Denmark has said it is suspending its widespread Covid-19 vaccination campaign. All remaining Covid restrictions were lifted in the country in February. Noting that the epidemic was under control and that vaccination levels were high, the Danish Health Authority said the country was in a “good position”. “Therefore we are winding down the mass vaccination programme against Covid-19,” said Bolette Soborg, director of the authority’s department of infectious diseases.
Around 81% of Denmark’s 5.8 million inhabitants have received two doses of the vaccine and 61.6% have also received a booster. Denmark noted a drop in the number of new infections and stable hospitalisation rates.
They say they may bring it back some vaccinations in autumn.
Alan Moran published an account of the carbon taxes that both the Coalition and the ALP support. In The Spectator he spelled out the cost of two forms of carbon taxation that we have at present and on top of that the ALP is determined to impose a great deal more.
The existing taxes arise from the RE mandates that increase the amount of wind and solar power in the mix and associated costs that arise from the additional transmission infrastructure required to service dispersed sources of power. Secondly there are taxes to support grants and soft loans dispensed by agencies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
The ALP spelled out their vision for increased power costs in a document called Powering Australia which represents a triumph of aspiration over reality. To quote, it will close the yawning gap between our current Federal Government and our business community, agricultural sector and state governments when it comes to investing in the renewables that will power our future.
Our plan will create 604,000 jobs, with 5 out of 6 new jobs to be created in the regions.
It will spur $76 billion of investment.
It will cut power bills for families and businesses by $275 a year for homes by 2025, compared to today.
Moran pointed out that the $78 billion to “rewire Autralia” is nearly four times the asset value of the existing NEM system in SE Australia and the cost of that “investment” will be a charge on taxpayers.
As to the reality of plans to increase the RE capacity and replace the poor old clapped out coal burners, have a look at the situation in South Australia just before sunrise this morning.
While the wind across the NEM was running at 20% of capacity (2/3 of the average) and delivering 10% of demand, in the wind leading state there was a wind drought (3% of capacity), with 60% of demand provided from Victoria while 80% of local generation was gas and (unusually) they were burning oil as well!
This picture will change through the day. And the NemWatch widget. Encourage people to look at the widget before after sunset and before dawn to get a vivid sense of the lunacy of turning to wind and solar power.
Wind was low in Victoria as well, running at 15% of capacity (half the average) while the much maligned coal burners kept the lights on, running at 75% of capacity (they can manage 100% when necessary.)
The video will become legendary. An MSMBC host creates great satire accidentally.
There is truly nothing funnier than this MSNBC host ranting about what Elon Musk could do to Twitter, and accidentally giving a perfect description of how Twitter has actually operated for the last five years
Elon Musk Is Evil! She says, in a video posted to an app controlled by the CCP, on a phone made by slave labor, repeating propaganda from a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos.
But the EU and UK have both already warned Elon Musk that Twitter must comply with The Digital Services Act:
“Whether on online harassment, the sale of counterfeit products… child pornography, or calls for acts of terrorism… Twitter will have to adapt to our European regulations which do not exist in the United States,” EU commissioner Thierry Breton told AFP.
The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.
In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
Jack Dorsey will get paid a cool billion from the deal, but his mention of “Wall Street” suggests he himself was under the thumb of the Monster asset shareholders.
Hillel Neuer reminds us of the cultural task ahead for the new management:
He tweets:
I fear Elon Musk could undermine the ideological diversity, equity and inclusion at Twitter which currently maintains a careful balance of 98.7% for one side.
The deal everyone is talking about, that has just gone through:
Elon Musk taking Twitter private in $44 billion deal
Reuters
…
NEW YORK, April 25 (Reuters) – Elon Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) for $44 billion cash on Monday in a transaction that will shift control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.
It is a seminal moment for the 16-year-old company that emerged as one of the world’s most influential public squares and now faces a string of challenges.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement.
Keep in mind that Twitter is slated to report first-quarter earnings this Thursday, and originally the board was going to wait until after that earnings announcement to respond to the bid. Something changed.
My suspicion is the financials of the Q1 earnings report will not support the $54.20 high end evaluation offer originally proposed by Musk. If the low Q1 earnings rumors are accurate; and if Twitter had declined or fought the offer; the board would have been in the position of declining a deal that was substantially higher than the company market value, a tenuous position legally. Thus, a deal was made.
Which raises the question of how Twitter makes money?
Twitter has struggled to be profitable. Will it become profitable and maintain the high shareprice, and pay off the debts Musk is taking on to buy it? Does Musk expect to make it profitable, or did he just buy it as an act of philanthropy “for free speech” or as a challenge because he damn well could.
Arguably, these monster fund managers could “afford” to lose money on Twitter in order to boost profits in all their other areas. Like, for example that Blackrock owns 7% of a certain pharmaceutical company called Pfizer, and Vanguard owns 8% of the same company. If they were using (or rather abusing) Twitter to suppress any news that hurt their other investments, or elect governments that help them, that rather raises the stakes. They wouldn’t sell Twitter for the profit of selling it unless they thought they had no legal choice, or they thought they could neutralize or sabotage the Free-Speech-Twitter after the sale.
What would stop the Octopus-Funds from abusing their social media pet corporations? Corporate Law.
Arguably, the Twitter Board are accountable to the Twitter shareholders, and are supposed to be making profits for them, not for other shareholders. It’s a legal bomb that Ron De Santis, Governor of Florida has pressed the button on. As he sees it, the Pension Fund of the State of Florida owns shares of Twitter, and the way the Twitter board was behaving looks like an injury to the fund.
“We’re going to be looking at ways that the state of Florida can hold the Twitter Board accountable for breaching their fiduciary duties...”
BREAKING: @GovRonDeSantis announces he is looking at ways to hold Twitter’s board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duties.
— Benny “Libs Of Tik Tok” Aficionado (@bennyjohnson) April 19, 2022
….
It’s a very big game of chess. Has Elon Musk just outsmarted the Twitter Board and caught them at their own game, or will the same machine that used Twitter, sell it, and then sabotage it with cancel culture, and leave him holding the debt?
Because, let’s face it, the Haters are not coping well already
It won’t be impossible for Groupthinker cults to poison-the-well. Here’s one projecting his hate already for fear that Elon Musk might let people like Donald Trump back on Twitter.
….
Soon, supporting Twitter or being seen on it, might be a crime people lose their job for.
Not to mention that Musk may face visits from the IRS, spurious legal cases and general harrassment of all kinds for getting in the way of someone’s narrative.
AUSTIN, TX—According to the latest reports, inflation has hit a 40-year high affecting the prices of many consumer goods. However, one consumer staple is actually at an all-time high. Speech, which as recently as earlier this year was free, is now valued at $43 billion.
“The free exchange of ideas has been under attack, causing massive inflation under the Biden presidency,” explained Joe Squawk of CNBC. “It used to be that people could argue about all kinds of things on Twitter, a bastion of free speech. Then liberals started saying a lot of dumb things, and conservatives started making fun of them. So, the liberals started crying a lot, and the people working at Twitter just started kicking the conservatives off so no one would laugh at them for being dumb.”
This morning at sunrise the wind across the NEM was average (29% of capacity) with interesting variations between the states. Most of the states were close to balance with some flow of power from Queensland through NSW and Victoria to Tasmania.
My main purpose to track these numbers is to see how often SA depends on coal power from Victoria which is always when the wind is less than average between sunset and sunrise.
The other purpose is to see how much coal and gas contribute between sunset and sunrise to assess the feasibility of getting through nights on the back of hydro, wind and storage.
Across the NEM wind was delivering 14% of power at 29% capacity, with coal 75% and gas 3%.
NSW, wind 13% at 40% capacity and coal 85%. Queensland, wind 7% at 60% capacity and coal 86%, Victoria, wind 10% at 11% (wind drought) and coal 82%. South Australia, wind 75% at 45% capacity and gas 25% (no imported power).
Tasmania, wind 1% power at 3% capacity, hydro 83% and gas 16%.
So the message is that even with average wind across the SE of Australia and better than average in SA, Victoria and Queensland the overwhelming source of power is coal. Imagine the situation without Liddell and Eraring, not to mention all the other coal power stations that are supposed to close as soon as possible due to the rapid growth of wind and solar capacity.
Who knew? A study came out way back in 2016 showing that most people still had antibodies against tetanus, or “Lockjaw” even 60 years after their last vaccination. It’s a reminder of what successful vaccination can look like. It also shows the extraordinary ability of the human immune system to acquire lifelong protection — that doesn’t happen with all diseases, but it does with things like influenza, polio, measles, and mumps, and possibly tetanus and diphtheria.
The study tested the blood of 546 people. Given the striking results the authors suggest that the need for a ten year booster should be reassessed, but six years after the study came out the CDC and the Australian government are still saying we need “ten year boosters”. Is anyone even looking at this data?
Notably, shifting to a 30 year schedule could save the US government US$280 million each year. But Big-Pharma won’t be too happy about that. It may also prevent “80–160 cases of brachial plexus neuritis” — a rare side effect.
We’ve all grown up knowing that we need to get a tetanus booster at least once a decade in order to be protected from the potentially fatal disease.
That strategy has been incredibly safe and successful, with these days only around 31 cases of the disease being reported annually in the US. But a new study suggests that although there’s nothing wrong with being overly cautious, we could still be protected from the disease by getting just one booster every 30 years – and save a whole lot of money in the process.
… the new research looked into how long 546 adults were actually protected against diphtheria and tetanus, and found that they contained antibodies against the diseases for up to 30 years after receiving their last booster – way longer than previously assumed.
Here’s the astonishing graph of antibody titres in people after vaccination against tetanus (below). Note the scale on the x-axis, that’s a “y”. This is not days after vaccination — it’s years! Scores above −2 log10 IU/mL are considered “protected” against tetanus (marked with a dashed line). That’s nearly everyone who was studied — all 546 people involved.
The fatality rate for real tetanus is a rather nasty 13%. But tetanus itself is so rare, that only 3 people a year die of it in the United States. However anaphylaxis rates with the vaccine are 1.6 per million, so the practice of boosting every ten years “should be reexamined” (see that discussion below).
From the caption: “95% of the population will remain protected against tetanus for 64 years after vaccination.”
Humoral immunity to tetanus as a function of age and time after vaccination. Tetanus-specific serum antibody responses were measured in adult subjects and plotted versus age (A) or time after vaccination (B). Dotted line in each panel represents level of antibody required for protection, equivalent to 0.01 IU/mL. B, Solid blue line is the fitted regression line representing the antibody half-life decay rate, and the shaded blue region represents the upper and lower bound of 95% confidence interval (CI) for the cross-sectional antibody half-life estimation. Dashed blue line represents a 1-sided lower bound 95% CI based on a 14-year half-life and indicates when tetanus-specific antibody titers would decline to 95% seroprotection by crossing the protective threshold of 0.01 IU/mL (ie, −2 log10 IU/mL) at 72 years after vaccination. Dashed green line is based on an estimated 11-year half-life [7] and indicates that 95% of the population will remain protected against tetanus for 64 years after vaccination.
Protection against Diptheria is likewise “not too shabby”:
“…95% of the population will remain protected against diphtheria for 30 years after vaccination.”
Contrary to rhetoric that we’ve “destroyed the planet,” the world has never been a better place for human beings to live. Life expectancy and income have been skyrocketing, with extreme poverty (<$2/day) plummeting from 42% in 1980 to <10% today.
Philosopher and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. A prolific contributor to the climate and energy debate.
Great news! We win. The Pandemic Emergency declaration is officially over and unvaccinated Australians are free to leave the nation.
Since Senator Rennick exposed it, and I mocked the Department of Health about how Unvaccinated Australians can’t leave Australia unless they escape, and how it was due to a WHO treaty so we could “protect the world” — things have changed. The mocking was on April 8th and 9th. Presumably the government recognized how stupid it all looked to restrict unvaccinated Australians when at least 72 nations around the world are happy to let them in, and everyone knows now, that vaccination doesn’t slow transmission. After all, the whole world caught Omicron thanks to vaccinated travellers.
In the last two weeks the plans to write special laws to stop the unvaccinated from leaving the country silently vanished. But most Australians will not be aware the unvaccinated were still banned from leaving the nation until a few days ago, and are now free to go.
The Australian official website still tells Australians they have to have a vaccine. Click to enlarge. | Source: Dept of Health
What do governments do when they realize they’ve been caught with an indefensible rule, easy to ridicule — they quietly drop it. How quietly? The only Australians that might know are the ones reading Senator Rennick’s Facebook page, this site here, or the GreekCityTimes and maybe the Herald Sun.
The Australian government is apparently still hoping to dupe Australian travellers into getting a vaccine. The illusion of mandatory requirements is everywhere.
A visit to many official Department of Health pages still tells Australians they must be vaccinated to leave. Often there are only hints they might not:
There’s no link there to explain what those changes are. Good luck trying to figure out what the rules are. I went hunting for a straight answer. It took hours. On another page it vaguely says:
“If you are an Australian citizen or permanent resident seeking to leave Australia prior to 18 April 2022, your vaccination status impacts your eligibility to leave. From 18 April 2022, travel restrictions for Australian citizens and permanent residents are being eased.“
From 18 April 2022, unvaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents will be able to leave Australia without an individual travel exemption, but you may still be asked about your vaccination status.
And since non-Australians were always able to leave, the simple answer is that no one needs to be vaccinated to leave and 99.9% of most of the government information pages are now irrelevant to every person on Earth. But you may still be asked by a stranger whether you took an injection. Why?
Scott Morrison and Minister Greg Hunt Lie through Omission
Travellers need to read the fine print, but the government seemingly wants them to mistakenly think they still must be vaccinated.
On the Outbound International Travel, updated conveniently on April 17th, the day before the rules changed, the PDF tells travellers, the government “recommends passengers departing Australia be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and travel with proof of vaccination status documentation. Unvaccinated Australians are strongly discouraged from international travel due to the health risks.”
Officially the site says: “People who want to travel overseas must provide proof of their vaccination status if requested by a relevant official when exiting Australia.” So apparently, any border bureaucrat can still demand to know whether you are vaccinated or not, and your medical details, even though it’s not a requirement to be vaccinated. And you need “proof” of your unvaccinated status? Is there any reason at all to leave that requirement there, apart from fooling travellers that they need a vax passport? What do you do — get a certificate from your doctor to say you haven’t had the vax? How would your doctor know?
Is there any other way to describe this than deceptive, over-bearing, invasive, and misleading? For all the world, it looks like it’s designed to trick Australians.
The failure of European energy policy has become easy to see lately although the usual suspects want to replace imported coal and gas with more green energy. They double down on the green energy policies that have failed. You couldn’t make this up, but here it is!
None of this is surprising in the light of the failure of the German energiewende – the green energy transition that has been driven by the resurgent Greens since the 1990s.
This video from the Five Dock Climate Realists describes the German Trifecta of Failure – failure on the three sides of the energy policy triangle – price, security and emission reduction.
Wow. What does it take to get a democratic government to stop picking winners in socialist electrical generation? It takes a war, a 50% price rise, and the possibility that 4 in 10 households might be reduced to third world conditions within months.
Share the word — no country on Earth has lots of intermittent renewables AND cheap electricity.
Energy bosses have called for more Government support for households facing a ‘truly horrific’ winter, with as many as four in 10 people potentially falling into fuel poverty before the end of the year.
Energy bills for the 22 million British households not on fixed-term deals rose 54 per cent to just under £2,000 a year on average in April, the last time the Ofgem price cap was reviewed.
The clean Green transition was supposed to reduce costs, create jobs, and set people free, instead the experiment failed everywhere it was done. “Free” energy turned out to be a high maintenance, unenvironmental expensive fantasy loaded with hidden costs:
Analysts have warned of a further jump in the price cap from October, which could see the typical household paying £600 more per year.
Chris O’Shea, chief executive of Centrica, said the situation would get ‘much worse’ without intervention, while EDF’s chief executive, Simone Rossi, said its vulnerable customers could be spending £1 in every £6 of their income on their energy bills.
And the UK government is only considering dropping Green Levies.
Net Zero Watch has called for an end to the subsidies and produced The Factsheet: The cost of green levies (pdf).
According to the Daily Telegraph, “government officials are examining whether the controversial levies – used to fund renewable energy subsidy schemes – could be phased out gradually or dropped altogether….”
Green levies cost the UK economy about £11 billion a year in total, putting £150 a year on the average household electricity bill, and a further £250 per household on the annual cost of living, a total of £400 per household per year. The levies also depress wages and rates of employment.
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch director of energy, points out the renewable firms are making out like bandits:
Is there any better proof that “believing” in climate action is just a fashion statement? For all the talk of the end of fossil fuels, the biggest and most powerful funds in the world sign up for their “Net Zero” clubs but pour money into oil, gas and coal, hither thither, anyway.
The 30 biggest funds in the world manage €42.5 trillion in assets. These funds are so big, they can move markets if they want too…
Soak in that hypocrisy
Larry Fink starred at Davos and other events pontification for years on the importance of “tackling climate change”, how it’s an investment risk, and on how “climate change will upend” the way we do business, and how we need to do “long termism“. But he’s the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management fund in the world and they don’t mind at all they profit from all the fossil fuels. They joined the Net Zero Asset Manager Alliance, but do almost nothing. Indeed, vocalizing about what bad investments fossil fuels are while investing in them, is like a reverse pump and dump. They’re just scaring off the competition.
Poor old journalists and NGO’s are flummoxed, but at least they are paying attention:
This sort of contradiction wreaks havoc with the Occupy crowd.
Climate Crisis? Fund Managers Are Sticking With Fossil Fuel
A new report alleges broken promises on the part of bankers and asset managers who just a year ago pledged to fight global warming.
Tim Quinson, Bloomberg
None of the world’s largest asset managers has definitively called on fossil-fuel companies to stop the development of new oil and gas projects.
Surely, one would think, given all the climate-conscious talk coming from Wall Street bigwigs like BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink, that the investment industry would be using all of its muscle to press the world’s worst polluters to reduce their production of dangerous greenhouse gases.
Instead, the opposite is true.
Together, 30 of the biggest asset managers have at least $550 billion invested in oil, gas and coal companies that have expansion plans, and even more alarmingly, they continue to provide “fresh cash to companies that are ignoring climate science,” said Lara Cuvelier, sustainable investment campaigner at Reclaim Finance, a nonprofit which published a scorecard Wednesday grading investment firms on their environmental commitments.
Big Government is supposed to fear the free press who criticize it — When the press fear the government, it follows the press prints Fake News. It’s just an arm of Big Government.
Justin Trudeau has invented a Social Credit system for journalists. What could possibly go wrong — Apart from death. corruption and wasted money. It explains a lot — like why virtually none of the news media in Canada covered the Truckers Rally, the problems with vaccines, or discontent among the unacceptable working class people. Apart from Rebel News, the other media outlets were afraid of losing their QCJO, or their subsidies, their income tax breaks, and their right to get into government events.
It’s the oldest trick in the Dictators playbook — make the critics get a license. It’s as bad as it sounds. An anonymous panel sits in secret and assesses something called the Qualified Canadian Journalism Organisational Licence or a QCJO. Not surprisingly Rebel News did not get a license. The invisible bureaucrats claimed that only 1% of Rebel News is “news” and therefore it doesn’t qualify. Which means Rebel News are banned from government events, and punished and downranked on social media (even more than they already are), and their subscribers can no longer claim their subscription costs as a tax deduction. In return Rebel News are suing Justin Trudeau.
Ask yourself if the invisible bureaucrats will get bigger or small paypackets if Canadians vote for Bigger-leftier-governments? Which kind of “journalists” will make the bureaucrats richer?
Rebel Commander, Ezra Levant, points out 99% percent of Canadian Media outlets are dependent on Big Canadian government. 1,500 news media companies in Canada took $61 million in funds from the Canadian Government and none of them reported it.
Thanks to Eric Worrall at WUWT who points out that last year the Biden administration introduced tax breaks for “local media” which are worth as much as $25,000 per journalist.
Biden’s tax breaks for local media an effort to turn them into ‘versions of leftist NPR or PBS,’ critic says
Published November 15
The tax break would allow eligible local media organizations, including newspapers, digital news websites and television stations to receive a tax credit of $25,000 per journalist they employ, and $15,000 for the following four years. The tax break can be claimed for up to 1,500 journalists.
He who is owned by Big Government is unlikely to be too critical of it. The fact that the US government wants to pay off the legacy media shows how important the legacy media is to the government. The fact that the public don’t want to pay for the same media show how poorly it serves them.
There’s been mayhem quietly running on the Australian electricity market this month. Shh. April used to be an easy month on electricity markets — it’s not summer and not winter, and nothing is stretched. At least not in theory. But this month prices have been running at $150 – $250 per megawatt hour. This is a big rise, even from last month when prices were often $70 – $120 in the big three states. To put that in perspective, six years ago in March, wholesale electricity prices were a tiny $30 – $60.
Last month a couple of units in a Victorian plant suffered a fire. Then on April 1, a single coal turbine at Liddell was retired, and then there was a wind drought, and now, lo, behold “we have lift-off”! Prices are now consistently running at $200-$300 per MWh, and often spend most of the day above $100. Hey, but it’s only been a few weeks.
Don’t blame Russia: Less coal, means more expensive electricity.
The headline makes it sound like coal outages are to blame, when really the only thing keeping electricity prices down in Australia are the coal plants:
…EnergyQuest chief executive Graeme Bethune said the sharp spike in domestic prices was not the result of additional exports of gas from the east coast.
“The spike in domestic gas prices does not appear to be due to any increase in LNG export volumes. In February Gladstone shipped an average of one LNG cargo per day but slightly less at 0.9 cargoes per day in March and in the first half of April,” Mr Bethune said.
“Nor do increases in electricity prices appear to be closely correlated to coal prices. Newcastle thermal coal prices reached a record $US430/tonne in March but were $US276/tonne by mid-April.”
Instead, outages at key coal-fired power plants in Victoria and NSW appear to have caused the spike in both power and domestic gas prices, along with a seasonal fall in solar generation as autumn rains set in across the NEM.
In late March a fire at a coal storage facility at EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn power plant in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley took two of its four generators out of service, stripping 700 to 750MW of power from the system. On April 1 AGL took the next step towards the eventual closure of its Liddell plant in the Hunter Valley, retiring a 500MW unit from the facility.
Mr Bethune told The Australian the winter outlook for east coast gas prices very much depended on the stability of the coal-fired fleet in the NEM.
On an unrelated note: There’s a war. Why do Australian gas suppliers have spare gas to sell?
“If Japan wishes to replace Russian cargoes and the US and Qatar focus on replacing Russian gas in Europe, there is certainly an opportunity for Australia to go a long way towards replacing Japan’s Russian LNG,” the report said.
Don’t most of the Northern Hemisphere want to “get off Russian gas”? Aren’t they supposed to be beating a path to other gas suppliers?
This was actually written by Mark Lawson. We are collaborating on a collection of papers covering the main problems with intermittent energy. He appears frequently in The Spectator and he is a published writer in his own right. His website.
Key points
The use of hydrogen as the medium of a power export market has an obvious, major flaw. Unlike coal or gas, hydrogen can be created anywhere where there is water, wind and sun. Why should any country import the gas when they can make it on their own territory?
Hydrogen is not like LNG. It is much harder to put into liquid form, is much more likely to leak and has different properties which make it a far more dangerous gas.
Hydrogen has been used as a feedstock in many industrial processes for decades, but the vast bulk of the gas is consumed in the same place it is made, from methane and steam. This is a cheaper method of manufacturing than by using electricity.
Energy losses from converting electricity from renewables into hydrogen and then back again at the other end means that it is less wasteful to use a transmission line. These can now carry power over thousands of kilometres. A battery is also a more efficient and safer means of storing power, at least compared to hydrogen.
Hydrogen is already used widely in industrial applications and certain specialised power applications such as fuel cells for submarines, but it has no role at all as a means of transmitting or storing power. Its main role is as a comforting fantasy for activists hoping for the green nirvana.
The worst idea of a bad lot
If we had to hand out awards for the worst idea among all the proposals for generating and storing “clean” energy, then the large-scale use of hydrogen as a sort of alternative to LNG would be a major contender for the top prize.
The very concept of using hydrogen as a means of storing power from countless “pie in the sky” solar, wind and photovoltaic projects has a major, obvious flaw which the many very smart, driven individuals involved in the area (mining billionaires come to mind) have apparently failed to spot.
Unlike power from coal and gas green power can be generated anywhere, and almost any country that can be named has at some point talked about becoming the “Saudi Arabia of wind” as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it. In other words, why would, say, Japan, import horrifically expensive power from elsewhere when they can make horrifically expensive power in their own territory, including coastal waters?
This point was forcefully made by Professor of Engineering at the Australian National University, Andrew Blakers, in the Australian edition of The Conversation, an online site for academic articles, in early April (1). He says that in the March 2022 budget the federal government set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to expand Australia’s green hydrogen capabilities. These funds are supposed to help create a major green hydrogen export industry, particularly to Japan, for which Australia signed an export deal in January.
However, he also points out that Japan has more than enough solar and wind energy to be self-sufficient in energy and – assuming all that energy is harnessed – does not need to import either fossil fuels or Australian green hydrogen. Whether or not you agree with Professor Blakers that Japan can realistically meet all of its energy needs from local renewable energy the country can certainly generate hydrogen locally.
Background
Hydrogen is currently used as a feedstock for many industrial processes such as treating metals, producing fertilizer, and processing foods. Petroleum refineries use hydrogen to lower the sulphur content of fuels. Almost all of that commercial hydrogen comes from the traditional extraction method relying on steam and natural gas. And for good reason – this is by far the cheapest way of extracting hydrogen.
Proponents of renewable energy, however, now want to build hectares upon hectares of wind farms and solar energy generators to make hydrogen by passing an electric current through water. This involves putting two bare ends of a wire attached to a power source into the liquid. Hydrogen bubbles off the wire plugged into the negative side of the source, or cathode, and oxygen comes off the positive or anode wire.
The idea is to store this hydrogen in some way, preferably in liquid form like LNG, then ship it off to where it is needed as a replacement for fossil fuels in applications such as creating steel, generating electricity, powering electric vehicles, shipping and aviation. This is basically the vision set out in a 2019 report (2) produced by the impressively named Council of Australian Governments Energy Council Hydrogen Working Group, chaired by Australia’s chief scientist of the time, Professor Alan Finkel. This report set out pathways for developing such a trade, but it was full of recommendations for developing pilot projects and building supply chains. There was nothing about actual commercial opportunities. Like the bulk of recommendations in green energy the emphasis was on government action in order to create this export market, preferably by creating demand. Commercial interest would follow, or so it was hoped.
Should this hydrogen market come into existence vast amounts of hydrogen would be required but, as was not mentioned prominently in the Finkel report, the process of making, condensing and shipping hydrogen is known to be technical challenging and wasteful.
Professor Blakers cites an estimate that converting energy to hydrogen, shipping it to where it is needed and then converting back into energy could consume 70 per cent of the energy generated. Michael Liebreich, a senior contributor to BloombergNEF (new energy finance) wrote in 2020 (3) that as an energy storage medium, hydrogen has only a 50 per cent round-trip efficiency – far worse than batteries. He estimated that hydrogen-powered fuel cells, turbines and engines are only 60 per cent efficient – far worse than electric motors – and far more complex. As a source of heat, hydrogen costs four times as much as natural gas. As a way of transporting energy, hydrogen pipelines cost three times as much as power lines, and ships and trucks are even worse, he says.
Another factor that is particularly significant in Australia is the need for large quantities of very clean water for the process. This may not be an issue for the small pilot projects that will be funded by government grants, but it will probably preclude large-scale commercial production.
Activists who talk so glibly about using hydrogen to store energy are no doubt thinking of Liquid Natural Gas, which is now the basis of a thriving international trade using purpose-built container vessels. Thanks to enormous projects on the North West shelf and in Queensland, Australia’s exports in LNG are now double those of thermal coal by value.
The international trade in LNG started growing in the 1960s with the large scale adoption of techniques for liquifying the gas in giant facilities called “trains” and for keeping it liquid for long periods in what amounts to giant thermos bottles. LNG requires low temperatures, minus 160 degrees Centigrade, but the gas itself is a source of energy and some of that energy can be used to power the liquification process. Once at that temperature the liquid form of the gas can be stored relatively safely at atmospheric pressures. Apart from a couple of accidents when the technology was new, LNG has an impressive safety record.
All that occurred without the mixed blessing of government direction. The technical problems of shipping LNG were worked out, the facilities were built and customers were found to buy the output before the general public was fully aware of the general usefulness of being able to trade gas across oceans.
As noted, Hydrogen has been produced on a large scale for some time, albeit from steam and methane, but the bulk of it is consumed on the spot. Up to the 1960s hydrogen was also used in town gas pipelines, usually contributing around 10 per cent of the mixture in a still mainly methane system. This became uneconomic with the advent of the large-scale LNG industry.
Unlike LNG, hydrogen presents considerable difficulties in its storage and use. It is a much smaller molecule than methane, so seals and pipes that would comfortably prevent methane leakage do not keep hydrogen in. The liquification temperature for hydrogen is much lower than that of methane, specifically minus 253 degrees centigrade or just 14 degrees above what physicists call absolute zero – you can’t get any colder – and so requires considerably more energy to achieve and maintain. The alternative is to store the gas under very high pressures.
This leads to the problem of safety. Without getting into technical details, hydrogen has different burning and explosive properties to that of LNG and, as noted, a greater tendency to leak.
It is a far more dangerous substance than LNG. History buffs will recall the explosion and fire that destroyed the German airship the Hindenburg in 1937, which used hydrogen to stay afloat. The technology of airships was abandoned after that but the few such aircraft still in service use helium rather than hydrogen to stay aloft. At the very least, major hydrogen systems will require a stringent set of safety rules and procedures which may have to be learned the hard way.
Then there is the problem that switching to hydrogen is not just about slapping a hydrogen tank on an existing engine or using existing pipelines. Everything will have to be redesigned and rebuilt, all at eye-watering cost.
Faced with these inconvenient facts, activists offer counterarguments that range from the feeble to the ridiculous.
They claim that green power will be so cheap the wastage from using hydrogen to store the power will not matter. Really? Refer to the chapters in this book on renewable energy, in any case if it’s so cheap why wouldn’t each country create its own power and never mind any export market? If energy has to be shifted around internally, why not reduce the losses and use a transmission line? If power has to be stored then massed batteries may be almost as ridiculous a solution, but at least it would be cheaper, more efficient and (probably) safer than a hydrogen storage unit.
Another argument is that hydrogen can be stored cheaply in salt domes. These geological features are a key part of the formation oil deposits. The salt can be extracted comparatively easily to form large, underground pockets for gas storage, or so it is hoped. There are development projects in Europe and in the US looking at salt domes but the last word in this area such be left to another BloombergNEF report.
“Storing hydrogen in large quantities will be one of the most significant challenges for a future hydrogen economy. Low cost, large-scale options like salt caverns are geographically limited, and the cost of using alternative liquid storage technologies is often greater than the cost of producing hydrogen in the first place.” (4)
Activists also point to hydrogen’s possible use in town gas supplies. That is at least possible, but town gas mains are now run at much higher pressures than they were in the 1960s, and have been designed for methane, not hydrogen. There may well be safety issues.
There are already niche uses where the advantages of hydrogen outweigh the disadvantages such as in rocket fuel and fuel cells for submarines. However, the use of hydrogen as a means of storing and retrieving energy was the subject of considerable research long before the present activist enthusiasm but, unlike LNG, no technological solution permitting its commercial use in the power system has emerged.
To judge by the large amount of nonsense spoken and written about its use, the main value of hydrogen is not commercial at all. The gas’s main value has been to provide comfort to activists. It is one of the many fantasy stories they tell themselves in the expectation of some day reaching green nirvana, somewhere over the rainbow. It is about as much use as any other fantasy story.
References
(1) Australia plans to be a big green hydrogen exporter to Asian markets – but they don’t need it. The Conversation, April 4.
(2) Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy, COAG Energy Council
(3) Liebreich: Separating Hype from Hydrogen – Part Two: The Demand Side, October 16, 2020.
(4) Hydrogen Economy Outlook – Key Messages, BloombergNEF, March 30, 2020
The real cost of backing up the intermittent provision of wind and solar power has been spelled out in a comprehensive model that has achieved virtually no coverage in the public discussion of energy issues. This is a scandalous situation that reflects the ignorance and virtually criminal negligence of the journalists and commentators of the nation. This is a short version of the report.
According to all the people who are supposed to know about these things the road to net zero is clear and the days of the coal power are numbered because wind and solar power are so much cheaper. How much cheaper? Well the inputs of wind and sunbeams come free of charge, so how much cheaper can you get!
The CSIRO GenCost study is regarded as the last word on the matter and who can challenge the authority of the CSIRO? It is disappointing to find that the study is full of holes and dubious assumptions. The biggest hole of all is the failure to account for the full cost of firming the intermittent inputs. This is currently provided by the much maligned coalers and it comes free of charge to the wind and solar industries. See here for the frog and centipede relationship between conventional power and the predatory parasites of the RE industry.
In November 2020 a group of consultants tabled a report in the NSW Parliament with the results of some elaborate modelling work to generate the total System Levelised Cost of Energy (SLCOE) which is defined as — “…the average cost of producing electric energy from the combination of generation technologies chosen for the system over its entire lifetime”
The models include additional transmission costs for various options including replacing brown coal with nuclear energy, replacing coal with gas and 100% RE with hydro and storage.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS
The best policy option to control costs and minimise emissions would appear to be to replace coal generation with nuclear power.
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