I was lucky enough to spend some time with the wonderful Professor William Happer the last few days thanks to the IPA. The man is a living legend of science having worked on the StarWars program in the Cold War and with the White House in the 1990s and in the Trump era. His talk had something for everyone, speaking about the need for bravery in dangerous times, and the psychology of crowds and yet with enough detail on emission spectrum calculations to appeal to the true science nerds as well. His work on adaptive optics with lasers in the atmosphere was considered so important to national security it was classified as a military secret. Despite that he was one of the first casualties of the political war on science – losing his position as Director of Energy Research in the US Dept of Energy in 1993 for speaking his mind on ozone.
Happer conveys an enthusiasm for physics, astronomy, the Earth that is infectious.
Book Now — and don’t forget the IPA offers a program for 15-25 year olds called Generation Liberty — with membership for just $10 a year and free admission to some events like this one. This is a chance to share that moment with children or grandchildren. Send this link to anyone you know doing science or engineering at university.
Melbourne at the Ritz-Carlton on Friday 15 September, Sydney at the Four Seasons on Monday 18 September, and in Brisbane at the Sofitel, on Wednesday, 20 September.
Each event will start at 5:30 pm and there will be a Q&A session following.
The new study on stalagmites in caves of the Pyrenees shows that modern climate change is nothing compared to normal fluctuations in the last 2,500 years, when it was at times much hotter, colder, and more volatile. Rapid shifts between temperatures were common.
The researchers looked at 8 stalagmites in 4 caves and local lake levels, but they also compared their results with other European temperature proxies and reconstructions and the pattern is consistent across the region. The Roman Warm Period was much hotter than today, and for hundreds of years as well, even though coal plants were rare. Apparently, there was a reason Romans were dressed in togas.
The Dark Ages were very cold, especially around 520 – 550AD — which may be related to what the researchers call a “cataclysmic” volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536AD. It was followed by two other massive volcanic eruptions in 540 and 547AD. This effect is apparently visible in European tree rings which showed “an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling”.
Indeed, the researchers declare that volcanoes and solar variability appear to be the main drivers of the climate in SouthWestern Europe.
So finally we see one long continuous proxy record from ancient Greek times right through until 2010. The big question is why these sorts of studies are not done everywhere and all the time. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of caves with stalagmites to analyze. If the climate really was “the biggest threat to life on Earth” why are these extraordinary datasets not the top item on the wish-list of every institution that claims they care about the climate?
There will be more to say on this remarkable paper:
Some passages from the paper discuss how these results match other studies from Europe:
The cold event at ca. 540 AD (the coldest of the speleothem record) may be related to a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536 AD and spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere, together with the effect of two other massive eruptions in 540 and 547 AD (Sigl et al., 2015). An unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling was observed in European tree-ring records associated with these large volcanic eruptions, corresponding to the LALIA period (Büntgen et al., 2016).
Some passages from the paper discuss how these results compare with many other studies from Europe and with stark moments in history.
Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.
The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:
Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs
Jillian Ambrose
None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.
The companies had warned ministers repeatedly that the auction price was set too low for offshore windfarms to take part after costs in the sector soared by about 40% because of inflation across their supply chains.
Electricity from wind isn’t cheap and it never will be
The latest auction of rights to build offshore wind farms failed to attract any bids, despite offering higher subsidised prices. That alone indicates that wind is not cheap or getting cheaper.
But the real reason for the lack of interest in the auction is that, for the first time, bidders are not free to walk away from their bids when it suits them. In the past, they could put in low offers, boast about them being cheap, then take the higher market price later. The Government has at last called their bluff, so they are having to admit that electricity prices need to be higher to make wind farms pay.
The cost of subsidising wind is vast. Then add the cost of getting the power from remote wind farms to where people live. And the cost of balancing the grid and backing wind up with gas plants for the times when the wind drops. And the cost of paying wind farms to reduce output on windy days when the grid can’t take it.
And yet the wind industry is complaining that today’s high electricity prices are not high enough, and without more subsidies they will stop building
The true cost of adding wind power to the electricity grid was always hidden with complex schemes.
It’s a catastrophe
At The Guardian, this auction was described as “catastrophic”, so we know it’s good news:
Sam Richards, the founder and campaign director of Britain Remade, which campaigns for economic growth in Britain, said the “catastrophic outcome” of the auction was “the direct result of the government’s complacency and incompetence”.
The government didn’t listen to the industry:
Industry insiders said the three offshore wind developers behind these plans – SSE, ScottishPower and the Swedish company Vattenfall – were forced to sit out the bidding after ministers refused to heed their warnings.
Now if the Government had listened to Exxon that would have been evidence of the planet-wrecking influence of Big Oil, but if the government didn’t listen to Big Renewables, it was incompetent.
Things are so bad, the wind industry is abandoning current half built projects:
Apparently the British government should have taken more money from citizens or forced the prices of electricity up for customers in order to “deliver low cost energy”, whatever that is:
Keith Anderson, the chief executive of ScottishPower, said: “This is a multibillion-pound lost opportunity to deliver low-cost energy for consumers and a wake-up call for government.
This “Low Cost Energy” seemingly refers to some mythical electrical kilowatthours that only show up on academic reports not on consumer electricity bills.
Sept 8th, 2023: The Government has today announced the results of the fifth auction of Contracts for Difference subsidies for renewable electricity generation. Its has been a failure, and may represent a landmark moment for renewables policy.
Only 3.7GW of new capacity has bid successfully, mostly through small projects, as compared to nearly 12GW last year. There were no bids for offshore wind, the UK’s flagship renewable generator.
Vivek Ramaswamy has a plan. It’s quite something to listen to. He has an extraordinary combination of skills.
This is a man who is only 38, and has studied molecular biology*, made millions in biotech, understands Big Pharma, but he’s also done a law degree at Yale. He is that rarest of combinations — the CEO who understand biology and science, and the lawyer who reads the constitution, and the investor who has played and won on Wall Street. He is all of these things.
I’ve never heard a Presidential candidate speak like this — with an eight year plan grounded in the legal foundations of the nation. He knows employment laws make individuals unsackable, but whole departments can be razed. Nothing can stop the President from dismantling the FBI if he wants to. Ramaswamy is already assembling a team, picking the players. He can list what he will get done by 2033 when he leaves office and his youngest starts high school.
Last week I played a small extract of this interview with Shawn Ryan — where Ramaswamy described how the FDA is captured by Big Pharmaceutical firms. ( “Big Pharma is the worlds biggest lobbying organisation”) But the whole interview is compelling and I’ve listened to interviews before about his books, about Woke Inc, about Strive (the Capital Fund he set up that runs counter to BlackRock and ESG) but this is about Ramaswamy himself, and his plan for the US, the Deep State and this strange moment in history. As the child of Indian immigrants he can explain what makes America Great better than many Americans can.
His role in this campaign will surely change it — his competitors must be listening to interviews like this, taking notes.
“It’s a machine that we are up against”
Ramaswamy describes the Deep State as a machine which needs puppets to represent them — the people we elect to run the government are not the ones who run the government. It’s no accident we have a gerontocracy, he says. It’s designed to be that way. The real laws of this country are not made in Congress, they’re made in the halls of bureaucracy.
The machine in the Monster that we have created. There are many good individuals doing what they think is a good job inside the machine. The waterfall of power flows from the President to the administrative state, to executives in social media, to managers in third party firms to AI. The decisions are not even being made by humans. The AI has learnt to spot US Flags in social media as a risk factor.
We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country
In the old world, Ramaswamy says, people got together in smoky rooms in the back of Palace Halls to decide how to run countries. Now it’s the enlightened elite making these decisions. We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country and decide about issues like climate change or racial injustice. The real divide now is not Republican or Democrat, it is between the managerial class and the citizen.
We fought a revolution to say Hell No to that theory and that We The People in this constitutional republic must be the ones who decide.
Now that old monster is rearing its head again, he says, except this time the power is diffused. We might think the power is at the back of a three-letter-government building in Washington DC, but there’s no smoking hall there. Maybe the power lies at the corner office of BlackRock, but it’s not quite there either. Instead the power is woven into a machine of the managerial class. It’s very hard to identify. It’s very pervasive…
It’s a two hour interview. You can convert it to Mp3 and listen as you jog, drive or cook. It was compelling starting from 3 mins in.
*Molecular biology is my favourite science — it’s not possible to understand the human condition, life, viruses, medicine and biotechnology without it.
It’s not now and has never been, about your health
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London is forcing workers to shell out thousands of pounds to buy new cars or fill his tax coffers with the £12.50 daily fee for driving slightly older models. Some will have to give up their cars altogether — and for many it means a profound change of lifestyle. Yet what’s it all for?
The Mayor’s own team shows it will achieve almost nothing, yet he’s doing it anyway. It’s not now, and has never been about “the science”. The results of research are entirely optional apparently:
Research by the Mayor’s own team in collaboration with Transport for London has found the scheme’s impact will be “minor” and “negligible”.
It’s predicted to only cause a 1.3% reduction in the average Londoner’s exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
And it would add just 13 minutes to the life expectancy of a Londoner in 2023, according to the Channel Four News Fact Check service.
A defiant Mr Khan insists the policy is critical to improving air quality.
An extra 13 minutes is “transformative”?
A spokesperson for the Mayor said: “The science is clear – the impact of the ULEZ expansion will be transformative.
Ulez is expected to make almost no difference to air quality in London. Click to enlarge. See Stop Ulez.com for more details.
The ULEZ (Ultra low emission zone) charges are projected to bring in £2.5 million a day to City Hall. That’s a nice bonus for Mr Khan to be used for all kinds of pet projects to “win friends and influence people”. Ulez will also add nearly 3,000 new cameras to the streets of London and get the riff raff off the road and onto buses where they belong.
Using the same ClimateChangeTM reasoning the UN Secretary General uses, it’s clear fossil fuel use dramatically reduces the number of dangerous cyclones in the Northern Indian Ocean. A new study revealed an astonishing 43% decline in the number of equatorial cyclones in recent decades (1981–2010) compared to earlier (1951–1980) when fossil fuel use was vastly reduced. The researchers also point out that this is especially interesting because “the Indian Ocean basin has warmed consistently and more than any other ocean basin.” Could it be that warmer oceans are not necessarily terrible?
The study looked at the Low-Latitude Cyclones (LLC) that originate near the equator in the North Western Indian ocean. These LLC’s are smaller but intensify more rapidly than other cyclones, giving people less time to prepare. In 2017 LLC Ockhi caught forecasters off guard, travelled 2,000 kilometers and caused the deaths of 884 people in Sri Lanka and India.
This is obviously a benefit for the billion poor people who live around the Bay of Bengal. The researchers however, for some reason do not call for an increase in fossil fuel emissions. Instead they looked for and found natural causes that they claim caused the shift — pointing at a link with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). (Apparently climate change only causes bad trends).
We conclude that the recent epoch (epoch-2, 1981–2010) has seen a remarkable decline in the post-monsoon LLC frequency over the north Indian Ocean in comparison with the earlier epoch (epoch-1, 1951–1980). This decline in LLC frequency (Fig. 1) cannot be attributed to an increasing SST and oceanic heat content and nearly unchanged mid-tropospheric humidity.
They quietly admit the climate models were wrong without actually saying as much. Esteemed experts in at least six peer reviewed papers had predicted that warmer oceans at this temperature would generate cyclones that would get more frequent and more intense, and yet the opposite happened:
The warming SST, which is much above the SST threshold (26 °C) for cyclogenesis19, is expected to support an increase in frequency and intensity of TCs20,21,22,23,24,25, yet the number of BoB LLCs has decreased (Fig. 1).
In the press release we see great moments in science-writing in an attempt not to say the obvious:
Study shows a decrease in Indian Ocean cyclones
While the threat of tropical cyclones increases around the world, a new study published in Nature Communications shows one area experienced a significant decline in cyclone activity. But, with recent changes in climatic patterns in the Pacific, the number of cyclones is expected to increase in the coming decades.
In the presence of warming along the equator and a favorable phase of the PDO, both the intensity and frequency of such cyclones are expected to increase. The paper notes the changes in tropical cyclonic activity due to natural variability and climate change call for appropriate planning and mitigation strategies.
“There has been a decline close to the equator, but there has been an increase at the same time away from the equator, in the Indian Ocean,” Ray said. “Overall, there is a decline definitely, but the decline is not this high, because there was an increase away from the equator.”
Years from now scholars will uncover press releases like this and remark just how pervasive and obvious the bias in science literature was.
Where are the headlines? A Google News search today shows that in the seven days since the press release came out, exactly no mass media outlets have reported this good news.
Warmist ‘science’ will need to define,
Why carbon dioxide is malign,
Causing extreme typhoons,
Hurricanes and monsoons,
When cyclones are much in decline.
— Ruairi
REFERENCE
Roose, S., Ajayamohan, R.S., Ray, P. et al. Pacific decadal oscillation causes fewer near-equatorial cyclones in the North Indian Ocean. Nat Commun14, 5099 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40642-x
The UK government is absolutely not asking you to ration electricity, to give up control of your own appliances, to pay more for less, and go to jail if you get it wrong.
Ministers are pressing ahead with new legislation that could see families made to adopt “smart” appliances to ease pressure on the grid. Tory MPs are opposing the proposals, contained in the contentious Energy Bill which will come back before the Commons on Tuesday.
Are they your appliances or the state’s? If you don’t control the power switch you know the answer.
When they call something “smart” we know it’s stupid — and the mind-boggling complexity of central agencies switching on and off ovens and heaters across the country to “fit” with the weather is a dystopia we don’t need to have. Do you need 90 minutes to roast a chook, or 120? It depends on the wind strength in Scotland. If the kids can’t get to bed early, or you can’t wash their clothes, they can just miss the first hour of school right?
Every word is a lie:
The Government insisted it was “in no way asking people to ration electricity” and that consumers will benefit in the form of cheaper bills.
“Cheaper than what?” Consumers will pay less that the highest pagan-witchcraft energy prices they might otherwise have had to pay, but they’ll pay more than what they would have if they had a free market in energy.
The problem with trying to control the weather with our energy grid is that it’s impossible, so no request aimed at reaching into your home and bossing you around is “too much”. There is no natural endpoint. No moment when the weather will be perfect and not in need of changing somehow. No day when they can declare, “We stopped the storms — you can have your fridge back”.
The demand for power and control over the masses will just keep increasing until they revolt. So save time, revolt now.
If you like your old fridge you can keep it, but we’ll send you jail
If you think they will let you run the diesel gen and have your own heater, think again:
Property owners who fail to comply with new energy efficiency rules could face prison under government plans that have sparked a backlash from Tory MPs.
Ministers want to grant themselves powers to create new criminal offences and increase civil penalties as part of efforts to hit net zero targets. Under the proposals, people who fall foul of regulations to reduce their energy consumption could face up to a year in prison and fines of up to £15,000.
Tory backbenchers are set to rebel against the plans, which they fear would lead to the criminalisation of homeowners, landlords and businesses.
The proposals are contained in the Government’s controversial Energy Bill, which is set to come before the Commons for the first time when MPs return from their summer break on Tuesday.
When a two star water heater might send you to jail:
Craig Mackinlay, the head of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, has tabled an amendment to strip the “open-ended and limitless” powers out of the legislation. He told The Telegraph: “The Bill is festooned with new criminal offences. This is just unholy, frankly, that you could be creating criminal offences
“The ones we’ve found most offensive are where a business owner could face a year in prison for not having the right energy performance certificate or type of building certification.”
The cult doomer prophesy upgrades to Billionaire Class. Put this man out of his misery.
Andrew Forrest, Executive Chairman of a $60 billion company made a bizarre speech a few days ago. This is a business presentation with the words like “vomit”, “stampede” and “seizures”, and pictures of skeletons in the desert. The big secret threat, he said, that scientists are not saying “is lethal humidity”. He really believes it. Here’s a man in command of the tenth largest company in Australia with a $33 billion dollar bank account, but not the judgment to get an advisor who can explain the difference between specific and relative humidity. He doesn’t realize that trends are rising in one, but falling in the other, and the modelers were wrong (again). He just had to pick up the phone and call the Met Office, or the CSIRO. They would have loved to talk to him. Even the IPCC experts could have saved him from this embarrassment.
“Lethal Humidity will be the next global pandemic” he prophecies.
“It is business that will kill your children,” he says blaming and demonizing the corporate world that made him rich. “It is the beginning of the end”.
The message for Fortescue shareholders, is run, don’t walk. He is setting up your company to “lead the way” on a sacred mission to save humanity. He hasn’t done his homework, and worse, must have surrounded himself with people telling him what he wants to hear.
“At just 35C with high humidity you can die in six hours”
“We do not have the human evolution to survive it”
There’s no cure.
Forrest runs away with stories of acute emergency care for hyperthermia, labeled with “Harvard Medical School” because, science, yeah…
We may have to drain the blood…
But he’s panicking about relative humidity and it’s not rising, it’s falling…
The fatalistic 35 degree death rate that Forrest is so afraid of, happens only “with 100 percent humidity” — it refers to relative humidity, not specific humidity which is measured in grams per kilogram, not percentages, and relative humidity is falling. So “climate change” such as it is, might reduce the rate of lethal humidity.
The Humidity Paradox
Forrest claims that for every degree the world gets warmer we will get a 7% rise in humidity. This is standard bucket chemistry — like a SciFi novel written by a precocious 12 year old. It comes from the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which works well in the lab but is cruelly being thwarted by slowing wind speeds or ocean currents leaving modelers scratching their heads. Even the IPCC agrees. Surface relative humidity is falling. Perplexed modelers call this “the humidity paradox” which sounds so much better than “we were wrong”, but that’s what it means. Temperature is important for evaporation, but as anyone who has hung washing on the line knows — wind speed will make or break your day and ultimately the models can’t predict future wind speeds. The dreaded “Global Stilling” was a thing right up until “Global windiness” suddenly became a great opportunity for wind farms. At one point, modelers split their bets saying the northern hemisphere winds would slow while the southern hemisphere would speed up. Confused? Join the IPCC.
In theory, if there are no limiting factors, then this [7% per degree] is the rate of increase we would expect to see. However, … this new dataset shows that relative humidity has actually decreased over many regions of the oceans. … This decrease is difficult to explain given our current physical understanding of humidity and evaporation. For example, the expectation from climate models is that ocean relative humidity should remain fairly constant or increase slightly.
The decrease in relative humidity over land is really interesting. We do not see the same decrease in historical reconstructions from climate models…
Specific humidity is rising as the world warms (compared to 1981). A warmer world is a “wetter world.”
But relative humidity is falling, which the models didn’t expect. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, and apparently the air is warming faster than the extra water vapor is leaping into the sky. With lower relative humidity the air has a little more capacity to cool mammals than it did 40 years ago.
Andrew Forrest must have surrounded himself with people who only agree with him. There would be scores of people at Fortescue Metals who could explain the flaws to him, save him from wasting billions of dollars, and from great public embarrassment, but presumably they are all too afraid to say anything. He does keep sacking top executives, after all.
His beliefs are launched on a list of something like 60 peer reviewed papers. He quotes these papers like a kid with a chemistry set. The key words are there, but he doesn’t understand what they mean.
….
Most other chairmen talk about the climate but they don’t believe it.
Fortescue Metals Group is worth $60 Billion AUD. This ought to scare any investor.
We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid
The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.
Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the chart. And they’re not projecting troubles fifty years from now. Those cropped peaks of invisible pain hit from 2027.
And even the pain we can see is apparently quite bad. Two states are already likely to breach “the interim reliability measure” in this coming summer. Ominously, just one day after releasing the report, the AEMO is calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” in South Australia and Victoria. Apparently, they want offers of industries ready to shut down who aren’t already on the list, and they want spare generation too — get this — even asking for “small onsite generators”. Does that sound bad to you? It sounds bad to me.
“Based on current trajectory, we’re in for a world of pain ahead. …theAEMO projections are looking pretty dire.”
Consider figure 1: A decade of blackouts coming
Have you ever seen a graph like this that hides the peaks? In the “central scenario” of the cropped graph — “only” four states of Australia go off the charts. Imagine what the bad scenario looks like…
AEMO, ESOO, 2023. Figure 1 shows the reliability forecast and indicative reliability forecast for the 2023 ESOO Central scenario. This forecast considers only the sub-set of known developments that have demonstrated sufficient commitment towards commissioning in the NEM (those developments classified as committed or anticipated), including announced retirements, and allows for project delivery schedules that may be slower than proponents have advised based on observed development, approval and commissioning requirements.
Given that South Australia flew in diesel jet engines for back up generation at one point (General Electric aero-derivative turbines) — perhaps we can ask Qatar Airlines if they can plug some planes straight into our grid? (The government won’t let them fly in more passengers, in case it screws up Qantas profits, but that means they must have a few planes they can spare.)
A leap to Figure 43 suggests those hidden peaks of Figure 1 might be quite high in NSW and Victoria. Figure 43 shows the same “Central Scenario” as Figure 1 — this time as dotted lines — and we are allowed to see a bit more of the graph. The y axis is the same Expected Unserved Energy (%) this time reaching up to 0.007%. But the NSW (blue) and Victorian (grey) lines are doing the Moonshot thing in 2027. They’re headed to infinity or some number the AEMO didn’t want to graph.
AEMO, ESOO, 2023,
The solid lines in Figure 43 are the slightly better scenarios that include contributions from CER or “Consumer Energy Resources” (that’s you!). This is what the future looks like with more help from things like solar panels on rooftops, home batteries, and Electric Vehicles. It’s also the best we can do with DSP assistance — which means Demand Side Participation — those people who participate by not demanding electricity. In normal English we would call them the customers who are paid to stay away or something.
Ten different ways to go without electricity
The AEMO doesn’t use the word blackout, but it has a dozen flavours of blackouts-by-another-name, many of them voluntary or subsidized and somewhat prearranged. It looks so much better on paper to say “DSP” but it means someone, somewhere going without electricity when they would otherwise have used it. DSP gets 146 mentions in the AEMO report, giving us some idea on how mini-blackouts are now an essential part of managing a very sick grid.
At a minimum DSP may just be an inconvenience — people have to program their washing machine and pool filter to run at lunchtime, which sounds fine until you have only one sunny day that week and you have six loads of washing. In a rich world without “reliability gaps” you would just run it, conveniently, from 5 to 10 pm the night before.
DSP is code for people willing (or dragged), in some sense, to have a voluntary mini-blackout — and the report notes the major factor driving an increase in DSP uptake is because electricity is now more expensive (what a great thing?). The AEMO notes: “These higher prices have led to more benefits to customers participating in DSP schemes or responding directly to market signals”. Table 5 lists the Negawatts of voluntary outages when prices rise to $1,000, $5,000 and $7,500 per megawatt hour…
Now that Alice lives in Downunder-land — more expensive electricity means customers get more “benefits” when they don’t use it. See how this works? Only the wealthy will have the convenience of electricity whenever they want it. The underclass will be cooking on barbeques, and getting up earlier each day to program the washing machine and set up the timers for the scooters.
Ominously the AEMO projects a lot more voluntary blackouts:
AEMO, ESOO, 2023
Drowning in complexity
The message in 42 tables and 100 figures is unspoken, but obvious — the Australian grid is drowning in complexity, there are so many moving unpredictable parts. The report models the various possibilities of low rain, low wind, low stocks of fossil fuels, droughts, heatwaves, and unexpected outages. They try to model some combinations and permutations of multiple troubles occurring simultaneously. Whether we get and can afford electricity now depends on ocean currents in the Pacific that no one can predict. We live in the land of drought and flooding rains, and we’re hoping the weather will be nice.
The AEMO brightly says that it can be managed, see Figure 2, if we just build 10,000 kilometers of high transmission lines through farmland and forests, and then finish all the wind farms and solar magic panels, along with lots more voluntary blackouts, “consumer investments” (home batteries) and dispatchable capacity (whatever could that be?)
The last thought is the predictions for South Australia:
There is an 84% chance under a “neutral/unknown climate outlook” that South Australia will have no blackouts this summer. But there is a 16% chance that some will occur, and these are most likely to be 1-3 hours long affecting 5 to 30% of the region (which means “of the state”, presumably). But there is a tiny chance they might lose half the state for as much as 16 hours (spread over four different nights, say). I bet they are praying they don’t get a hot windless week?
But even if they don’t have one blackout, more of people’s lives will be wasted paying electricity bills and reading articles on how to save electricity, how to reprogram the pool filter, how to charge the kids scooter, how to put out fires started by the scooter…
If that’s a neutral/unknown outlook, what does it look like for a long hot summer?
Photo by Gage Skidmore
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