have your pool pump running during the middle of the day when the solar is on. “And also you can’t have a normal meter installed in a house — if you build a house or change your meter it must be a smart meter so all those controls are available to the household.”
h/t David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz, Pat, Ian, others Thank you.
The Queensland government is concealing its financial support for large-scale renewable energy projects, guaranteeing subsidies to solar companies that do not appear on balance sheets.
With an expert panel previously finding the government would need to spend between $500 million and $900m in subsidies to meet its 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, there are now calls for spending to be made public.
The government has struck four deals with major solar-farm developers, under “contracts for difference”, with floor prices nominated for the sale of their energy in order to attract finance. When the market price falls below that threshold, the government has to make up the difference.
Luckily for Queensland taxpayers — who don’t know how to spot a good investment or the energy source of the future — the Government can spend their money for them. The Palaszuczuk government has hammered out such a good deal for Queenslanders that it can’t tell them what it is. Try to figure out a situation where the Taxpayers are winning, but the government doesn’t want to say so.
Two of the four lucky subsidy farms have capacities of 50MW and 15MW which will make a big difference to the states 14,000MW generation capacity. These two solar farms are expensive but token to the point of being nearly imaginary. As commenter Terrence says:
“Yesterday at 9 am Queensland was generating 7,000 MW from fossil fuels/hydro and 80 MW from windmills and solar panels which is typical of Qld’s power mix over the last couple of months.
…These [50 and 15MW] capacities are nameplate ratings only if they run 24/7/365, …. The real ratings of these two baby power projects is more like 12.5 MW and 3.75 MW respectively which are definitely not large scale. “
Queensland has quite a lot of coal, oil and gas, so the Queensland govt has decided to use… something else. The state is aiming for a miraculous 50% renewables. Ponder the brave task ahead. To be 50% renewable, Queensland needs to generate more like 3,500MW on average with the unreliables, and that’s after capacity factors are taken into account.
Secret subsidies paid underhand,
By the government of sunny Queensland,
To give solar capacity,
An unearned veracity,
Which their climate-change masters demand.
Back from travels finally. So much to catch up on.
Last week, the world leading nation in solar panel manufacturing announced big cuts to subsidies in order to make their electricity cheaper. Can you believe? The cuts are big enough for The Motley Fool to headline this “Why the Lights Went Out on Solar Today”. (h.t GWPF)
Put this in perspective — in late 2016, Scientific American declared that China Is Dominating the Solar Industry. Apparently, the Chinese forced the prices down, drove US leaders out of business, and the US could only hope to be second. Without a hint of impending doom, Scientific American went on to title one sub-part: AN INDUSTRY PROPELLED BY TAX CREDITS. The Chinese government picked a “winner”, grabbed the industry from all over the world, brought it to China, and ran with it. Now apparently rising electricity prices hurt too much. Who could have seen that coming?
“According to some veterans in the U.S. solar industry, China bought solar companies and invited others to move to China, where they found cheap, skilled labor. Instead of paying taxes, they received tax credits.”
[Capital Watch] Chinese regulators said Friday they were unexpectedly suspending construction of new solar panel farms and cut subsidies to the industry, sending solar energy companies’ stocks plummeting Monday.
Some media reports said this policy approach was the most austere in years, and that it indicated a more significant rollback of subsidies for industry players.
Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, said the policy will curb the fast growth of PV power bases, amid efforts by the central government to make electricity cheaper for consumers.
“This year’s government work report clearly stipulated that 2018 electricity prices will be lowered by 10 percent. But the PV subsidy comes from continuous hiking of electricity prices in the past, which was paid for by ordinary consumers,” Lin told the Global Times on Sunday,
He added that with the need to cut electricity prices, the PV subsidies must now be scaled back.
The academic also admitted that the PV subsidy is paid for by “ordinary consumers”. If only Australia could aspire to have academics so honest, open and free to speak?
Both moves are aimed at keeping in check the more than 100 billion yuan (US$15.6 billion) deficit in a state-run renewable energy fund, which is financed by a surcharge on power users’ bills.
All this and Chinese electricity consumers don’t even get meaningfully votes…
No company will be spared from the reduction in China’s solar incentives. Out of 99 gigawatts (GW) of solar projects built in 2017, 53 GW were built in China. That bullish streak came to an end on Monday when China took steps to slow its solar industry. Feed-in tariffs that provide set prices for electric power sent to the grid will be cut and distributed generation (DG) projects will be capped until further notice. Early estimates are that solar installations will fall to around 35 GW in 2018, with a lot of that already installed. The impact of the policy changes will be widespread, and no company will be spared…
China’s National Development and Reform Commission said there would be no more planned ground-mounted solar projects in 2018 and subsidies for future ground-mounted projects would be forbidden…
Distributed solar farms were also capped at 10 GW for 2018, a level that may have already been exceeded…
Demand is going to fall and prices could go with it. Roth Capital estimates the solar market will be oversupplied by 34 GW of panels…
Even SunPower’s (NASDAQ:SPWR) premium-priced high-efficiency solar panels will have a little more competition as Chinese manufacturers look to dump solar panels on anyone who will buy them…
So if 50% of the worlds solar was being built in China and it has suddenly slammed on the brakes there will be a flood of cheap panels in the next few months but solar manufacturers will go broke as the industry adjusts, and then panel prices will recover in a smaller market.
“Britain has enjoyed its sunniest and warmest May since records began in 1929, provisional figures show…”
The average daytime maximum temperature was 62.6F (17.0C), just beating the previous all-time high of 62.4F (16.9C) set in May 1992.
However not-so-provisional, long known and well studied records show that this May was just like a lot of other Mays. So far, this controversial and unexpected result has not been reported.
The Met Office appear to have lost the worlds oldest and longest temperature dataset. Luckily unfunded blogger, Paul Homewood of Notalotofpeopleknowthat, kept a copy of the historic Central England Temperature record on a spare USB stick and spotted that this May in England really wasn’t that unusual.
The average temperature from May 1 to 10 was the highest ever noted since meteorologists first started gathering precise daily data in 1772.
If only all Met Bureaus had a 359 year thermometer record to selectively sweep so they could meet their mandatory Hottest Ever Headline Quota.
The Agency-of-Data-Amnesia has been reporting the first ten days of May as a national benchmark for at least the last 456 hours. It’s up there with the Hottest EVER Bank Holiday — a climate marker of an era that started when Bank Holiday Weekends were first discovered as long ago as 1978.
Coming soon, the hottest EVER third weekend of June.
Showing an uncanny knack to do exactly the wrong thing in an expensive way and with prosaic timing, the Turnbull government is apparently considering using Australian cars to control the climate. As a nation of die-hard car heads with the lowest population density in the world and award winning high prices for electricity, we qualify as the last advanced nation on Earth who should go “electric”.
Currently, EV’s are so rare here, we have one for every 1,750 square kilometers. Don’t be fooled by the Australian continent’s map of charging points. Each charging point is scaled up to approx 14,000 times its real size.
The day after Trump was elected on a vow to quash Paris, we signed up, now as the US winds back emissions rules, Turnbull wants to ramp them up:
The car industry has warned that some of Australia’s most popular cars will be taken off the market, or face significant price hikes, under tough carbon-emissions standards being actively considered by the Turnbull government.
The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries said the Toyota Hilux and Ford Ranger, the nation’s top-selling cars last year, would be among those at risk under proposed emissions rules, similar to those abandoned by US President Donald Trump.
How many storms will we stop with this?
There are 1.2 billion cars in the world, and Australian drive 1.5% of them. We have a 19 million strong car fleet, and Minister Frydenberg predicts an electric vehicle “revolution” with “more than one million EVs on Australian roads by 2030”. Sure. We have all of 4,000 EVs now. That’s the entire national tally.
Only 996,000 new EV’s to go.
Australians love their big cars. And only 2 of the top 20 sellers would pass the proposed 105 g CO2/km limit. But that’s ok, because the rules will only apply to new cars, which means more people will keep driving the old ones. Too bad if you own a new car sales yard. Too bad if you wanted to reduce CO2.
According to a regulatory impact statement prepared by the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities, the average annual cost for those required to comply with the policy would be more than $2bn a year. If the government opted for a softer target of 119gCO2/km, the compliance burden would fall to about $1.4bn.
And the rest…!
UPDATE: From commenter TdeF: … the CO2 limit of 106g/km translates into a petrol limit of 4.6litres/100km.
This eliminates even the smallest lightest 4 cylinder Toyotas. Clearly the only way to meet this limit is for hybrid or electric cars, of any weight. According to this standard all electric cars pass, no matter how heavy. That is not true however. If we assume deceleration costs nothing, energy costs vary directly with vehicle weight and all energy costs translate directly into CO2. So this is once again an anti Fossil fuel limit. Consider that in Australia today is that 90% of all power is coal. The wind and solar are name plate, sometimes of zero value.
So how much CO2 in g/km does a Tesla S generate with a 65kwhr battery in Australia today? 60KwHr and a rage of 350km. Firstly coal produces 1kg of CO2 per kwhr, and add 5% for distribution losses and the Tesla S generates 70kg of CO2 at the power stations in 350km. This is 200g/km. Ban Electric cars!
Lets pay more to increase emissions?
But EV’s were never much good at reducing CO2 unless you live in France, where they have nuclear power. A Norweigan study found EV’s were worse than useless in countries where electricity was made from, you guessed it, coal. In China, which is powered by 65% coal, one study estimated EV’s produce 50% more CO2 than gas guzzlers. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, by why pay more for it?). Australia, of course is even more dependent on coal than China is with our grid being 73% coal fired. These are coal fired cars.
Let’s pay more to raise the price of electricity and gas, and ruin the grid?
Let’s pay more to pay more. The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) estimates that each new EV could add $2,000 a year to the cost of infrastructure and generation. At the moment that will be paid for by people who mostly don’t own electric cars. Often-times the same people who are paying for other people’s solar panels and other people’s wind farms.
And if people get the new fat-batteries that supercharge nice and fast with 50kW chargers, each new car will be like adding 20 new houses on the grid. Just what we need.
Sell this as a “Win” for consumers?
This will save Australians money, but not the way the Minister thinks.
Cities Minister Paul Fletcher, who is leading the government’s Ministerial Forum on Vehicle Emissions with Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, said the government was yet to finalise the policy, but “any decision will place savings for Australians front and centre”.
“Under a fuel efficiency standard, the average motorist in Australia could save up to $500 a year in fuel costs,” he said.
The average motorist will save thousands by holding onto their old cars, or by buying second hand cars, and mostly from ex-government agencies which are still “rich” enough to afford aquiring the new ones.
Even without a fuel efficiency standard the average motorist is free, as far as I know, to buy cars with better fuel economy, and mostly they don’t.
After 2.5 years of development, this is all they have?
Apparently the development team has been working for 30 months on this plan.
Carmakers would be forced to meet the target as the average emission level of all vehicles they sell in Australia, or face fines for breaching the limit.
To sell cars such as the Hilux and Ranger, which typically emit more than 260gCO2/km, manufacturers would have to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids. The Toyota Corolla, which is leading vehicle sales this year, emits 96gCO2/km in its hybrid electric form, while the 1.8-litre petrol version emits 159gCO2/km, the Green Vehicle Guide says.
Bureaucrats looking for a tooth fairy:
It’s understood energy bureaucrats are continuing to model the 105gCO2/km target under different EV uptake scenarios to come up with a policy that will have no theoretical impact on prices and won’t force drivers to switch cars.
The only good news, the damage might not start til 2025. Then Australians will have to buy 200,000 EV’s a year to meet the target.
Yet another climate-change czar,
Wants a carbon-tax, on each new car,
To stop droughts, hurricanes,
Heatwaves, extreme rains,
And flash flooding in Kandahar.
In 2011, environmentalists won the worlds largest judgement against Chevron (holy moley $18 billion), but it turned out it was all based on fraud, fake witnesses and telling lies. Who would think people who say they like trees and human rights would be so self serving? The award has since been overturned — indeed the tables have turned, and last week Chevron was awarded $38 million in damages.
Strangely, bad behaviour of planet-saving-people doesn’t appear to rate highly in the news. Hands up who thinks the BBC/ABC/CBC would fail to mention it if environmentalists won a $38m suit against a money-laundering-witness-tampering oil company?
[May 25th, 2018] SAN RAMON, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 25, 2018– The Supreme Court of Gibraltar has issued a judgment against Pablo Fajardo, Luis Yanza, Ermel Chavez, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia (the “Front”) and Servicios Fromboliere for their role in a conspiracy to procure and attempt to enforce a fraudulent Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron. The court awarded Chevron Corporation$38 million in damages and interest and issued a permanent injunction against the defendants, preventing them from assisting or supporting the case against Chevron in any way.
Donziger and Fajardo, an Ecuadorian lawyer, were found by a U.S. Federal Court to have engaged in extortion, money laundering, wire fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. The Front, which has long been involved in peddling a dishonest public relations campaign against Chevron aimed at extorting a settlement from the company, and Servicios Fromboliere, an Ecuadorian law firm established by Fajardo, are both shareholders in Amazonia and part of the extensive web of obscure entities established by the participants in the fraud against Chevron to attempt to hide their misconduct and profit from it.
The backstory –thanks to The Daily Caller, and Tim Pearce
An Ecuador court issued an $18 billion judgement against Chevron in February 2011 for environmental and social harm the company allegedly caused to the Amazon. The amount was later reduced to $9.5 billion, but a U.S. district court in New York nullified the judgement due to fraudulent and illegal activities by Steven Donziger, the lead American lawyer behind the lawsuit, according to the district court ruling.
The New York district court found that while Donziger had initiated the case with good intentions, he corrupted the process through telling half-truths, outright lies, and using fake evidence and witnesses.
“If ever there were a case warranting equitable relief with respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it,” the district court ruling said.
The dark side of environmentalism has been turned into a play that’s too hot for at least one actor
Haven’t heard about it?? Funny. The same media that reported endlessly on the so-called “pollution” went pretty quiet when the case turned out to be a fraud. And a load of Hollywood celebrities who helped promote the fraud have also gone very quiet recently. Yes I’m talking about you Sting, Mia Farrow and Danny Glover.
The play shows how the plaintiffs, led by Donziger, bribed the judge and ghost wrote the judgment that awarded them this massive amount. And they were helped on their fraud by a cheerleading media that reported the allegations as fact but have been silent as the truth was revealed.
The scope of the fraud was enormous and at times farcical. Along with bribing judges, they used ludicrous code words to describe the top secret payments. It was all revealed when a New York court, realizing that something was amiss, ordered Donziger to hand over his files. In those files and diaries, Donziger admitted illegal bribes to judges and court officials as he wondered if he had “done a deal with the devil.”
That is one heck of a carrot:
In one of the most outrageous examples, Donziger secretly fought and stopped the Ecuadorian government from cleaning up their pollution because it wouldn’t look good for his case. Donziger was also going to become very rich in the process. He stood to pocket $1.2 billion before the fraud was uncovered.
The script is based on Donziger’s own diary, yet the actor couldn’t cope. It’s almost like it was a religious blasphemy…
Apparently, the actor had difficultly performing the part because it cast the environmental movement in a negative light, the sources say. But the facts attached to a lawsuit involving Chevron Corp. show that environmental activists colluded with Donziger to bribe a judge [in Ecuador] and ghostwrite a massive legal judgment against the company that initially totaled $18 billion. …
“The $18-Billion Prize reveals a dirty secret that many environmental lawsuits are frauds based on outrageous claims and sometimes outright lies and that the media are little more than stenographers for these liars,” McAleer said in an email.
Climate change might bring more food as it expands into the arctic. In a big surprise, scientists found that agriculture works best in places without much snow and ice.
Burn oil and feed the world
Only a third of the giant northern boreal forest is able to be cropped at the moment. With any luck, serious global warming will set in, allowing us to raise the edge of the zone of arable land and feed millions more hungry people.
Obviously , we need to spend billions to stop this.
Though Canadians and Russians may disagree (especially if they thought CO2 actually mattered, but who does?).
Given CO2’s mixed performance in the last hundred years, I predict disappointment…
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