The people making wonder wind turbines are having a tough time. They thought they were picking the hottest new industry, saving the world, and expecting to make great money. Instead supply chains are in crisis, competition is fierce, and profit margins are razor tight. They know that the solar panel industry has largely gone to China, and worry that wind turbine manufacturing will do the same.
What they don’t seem to realize is that the reason the factories went to China is that the country isn’t powered by wind turbines. No country powered by unreliable power is also a growing manufacturing base. And as well as having cheap coal power, China also has the advantage of cheap slave labor, few environmental rules, no ethics and hardly any red tape. It’s a red-light flasher. About now, a wise investor might be wondering about the the odd disconnect in the idea of building devices to save the world while imprisoning people and polluting lakes. What if the environmental movement is a hollow geostrategic trojan fantasy serving Russians, Chicomms, socialists and investment banker cartels?
For Ben Hunt, the light-bulb moment isn’t there yet. These are the guys trying to make ends meet with real products for real consumers. But they haven’t done quite enough homework. Ben Hunt thinks carbon dioxide controls the climate and the world needs wind towers. He thinks “the message isn’t hitting home hard enough” as if showing people more climate-porn-storms will make their industry grow when they’re already at 130% saturation and have been for decades.
Former Siemens Gamesa insider says turbine manufacturers are in dire need of the bright future they were promised
Ben Hunt wrote to colleagues to say “it will get worse before it gets better”
One of the first responses I received was very instructive: “When I joined more than 15 years ago, I was told that I was joining the sector with the brightest and most promising future. The problem is that it is a future that seems never to come.”
The Wind Turbine OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturer) are struggling to turn a profit, and worry that they can’t compete with China:
It is fair to say that that sums up much of the prevailing mood in the wind turbine OEM sector right now with all the major western OEMs struggling to turn a profit. It is not unusual to hear senior industry figures raising the spectre of the fate of the European solar manufacturing industry, long ago lost to the east.
While everything should be going gangbusters for the highly fashionable, saintly industry, reality is no fun:
Instead the news is full of stories of lay-offs, factory closures and eye-watering financial losses. And the resources required for the necessary investments are in jeopardy.
The fantasy is alive and well even if the wheels are falling off:
Wind is a cost effective, inexhaustible and clean provider of secure energy that isn’t going to further poison the planet.
Somehow, however, that message isn’t hitting home anything like hard enough. At Davos late last month, the discourse turned back towards nuclear, shale and more large-scale fossil to overcome the energy crunch.
Many in the industry believed these arguments long since won, but the fight is ongoing, and I’m really not sure we are winning.
After 30 years of the media doing nothing but glowing soft agitprop for the wind industry, blaming fossil fuels just doesn’t cut it.
..it is time to take the gloves off in the lobbying area. The fossil industry is more established, better resourced and more aggressive. The case for wind and renewables needs to be more forceful and more focused. We have been guilty of being too polite and too naïve, perhaps believing the overwhelming weight of argument is enough. It clearly isn’t.
What part of BP being Beyond Petroleum, and Royal Dutch Shell lobbying the World Bank against coal doesn’t make sense? The gas industry has been trying to demonize coal and CO2 just as much as the renewables industries have. And so have the bankers — the Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley –they’re all fans of wind farms. But in the end, the world is paying $400 a ton for coal.
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Given the dire shortage of cheap energy, another plan is to pay British households up to £6 for each kilowatt-hour they don’t use at peak time. While a normal kilowatt-hour would cost 28p, the blistering premium price shows how desperate the National Grid planners must be. The last thing they want is everyone to come home, turn on the oven and washing machine and plug in their scooters and EV’s at 6pm.
So now possibly in a grand experiment, as well as trying to control the weather with windmills, millions of families may try to reschedule body clocks somehow, eating later, doing laundry later, watching the melatonin-destroying blue-screens-of-insomnia after 10pm and running the drier while they sleep. Maybe it won’t be so bad, or maybe people will be more sleep deprived and less productive, fatter, or crash their cars on the A6 as they drive right over 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in Lancashire that could have easily kept the lights on. Hopefully the drier won’t catch fire at night.
Sometime 20 years from now, people at Oxford will get a nice grant to study what happened to the lifespan and health of the working class and the poor during the winter of the Energy Crisis. They may not find a conclusive link with house fires, car accidents, falls or school performance, but that’s OK, there’s always another grant for that.
Families are struggling with energy bills that have jumped by 54 per cent (an average of £693) this year.
It [National Grid ESO] is believed to have written to suppliers last week asking them to assess how much less energy their customers could be persuaded to use at peak times.
Ultimately everyone who uses electricity at dinnertime will pay more so other people can have less.
The cost of the scheme would be added onto energy bills but the National Grid is said to believe the additional charge would be less than the cost of paying power plants to increase supply.
Look at that evening Peak of maximum power consumption, and last night that was at 6.05PM. Incidentally, it’s at that same time year round day in day out, 365 days a year, and has been at that same time forever. In Summer it might be somewhat hidden by HVAC (air conditioning) power consumption, which is so much higher, but the evening Peak has always been at that time, you know the time the power retailers charge the most for, telling the gullible gulls people that they can avoid the peak cost by moving their power consumption to cheaper times, you know come home from school and work some other time. Have your main evening family meal at some other time, watch TV etc at some other time. Live without lighting till some other time. Tell you children to do their homework some other time. Charge your phones at some other time. Move the habits of everyone of many many many lifetimes to ….. some other time.
So let’s utilise that known for Centuries time of day and change the cost to a higher rate, eh!
Countries where energy consumption is plummeting don’t feel much pain … yet. And there is a good reason for that. One country is increasing its energy use, propping up Western consumption with exports and giving us a false sense of well-being. That country is, of course, China.
Since the West began its energy starvation diet, Chinese energy consumption has increased by over 50 per cent and its electricity consumption has increased by 200 per cent, overtaking the U.S. by a large margin. China, unlike the EU, U.K. and U.S., is still 90 per cent reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear. What’s more, only some of the immense wealth these fuels are generating is being exported. What is China doing with the rest? Time will tell.
But right now, as a matter of urgency, we must reverse the decline in Western energy quality and consumption by ending impoverishing renewable subsidies and clearing the path for fossil fuels and nuclear. Toying with low-density, thermodynamically incompetent renewables is an indulgence we cannot afford. With the Chinese economy on an energetically sound footing and those in the West not, the world has turned upside down. The economic consequences of this reversal are serious, the security implications terrifying. Our energy blindness is both costly and dangerous.
Energy Starvation costs a lot
Energy demand is falling because of environmental policies, including subsidies to modern renewables such as wind and solar. As distasteful as this might sound, it is nonetheless true. So far, both the U.S. and Canada are relatively minor players, the U.S. having spent a mere US$125 billion between 2008-2018, and while Canadian national totals are lower, the province of Ontario alone is reported to have spent about US$30 billion in the period 2006 to 2014. But the EU, where the biggest energy collapse is observed, has spent a staggering US$800 billion since 2008, a total that has been increasing at $US70 billion a year. And the U.K., a country of 65 million people, is shelling out well over US$10 billion every year.
The intention of these subsidies was to reduce costs, but the gamble has not paid off — nor will it so long as Mother Nature and her laws of physics are at the table. Wind and solar remain stubbornly expensive for consumers in spite of a blizzard of misinformation and propaganda claiming otherwise.
Some sources of energy are disordered from the start — doomed by entropy
Moreover, energy varies in quality, not just quantity. To support complex society a fuel must be of high quality, that is, structured so that it has the potential to do a lot of work. In thermodynamics, this is referred to as a fuel’s degree of “disorder” or “entropy.” Greater disorder equals greater entropy equals less work. But our “energy-blindness,” the inability to easily grasp thermodynamic principles, means that we must rely on physics to see — and what it reveals is that fossil fuels and uranium are highly ordered and rich in their potential to do work, making them cheap, while wind and solar are the reverse.
John Constable is energy director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London and author of its forthcoming study Europe’s Green Experiment: A costly failure in unilateral climate policy. Debra Lieberman is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and author of Objection: Disgust, Morality, and the Law (OUP, 2018).
The Greens must be having apoplexy. In Glasgow last year everyone was signing climate agreements with no idea that by June they would be signing 15 year new deals for gas with the U.S., the Middle East and Africa. Germany is pouring $3b into floating LNG import platforms. The Germans are also suggesting that the G7 now allow funding for fossil fuel projects, presumably to allow new gas or even coal projects to solve the energy crisis. Meanwhile Boris Johnson is cutting net-zero targets and suggests maybe in the face of food shortages we should feed food to people instead of cars. Starving people to save the world was never going to sell well. Especially when the UK was getting 20% of the ethanol for the biofuel program from Ukraine.
Some of these changes, like the gas contracts and national security issues, are going to leave a mark for years, but back-flipping again on things like biofuels and combustion engines will be done in a flash if they can get away with it. The pushback is coming.
Germany is pushing for Group of Seven nations to walk back a commitment that would halt the financing of overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the matter. That would be a major reversal on tackling climate change as Russia’s war in Ukraine upends access to energy supplies.
A draft text shared with Bloomberg would see the G-7 “acknowledge that publicly supported investment in the gas sector is necessary as a temporary response to the current energy crisis.”
The whole world wants coal now but there is no spare capacity anymore, so coal shortages are not going away
The price is record high for coal but investors don’t have faith that there will still be a market in five years time, so there is little investment. Meanwhile in South Africa people have stolen and vandalized the rail lines so it’s hard to move coal. Australia has had flooding which has slowed production, Colombia has elected an anti fossil fuel leader, and India and China are both digging as much out of the ground as they can already.
The long-term pressure to move away from coal also means there is limited spare capacity, and investors are unlikely to try and pump cash into alleviating what may only be a short-term demand surge.
“Coal markets have been burned so many times [..] and you’ve still got a very drastic retirement schedule in Europe,” says Natalie Biggs, global head of thermal coal markets research at Wood Mackenzie. “What’s the purpose of opening new mines and rushing out into the market when that market disappears in the next five years?
Europe is scrambling to set up gas infrastructure to replace the Russia piped supplies, but these new capital project come with long term contracts that are making the greens very nervous:
Suddenly the warning lights flashing in Germany. The message is to go easy on the gas, but ultimately even if the national storage tanks were completely full, the largest economy in the EU would only have ten weeks of gas without supplies from Russia. It’s summer and they’ve already hit stage 2 of the 3 stage emergency plan.
It was all totally avoidable. A wholly Green-made crisis. They could have gone nuclear, kept using coal, and explored for more gas and then they could have laughed at GazProm. Instead talk of rationing has already started, and the event horizon now includes the possibility of mass industrial shutdowns and recession.
Germany has been so suddenly crippled it’s almost as if an enemy force had infiltrated the activist soul and culture of the nation and duped it with a magic spell.
Germany says that its citizens may have to ration the use of natural gas this winter as the country faces an energy “crisis” due to Russia reducing its supplies last week.
Germany is facing a “Lehman Brothers” collapse in its energy market that could spark a domino effect leading to a severe recession should the gas-addicted economic powerhouse of the European Union be fully cut off from Russian energy supplies.
Economy Minister and Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck said on Friday that Europe’s largest economy could be forced to shut down certain industries should gas supplies run think by the winter.
“Companies would have to stop production, lay off their workers, supply chains would collapse, people would go into debt to pay their heating bills, that people would become poorer,” he said according to DW.
The Green Party politician warned that there could be “a kind of Lehman-Brothers effect in the energy market,” spreading through municipal utilities, industrial and commercial companies, “And then you have a domino effect that would lead to a severe recession.”
Müller predicted on Thursday that the country could only live off reserves for less than three months without Russian gas over the Winter, saying: “If the storage facilities in Germany were mathematically 100% full… we could do without Russian gas completely… for just about two-and-a-half months and then the storage tanks will be empty.”
Tucker Carlson savages the UniParty and talks about the disarray in voters, the sea change sweeping parts of the US in political alliances. The Great Replacement and influx of new democrat voters has run out of steam.
The old coalitions are crumbling before our eyes. Suddenly we’re seeing Hispanic voters, African and Middle Eastern immigrants, as well as huge numbers of American-born young men, all running at remarkable speed from Joe Biden and the anti-human corporate neoliberalism he represents. …
Joe Biden’s support among Hispanics has dropped to a stunning 24%. That’s the lowest among any ethnic group in America. …
…
At the very moment that Joe Biden is at his weakest, months before a pivotal midterm election, Republicans are propping him up. They are saving Biden from himself.
Since the day Biden was elected, Republicans in Washington have taken Biden’s side on virtually every significant item in his policy agenda. That would include: COVID restrictions, vaccine mandates, transgender ideology in school, sanctions against China, the January 6 charade, free speech, civil liberties, spying by the Intel agencies, preserving the big tech monopolies, the anti-White race politics of CRT and Juneteenth, border enforcement and energy policy, and above all, the administration’s signature issue: its lunatic and reckless support for the war on Ukraine. Republicans are all-in.
Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are united in their fear of populism and in their gut-level loathing of the American public and they’re not alone. What Washington fears most is democracy — that is letting voters have what they want. That’s not allowed. Republicans and Democrats have formed a uniparty specifically to prevent it. You see this everywhere, but you see it most clearly in the gun control legislation that’s in the Senate right now. …
Just in case anyone can’t think of 25 million reasons why Mitch McConnell might feel inclined to serve other agendas than his voters, read what I wrote in January last year describing Mitch McConnell’s very strange rich connection with China. The corruption is not even hidden…
McConnell’s wife is a Chinese-American and also happens to be The Transportation Secretary of the US Government (!). Since Elaine Chao took up that job four years ago, her fathers company has expanded rapidly and has added 40 percent more ships. Her father, James Chao, is a shipping magnate that gave his daughter and her husband McConnell a gift of at least $5 million in 2008. That’s the conservative estimate — it might have been worth as much as $25 million dollars. (Nice in-laws if you can get them.) The largess was legally disclosed. The net worth of the political couple went from $3m in 2004 to something between $9 and $36m by 2018.
The Chinese Ship building company is called CSSC Holdings. McConnell’s wife’s family is so close to it that both her father and her sister sit on the Board of the financial arm of this Chinese company they buy boats from. It’s odd, stacked on weird, wrapped up in long explanations. CSSC is not just a boat building company, it’s the Chinese government’s military contractor. Indeed, the letters CSSC stand for the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Get it?
Speaking of signs of decay: Who IS in Charge?
President Biden on Thursday inadvertently held up a comically detailed cheat sheet prepared by his staff instructing the gaffe-prone leader of the free world to “take YOUR seat” and to limit his remarks to “2 minutes.” — New York Post
YOU take YOUR seat’: Very specific cheat sheet reminds Biden how to act. By Steven Nelson.
Who writes these notes for the Leader of the Free World?
h/t Old Ozzie, Scott of the Pacific, Bill who moved from AZ.
A new study shows natural protection still good at 50% after ten months, while vaccination protection waned after 4 months
The utter scandal here is that all those people who had natural protection were being forced to take vaccines to protect them from Omicron, when the vaccines were providing only a fairly limited benefit or no advantage at all.
A new study was based on the whole population of Qatar. It shows that people who caught the original older variants had about 50% immunity to catching Omicron — even ten months later. Those who were double vaccinated had so little protection six months later, it was effectively zero. Indeed, if they had Pfizer their effectiveness was minus 3.4% meaning they were ever so slightly more likely to catch Omicron that if they hadn’t had any vaccines. For moderna it was minus 10% at the six month mark, which sounds, well, not good.
Ten months later, those who had caught earlier variants of Covid still had 50% protection against Omicron:
The authors of the study found that those who had a prior infection but no vaccination had a 46.1 and 50 percent immunity against the two subvariants of the Omicron variant, even at an interval of more than 300 days since the previous infection.
Immunity levels for two COVID-19 vaccines fell to negative figures 270 days after the second dose of vaccine. These numbers predict a trend of more rapidly waning immunity for vaccines compared to immunity from infections.
The findings are supported by another recent study from Israel that also found natural immunity waned significantly more slowly compared to artificial, or vaccinated, immunity.
The study found that both natural and artificial immunity waned over time.
Individuals that were previously infected but not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.
Natural protection was as good as three doses for outcomes that mattered
From the paper, the first box below compares people taking Pfizer or catching old versions of Covid and their later likelihood of catching Omicron BA1. Basically two doses were useless and once someone had caught covid they’d need at least three doses before there was much benefit above and beyond what they already had, and when we say “benefit” we’re only talking about a reduction in symptomatic Covid.
The box on the right shows just how useful any kind of protection was against severe, critical or deadly outcomes. Remarkable stuff. 100% everywhere.
Bear in mind that the third dose “boosted” people were usually were still in the seven week honeymoon period. If this study were done now, a few months later, the 3 doses numbers here might not look much different to the other options, or possibly, might resemble the “2 dose” poor results. We can’t tell from this study.
The numbers are similar for the newer variant of Omicron called BA2 but protection was a bit lower (below). Meaning the the newer Omicron version which took over the world in January was slightly better at evading protection than the December one. BA2 was definitely a bit nastier for some people though. And protection against severe, critical or fatal BA2 infection was lower from natural infection, though monster error bars neutralize all simple statements.
All the figures are slightly out of date though. We’re now up to Omicron 4 or 5 or so.
Tracking the slide
The honeymoon period for vaccination lasts for three months and then wears off quickly to the point where at six months the injectee might as well not have had a dose at all.
It also has to be said we don’t know if catching Omicron protects a lot against catching Omicron. It does for a while, but we don’t know how long. It’s possible that a mild case of Omicron doesn’t set people up for long term great protection, which is what happens with other normal mild coronaviruses at the moment.
ENSO is playing games with climate scientists — mocking their ability to predict the single greatest natural short term climate swing factor. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation drives floods, droughts, bushfires, and essentially pushes the planetary temperatures up and down on a year by year basis. Nothing determines the year’s climate headlines more than this one thing, yet climate scientists haven’t the faintest idea what drives it.
Imagine what it would look like if they could? They’d be able to say … blah… solar wind changes driven by, say, solar barycentric dynamics will lead to El Ninos in 2023, and ’25, a weak one in 2026. Farmers could plan ahead. Dam managers would know when water would be scarce. The UN would know which years to ask for even more money.
Meteorologists are forecasting a third consecutive year of La Niña. Some researchers say similar conditions could become more common as the planet warms.
On ongoing La Niña event that has contributed to flooding in eastern Australia and exacerbated droughts in the United States and East Africa could persist into 2023, according to the latest forecasts. The occurrence of two consecutive La Niña winters in the Northern Hemisphere is common, but having three in a row is relatively rare. A ‘triple dip’ La Niña — lasting three years in a row — has happened only twice since 1950.
Get ready: Matthew England predicts more triple events:
This particularly long La Niña is probably just a random blip in the climate, scientists say. But some researchers are warning that climate change could make La Niña-like conditions more likely in future. “We are stacking the odds higher for these triple events coming along,” says Matthew England, a physical oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. England and others are now working to reconcile discrepancies between climate data and the output of major climate models — efforts that could clarify what is in store for the planet.
“Working to reconcile discrepancies” is climate-scientist-speak for “working to fix our broken models”. We note the get-out-of-jail clause on most climate news reporting, some scientists say this, some say that, so some climate scientists are always right.
How useful, exactly, are those models that predict a 51% chance of a La Nina seven months from now?
The latest forecast from the World Meteorological Organization, issued on 10 June, gives a 50–60% chance of La Niña persisting until July or September. This will probably increase Atlantic hurricane activity, which buffets eastern North America until November, and decrease the Pacific hurricane season, which mainly affects Mexico. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Centre has forecast a 51% chance of La Niña in early 2023.
When it comes to predicting what climate change will actually do to ENSO events — for years most scientists hedged and only say that both La Ninas and El Ninos may get more extreme, but not necessarily that one or the other will become more common.
Review says the models of an increase in extreme weather events are agreeing.
According to Cai, extreme El Niño events happened roughly once every 20 years in the 20th century, but they’re now increasing in frequency. “It will almost double, to one in 11 years or so.”
He adds that there’s more consensus among the models they’ve examined than in previous studies, such as one he authored in 2015. “More models are saying the same thing. I think that it’s because we are now able to get more realistic models.”
Cutting-edge models predict that El Niño frequency will increase within 2 decades because of climate change, regardless of emissions mitigation efforts.
Now, new research published in Nature Climate Change has used cutting-edge climate models to predict that by 2040, El Niño events will become more frequent because of changes to the climate. These events are already in motion and will happen regardless of short-term emissions mitigation efforts, according to the authors.
“This [finding] is another layer on a growing pile of work that is pointing quite conclusively to ongoing changes to ENSO related to greenhouse gases,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new research.
Admiral Chris Barrie will be paid to worry about how seas rising by 1mm a year might affect our supply chains, but not about how making electricity ten times more expensive might destroy manufacturing in Australia.
If we had to actually build our own nuclear submarines will China still be happy to sell us the steel? Will we have an aluminum smelter left in the nation, and how long can we run that on solar panels and batteries? Are 2,000 kilometer long high voltage lines an easy target for hostile forces? Will electric vehicles be easier targets for cyber hackers or EMF weapons? Could dust bombs sabotage 2GW of solar panels? Would paint bombs be worse?
If we managed to build one nuclear submarine by 2040, will it be the most reliable baseload generator left in the national energy market and should we plug it back into the grid so we can build another sub?
Anthony Albanese will ask Australia’s most senior intelligence chief, Andrew Shearer, to personally lead a review of the security threats posed by the climate crisis.
In a document submitted to the UN outlining Australia’s new 2030 emissions target, the Albanese government confirmed it would order “an urgent climate risk assessment of the implications of climate change for national security, which will be an enduring feature of Australia’s climate action”.
The exact scope and terms of reference are currently being drawn up, but the assessment was expected to consider options such as setting up an Office of Climate Threat Intelligence. If created, that office would update the threat assessments on a rolling basis.
Threats will be updated as funds roll in. Imagine if someone was paid to find out if unreliable expensive energy made us an easy target?
Former Australian defence force chief, retired Admiral Chris Barrie… said climate threats and costs would affect Australia in many ways, including disruptions to vital import and export markets and supply chains. He also cited increasing demands on the health system, degraded and lost natural systems, and escalating adaptation needs.
“Globally there will be regional conflicts over shared resources, climate-change enhanced famine, breakdown in social cohesion, forced displacement of populations, and state failure, including in our region,” Barrie said.
These small wins matter. Cancel Culture is about shutting people up — and even if it’s just a dumb joke being cancelled, the danger is that each minor win gives power to self-annointed Thought Police. The Grand Sacred Cows of our culture are created through a thousand irrelevant outrages.
Bill Maher, comedian, savages The Washington Post and Felecia Somnez and half the Millennial Gen:
For the Australians who missed it in our election week:
Nina Jankowicz just quit and the Disinformation Governance Board is dead. It’s the best possible ending to a move that was demented from the start.
Whatever the Department of Homeland Security thought the DGB would do, the board’s ham-handed launch (and very name) could only feed the direst suspicions. The US government has no business determining what’s “disinformation” — certainly not via an Orwellian shadow department, housed within a national security agency.
Just like that — Europe is hitting the panic button. Thank the Russians for demanding rubles for their gas and threatening supply. Not only has Germany decided to rescue old coal plants, but so has Austria, which had gone blissfully “coal free” two years ago. How long did that fairytale last? In the Netherlands coal power plants were forced for years to run at only 35% capacity by government ruling, but now, suddenly, full tilt is fine. Sweden and Denmark have both issued an “early warning” to flag potential energy shortages.
In Poland, energy prices are so expensive that three weeks ago the government told people to go and collect wood from forests to keep their homes warm. Last week they the government said it would pay a large part of the cost of buying three tons of coal for each household. It’s that bad.
Much of the EU rely on Russian gas for about 40% of their supplies. The Austrians have storage sites for gas so large they can hold an entire years worth, but they are only 39% full and they want to double that before November.
Gazprom said last week it would reduce supplies of the fuel to Germany via the pipeline due to delayed repairs, but the German government has called the decision ‘political’ amid the widespread European support for Ukraine following Putin‘s invasion.
Germany has also mandated the filling of gas reserves to 90 per cent ahead of the European winter, to hedge against a further reduction in supply. ‘When we go into the winter with half full gas stores and the taps are turned off then we are talking about a difficult economic crisis in Germany,’ Habeck said. Currently, Germany’s gas storage capacity is just under 60 percent full.
Meanwhile Russia is calling it a blockade to stop deliveries to Kalingrad. The Lithuanian Prime Minister says it is not a blockade, only “sanctions”.
Russian gas pipelines to Europe (Click to enlarge) | Samuel Bailey
That’s a lot of countries suddenly looking for alternative energy:
Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom has turned off supplies to several EU countries for refusing to pay for gas in roubles — including Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, and the Netherlands.
But Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Austria, and Slovakia have also faced reduced gas delivery volumes, raising fears over gas security supply.
Things people thought were set in stone can be turned on a dime:
The Netherlands said Monday it will lift all restrictions on coal-fired power stations to counter a drop in gas supplies from Russia….
“The cabinet has decided to immediately withdraw the restriction on production for coal-fired power stations from 2002 to 2024,” Jetten told a news conference in The Hague.czech. “This means that coal-fired power stations can run at full capacity again instead of the maximum of 35 percent.”
The Austrian greens were very pleased Austria was only the second European country to go “Coal free” in March 2020. It was “historic” at the time.
State-controlled Verbund AG, Austria’s biggest utility and most valuable company, was ordered late Sunday to prepare its mothballed Mellach coal-fired station for operation. The plant, 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Vienna, was shut two years ago as Austria became only the second European country to eliminate coal entirely from its electricity grid.
Meanwhile, in Poland, a reminder of how desperate the situation really is:
Authorities in Poland reminded citizens on Friday they can forage firewood from forests to keep warm amid soaring energy costs in the country. The government said it was taking steps to make it easier for people to collect firewood in an effort to ease the pressure created by sky-rocketing energy bills and shortages of coal.
Opponents of the ruling ‘Law and Justice party’ said the comments showed it had not got a grip on the wider economy. Inflation in Poland has climbed to 14 per cent in recent weeks, with fuel prices hitting 8 zlotys ($1.87) per litre. The average monthly wage in Poland is around 7110 zlotys ($1800).
The Polish government wants to subsidise coal for household and housing cooperatives amid rising coal prices and shortages caused by the Russian coal embargo, Energy Minister Anna Moskwa announced Tuesday.
Under the government’s plan, consumers can buy up to three tonnes of coal per household for a maximum price of 996 zlotys (€214). The sellers that keep the price at this level will receive up to 750 zlotys (€161) in compensation.
Would you like blackouts or floods with your Green Burger?
Tumut Generation Station No. 3 Snowy scheme | Joe “velojo” A
Here in Weather-Dependent Renewable World the chief crash test dummy is struggling because of yet another bit of terrible luck. We desperately need the only reliable renewable energy we have to generate while reliable but-badly-maintained-coal is breaking — and our national grid sits on the edge of blackouts. But Lordy No! Oh the schadenfreude — the dams are all full. Seems we have too much water thanks to the La Nina we didn’t predict, and the excess rainfall that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the dams that weren’t supposed to fill. Now if Snowy Hydro releases too much water to make electricity they may flood lower areas.
You can’t make this stuff up. Hydroelectric dams serve two purposes and sometimes they conflict. If we are lucky, we might avoid both blackouts and floods, but we won’t avoid the bonfire of electricity bills that are coming.
Ponder the impossible quandry of the Green religion. Like the Escher puzzle of Energy — It’s always the weather’s fault. If only we could use enough renewables to get perfect weather we could solve this! And perfect weather is just a hundred trillion solar panels away…
Oh woe is the journalist trying hard not to get the message about relying on weather dependent generation:
It’s only one example of how weather extremes have deepened the nation’s man-made power crisis.
Snowy Hydro’s biggest power station is Tumut 3. At maximum output, it can generate 1,800 megawatts of electricity.
The huge volumes of water used by Tumut 3 are either pumped back up the hill to an upper reservoir or emptied into Blowering Dam.
“Generation from Tumut 3 Power Station is significantly constrained by the current storage levels in Blowering Reservoir and the release capacity of the Tumut River. “In order to meet the predicted energy demands in the coming days, it is possible Blowering Reservoir will fill and spill, potentially exceeding the Tumut River channel capacity. “In this scenario, there is potential for the inundation of low-level causeways and water breaking out of the river channel onto agricultural land adjacent to the river.”
Green motto: If in doubt, blame the weather. Never ever admit it was your own arrogant damn stupidity, your fantasy plans, your lack of humility and your inability to add up.
The real world is so complicated
Ben Kefford at LinkedIn does an analysis that explains the dilemma for the generators bidding. In this case Snowy Hydro was afraid that when the Administrative price cap was forced on the system that many other generators would withdraw (which happened). That would leave them pumping far too much water — and risk the flooding in lower areas. To stop the flooding they would have to pay exorbitant daytime rates to pump water back up to the higher dam at blistering prices above $250/MWh. Normally, like a battery, they try to buy-low, sell-high, in terms of finding cheaper parts of the day to run the pumps. But at the moment, there are no cheap hours.
And then there was the possibility that those dollars would not be recouped for up to five months leaving them with a cash shortfall of millions:
While it is true that there is a compensation mechanism via AEMC for recovering opportunity costs lost via generating during administered pricing periods, the actual methodology for calculating storage opportunity costs is not clear, and the mechanism has been rarely used in the past. Notably, under the Rules there is also an upwards of 90 business day (4 – 5 month) delay in determining these costs, including public consultation plus draft and final methodologies.
With an average output capacity of 260 MW in the week leading into the APC, continuing to operate the same way and keep the same price spread would require $18.2 million* in revenue claims per week which are potentially being delayed up to 5 months. Over the unknown period of time which the price cap would remain in place, this turns into a massive liability.
So finally when the APC did hit, not only was Tumut 3 left with little viable economic options for releasing capacity from the upper reservoir, it became evident that the race for the exits from other limited fuel generators was going to put enormous pressure on the lower reservoir if they were called upon. Taking all of this into account – we begin to see that it made unfortunate sense to follow suit.
The bureaucrats designed a poor market then blame the market or the players when they fail. The Greens and renewable-delusionals were blaming the generators for greed and gaming the system — as if they were withholding generation during wildly high priced market times.
Amazing how fast the Sacred Cows get pushed aside. Until a few months ago, Germany had been planning to close its last nuclear plants and gas production had been falling for 20 years. But the Russians are cutting back the gas feed and even the German Greens understand what will happen by winter if they don’t have enough energy. Though on twitter, a lot of commentators are wondering why they don’t reopen the nuclear plants they just closed first and why they still plan to shut the last three later this year?
As Russia reduces its supply of natural gas, Economy Minister Robert Habeck has said Germany must curb its usage. Otherwise, things “could get tight in winter,” he said. Germany must limit its use of gas for electricity production and prioritize the filling of storage facilities to compensate for a drop in supply from Russia, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday.
In a move that goes against the principles of his environmentally-friendly Green Party, the country will also have to increase the burning of coal, Habeck said.
They are offering schemes and incentives for industry to save gas so it can be stockpiled ahead of winter. They’re talking about a cap on domestic heating too, but they know it won’t be enough. It hurts:
“That’s bitter, but it’s simply necessary in this situation to lower gas usage,” he said.
Yet they still claim they can go coal free by 2030. The fantasy olive branch to soften the pain:
The coalition government has made it its goal to make German energy production coal-free by 2030.
The third party in the government coalition, the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), has also called for Germany to reconsider its 2017 ban on unconventional fracking…
If it wasn’t, it should be easy for the FDA and or Pfizer to reply. If it was this extraordinarily rigged to “find” some infinitesimally tiny benefit among the acres of null and even bad results, we have to ask, does anyone care about babies anymore? If the data Pfizer sent is this awful, no one is even trying to hide the corruption. Does the FDA care about its own reputation?
According to Dr Clare Craig (in the video below) — the evidence that Pfizer sent to the FDA is dubious in the extreme: As she tells it — the trial recruited 4,526 children aged from 6 months to 4 years, but as many as 3,000 did not finish the trial. On that basis alone, she says, “the trial should be deemed null and void.” This trial data is so they can get EUA – Emergency Use Authorisation, but they defined severe covid as a raised heartrate and an increased breathing rate — which hardly sounds like an emergency, or something severe. In the end there were only six children age 2 – 4 that had “severe covid” and who were vaccinated and 1 child that had severe covid that was not vaccinated. There was one child that was hospitalized — they were vaccinated.
In terms of pure cases of Covid — Dr Clare Craig describes a process that filters out nearly every case there was. They vaccinated the babies and children and waited 3 weeks after the first dose for the second dose — but in that time, 34 children got covid who were vaccinated and only 13 got covid in the placebo group. It worked out as a 30% increased chance of getting covid if they were vaccinated. They ignored that data. It takes a few weeks for the vaccines to generate antibodies, so, the vaccinated were not really vaccinated. We understand the reason, but it doesn’t change that if there is an increased risk during that time, it says something.
Then there was an eight week gap between the second and third dose. Again, according to Dr Craig, plenty of children were catching covid during that period, but Pfizer and the FDA ignored that data. They filtered out 97% of the incidents of children catching covid. They looked at tiny numbers left over after all the waiting periods. They claim the vaccines work on the basis of 3 covid cases versus 7 after ignoring all the other cases. There were even 12 children who caught covid twice in the two month follow up period and 11 were vaccinated, mostly with three doses.
Babies are not at risk of Covid… and they have no long term safety data. How is it that an EUA – an Emergency Use Authorisation — even applies to children? The whole cost benefit ratio is vastly different for a one year old to a ninety year old. The long term risks, whatever they are, are so long.
The placebo group was vaccinated — on average — after only six weeks and the trial was unblinded, so there is no long term control group.
As Dr Craig says: “Parents should be demanding that the decision-makers explain themselves.” Not just parents, but where is the media, the Professors, the Doctors, and the elected representatives? Where is the UN Humans Rights Commission, on an issue that actually matters?
….
I seem to recall that it was important for Pfizer to get approval for all ages. It’s not just the bit of extra market share from opening up a new “market” but something much bigger — something about getting approval in every age qualifies the product or indemnifies it in a whole new way. Search engines naturally, are not making that easy to find right now. Perhaps a reader can help explain why — legally — it was important to get the EUA in the USA extended to all ages. The risk they are taking with this shows the stakes must be very high. They know how bad this data is.
The UK government‘s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on burning the equivalent of almost 120 million trees a year, a new report claims.
The government’s Net Zero Strategy, released in October 2021, aims to capture up to 58 million tonnes of CO2 from the burning of biomass and piping it under the North Sea.
But to create this much carbon, a whopping 32,534,939 tonnes of wood pellets would need to be burned every year, according to a report by The Telegraph — the equivalent of 119,834,572 trees.
The UK plan assumes trees are carbon neutral, though some of these forests are shipped from America, and probably not via sailing ships. Who can forget how in 2015 Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets. Who also can forget the remarkable coincidence that Chris Huhne, former UK parliamentarian who poured millions of UK tax money into biomass, later got a job directing a company called Zikka Biomass. He did spend time in jail, but that was for lying about speeding tickets.
To balance the UK carbon books some extra CO2 now has to be stuffed under the North Sea in a carbon capture project called BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). Not only will it be obscenely expensive, and serve no purpose, but no one will know until years later whether the carbon obediently stayed there.
Ponder that the Greens say that Net Zero will prevent forest fires, and so we arrive at a point where The Science apparently says we have to incinerate 120 million trees a year to stop forests burning. Witches never had it this easy.
The UK Government says that 120 million trees is not a number they can use in a screenplay or something like that:
Speaking to The Telegraph, a spokesman for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) said that the plans are not final, and that they ‘do not recognise this characterisation’ of the number of trees being burnt.
Presumably the trees would not identify as “burnt” either.
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Amazing how fast the Sacred Cows get pushed aside. Until a few months ago, Germany had been planning to close its last nuclear plants and gas production had been falling for 20 years. But the Russians are cutting back the gas feed and even the German Greens understand what will happen by winter if they don’t have enough energy. Though on twitter, a lot of commentators are wondering why they don’t reopen the nuclear plants they just closed first and why they still plan to shut the last three later this year?
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