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By Jo Nova Thanks to Paul Homewood at NotAlotofPeopleKnowThat for finding this gem of a video. Commiserations to friends in the UK, where Ed Miliband, or worse, his new National Electricity System Operator (NESO) think that flywheels will save money because the UK won’t need to maintain back up power stations and import so much electricity. Ed Miliband is the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is a bit like being the Minister for War and Peace at the same time, or perhaps more like Health and Ebola. His big new plan is to set up a big new bureaucracy (NESO) and their big idea is to stop blackouts by installing giant flywheels around the country. Flywheels are good at smoothing out the frequency glitches, but the second largest flywheel operation in the world would only power the UK for a fraction of a second. It’s going to take a lot of flywheels, or as David Evans dryly remarked, if they can speed up the flywheels it might work, but to put enough energy in, they may need to get close to the speed of light. Ed Miliband reveals plan to prevent net zero blackoutsby Johnathon Leake, The Telegraph Giant flywheels are to be installed around the UK to minimise the risk of blackouts as the power system goes carbon-free. Flywheels are energy storage systems that use surplus electricity to accelerate a massive metal “wheel”… NESO said the schemes would save consumers money by cutting the need for maintaining backup power stations and importing power from overseas via interconnectors. A spokesman said: “The pathfinders alone are expected to provide consumers with savings of £14.9bn between 2025 and 2035.” As Paul Burgess explains, the flywheel sales team often talk in megawatts but rarely mention megawatt-hours (probably because they are embarrassed). The worlds second largest flywheel system has 200 carbon fibre flywheels spinning in a vacuum chamber and provides 20 megawatts. But it can only supply 1 megawatt for 15 minutes, which is a quarter of a MWh, which is a problem because the UK uses about 860,000 MWh every day. Paul Burgess estimates the second largest flywheel installation in the world can power the UK for about one 200th of a second. A flywheel is like a coal generator the second after it runs out of coal. Then there’s “The Cost”Burgess points at a study by Dongxu et al that reviews the costs of supplying energy via flywheels, and its in the ballpark of $1,000 to $5,000 per kilowatt hour. (That’s a million dollars a megawatt hour). It’s 1,200 to 4,600 times as expensive as gas in the UK, and about 100,000 times as expensive as Australian brown coal power. It’s cheaper to cook food over a pile of burning money. …the capital cost per unit power of a FESS [Flywheel Energy Storage System] with a rated power of 250 kW and a maximum expected storage time of 15 min is 250 to 350$/kW, and the corresponding unit energy cost is 1000 to 5000$/kWh. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that the unit energy installation cost of FESS will decrease by 35 % by 2030, from the current estimate of 1500–6000$/kWh to 1000–3900$/kWh [14]. — Dongxu et al. Yet NESO says it will “save consumers money”. Aren’t there laws about fraud or dishonest advertising that apply to statements like these? Then there’s “industrial accidents”The same paper mentions that things can get fairly hairy with heavy objects moving at high speeds: In order to fully utilize material strength to achieve higher energy storage density, rotors are increasingly operating at extremely high tip speeds. However, this trend will lead to severe centripetal stress and potential safety threats caused by rotor failure. In 2011, two carbon fiber composite rotors weighing 1 ton and storing about 30 kWh failed and began to disintegrate. Flywheels are also known as “Synchronous Condensers” though coal, hydro, nuclear and gas plants effectively have free flywheels built into the system. The only reason to add flywheels to the grid today is to allow the wind and solar generators to run without crashing the system. It’s yet another subsidy for wind and solar generators, and the costs should be laid at their feet. The real issue here is that the people running the country are innumerate simpletons, and the professors who know that are too afraid to say anything lest they lose their next grant, or fall off the Honours list, and the journalists are too indoctrinated, and the editors too captured for the bad news to make it to the front page. REFERENCEDongxu et al (2023) A review of flywheel energy storage rotor materials and structures, Journal of Energy Storage, Volume 74, Part A, 25 December 2023, 109076.
October 8th, 2024 | Tags: Battery, Electricity Cost, FCAS, UK | Category: Renewable |  Print This Post | | UPDATE Friday: –– For readers in darkness, there is currently a G4 geomagnetic storm. Satellites at L1 suggest a spike in density (SWEPAM) coming through in minutes (5.30pm WST 8.30pm EDT). See Glendale for live reports of where the action is. Graphs and discussion at SpaceWeatherlive. Nullschool-Space (a very low resolution, generic estimate) is as colorful as it gets. This post is temporarily bumped. Keep reading → ***UPDATE: the X9 has finally arrived (Monday afternoon and evening) and is triggering auroras (briefly) as far south as Cape Cod in Florida. Keep your eyes out…. By Jo Nova Two X-class flares in two days, X7.1 and now X9I put in an order for an x class flare while I’m away from city lights. I was delighted when a big X7.1 was launched on cue a couple of days ago. It was the second biggest flare this cycle until a few minutes ago when a huge X9.05 occurred. This is now the largest solar flare in Cycle 25, bigger than the flare in May this year which caused all the auroras around the world this year in places like Florida and southern Queensland. That was an X8.7. The X7.1 flare may bring auroras Friday or Saturday which was exciting enough. The scale is logarithmic, so this latest one is effectively 100 times larger. Few details are available yet on the latest flare. The same sunspot (AR 3842) caused both x-class flares this week, and it is near the centre of the side facing us. It does appear to be Earth directed, but as with all things aurora — we won’t know for sure until it happens (or it doesn’t). Space agencies will make guesses about when these will arrive but they may turn up 8 hours early or late, and the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field needs to be “negative” for good auroras. People who want to see an aurora are best signing up for an email or SMS notification (EG Glendale App). We won’t know exactly when the best action will be until the charged particles from the Coronal Mass Ejection hit the satellites at the Lagrange point. These sit about a million miles away from Earth. When (if) that happens, aurora-hunters will have only 30 minutes to an hour to get to a dark spot. And of course, the best laid plans may be wrecked by clouds or dawn.
RESOURCES
UPDATE: The AuroraGuy has a good description here. Find a place with a dark sky to watch from. He suggests the Bortle Scale 1-5 which are country or rural sites. The darkest sites are class 1 and the brightest city is class 9.
October 4th, 2024 | Tags: Aurora, Solar Flares, Space-weather | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Sorry. I’m away from the desk for a couple of days…
By Jo Nova All those sustainable dreams, gone pfftGoogle, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to reach “net zero” with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock. In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race. It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants. Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups. The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear ComebackThe AI boom has left technology companies scrambling for low-carbon sources of energy to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI, data centers, and crypto could more than double by 2026. Even its lowball estimates say that the added demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or—in the high-usage case—Germany. Australia uses ten times as much electricity as Microsoft, but is still fantasizing about reaching 82% renewable by 2030 with no nuclear power “because it will cost too much and take too long”. Microsoft uses 24 TWh of energy a year and employs 220,000 people, and knows it needs a nuclear plant to be competitive (and reach, albeit frivolous weather changing ideals). Australia uses 274 TWh of electricity, and employs 14 million people but is going to aim for frivolous climate witchery anyway, and do it the double-hard way. Who needs to be competitive, right? Pierre Gosselin discusses how Germany risks being left behind because it has switched off all its nuclear plants. At least it has some power lines to France. Australia has no nukes, not much hydro, no mountains to spare, is the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has no powerlines to anywhere. We are the crash test dummy. Soon most big companies will have more reliable power than we do.
Submissions close today!It’s better to say something short than nothing at all. Let it be known that we have grave concerns, and far too little time to debate and discuss such far reaching legislation. Please read submissions posted below and add your own here too. Thank you! — Jo Upload your submission here (button on the right hand side) Committee Secretariat contact: Committee Secretary Public submission regarding: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. _____________________
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out, which is surely the main purpose of the Misinformation Bill amendments. The government can already correct any misinformation that really matters, so these amendments curtail our freedom of speech for no benefit at all. Guilty until proven innocent?The amendments turn free speech on its head — instead of having the implicit right to criticize the government, everyone now needs to prove to some judge that their views are “reasonably” satire, or reasonable dissemination for an “academic, scientific or religious” purpose, and that their “motive” is honest and their behaviour is “authentic”. When it comes to reasonableness in a democracy the highest court should be the court of public opinion, but how can the people decide if they are not allowed to hear it? How is it even a democracy still if the government is allowed to take our money to force feed us the governments view on the ABC and in every captured university (dependent on government funds), but the people cannot even reply through sheer unfunded creative wit? This legislation puts a very unfree cloud over all groups, forums, blogs, and social media.The fines (and all legal fees today) are so obscenely, disproportionately harmful to Australians that few will risk going to court, instead the platforms will be preemptively second guessing what a judge might say is reasonable, and people with serious social media accounts will be second guessing the second-guesses of their platform controllers in fear that they might be thrown off, and lose years of work if they guess wrongly. Worse, the big platforms, supposedly so “independent” will become unaccountable but de facto arms of the government. The platforms will know if they don’t perform as expected and favorably to the incumbent masters, that the rules will get more onerous, the fines bigger. And thus and verily will the unholy alliance of Big-Tech and Big-Government will become Big-Brother in your conversations, and Big Bankrupter in your nightmares. The government claim they are not censoring anyone, but it’s just done at arms length with “implausible” deniability. Obviously the laws will censor all of us who are not already controlled by ACMA or the government through a public salary, a grant, or a Code of Practice written into the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act. Who silences the government misinformation, then?
What happens when the experts are wrong, but the people who are unconvinced can’t speak up because they might “harm… the efficacy of a preventative health measure”? These health measures may take a … lifetime… to even measure the efficacy. Does the government get a free pass for 40 years? It was estimated dietary trans fats (found in margarine) were killing 82,000 people a year in the US. (Danaei et al 2009). Should we have fined all the people who talked about this, and perhaps delayed things, and killed a half a million more? Someone speaking against hydrogenated margarine could have been deemed to be spreading “misinformation causing harm to public health in Australia”. So 20 years later, they turn out to be right — will the government compensate the families of the dead who might have chosen a different sandwich spread had they heard another opinion and been able to make up their own mind? Will Facebook and Twitter need to block the accounts of experts who were wrong? Or, are there two kinds of citizens in Australia — one sort that work for the government, who can give their opinions and get things wrong without losing their right to speak, and the Untermenschen, who cannot speak, even if they are right? Confidence has to be earned, not orderedApparently the citizens of Australia are not allowed to say anything that might harm the confidence in the banking system or the financial markets. But if our banking system is so fragile, or our currency so fake, that it needs a law to force people to “feel confident” then we are in a trouble already. Nothing damages confidence like making a law to silence critics. As adults, we filter misinformation our whole lives, it’s our jobWe are all adults in this room, and we have lived our whole lives filtering out advertising spin, ignoring political lies, and reading books telling us we can stops storms if we just ride a bike. Since the stone-age we’ve spent our lives climbing from one misinformation-swamp to another, but as adults, it’s our job to figure it out. Free will and all. How dare you treat us like children. And even the children about to enter the room have to learn how to deal with misinformation. How exactly can we teach them, if the government serves up one permitted line to protect us from accidentally hearing something “wrong”? It’s not just that this misinformation bill is egregiously wrong, it’s that we shouldn’t have one at all in the first place. REFERENCES Danaei et al (2009) The preventable causes of death in the United States: comparative risk assessment of dietary, lifestyle, and metabolic risk factors, PLoS Med, . 2009 Apr 28;6(4):e1000058. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058. Epub 2009 Apr 28. The Bill: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 The 69 page proposed legislation PDF form and Word doc. Submissions close on the 30 September 2024. (General advice on how to make a submission). Submissions can be uploaded here (button on the right column) or emailed to the Committee Secretariat below.
September 30th, 2024 | Tags: Free Speech, Misinformation | Category: Australia, Global Warming | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova It’s grand final day in Australia, and awkwardly the State of Victoria risks a grid overload. A truckload of solar power will arrive at lunchtime that no one needs, and which has no place to go. The largest single generator in Australia now is rooftop solar and it’s virtually uncontrollable. The geniuses running the national grid have subsidized solar panels and made electricity unaffordable at the same time, thus driving more householders into the arms of the solar industry. So they’ve created an artificial market bubble — as all good communists do. We now have a 20 gigawatt capacity generator that mostly can’t be turned off, except by clouds or possibly Chinese cyberwarfare. And where autumn and spring used to be the easy seasons, now Sunny spring days are diabolical too — hardly anyone needs their air conditioner or their heater at lunchtime, but solar watts are pouring in. This was the situation yesterday in Victoria: Again, the poor sods who built solar industrial parks (marked in red) have to curtail their production massively from 8am to 5pm. The red curve is supposed to look like the yellow curve. The missing red peak is wasted solar production. As the yellow uncontrollable peak rises towards the black line (the total demand), the whole grid has a problem — more reliable cheap generators have to shut down to prevent the toxic excess electricity building up. Without the reliable generators, with their 500 ton turbines spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute, (or 3,600 in the USA) the grid loses frequency stability, and spinning inertia, and the ability to cope when a cloud rolls over. The problem of excess solar at lunch time is also called The Duck Curve and has been known for years. It’s not like this snuck up and surprised anyone, yet here we are — courting disaster. The ABC reported on this, but can’t bring itself to call this what is is — a “Solar Glut” dumped on the grid. Instead rooftop solar is a “juggernaut” and the grid faces a “low demand warning”, as if you personally are the problem, for not using enough electrons. Don’t blame the artificial pointless bubble of solar panels. Rooftop solar ‘juggernaut’ risks grid overload as AEMO issues first-ever low-demand warningby Daniel Mercer, ABC Rooftop solar output has reached such enormous levels that authorities have begun issuing warnings about their ability to keep the electricity system from being overloaded at times. In an extraordinary first this week, the body that runs Australia’s biggest energy market said the supply of solar power in Victoria threatened to overwhelm demand for electricity from the grid amid mild, sunny conditions. It said Friday’s oversupply of solar was so acute that demand for power from the grid would fall below a threshold critical for keeping the electricity system on an even keel. Even the AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) calls it a minimum system load notice – not a solar surge, or a renewable overload. And despite the toxic excess of solar panels, and that we’ve known this day would come, in true Soviet fashion, we’re still installing as many as we can (see below). The trainwreck continues.  The relentless rise of solar PV in Australia. That would stop dead in its tracks if householders had to pay fair costs for the frequency stability, the back up power, and the storage. The solution, according to government experts, is not to have a real market and accurate prices, it’s to give more powers to some bureaucrats so they can order battery owners to discharge before lunch and be ready to soak up the dangerous excess at midday. The battery owners don’t like that, but like an anaconda, the government gradually tightens its grip until the free market is dead. The other “solution” is to add controllers to home solar panels so the government can switch them off (which is starting to happen in South Australia and Western Australia). Solar panels owners don’t like that either, but they were sold rainbows and fairy cakes that no one could deliver. The communist quislings complain that the market is failing us and needs more governance. But the truth is, the overlords destroyed the free market long ago. The people want reliable electricity, and if they were allowed to choose reliable power over renewable energy, the problem would solve itself. Meanwhile, grid managers surely pray for cloudy days. Soon, some bright spark is going to suggest cloud seeding for grid stability. UPDATE: The grid demand fell to 1817MW in Victoria, and survived but prices spiked to minus $367 today during the low minimum solar belly of the duck.
September 28th, 2024 | Tags: AEMO, Duck Curve, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  Robert Redfield stands to the right of Donald Trump on Feb 29th 2020 for The Coronavirus Taskforce. By Jo NovaThe rift in the political heliosphere continues to tearThe phase change is upon us. The most unlikely people are suddenly fans of Donald Trump and talking about cleaning up corruption. From the core command center of the US Pandemic Bureaucracy, the Former CDC director, Robert Redfield, whom Robert F Kennedy Jnr mercilessly criticized, has come out endorsing President Trump, and admitting Kennedy was right all along. Redfield was director of the CDC from 2018 – 2021, and now says that the three behemoth government health agencies — the FDA, the NIH and the CDC, have been captured by industry and the federal government must fix this problem. Furthermore, he says Trump “has chosen exactly the only person who can do this, Robert F Kennedy, Jnr.” Redfield writes in Newsweek “Donald Trump Has a Plan to Make America’s Children Healthy Again. It’s a Good One.”Across a century-plus of cozy courtship, the federal regulators have nearly married the regulated, especially in health care. Today, private industry uses its political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. Kennedy is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA‘s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies. NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma. And as the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I know the agency can be influenced by special interest groups. But it doesn’t stop in the health agencies: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a captive of industry, too. Created to help the family farmer and to ensure a wholesome food supply, today the agency often favors large corporations over the interests of small farmers and the public’s health. To cure our children, we must reevaluate our food choices and the underlying practices of the agricultural sector. We must prioritize wholesome and nutritious food. If we do not discover the depth of our corporate capture problem and fix it, we cannot truly address chronic disease in this country. Redfield says nothing about vaccines specifically, but if the agencies are captured, and Kennedy is right about so many things, the stinking mess is sitting there on the table, unmentioned. And the question of course is, where was Robert Redfield when the nation needed him?Has he seen the light, or is he jumping from a sinking ship, and throwing himself a life-raft? Kennedy was shocked:
It’s hard to believe Redfield would be doing this if he thought Trump would lose. Redfield had years to speak up about the problems at the CDC and other agencies. He had years to improve childhood nutrition or to explain the risks with a rushed roll out of vaccines and he did nothing. But his endorsement surely adds a major dose of credibility to Kennedy’s claims, and thus to Trump. It’s hard to call Kennedy a conspiracy theorist when the head of the CDC says he was right. There are a lot of left-leaning women who are very concerned about problems with food additives and children’s health. Some of these same women were worried about vaccines even before Covid arrived. Kennedy is speaking their language, and the Democrat party establishment has nothing at all for them. The mood is shifting.  Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
September 27th, 2024 | Tags: Corruption (Medicine), Health, R.F.Kennedy Jnr, Trump (Donald) | Category: Health, Politics | Print This Post | | |
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