Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we call it when it’s so bad it’s not even subsidy-viable? — A blessing.
They’re talking about batteries “degrading in weeks”:
Tecnam was more forthright in their press release. “A few hundred flights” was the optimistic best case scenario. Fast charging and rapid turnarounds would make that worse:
The proliferation of aircraft with “new” batteries would lead to unrealistic mission profiles that would quickly degrade after a few weeks of operation, making the all-electric passenger aircraft a mere “Green Transition flagship” rather than a real player in the decarbonisation of aviation. Taking into account the most optimistic projections of slow charge cycles and the possible limitation of the maximum charge level per cycle, the real storage capacity would fall below 170Wh/kg, and only a few hundred flights would drive operators to replace the entire storage unit, with a dramatic increase in direct operating costs due to the reserves for battery replacement prices.
The power to waiting ratio was doomed
Waiting times are too long, the power is too low, and the battery life is terrible.
The truth is everyone in aviation wants fast-charging planes so the air crew and the capital assets aren’t sitting around for hours paying airport-world prices while they earn nothing. But batteries have a shorter lifespan if they are pumped hard, fast and charged completely full. Sadly slow charging and underchanging are not a solution either. Even if we treat these babies gently with long slow feeds, they would only store less than “170 watt-hours per kilogram”. As the Telegraph authors point out, jet fuel has an energy density of 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram, which is seventy times as much.
The bottom line, Tecnam explains, is that the only alternative to waiting for the development of much lighter, better batteries, is “extremely aggressive speculation on uncertain technology”. It would be a wild and risky bet. Not that we aren’t doing that with our energy grids.
Corporate leaders are not bragging about their environmental wins or diversity hires with the same fervour they had a year ago. Some of this is due to pressure from the 23 US state Governors who are asking CEO’s sharp and pointy questions about anti-trust behaviour and fiduciary duty and campaigning on anti-Woke platforms. And some of this is due to the backlash against disastrous Bud-Light and Target campaigns.
Companies Quiet Diversity and Sustainability Talk Amid Culture War Boycotts
Mark Maurer, Wall Street Journal
Companies’ mentions of green and social initiatives during earnings calls have fallen off sharply in recent quarters, reversing a more boastful approach taken over the past few years amid intensifying pressure from some investors and conservative activists. Finance chiefs and other executives have significantly quieted down in public settings about their environmental and employee diversity efforts …
Charting the rise and fall of public “Woke” declarations in the corporate world.
The backlash is coming from several angles — investors, conservative groups, political leaders.
It’s a good sign democracy and free markets are not dead yet. But these companies are probably pursuing quiet “Woke” agendas. After all, as long as the Big Money end of town is demanding progress reports during the ski weekends in Davos, many companies will continue to buy the wind and solar talismans to ward off the fury of the BlackRock and Net Zero Banker cabal.
It’s a win, the trainwreck is slower, but still in progress
In Australia, politicians stopped bragging about emissions trading schemes when Tony Abbott won in a landslide in 2013 with Axe the Carbon Tax. But two years later the party dumped Abbott and snuck in an emissions trading scheme anyway — they called it “The SafeGuard Mechanism” and hid their plans in the details. In that case, popping the public bragging bubble slowed the trainwreck by a decade.
We haven’t won until CEO’s can openly mock people who think eating crickets will change world temperatures.
Ten years of lies, deception, and dangerous experiments
Imagine if our adversaries were splicing together mutant viruses and testing them on humanized mice for years in order to make them more pathogenic, and our top researchers were helping them, our government was funding them, and we had years of warnings that the experiments were dangerous.
The Sunday Times says “bioweapon” very quietly, but it’s in print in a long feature article with plenty of ugly details. The headline is very sedate given the gravity. The world would have reacted very differently in January 2020…
Johnathon Calvert and George Abuthnott, The Sunday Times
Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report.
For starters — here’s a map of the places where people were reporting on social media that they had covid in January 2020. While everyone was talking about sea-food markets, the big clue was there all the time.
…
These hot spots were published by the academics at Wuhan University. But they somehow didn’t think to label the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The US Senate investigation years later put that dot on the map (after half a billion people had caught the virus). If any of our government health and intelligence agencies had been remotely competent or interested in our health, and if the CCP had been a good global citizen, this would have been known in the first few months.
From a cave in Yunnan
The story starts in 2012 with the WIV team finding SARS like viruses in the Shitou cave 800 kilometers south of Wuhan. They had American funding and training to help them. The same year, six miners nearby in Moijang Mine fell horribly sick with some unknown coronavirus and three died. The WIV team kept this to themselves, but went back to the Moijang mine to collect 1,300 samples from the bats there over the next few years. They discovered not one or two, but 293 coronaviruses. One of those viruses would emerge as the nearest known relative of Covid-19. (Called RaTG13)
Over the next eight years the WIV would experiment on the SARS-like coronaviruses from the Shitou cave and publish some papers, but in parallel, they were apparently also working on the nasty Moijang mine viruses, which they weren’t talking about.
Thanks to American know-how
The Americans meanwhile have taught the chinese researchers how to work with mice that have “humanized” lung cells. The WIV team infects the mice with a mutated version of the SARS-like virus they found in the cave in 2012. Three quarters of the test mice die, but again, the WIV team keeps it to themselves.
The American who led the way and taught the Chinese was Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. He was the one who made the humanized mice — he put human genes into the mice so they grew “human-like” lungs which made them ideal for studying human pathogens.
He knew he was playing with fire:
“Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility,” he had written in a 2006 paper. “These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation.”
By 2012 as many as 30 labs around the world were working with live SARS viruses and a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation called for these experiments to be stopped, pointing out that it was just a matter of time before a virus escaped. Yet grant money continued to flow to China.
Between 2013 and 2015 the Bat lady of Wuhan, Dr Shi Zhengli collaborated with Ralph Baric in the US. She sent him the genetic sequences from the Shitou Cave SARS like viruses. In 2014 Barak Obama called for a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments, except for the “urgent and safe ones”, of course, and so Ralph Baric got an exemption. He melded the spike from one SARS virus onto another:
The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.
It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
The Wuhan team were apparently very happy to learn these techniques and kept right on going.
Meanwhile a British bat expert called Peter Daszak was involved in a Wildlife Trust which somehow became the EcoHealth Alliance. He arranged some NIH grants, and provided cover by writing reports that missed a few important details. When 75% of the mice died in one experiment he wrote that they had mild SARS-like symptoms. He later said that this was based on “preliminary results”, but the mice were long dead by a few months before he said that.
At one point in 2018 Daszak applied for $14 million in funding from Darpa (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He and Shi and Baric wanted to find lots of SARS like viruses and fuse them with their favourite deadly Shitou cave varieties. So Darpa said “no thanks” to that. But in the application they said they’d like to insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS virus. When the funding bombed, they claim they didn’t do the experiment, but somehow, by strange coincidence, when SARS-2 appeared it had a furin cleavage site. It was the first SARS-like coronavirus which had a the target site for our furin enzymes to cleave.
[Dr Steven] Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”
The Chinese Military thought they would like to help too?
Around 2016 or so the WIV team became fairly secretive. The Chinese Military allegedly got interested and funded WIV work as well. What a cauldron.
The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
As I’ve said — we’re in a biotech Cold War, or maybe even a hot one:
A vaccine to shift power
The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
Electric cars are not enough, they want no cars (for you)
Will taking a billion cars off the road change the climate or just make parking easier for WEF billionaires?
The conference-and-ski club for the uber rich has issued another white paper no one asked for. In it, the World Economic Forum that no one elected, says the world should redesign cities and reduce the number of cars to 500 million by 2050. Given that there are 1.5 billion cars around today and we’re headed for 2 billion cars by then, this means thwarting the desires of 1.5 billion people. It won’t be rich people who miss out.
It’s not clear why anyone should anyone care about the pronouncements of the Ski Club for the Stars of Money — but their strange catch-phrases have a spooky way of being parroted by our elected politician-minions. The galaxy of money that orbits the Planet WEF presumably waves their $100 Trillion dollar weight around and tells politicians “nice career you have there”. Who could argue with that?
The WEF world always looks disturbingly like a preschool cartoon.
The benefits of adopting their plan are, seriously, that there will be a lot less cars. They say this like that is a good thing in and of itself, rather than a deprivation. Imagine saying it would be a benefit to have 75% less houses? The assumed car-vilification is part of the packaging.
The second reason is, naturally, that it will reduce plant fertilizer (CO2), presumably stopping storms, saving whales, and calming anxious jellyfish. It will also “free up” 75% of urban public space and “save” $5 trillion a year. Sure.
WEF billionaires can give up their cars and private jets any day and show us the way, but they don’t.
The Scorecard tool is not a tool to create a future the voters voted for or voluntarily want, but it will help to bully bureaucrats into doing what the WEF want. This is the protoplasmic One World Government coalescing — issuing their policy prescription.
Look out for the keywords “SEAM Strategy” — it stands for Shared Electric Connected and Automated Transport Modes which means buses and trains and automated tracking. Any politician that starts to mouth the WEF lines should be reported to your local talk-back radio show.
Did I mention “cartoon-like”?
It’s like the wolf turned up wearing a teenage girlie magazine cover:
Presumably with all the bad press EV’s have been getting lately someone at the WEF realized they need to revive the old “public transport” canard. It’s not enough to force us out of our fossil fuel cars and into EVs, they need us to catch the bus.
The Green dream is unravelling in the fourth largest economy in the world. The Vice Chancellor is bluntly saying that Germany industry may have to shut down in 18 months if the current gas flow deal from Russia through Ukraine isn’t extended and he doesn’t seem to believe it could be. Meanwhile 13,000 people protested in Bavaria against the “heating ideology” — whereby evil gas is theoretically going to be forcibly replaced with wildly expensive heat pumps powered by erratic green electrons. The people just don’t want them: last year Germans installed 600,000 gas systems and only 236,000 heat pumps. Politicians are starting to back away slowly from the plan to make all new heaters “65% renewable” by next year. It’s starting to look like the backdown on banning fossil fuel powered cars.
The German economy is possibly in a recession already and Greens are finally getting the blame. It’s so bad that journalists worry that the “Far Right Surge” could endanger some businesses. The right wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party is now polling second across Germany. The AfD is particularly popular in East Germany, (where voters are experts on the failings of socialist experiments).
Today the Greens are being mocked for failing to install a heat pump in their own headquarters after a three and half year quest. The cost is set to reach €5 million because they opted for the geothermal plan and have to drill down “almost 100ft” (that far eh?). The project has been beset with delays.
Germany may be forced to wind down or even switch off industrial capacity if Ukraine’s gas transit agreement with Russia isn’t extended after it expires at the end of next year, according to Economy Minister Robert Habeck.
Habeck, who is also the vice chancellor, issued the stark warning Monday at an economic conference in eastern Germany, saying that policymakers should avoid “making the same mistake again” of assuming that the economy will be unaffected without precautions to secure energy supplies.
His message is aimed at Green and environmental groups
“There is no secure scenario for how things will turn out,” Habeck said at the forum in Bad Saarow. Additional capacity — including a planned LNG terminal on Germany’s north coast that has provoked opposition from locals and environmental groups — will therefore be essential to maintain supply to both Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe, he said.
Companies are moving to the US as they face administrative burdens and high energy costs in Europe, Stefano Mallia, the head of the Employers Group of the European Economic and Social Committee, told EURACTIV.cz in an interview.
The relocation of companies mainly concerns those sectors dependent on high energy use, according to Mallia. “I can call it a real and present danger,” he said, adding that the EU has to put the competitiveness agenda to the forefront of its policymaking.
The Malhotra-Dowd-Wolf-Shipman event about the Corruption of Medicine in Perth was a smashing success. The crowd of nearly 2,500 was on fire, the speakers were excellent and you can still watch it (and help cover some of the costs) by buying tickets to watch it online. Four hours of some of the best and brightest of humanity.
Fact-of-the-day (for me) was that the Australian TGA (drug approval agency) gets 96% of its budget from the industry it supposedly is a watchdog for. Hello? So when the TGA inexplicably banned the safe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine options they were, it seems, just doing what any bought-and-paid corporate crony agency would, even if people died. Apparently the government agencies are not just a rubber stamp for profitable drugs, they are the iron mallet to crush the competition too.
While Australia won the prize for the agency with the Biggest Conflict of Interest, there’s little material difference in the EU, the US or the UK (or Canada). The drug industry funds 89% of the EMA budget in Europe and 86% of the UK-MHRA’s. The giant US FDA is “only” 65% industry funded. Glory be — is $800 million enough of a conflict of interest?
From the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and Australian investigator — Maryanne Demasi:
Over the past decades, regulatory agencies have seen large proportions of their budgets funded by the industry they are sworn to regulate, explains investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi.
Industry fees to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have increased 30 fold – from around $29m in 1993 to $884m in 2016, while in Europe, industry fees now fund 89% of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), up from 20% in 1995.
In 2005, the UK House of Commons’ health committee evaluated the influence of the drug industry on health policy. But nearly two decades on, little has changed, and industry funding of drug regulators has become the international norm.
The BMJ asked six leading regulators, in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, the UK, and US, a series of questions about their funding, transparency in their decision making (and of data), and the rate at which new drugs are approved.
Of these, Australia had the highest proportion of budget from industry fees (96%) and in 2020-2021 approved more than nine of every 10 drug company applications.
Just how deep and how wide is that river of drug money…
Click to enlarge. (BMJ)
These agencies control what you are allowed to take into your own body. Hours after ivermectin was banned in Australia, a legal script from a qualified doctor was worthless at any pharmacy. Three adults with university training in medical science were suddenly unable to get what they wanted (money, work or medicine). The power of these unelected agencies reigns — where is the accountability? Nice racket you have there…
Sociologist Donald Light of Rowan University in New Jersey, US, who has spent decades studying drug regulation, says, “Like the FDA, the TGA was founded to be an independent institute. However, being largely funded by fees from the companies whose products it is charged to evaluate is a fundamental conflict of interest and a prime example of institutional corruption.”
“It’s the opposite of having a trustworthy organisation independently and rigorously assessing medicines. They’re not rigorous, they’re not independent, they are selective, and they withhold data. Doctors and patients must appreciate how deeply and extensively drug regulators can’t be trusted so long as they are captured by industry funding.”
It’s time to ask our elected members where they stand on corporate-regulatory-capture. For or against? But don’t just stop there, the media are culpable too — why aren’t they grilling the politicians, the TGA, the AMA? Do they get advertising money from BigPharma, or is it more that they lack the courage to speak the truth, or need to believe in a religious savior? Hail Mary for Big Government?
Meanwhile the GP’s, the specialists, the pharmacists didn’t ask for this test, but it is here. And if they want to keep their high status leadership roles, they need to earn it. The brave ones speaking now are the heroes.
Totally blown away after my talk to over 2000 full capacity crowd in Perth tonight. Atmosphere was electric and full of hope. Hope that speaking and fighting for the truth will redeem the world from the hell of corporate tyranny. We can do this 👊👊👊🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/OsR5oDYqE8
— Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) June 10, 2023
The comedian who opened was savagely good. Someone tell me his name…
Some overpaid academics think the rich nations owe $192,000,000,000,000 to poorer nations because of the “carbon pollution” they emitted.
Jo Nova says that fossil fuels built a civilization that invented cars, trains, planes, penicillin, the Haber-Bosch process, and clean water — making seven billion more lives possible. Fossil Fueled nations added free fertilizer to the atmosphere, increased crops and forests, greened the world and fed more people than ever.
The uncosted benefits owed to the West far outweigh the imaginary losses, so call off the parasites and let’s consider it all a free gift from the West to the world. What are seven billion lives worth?
The global population was resolutely stuck under 1 billion people for a hundred thousand years, then we discovered fossil fuels. | Source: OWID
It’s just another jumped up claim, not to feed the poor, but to enrich the bureaucrat class:
High carbon countries owe at least $192 trillion to low-emitting nations in compensation for their greenhouse gas pollution. That’s the conclusion of a new paper published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability by researchers Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel.
…they divided the carbon budgets into fair shares for every country. Each nation gets a slice of the budget according to its size and population.
And that’s retrospective back to 1960 because the science was settled then.
Next, they examined each country’s cumulative emissions since the year 1960. The world had been emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases for decades beforehand — but by 1960, they said, researchers clearly understood the science of global warming and were beginning to communicate it to the public, as well.
The countries that burn the most fossil fuels are also the ones with the cleanest air. If people are serious about clean air, they need more fossil fuels, not less.
By Jo Nova It’s great to see new media platforms blossoming Australia. I spoke to Topher Field at The Aussie Wire to explain how BlackRock, bankers and the Insurance giants use your insurance, pension and super funds against you and why the 23 states of the USA are pushing back and even winning some battles. UN NetZero cartel wants to make Insurance Firms into “Climate Police”. But the insurance fund cartel is unravelling.
Topher introduces me at 13 minutes and generously lets me talk…
Hopefully we can reach a whole new group of people who might not read blogs.
In this episode of the AussieWire Topher also discusses the Housing Affordability Crisis in Australia, the South Australian Penalties for disruptive protests, and questions about “hate speech” legislation with David Limbrick MP.
Who wouldn’t want to wake up to these beautiful towers…
By Jo Nova
Just another community horror thanks to Green fantasies
Australia’s Power Grid is full they say, and to collect all the sacred green electrons and save the world now means building thousands of kilometers of high voltage towers that will carve up farms and wilderness, damage property values, and ruin good farming land. For some reason, inner city activists think that’s a good idea.
But out in the country farmers and rural people are angry.
Few people want giant wind turbines spoiling the view and their sleep, but if the turbines are built in lonely far-flung spots, then thousands of 70m high steel towers will have to cross the land anyhow to connect their useless electrons.
In theory the Renewable Crash Test Dummy nation “needs” another 10,000km of new transmission lines and they’re supposed to be built before 2030. To get some idea of just how impossible this is, consider Humelink which is meant to be the interconnector to “Snowy 2.0” (the doomed pumped storage scheme). It is only 360km long and was supposed to cost $1.1 billion but is now projected to cost $3.3 billion. What will the other 9,600 kilometers worth cost?
…
We’re struggling to build those towers
It may have seemed like a good idea on the back of an envelope in Canberra, but out in the country, landowners are forming alliances to refuse the compensation on offer, saying they want the lines put underground, which will make building the transmission lines even slower and much more expensive. Only about 40% of the property owners affected by Humelink plans have accepted the offers, which means 60% haven’t. Given the schedule for blowing up coal plants in Australia, governments here are getting desperate, and are ramping up the offers — in NSW and Victoria landowners could get as much as $200,000 per kilometer in compensation. In Queensland the going rate is $300,000.
Farmers are not impressed. Some were arguing that they would lose an 80 m wide easement across their land. They can’t build or dig too close to the towers in case it weakens the footings.
Angela Macdonald-Smith and Colin Packham —Australian Financial Review
Katz – and others – have already rejected an offer from the NSW government of $200,000 for every kilometre of his land crossed by a major infrastructure project, a payment which was designed to put an end to a deadlock between landowners and the state.
Katz says that allowing large pylons – each as tall as those on the Sydney Harbour Bridge – would reduce the value of his property by 30 per cent and significantly change how he manages his herd of cattle.
I do not believe, … that it makes sense to build it as an overhead line with such huge risks in causing environmental destruction in the name of saving the environment. That seems to me a non sequitur of monumental portions,” Katz tells AFR Weekend.
Calabria told a business lunch in late November that the urgency and complexity of the challenge to meet the 2030 targets increases every day – as does the cost. The risk looms large of losing support for the transition from the community, which has been promised cheaper and cleaner energy from the process with little perception of the expense involved, he says.
4,000 people have joined the “Piss Off Ausnet” protest group in Victoria and protests are continuing. In NSW, the HumeLink Alliance are growing and further north The Merriwa Cassilis Alliance have won concessions in the Hunter Valley. (The line will now go through public land and old mining areas which will reduce the impact on farmers). Never mind about the wilderness though…
They explained some of the ways these transmission lines affect farmers:
Height restrictions on farming machinery, interference on guidance technology and the no go areas for aerial management means crops and pastures could not be managed in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Standard farming machinery like headers and boom sprays over 4.6m will be out of action, deemed too high to drive frequently and safely under these power lines. The use of light aircraft to manage crops, spread fertiliser and control pests and diseases would also be too dangerous to carry out near the powerlines. These practices are regularly carried out when crops or pastures are too advanced to manage on the ground.
Strategic agricultural land and transmission lines don’t mix!
It takes a lot of infrastructure to connect up the Green Totems:
So much infrastructure, all of it expensive and completely unneccessary. — Source: (Western Renewables Link)
Australians lose either way
If the government pays for the transmission lines, and pays adequate compensation to farmers, which they should if they build them, that just means the average Australian gets screwed for a even bigger bill to build the Green religious talismans against storms a hundred years from now.
The only people who benefit are the subsidy-farmers in the city, the foreign manufacturers of unreliable generators, adversaries that want to ruin competing industries, and any potential military foe.
…
It would cost about 0.0001% of this to audit the UN science committees and find that it was all a waste of money.
The land that is the Renewable Crash Test Dummy is holding its breath
This time last year, the Australian energy market turned into a kind of Hunger Games spectacle with daily feeding-fest at dinner time where prices were so burning hot that unhedged smaller retailers begged their own customers to leave them and then the whole market was suspended. The bonfire was so big we’re still paying for it, and retail electricity prices are set to rise another 25% in a few weeks.
So it’s no surprise that as the cold weather arrives downunder, everyone involved in energy is “on edge”. Suddenly Australian corporate leaders are telling it like it is — the Alinta Gas chief says there is just no way we can build enough renewables in time — he can’t even “see a way” of building enough renewables to compensate for the coal units that are being closed.
The man who used to run the Snowy Hydro Scheme agrees (and then some) — saying we need to build a “Snowy” every year, and we are being lied to (his words) and it will take not 8 years, but 80 years to get there. The head of EnergyAustralia says shutting down the Liddell coal plant means the system is “exposed”. These are people at the top (or formerly) of our biggest energy companies.
A year ago the new government won with a pledge to bring electricity prices down. Instead prices just keep rising and are set to remain high “for years”. To appreciate just how like the Starship Enterprise the nation is, going where no nation has gone before, we have a roughly 30GW grid, and in the next eight years 8GW of coal power is scheduled to be lost. But in reality the AEMO estimates that 14GW of coal power capacity will flee the rigged Australian market by 2030.
The cost of the rushed transition-we-don’t-have-to-have is estimated to be $120 billion which is $4,500 for every man, women and child or about $20,000 for a family of four, who could have gone to the Bahamas instead. As it is for $20k, they will get expensive unreliable electricity, lose jobs to China, and reduce world temperatures by 0.00 degrees C.
Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery, head of the country’s fourth largest energy retailer, said he could not see a way of building enough renewable energy sources to compensate for the loss of coal, which still generates about two-thirds of Australia’s electricity.
“We’ve had one battery reach a final investment decision in the last quarter – one battery,” Mr Dimery said.
“Snowy 2.0 is delayed, VNI West [interconnector] is coming in 2031, three years after Yallourn comes out. The whole transition is not lining up. We are so far off track.
The transition may not happen this century…
Paul Broad, who ran Snowy Hydro until resigning shortly after Labor won office last year, said the challenge of the huge pumped hydro expansion under construction could not be overstated, adding that was just a tiny fraction of new green-energy supplies needed.
“We need a Snowy every year, but it’s extremely difficult,” Mr Broad said. “We are being lied to that this is achievable; the transition will take 80 years.”
Australia’s electricity network is precariously balanced going into a peak demand period, the head of one of the country’s biggest energy companies has warned.
Mark Collette, head of EnergyAustralia, said recent fossil fuel closures, including the shutting of AGL Energy’s Liddell coal-fired power plant, had left the national electricity system exposed… If there were outages or supply shocks – we notice them”.
The Australian Energy Regulator last month approved bill increases of about 25 per cent for households and businesses across the east coast from July 1, which it said was predominantly driven by the increased cost of generating electricity in winter 2022.
Meanwhile the resolutely green AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) forecasts an improved winter outlook but says “risks remain”. Translated, they’re saying that things are slightly better than the bottom of the barrel and if nothing else breaks, we might get through the winter without the same trainwreck we had last year. Maybe.
But ponder that since last winter 400,000 immigrants have moved to Australia. It’s not clear the generation has even kept up with that.
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