If you are in Perth this weekend, I’ll be speaking about vandals and witchcraft in the National Energy Market for the Council for the National Interest (CNI)
Sunday 21st July 2024, 2.30pm to 4.30pm (Socialising from 1.30pm to 6.00pm) at the APIWA Clubroom, Rear No.10 Mallard Way Cannington 6107.
Readers here are welcome tomorrow. There is no charge but please RSVP to apimail AT apiwa.com.au
Imagine, in this cost-of-living crisis, if the nation discovered a 430 billion ton deposit that could produce electricity at a tenth the cost of gas and hydroelectricity? What a bonanza — the people could live like kings with heated pools, large homes, indoor spas and businesses would flock to the state to set up production lines. The state would become a trade giant and a mecca for tech.
Then imagine they let themselves be spooked into not using it for fear it would cause bad storms in a hundred years? Like the country is run by teenage girls…
Despite the costs of everything rising in 2024, the brown coal plants in Victoria are still offering to supply wholesale electricity at $8 per megawatt hour (which is 0.8c per kilowatt hour). That’s the average winning bid from brown coal plants across Quarter 1, 2024.
In the chart below of the last five years of quarterly prices, we can see that every single quarter brown coal power is the cheapest source of electricity there is bar none. (Wind and solar power, with their crazy negative prices, don’t count because they’re subsidized up-the-kazoo. Their real cost is paid through other hidden means. It’s either that, or the negative prices tell us wind and solar power are so awful you have pay people to take those toxic electrons away…).
In the last quarter brown coal set the winning bid price about 15% of the time. These were the times when there was enough brown coal power in Victoria that the grid managers didn’t have to buy any black coal, gas or hydro power at all.
The more coal power Victoria has, the more often the wholesale price will be insanely low…
Because of the way the auction works, the highest successful bidder sets the price for everyone. In theory, generators are supposed to bid the lowest price they’d accept and then the AEMO takes the cheapest offers first until it meets the full demand.
And it’s the same all across the Eastern Coast of Australia — in New South Wales was getting bids from brown coal generators at $12 per megawatt hour. In South Australia, $11. In Queensland $13, and in Tasmania $7.
The irony! The only generator that can make affordable hydrogen is brown coal
The Great Green Hydrogen dream was killed by the dual impossibility paradox, it has no customers prepared to pay the Gucci level rates, and it can’t be made cheaper without using brown coal to which would mean it isn’t “green”.
The irony is practically radioactive — analysts admit Green Hydrogen is only economic if a company can get electricity at $30 to $40 per megawatt hour, which Australia had for decades, but blew away by adding “renewables”. Like every other nation on Earth, the more unreliable wind and solar we added, the more expensive our electricity got. These days the only generator that still make electricity at that price now is old brown coal.
For years Australian average wholesale electricity prices were $30/MWh
Sure, for five minute bids, and with generous subsidies stolen from taxpayers, wind and solar can pretend to be cheaper, but it turns out that the hydrogen factories, like every other factory, aren’t efficient if they stop and start every time a cloud rolls over, or the wind ebbs. All the infrastructure and staff, and the insurance and loans are still sitting around clocking up the bills, while nothing gets done. And all the inflows and outflows need to be adjusted, and the temperatures held steady. It would have been obvious to any precocious ten year old that hydrogen plants needed reliable electricity, which means they needed galactic size batteries to fill in the gaps, and therefore an interstellar budget.
The truth is, no one really wants “Green” hydrogen, or green steel, except as a fashion accessory to brag about at Davos. But people might buy it if it was cheap, which it isn’t. The only way to make it cheaper is with brown coal, which means it’s isn’t green hydrogen, and so we find the nation has accidentally stepped into a Escher Puzzle where all staircases lead upwards and left and end right where they started except the bank balance goes phht with every cycle.
Let’s not underestimate the scale of this debacle
Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest burned off $2 billion dollars (AU) on setting up his Green Dream Hydrogen energy plan which has just collapsed with the loss of 700 jobs. But bigger than that, the Australia Labor Government made it the centerpiece of its $2 billion Hydrogen Headstart program.
For more than two years, Fortescue has been full throttle trying to turn Forrest’s promise of converting green hydrogen into a commercial reality within years.
Instead, as the economics around surging electricity costs needed to produce green hydrogen sunk in, deadlines were pushed back and back. The mission changed, then there was a revolving door of executives.
Twiggy blames fossil fuels and the Russians:
“I am not giving up on hydrogen at all,” Forrest tells The Australian.
“The green electricity price just kept keeps heading north, and It’s been dragged up by the fossil fuel price. We’re not pivoting away. We’re going upstream to get the green electrons at the right price”.
On the 7:30 Report he kept dodging the question of what this meant for Labors big Renewable Nation plan, which means it obvious isn’t good.
At one point he mentioned “the war”. As if somehow a war which limited gas supplies and drove up the price of coal “dragged up the price” of renewables. The truth was that the Ukrainian-Russian War and the death of the Nordstream Gas pipeline should have been the best thing that could happen to renewables. It was their golden market opportunity to fill the gap, but it only exposed how useless they are. When push came to shove, everyone wanted coal and gas, including the companies that make wind turbines and solar panels. The reason wind and solar went up in price was because wind power can’t make wind turbines, and solar power can’t make solar panels, and no one can afford to make batteries.
Matthew Rennie, a former EY partner who is now an independent adviser, said his firm’s analysis indicated that prices for power and electrolysers – which use renewable power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – would need to be much cheaper to produce green hydrogen in Australia even at under $3 a kilogram.
He said power prices would need to be less than $40 a megawatt-hourand electrolyser costs would need to more than halve to produce hydrogen at that level – still 50 per cent more expensive than the government’s $2 target for the gas to be competitive.
By Joe Kelly, Nick Evans and Rhiannoin Down, The Australian
Dr Finkel, said green hydrogen could replace coal as a chemical-reducing agent in the production of iron, but acknowledged its viability was “highly dependent” on the costs of renewable electricity.
He said the goal should be to start producing green hydrogen at about $2 a kilogram, “which would require the electricity that is used to make the hydrogen to be less than about $30 per megawatt hour – which is very cheap.”
The current average price on the wholesale national electricity market in the top two renewable states this month is $199 per megawatt hour (SA) and $214 in Tasmania. Even in Qld and NSW the prices are still $100 a megawatt hour more than they used to be.
Twiggy Forrest and Anthony Albanese believed their own fantasy propaganda. Twiggy was still talking tonight of “infinite” energy in Australia from the sun and the wind, showing how little he cares about numbers that matter.
Climate change makes the Earth wobble on its axis. Now, if you shower too long, and enjoy that beefsteak too much, you could affect the tilt Earths axis. Are you feeling guilty yet, or just fed up that modern science is indistinguishable from the prophesies of Neolithic shamen?
New studies, which utilized AI to monitor the effects of climate change on Earth’s spin, have shown that our days are getting increasingly longer and that our planet will get more wobbly in the future. These changes could have major implications for humanity’s future.
We’re talking of fractions of a millisecond:
Initially, these changes will be imperceptible to us, but they could have serious knock-on effects, including forcing us to introduce negative leap seconds, interfering with space travel and altering our planet’s inner core, researchers warn.
So it’s probably your air-conditioner in Power Mode, but it could be due to crustal plates shifting:
A day on Earth lasts about 86,400 seconds. But the exact time it takes our planet to complete a single rotation can shift by tiny fractions of milliseconds every year due to a number of factors, such as tectonic plate movements, changes to the inner core’s rotation and gravitational tugging from the moon.
And it might have something to do with the moon, or the inner molten core of Earth, which might be affected by the sun’s magnetic field. I mean, we really have no idea, but let’s remake our electricity grid just in case we lose a millisecond?
When we melt the ice at the poles and the seas rise higher over the equator, the Earth spins slower just like the iceskater who spreads out their arms:
Over the past few decades, the rate of ice loss from Earth’s polar regions, particularly Greenland and Antarctica, has been increasing rapidly due to global warming, leading to rising sea levels.
All those emissions sped the world up, and now all those emissions are slowing us down?
In 2020 scientists made a startling discovery. They found that, instead of slowing down, the Earth has started to spin faster. It is now spinning faster than at any time in the last 50 years. In fact, the shortest 28 days on record all occurred during 2020. — ScienceFocus
At the Guardian they’re afraid the extra millisecond will disrupt internet traffic, or screw up financial transactions and GPS. It’s be like Y2K all over again, and we all know how catastrophic that was.
Look at the language here, these people so want to believe we are Gods:
The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years.
The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.
The other thing that’s persisted for billions of years is radical sweeping climate change. Like this (below). Nature has been screwing up our GPS, our financial transactions and our space travel for millions of years and we just didn’t know it.
Wait til you see how solid this research is — like climate modeling but with less data:
I mean, how accurate were the clocks at recording milliseconds in 1901? We didn’t even define what a second was until 1968. and it’s not like we’ve got many measurements of changes in Earths’ core since then either. Ask Jules Verne?
In the new study, published July 15 in the journal PNAS, researchers used an advanced artificial intelligence program that combines real-world data with the laws of physics to predict how the planet’s spin will change over time.
And this is a Nature paper. Yet the whole thing could have been an AI school project from start to finish. An AI awarded an AI a grant, which produced a “paper” which an AI editor thought was worth publishing, and AI journalists turned into nonsense headlines, which an AI audience clapped. And no one anywhere thought to ask whether the researchers knew Antarctica is not melting, and seas are barely rising, and length of day was shrinking only a few years ago.
Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work
And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know. It’s not their fault. It’s not the Ministers fault. It’s not the fault of the solar power glut, or the wind drought, or the lack of spinning inertia, the dearth of despatchable power, or the byzantine complexity of managing a grid full of unreliable generators being randomly unreliable. The grid is not more fragile because we built 100,000 kilometers of long delicate high-voltage-interconnectors, swaying in the wind, and made of cheap imported steel because we can’t afford to make proper steel ourselves. No!
It’s your fault the blackouts are coming. You didn’t ride your bike, you didn’t eat tofu and crickets, you didn’t buy enough solar panels and you drove your car to work, you planet-monster. What did you expect?
Climate Change is coming for your electricity grid.
It took four writers, five advisors, several editors and probably buckets of money to write an obsequious article radiating nonsense. It’s like a form of mass hypnosis — training the serfs to blame Exxon, and forgive their inept, traitorous Grid Managers, for their incompetent blackouts.
The answer to every problem on Earth apparently, is to buy more solar panels, install more wind farms and use child slaves in the Congo so the weather will be perfect.
The excuse for every bureaucrat failure is “climate change”:
By Eamon Farhat, Misha Savic, Fiona MacDonald, and Mark Chediak, Bloomberg
The bad news for Martinovic and hundreds of millions of people around the world is that the risk of outages is getting worse. Hotter summers mean spikes in demand for cooling, as high temperatures cause wires to sag and risk sparking forest fires. Upgrades to power infrastructure haven’t kept pace, even as efforts to reduce use of fossil fuels make electricity distribution more crucial.
Millions of households in Houston suffered blackouts in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last week, losing air conditioning as sweltering heat followed the storm. Hitting emerging and developed economies, outages from Ecuador to India in recent weeks offer a foretaste of coming disruption.
Unstable networks create instability for businesses, roil politics and threaten lives….
All those unreliable generators are making the grid more unreliable, so hurry, we need even more of them.
Pay us more money, pay everyone lots of money.
Global Power Grids Require Trillions of Investment
Expanding the grid will cost about $24.1 trillion to meet net-zero goals by 2050, outpacing the investment needed in renewable-power capacity, according to BloombergNEF.
“The whole power system was built and designed in one climatic era and now is being asked to work in a different climatic era,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It just means more things can go wrong.”
The Earth is warming at 0.13°C every decade. Plant “hardiness” zones are shifting by, hold your breath, 13 miles per decade. The permafrost line has shifted 80 miles north in Canada. Plants can move, you know, but high-voltage lines can’t. It’s so unfair.
If only expert climate models could have predicted this thirty years ago, so we could build power lines 50 miles north…
Most blackouts occur when big chunks of supply or demand come on or off suddenly. Damage from storms, a burst of renewable generation or spikes in usage can all cause outages where the network isn’t resilient enough.
Climate change affects power distribution in lots of ways. Extreme heat increases demand for cooling, while reducing the efficiency of solar panels, crimping supply. High temperatures can cause lines to sag and transformers to overheat, leading to equipment failing and increasing risks of fires.
So solar panels don’t work as well in hot weather when everyone needs their airconditioners on. I mean, who could have seen that coming, apart from a million material engineers?
It’s a lever point in history. Millions of people want answers. Such is the demand for news on one of the last free platforms, Elon Musk reports that X usage hit another all time high yesterday. In the US, traffic was 23% higher than it had ever been on any single day ever.
Meanwhile all the people who know that Donald Trump is the Single Biggest Threat to Democracy, must be wondering why Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are so pleased that the Threat survived.
If Trump really is a “threat to democracy,” if he really is Hitler redivivus (as the New Republic cover currently has it), if he is going to usher in a Mordor-like totalitarian regime, then what could possibly be wrong with an assassination to save democracy? We lionize Bonhoeffer because of his willingness to be part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Ehud did the Israelites a great service when he took out Eglon (Judg. 3:15).
What kind of sense does it make for Biden to call Trump up to congratulate him on his survival if Trump really is a threat to democracy? The call reveals the hypocrisy and hollowness of the prior rhetoric. This reality puts them on the horns of a dilemma. If their rhetoric is to be believed, then Thomas Crooks is a hero and a martyr. If it is not to be believed, then why were they talking that way?
The Democrats were, of course, doing character assassination with galactic hyperbole
They were winding up the crowd and feeding the hate, then people got killed.
Ad hominem attacks are all very well until the crowd realizes they are on the same side as the bad guys. According to Joe Biden, the extreme MAGA Republicans want to stop you using contraception, you will have no right to marry who you love... MAGA Republicans look at the darkness and see carnage and despair… yet somehow it’s the good guys who are shooting at the families in the crowd. It’s not supposed to be this way.
Every American should watch this video, especially those on the left who are about to start preaching about “lowering the temperature.”
This was the President of the United States dehumanizing and vilifying 35% of the country on primetime TV.
Paul Joseph Watson has spliced together the sequence of events at the attempted assassination, showing just how long the would-be-assassin had to prepare while in full view of a very agitated crowd who could see him on the roof and were trying to warn people. There goes that idea that the Secret Service are dedicated patriots, and experts, and the best on Earth.
Just in: Donald Trump has chosen JD Vance to run for Vice President (skipping the whole DEI theme, and deciding to treat female voters like adults with brains instead of like teenage girls wanting a cheer squad.) On X, MAGA fans seem happy about this, which means the Deep State definitely won’t be. Vance has been endorsed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy already.
But such is the moment we are living through, people are seeing it as divine providence that Trump turned his head at the moment the bullet went past. Such is the mood, that a video of of an eerie prophesy of Pastor Brandon Biggs is going viral. Three months ago he said that the Lord told him a bullet would pass just by President Trumps ear, so close it would break his eardrum… It’s quite spooky.
Gears are shifting. People report seeing MAGA hats in San Francisco, and others tell the story of conversion from a Trump hater to being a silent supporter too afraid to speak up over the years, but now finally coming out, unashamedly.
The narrative has always painted the picture that Trump is just a narcissist seeking power and fame. But how much fun is it to be shot at? Who, exactly, wants to be indicted and face jail and fines of hundreds of millions of dollars? The latest event shows how wrong the narrative is.
Donald Trump is a billionaire, he doesn’t have to do this. He could retire and play golf and fly from resort to resort.
Instead of getting rich being President, like the rest of the political class, it’s costing him a fortune — and possibly everything he has.
Donald Trump barely survived an assassination attempt while on stage in Pennsylvania. The bullet hit his ear. Other bullets killed someone behind him, and critically injured two others. The assassin was on a rooftop just 130 yards away, and was shot dead. (How convenient). He has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, aged just 20. He probably had no idea how expendable he was.
Someone on twitter — “This will be the most iconic photo in the history of this country”.
ZeroHedge reports that the BBC interviewed a witness who says he saw the assassin on the roof before the shots were fired and warned the secret service, but they didn’t prevent this. He wonders why they didn’t have their own guys on every roof.
The head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign https://t.co/ihlEC5NP1w
“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” Biden said.
The Democrats and the Media hounds have been making Trump out to be Hitler and a threat to Democracy for the last year. They feed the hate, and wind up the crowd.
CNN rush to bury the story:
As Tucker Carlson says “You don’t hate the media enough”.
This can only be a huge boost to Donald Trump’s chances of winning the election
As ZeroHedge points out, searches for “donate to Trump” are surging, and so are his odds of winning in November.
If there is any way to suggest that he faked this to boost his popularity and play the victim card, the misinformation industry will find it. But the death of the person behind him might be harder to explain.
Afterwards Trump was not cowed but stood up defiantly and declared “Fight! Fight!” tot he crowd as the Secret Service tried to bundle him away:
Ever been in combat? Ever been shot at? I haven’t. Neither, until today, has President Trump.
But one thing that combat veterans tell me, over and over, is that combat reveals character. The experience of being under fire exposes who you are in fundamental ways. You don’t really… pic.twitter.com/6dBjrqX3Vi
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk wrote on X, which he owns, 30 minutes after Trump was shot at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The system is crooked to the core. They won’t give Robert F Kennedy Jnr secret service protection, even though his father and uncle died by assassination and he is third most popular candidate for the Presidency. Tell that to friends who think the US Intelligence agencies are patriots concerned about democracy.
Trump’s VP pick is crucial. If he chooses anyone compromised, weak, or with any sympathy for the Uniparty he would be a dead man walking. They could solve the Trump problem with one bullet. Neutralize those inconvenient voters!
h/t To Scott of the Pacific, Pierce, Steve of Cornubia
We know what secrets they fear the most, by how they overreact
In France, the second largest news network let an economist go on air and declare he thought global warming was a lie and a scam used to justify State intervention. He even went on to say it is a form of totalitarianism. Shockingly (to the regulators Arcom), the CNEWS TV hosts did not contest this, and nor did anyone else in the studio. For this, 11 months later, the TV channel is being fined €20,000.
During the programme, prominent economist Philippe Herlin shared personal climate scepticism – but was not contradicted by anybody else in the TV studio, including the hosts.
“Anthropogenic global warming is a lie, a scam… Explaining to us that it is because of Man, no, that is a conspiracy, and why does that have so much weight?”, Herlin said. “Because it justifies the intervention of the State in our lives, and it absolves the State from having to reduce its public spending… It is a form of totalitarianism.”
Apparently, the real crime here is not that he said the unthinkable, but that the TV crew didn’t correct him:
After investigation, Arcom found that CNews’ lack of reaction was a “failure” to meet the obligations of the channel …
Perhaps if they’d laughed at him, called him petty names, and treated him like a leper it would have been OK? (No, seriously, there is a razor point here. There are bound to be past examples where the only response to a skeptic was to call them a climate denier, and Arcom was apparently happy with that, since they’ve never used this fine before.) Does Arcom approve of namecalling or social opprobrium as a “balanced response”? Oh. Yes. They. Do.
The regulators go on to explain that the channel:
“…is required to ensure an honest presentation of controversial issues,in particular by ensuring the expression of different points of view”.
Which must be a new requirement since French TV has relentlessly hammered the establishment line in a one sided way for thirty years without needing any balance at all. And Arcom didn’t fine them for shamelessly promoting government propaganda. Perhaps a French skeptic could ask Arcon if controversial government opinions need to be balanced “in an honest presentation” or whether it’s only critics of the government who need to be held to account?
Arcom found that the views shared “contradicted or minimised” the scientific consensus on climate change “through a treatment lacking rigour and without contradiction”.
Since when was it the job of journalists to promote government approved “science”?
The regulator is going out on a limb and sawing off the branch…
Officially, the regulators are trying to pretend they are not punishing the TV channel for putting on a skeptic, which would be a free speech issue, but it’s clearly what they are doing. So they dress this up as a lack of balance, which accidentally exposes that they’ve never cared a jot about balancing opinions before. Immediately, this opens up all kinds of interesting doors: for one, skeptics can start asking where the balance is on controversial government propositions? In most countries about half the population doesn’t agree that mankind is solely responsible for “climate change”. Where is their voice? The government is suggesting that solar panels can stop storms, and EV’s will control floods, why isn’t this a failure of the obligations of a news channel?
Secondly, skeptics can ask when this rule started and why the regulator missed so many past examples. Why aren’t breaches the other way being fined too?
The overreaction IS the news story
Ponder how afraid the believers must be if the mere opinion of an economist is so dangerous. This man is a not a scientist and every person in France has heard the evidence is overwhelming, climate change is real, and 130% of all scientists who ever lived know that CO2 threatens life on Earth. For three decades children have been trained to say that skeptics are funded by Big Oil, and motivated by money, and yet here is one guy who used the word “totalitarian” and they all go off their rocker.
Why, perhaps because it suggests that believers are motivated by a bigger pot of money and power than skeptics ever could be.
BACKGROUND
Arcon stands for theRegulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication
CNews is controlled by billionaire business magnate Vincent Bolloré and has been compared to FOX in the US.
Edit: Approbration corrected to opprobrium. H/t Robert Swan.
In May this year, on the flat plains of an Icelandic geothermal reserve, a gigantic vacuum cleaner designed to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the sky was switched on.
The machine, called Mammoth, would not be entirely out of place on a Mad Max set….
The big machine in Iceland and will soon start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year and turning it into calcium carbonate rock underground.
In a world where humans make 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually the project will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 each year, which is approximately one millionth of human annual emissions.
Cost estimates are said to be “closer to $1,000 a ton” to remove the CO2. Effectively, we’re spending 36 million dollars US to convert one millionth of human annual emissions of a fertilizing gas into limestone rock we don’t need.
Flagrant Big Government wastage doesn’t get much more pointless than this.
File this away for the history books of the future like the quest for perpetual motion machines.
The process is called Direct Air Capture (DAC) and supposedly the Mammoth plant achieves something equivalent to taking “8,000 cars off the road” each year, as if that was a useful thing.
The problem for the Swiss Company (Climaworks) is that the most efficient machines for capturing carbon are plants, and they’re cheap and out of patent.
Climeworks built this project in Iceland, of course, so they can use “clean” geothermal energy. But that raises the question of how much electricity it takes to turn CO2 into limestone. If we ran it off coal fired power would it ever be carbon neutral?
“It’s essentially a SodaStream on steroids,” says Douglas Chan, COO of Climeworks. Absorption water is injected at the top of the tower and trickles down through packing that fills the column. The water dissolves the CO2 coming up through the bottom of the tower producing a pressurised mix that is ready for injection underground through two onsite wells operated by project partner Carbfix. Deep under the earth it reacts with the rock, becoming mineralised, locking up the emissions for long-term storage.
Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks CEO, said: “Within two years, the CO2 has become solid carbonate rock, 800m underground where it will stay for the next couple of millions of years for sure.”
As for the cost of capturing the carbon, Wurzbacher says: “Today we are closer to the US$1,000 per tonne mark than we are to the US$100 per tonne mark.”
If we pretend the costs will fall like they did with slave-made solar panels subsidized by the Chinese Communist Party this process will become wildly cheap I promise:
“If we apply learning rates, which are known from other industries such as solar PV and the wind industry, and if we compare them to our predicted technological learning, we’ll end up at a cost level at the order of US$100 per tonne, going towards 2050.”
Even if this fantasy comes true, it’s still $100 a ton we don’t have to spend.
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip just what a drain EV’s will be on the average household.
“Stopping just 6,000 EVs charging would have kept the power on for those 90,000 customers whose power was cut on February 13.
So one EV consumes as much electricity as 15 houses, and we want to add a million to an unreliable grid? Where is all that electricity coming from?
And as Andrew Bolt points out, you might have been charging your car for a reason…
There’s huge bushfires, say. They knock out electricity lines, like the ones that went down and triggered Victoria’s big blackout. Your EV, which you were charging at home, is suddenly drained to save the electricity system. And then the fires approach. Or the floods.
So after they subsidize your EV purchase, and you think you have a good deal, they’ll raise the price of electricity. Then they’ll offer their hostages discounts if they join the scheme and plug in the car every day. But when your car battery depreciates “to landfill”, or your house burns to the ground, you’ll be the one paying the bill.
UPDATE: To clarify — It will be voluntary but only the wealthy will really have the choice… Like air conditioners that the government switches off in our homes on hot days, the unwashed masses will find the “discounts” offered to keep their car plugged in at peak hour will be hard to refuse.
Expensive electricity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cheap electricity gives power to the people. Expensive electricity gives power to the bureaucrats who control the complicated pricing schemes. The bureaucrats give discounts to encourage certain “patterns of behavior”. The wealthy do what they want.
h/t Bally and MeAgain.
REFERENCE
Bjorn C. P. Sturmberg et al, Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid – successes and shortcomings (2024). DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4445838/v1
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