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By Jo Nova The Renewable Age of Waste has arrivedHow do you make a solar plant perform best at breakfast and dinner time — when humans need it most? Just build three times as much generation as you *need* and throw away most of what it produces in the middle of the day…. Solar panels peak at midday but demand for electricity is highest when everyone goes home and turns on the oven, the dryer and plugs in a Cybertruck. But that’s no problem when you have billions of taxpayer dollars to waste — just burn the money building generators that spend most of the day working at minimal efficiency. Then call that waste “Economic Curtailment” — supposedly because it not economically worth operating the equipment. This happens when wholesale prices have gone negative and solar plants are *choosing* to blow away the megawatts most of the day. Profligate waste is not just a rare event but our national energy policy. Looking at the graph below, “Availability” is what they could have produced on the left. But what they actually contributed to the country is shown on the right. “Keeping up with the curtailment”By Dan Lee at WattClarity Rising levels of curtailment are increasingly shaping development decisions for both greenfield and brownfield projects across the solar and wind fleet…
Welcome to the ““The National Program of Electrified Futility.”” Dan Lee points out we are throwing away 1.5 Terrawatt-hours in Network curtailment and about 5.7 Terrawatt-hours in Economic curtailment. He argues that 1 Terrawatt-hours is roughly what a turbine at Gladstone Coal fired Power Station made in 2025. In other words — we’re throwing away the output of a full power station. Ominously the rate that curtailment is rising at is faster than production is growing. It was inevitable that renewable energy would reach this point. Gradually, because intermittent generators often work and fail “together”, every extra unit of intermittent generation is slightly more useless than the one before. And in the AEMO latest Quarterly report we see that the rate of economic curtailment has suddenly grown.  AEMO Economic Curtailment Q2, 2025 Welcome to the The National Program of Electrified Futility. Waste is no longer an exception — it is the operating model.
Photo by Prashanthns
February 27th, 2026 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV), Wind Power | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | By Jo Nova It’s rare to see such a dramatic 20 point shift in such a short amount of timeFour years ago, 54% of Brits said they wanted Net Zero to happen even sooner than 2050. Now only 29% do. It’s still a crazy thing to want, to spend billions to change cloud cover in 2100AD, but somehow 20% of the population are more skeptical than what they used to be. This is a sizeable survey of 4,027 UK adults from 21-27 August 2025.  The ‘culture war’ on net zero: Why have Brits stopped supporting climate policies? These anodyne surveys will always overestimate the enthusiasm for Net Zero, because they are not asking people how much they are willing to pay, or whether they would rather the government solved something else. Nor are they giving people gung-ho skeptical choices — like asking them if climate change is more like a religion than a science, for example. A question that gets people thinking in a way that 30 years of propaganda never does. EuroNews asks why this shift happened, but has no idea. They don’t mention the bill shock in electricity prices in the last few years, or the way science was used and abused during the Covid era. Instead they blame the media… The ‘culture war’ on net zero: Why have Brits stopped supporting climate policies?By Liam Gilliver, Euronews How the UK’s net zero attitudes are shiftingIn 2021, surveys found that 54 per cent of the British public believed the UK government should achieve net zero before the 2050 target. Now, this has fallen to just 29 per cent. The study*, carried out by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, Ipsos and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations also found that the proportion who feel the UK either doesn’t need to reach net zero by 2050 – or shouldn’t have a net zero target at all – has risen from nine per cent to 26 per cent over the same period. Researchers warn that between 2024 and 2025, support for climate-driven policies such as low-traffic neighbourhoods, taxes on those who fly more, subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) purchases and a tax on environmentally damaging foods have all declined. The naughty media apparently focus on Net Zero and omit any references to climate change, tsk, tsk. Researchers argue their findings show a “divorcing” of climate change from the solution of preventing emissions from rising, and come amid low levels of understanding around what net zero actually means. The analysis found that a year before the legislation was signed, 100 per cent of articles across nine major publications mentioning the term ‘net zero’ at least three times (including in the headline) also mentioned ‘climate change’ or similar terms such as ‘global warming’. However, by 2024, this figure had plummeted to just 59 per cent. There is hope: …the percentage of 16-34-year-olds backing the target has dropped from 59 per cent in 2021 to 37 per cent in 2025. It’s a big survey of 4,027 UK adults from 21-27 August 2025 REFERENCEDeclining Urgency, enduring support, Public attitudes to Net Zero and climate policy, IPSOS, The Policy Institute, Kings College. [Download PDF]
The site appears to be under a DDOS attack again. Thanks for your patience. The suspicious traffic is very large has been running nearly all day. Hopefully we can limit this soon. More details coming…  Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay By Jo Nova The US Threatens to withdraw from the International Energy Agency (IEA)The IEA is a Blob Agency living off the hard earned money of largely Western taxpayers. It was set up during the Oil Crisis in 1974 to advise its 32 member states on oil reserves. Like all Blob creatures it expanded, and now advises on all energy sources, including advocating for the unreliable and fantasy options. Every year it issues the World Energy Outlook, and tells us that coal has peaked and is about to decline. And every year, it’s been wrong. Chris Wright, the US Secretary of Energy slammed the IEA (International Energy Agency) and threatened to withdraw US funding (which is about $6m of the total $22m). The US government wants the IEA to get back to their core mission and stop pushing Net Zero. Chris Wright speaks the blasphemy that The Blob will not say: “There is a 0% chance of the world hitting Net Zero by 2050.” By Energy News Live He said: “This organisation has been pushed off course, and for five years published energy scenarios going forward, none of which had any relevance to reality. “They were all just based on climate ambitions, politics, local domestic politics, do whatever you want.” He claimed governments have spent around $10 trillion (£7.9 trillion) pursuing net zero policies only to add roughly 2.6% of wind solar and battery power to the global grid, while pushing electricity prices sharply higher. Lordy! Imagine an international conglomerate Blob organization being accountable to those who fund it? Naturally the EU rushed to defend the IEA. It was a “trusted pillar of the global energy community”. (The Blob always serves The Blob). But Chris Wright pointed out that the EU could continue “to become former industrial powers” but he didn’t think that was a great choice. All bureaucratic Blobs are destined to grow until they are One World Government. Yet there is no accountability unless our elected representatives demand it before they hand over our cash.
From Renewables Superpower to Stupid-Power: History books will be written about how the world’s largest coal exporter placed a trillion dollar bet that it could lead the world away from coal, and how most of the world ignored it. Australia spent billions to close one lone coal plant while China built 50 new ones — partly so it could power the factories that Australia used to have. Just when things were starting to go horribly wrong, the AI revolution arrived to make it worse. Suddenly the world found itself in a race it could not afford to lose. The winner would have a force-multipler for every field of research, science, weapons, drugs, medicine, and encryption. But information is energy, and the AI need for reliable gigawatts is insatiable. Microsoft is so hungry for electricity, in one year it switched from building “the biggest renewable plant”, to reactivating the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Australia is the last major coal producer on Earth on a suicidal mission to kill coal, which fits right in with being a uranium powerhouse in an anti-nuclear zone.
RSL Hall, 22 Leake Street, Belmont, WA 6104 Wednesday 25 February 2026, $15 Includes pies, pizzas, sandwiches, coffee and cake. Drinks available at the bar. Book at Ticketebo (Bookings close Tuesday.) h/t David Maddison who’s been talking about Stupidpower.
By Jo Nova Yet more proof that mother nature is far worse than man-made climate change.The extinction of tall trees and land birds on Easter Island became the apocryphal story of a man-made ecological disaster, but a new technique for estimating rainfall shows that there was a terrible drought starting in 1550AD that lasted for 100 years. This would have been a bit dire on a small island that doesn’t even have a river and relied on a crater lakes. In recent times, catastrophic climate change has apparently reduced rainfall by 370mm. But starting around 1550AD rainfall declined by a shocking 600 to 800 mm per year. Despite the severe drought the population wasn’t wiped out — their population doesn’t seem to have collapsed. The rainfall shift coincided with many cultural changes and even the development of rock gardens called lithic mulching – where farmers get desperate enough to use rocks as ground cover and a soil improver to keep the evaporation rates down.  https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02801-4/figures/3 At the same time as the rain declined, the people changed the way they live... Notable cultural shifts also took place during this time. Fewer ceremonial ‘ahu’ platforms were built, and Rano Kao became an important ritual site. A new social system called Tangata Manu emerged, in which leaders were chosen through athletic contests rather than through family ties to the moai statues. The new rainfall estimate comes from Stein et al, who found a way to estimate rainfall using hydrogen isotopes in leaf wax. “We think leaf waxes on Rapa Nui are only recording information about local rainfall and aridity,” lead author Redmond Stein explained. By measuring the ratio of “heavy” to “light” hydrogen preserved in those waxes, the researchers reconstructed 800 years of rainfall history. The data shows that rainfall declined sharply in the mid-1500s and remained low for more than a hundred years.  Easter Island has no permant rivers. | Photo by kallerna So rather than being the foolish people who built stone statues and chopped down every last tree, the people of Rapa Nui are a remarkable survival story. I’ve written about Easter Island at length in “What if Easter Island was a sustainable success story instead of an ecocidal disaster?” Benny Peiser (of NetZeroWatch fame) published a research paper detailing how the real disaster was when slave traders, whalers and others came in the 1800s. This tiny patch of land was discovered by European explorers more than three hundred years ago amidst the vast space that is the South Pacific Ocean. Its civilisation attained a level of social complexity that gave rise to one of the most advanced cultures and technological feats of Neolithic societies anywhere in the world. Easter Island’s stone-working skills and proficiency were far superior to any other Polynesian culture, as was its unique writing system. This most extraordinary society developed, flourished and persisted for perhaps more than one thousand years – before it collapsed and became all but extinct. Naturally the media doesn’t mention any of this, instead the headlines talk about how the “enigmatic” the collapse was and how it was more “complex” than anyone thought. These are just weasel ways to not-admit they were wrong. UPDATE: The drought on Easter Island coincides with the Little Ice AgeA cooler world is usually a drier world, because there is less evaporation. Why would anyone want a cooler world? — Thanks to TdeF, El Gordo and Mike Jonas for the reminder. REFERENCEStein, R., Curtin, L., Balascio, N.L. et al. Prolonged drought on Rapa Nui during the decline of megalithic monument construction. Commun Earth Environ 6, 865 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02801-4
February 21st, 2026 | Tags: Civilization (dawn of), Pacific Islands | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  Shuozhou coal power plant. by Kleineolive By Jo Nova It’s almost like China doesn’t give a toss about climate change, eh?Just quietly, while everyone was gushing tears over a two year extension to a fifty year old Australian plant, China added a gargantuan number of brand new coal plants. Australia’s total coal fleet stands at 26 gigawatts in capacity. Yet China added three times that capacity in a single year. Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor. The graph below represents how many gigawatts were added, but only in the largest turbines size. China added 52 gigawatts of energy from one gigawatt units. Presumably the rest of the 78GW came from smaller sized turbines. And here’s the thing, while everyone will pretend this is the peak and tell us “it will decline soon”, another 83 gigawatts of coal plants has already started construction, and another 161GW is newly proposed or applied for. These coal plants are apparently only being used at 50% capacity, but the thing is, if China ever needs to ramp up its energy supply, like say, in a time of war, it could double it in days.
But China is just replacing the old dirty coal plants, right? That’s what they want you to think. See the tiny black bars, top left, marked “Retired”
All the coal power Australia has built in the last 50 years, China just effectively added that in the last four months. According to a research report published on February 3, more than 50 large coal-fired power plants will be connected to the grid in 2025. These are individual boiler and turbine sets with a capacity of at least one gigawatt. In the ten years prior, the number was less than 20 per year. Depending on consumption, one gigawatt can supply several hundred thousand to over two million households with electricity. — Euronews Euronews asks — if wind and solar are booming in China …why is it building so many new coal plants? The answer apparently is that there were blackouts in 2021-22, and it takes a few years to h/t to Eric Worrall at WUWT, and Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone, plus Leith van Onselen on Macroeconomics. PS: For those in Perth — I’ll be speaking on Wednesday night next week in Belmont. More details to follow on that soon. Source of Graphs: CREA: Global Energy Monitor
 … By Jo Nova Australian Mums and Dads who want a petrol or diesel car will soon be effectively paying money to China to make EV’s cheaper for inner city socialites. Make no mistake, despite the propaganda, Australia now has a carbon tax on petrol and diesel cars and the revenue will go straight to companies that sell EVs — which means the cash will flow to China more than anywhere else. The news today: “Mazda, Nissan, Hyundai and Subaru face multi-million-dollar penalties under NVES” by Jake Evans, the ABC The New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES) requires car makers to meet emissions limits on the total cars they sell each year, incurring a $50 liability for every gram of CO2/km over that limit, which must be paid as a penalty or traded with greener car makers that accrued credits. The liabilities are due to be paid in three years’ time, meaning the car makers can also reduce their liability by selling more cleaner cars in the next two years. In the first six months of the NVES, Mazda has incurred a $25.4 million liability, Subaru a $7 million liability, Nissan a $10.8 million liability and Hyundai a $4.2 million liability. President Xi will be very happy. BYD and rivals bank millions in Australia’s carbon credit car scheme NVESBy Danielle Collis, News.com.au China’s BYD has emerged as the biggest winner of the Federal Government’s green car push, amassing millions of tradeable carbon credits in the first official results under the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES). According to the NVES unit holdings table, BYD’s two regulated entities generated 4,234,294 credits and 2,048,530 credits respectively in just six months, more than 6.2 million in total. Several other Chinese automakers also recorded substantial surpluses, including Chery (438,633), Great Wall Motor (405,198), SAIC Motors (377,601), Zhejiang Geely (620,233) and Zeekr (259,440). The secret car tax is all lies and deceptionEverything about the NVES is designed to confuse and conceal what is really happening. This tax won’t be listed on your receipts. The government is forcing car manufacturers to be the tax collectors. The carbon credits will work like a subsidy but are not listed as one. The price rises come in 3 years time (after the next election). Or they come silently as manufacturers give up selling their cars in Australia. One day, you’ll go to a car yard and the only options left will be expensive to buy or expensive to run. The Labor Party could have put a simple tax on cars for their carbon emissions — but people would have understood that and rebelled. Instead they copied the British ZEV and American CAFE standards schemes where car makers are punished or paid for their average fleet emissions. A car company that sells too many petrol cars compared to electric cars has to buy “carbon credits” from another company that sold more electric cars. It has the illusion of being a free market — but it’s a tiny kernel of free enterprise wrapped in a Giant Communist Squid. Perhaps they hope some politicians don’t run an “Axe The Carbon Tax” campaign and win 90 seats in the next election? Basically, carmakers selling popular petrol and diesel cars will have to raise their prices to cover the cost of buying the NVES credits. So those cars will cost more, and the extra money the customer pays will be fed to the companies that mostly sell EV’s, — let’s all say “China”. The Government spins the NVESIs your lie detector buzzing? The government says the NVES helps to: “save you money at the bowser.” It doesn’t say it’s at the expense of other Australians, or it only applies to people rich enough to buy an EV, or who ideally own their own garage and solar panels. The government says “they give you more choice of new cars that are fuel-efficient, low or zero emissions” [but they don’t day they take away your choice to buy the cheapest or best car for your family] The government pretends the NVES” reduces transport emissions, improving the air that you and your family breathe.” They don’t say that EV’s are heavier, add more tyre dust and microplastic pollution to the air, and pollute lakes in China. Nor do they mention the koalas being clubbed and the forests razed to install the “cleaner” turbines, If the poor are not subsidizing the rich in Sydney, then the money just flows to Chinese oligarchs so they can buy themselves another Super-Yacht, and who knows, make some back-door donations to the ALP? Australians would be angry about the NVES if they knew what was coming…. h/t Bally
February 19th, 2026 | Tags: China, Electric Cars (EV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova Is this the End of Communism in Cuba?We don’t hear much about Cuba in Australia, but it is suffering rolling 16 hour blackouts, the streets are filled with rubbish, people are cooking with wood and charcoal, and the airports have run out of jet fuel. The US is offering food aid, but only on the condition that the Cuban government does not interfere with the delivery.
The US is blockading shipments of oil to Cuba in an effort to get the communist regime to talk. Cuba relied on Venezuelan shipments of oil, but after the US captured President Maduro, Cuba lost one of their best allies, and the US has stopped the oil shipments. Trump also signed an order last month declaring Cuba to be a national security threat and he threatened to put tariffs on any nation that sent oil to Cuba. Trump has said that “Cuba is a failed state” and that he won’t mind if there is regime change. “I don’t think we need (to take) any action,” Trump said on Jan. 4, adding: “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall.” Has Cuba Reached the Point of No Return?— By Sarah Anderson, PJ Media Power outages have increased throughout the nation, with some impacting hundreds of thousands of people at a time and lasting for days. Public transportation has come to a standstill, and there are reports that citizens are not currently allowed to fill up their own vehicles. Food prices are through the roof. Resorts and tourist attractions have shut down. People are using charcoal or wood to cook. Hospital and schools that were already barely functioning are not viable. Several companies and embassies from other countries have plans in place to stockpile supplies and/or evacuate their people. While the immediate cause of Cuba’s pain is the oil embargo, decades of profligate communist economics, and brutal suppression of political dissidents meant healthy workers were fleeing, and the few resources Cuba has were wasted. Rumors suggest as many as a million people have fled out of a population of 11 million. Things were so bad, Cuba, known as ‘the sugar bowl of the world’, had to import sugar. The communist economy builds things no one wants — like 7000 hotels rooms, no one uses: A programme of hotel building has been under way, with 7,000 more rooms added since 2019, despite tourist numbers halving in the same period. And no one answers the question why. The lobby is clean and the shop is open, selling beach towels and hats. The staff are welcoming, their uniforms pressed. The swimming pool is empty and there are no guests. I ask when the last came through and the receptionist tells me four years ago. Meanwhile, in 2021 came a unification of two currencies, one pegged to the US dollar, one local, which resulted in hyperinflation that collapsed the value of state sector pay and pensions. José Daniel Ferrer was once the only effective opposition leader in Cuba, but he spent 12 years in jail, where he saw two people beaten to death, and finally he fled. His view is ““There is nothing to lose with the fall of the regime,” he says bitterly. “Rather we will gain freedom, opportunity and prosperity.”” Rebel News interviewed people in Cuba and found some waving American flags, and others with hopeful signs that Trump will save them like he saved Venezuela.In the soft West it is easy to forget how quickly energy can be weaponized by an adversary, especially if we don’t have our supply chains locked up.
By Jo Nova The latest plan to get better weather in a hundred years, is to cut down trees and dump them in the ocean.The great northern boreal forest has expanded by 12% since 1984. Which means it has locked up all this extra carbon in it. Instead of waiting for it to catch fire and burn, the thinking is that we could cut it down now, and throw the logs in a river that leads to the Arctic ocean where they will sink (eventually, maybe) and take carbon to the sea floor. New Scientist thought this was a good idea. Future anthropologists may file modern eco-science with arsenic cures, and radium toothpaste. In order to save the environment, we need to cut down 180,000 square kilometers of forest and toss it into the river (every year). How many trees do we have to kill to stop a cyclone in 2100AD?
 … These researchers and journalists are the kind of people who’ll check everything — except the core underlying assumptions that their fantasy is based on: Humanity will need to find ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate for industries that are hard to electrify – or even to begin reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Direct air capture machines are expensive, however, and planting trees can backfire if they die or burn.
Several companies are burying wood, and US firm Running Tide sank 25,000 tonnes of wood chips off Iceland, although it was accused of endangering the environment and later shut down.
How many solar powered chain-saws are there in the world? Is that zero?They have six Arctic rivers in mind, and say that if we can only cut down 30,000 square kilometers of forest on each river, that will bury about 1 billion tons of carbon, which is about 3% of our anthropogenic total emissions (ie. not much).
Previous research shows that waterlogged wood had lasted 8000 years in low oxygen Alpine lakes. How long will it last as a shipping hazard?
The only thing this study shows is how effective government funding is.
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