Grid not-fit-for-purpose: On a warm day, Crazy Australia paid $3.5m to industry to *stop* working

By Jo Nova

The Australian electricity grid is not-fit-for-purpose. And failure is being normalized.

Last Wednesday, during the near-miss of a blackout in Sydney, the AEMO spent $3,558,000 on “demand reduction” which means they paid productive industries to stop working to save the grid from a blackout. Translated: poor electricity users in New South Wales paid $3.5 million to businesses to do nothing, because the grid didn’t have enough energy, and the people in charge really didn’t want any embarrassing blackouts so close to an election.

So renewables are wonderful, clean and cheap but your workers, assets and capital will sometimes need to sit around and do nothing so we can stop some storms in the 22nd century.

In political spin, planned blackouts can also be called “Virtual Power Plants”

“Demand Management” is a smarmy marketing word for a lot of little Blackouts. In the lexicon of a failing grid, all the bad-words get tortured into iced doughnuts — if your company has agreed to be ready to shut down at a moment’s notice on a warm day, that’s not being on “Standby to Close”, instead your business is a ““pre-activated” extra reserve.”

In Renewable-World-Psychosis bad is good: your […]

In Deep State warfare space rockets need to show they don’t hurt sharks

By Jo Nova

There are a million pointless ways the Deep State Machine can tie down opponents.

Elon Musk is having fun sharing his stories of Bureaucratic Entanglement, as petty officials demand he protect sharks, whales and seals in every launch.

Tomorrow, I will tell the story of how SpaceX was forced by the government to kidnap seals, put earphones on them and play sonic boom sounds to see if they seemed upset https://t.co/e8VsQpTOOa

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2024

Bureaucrats are not even pretending to serve the people anymore, they just serve themselves

The Lordships at the Californian Coastal Commission have admitted they are disallowing extra Space X launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base because they don’t like Elon’s tweets. And they even said so out loud. It’s so third-world.

Commissioner Gretchen Newsom apparently has a theory that stopping rocket launches will protect the people of California from hearing opinions she doesn’t want them to hear. She has appointed herself decider of your vote.

“Right now Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims […]

The Green Industrial Complex: The CEO of WWF is paid up to a million dollars to save “nature”

By Jo Nova

It takes a lot of money to get a Green saviour out of bed…

If these green groups were really tin-rattling charities supported by Mum and Dad donors, there would be outrage that so many funds were diverted from forests and fluffy animals to lining the pockets of the staff. But apparently the largest donors to these groups don’t care either, because the money keeps on flowing.

According to E&E News the CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, Carter Roberts, takes home a nifty $1.2 million each year in compensation. Similarly the president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) gets close to one million each year, and the head of the Nature Conservancy gets three-quarters of a million. It takes half a million dollars to get the chief of the “Rainforest Alliance” to turn up for work, and $415k to feed the account of the president of the Wilderness Society. The two co-directors of Greenpeace USA get about $330,000 a year each. “Nice work if you can get it”…

Thanks to Climate Depot:

Meet the top-paid green group bosses

E&E News by Politico

The heads of influential groups including the World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defense […]

Cold showers coming, as largest exporter of LNG runs out of gas due to red tape and green fantasies

By Jo Nova

In Great Achievements of Government mismanagement, there is a $1 trillion dollar boom in LNG infrastructure around the world, and Australia is one of the top three exporters of LNG, far ahead of the rest, yet we’re about to run out of gas to keep the lights on. It’s so bad we probably have to import gas.

As if anyone needed another example of how small-minded-dictocrat-decrees can screw up a free market and achieve the exact opposite to what they tried to arrange, feast your eyes on Australia.

It takes real planning to start this far ahead and still bollix this up:

Australia was literally the worlds largest LNG exporter in 2020

One of our large energy companies APA Group says a vital Queensland gas pipeline was already running at capacity this winter, and things are so bad, gas power stations here may have to run off diesel, which is stupid on many levels at once. Not only does it lose triple points in Climate-Scrabble, being a dirty high emissions fuel, it’s one of the only fossil fuels we aren’t swimming in. We have 300 years in proven reserves of coal and if we’re lucky, just […]

German State Media makes a game where players shoot down flying climate deniers

By Jo Nova

If anyone made a game shooting lasers at parasitic flying climate believers they would be arrested for hate-speech. But if a government agency promotes a game that dehumanizes, mocks and kills critics of the government “Green program”, they’ll probably get another grant.

A bit like the 10:10 “blow up deniers children” video, this game accidentally reveals the intellectual and moral vacuum that Big-Government funding inevitably flows to, unless there is a true Free Media to embarrass and mock it. And unfunded blogs like this are that free media.

The State pays these Groomers of Hate:

German state media broadcaster develops virtual reality game in which players shoot lasers at flying climate denialists, in perhaps the most eccentric effort to propagandise teenagers known to man

By Eugyppius

Climatists at the German state media broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR) have used the mandatory license fees they collect from all German households to produce an astounding virtual reality video game called GreenGuardiansVR. In this game, players shoot lasers at flying climate denialists to defeat disinformation and save the planet (h/t RatSays). This is literally true, this thing really exists. It will be released to the public sometime in […]

Transition hell: Solar plants sit idle for 4 years in NT because of fears they’d make the grid too unstable

ENI Katherine — might as well be a pagan temple to the Sun.

By Jo Nova

The Northern Territory is a test case for renewable energy and it’s a bonfire

In 2016, the new Labor Government waved a magic wand and commanded they would be 50% renewable by 2030. The experts said it was doable and would save $30 million a year. They gave out the permits for large solar installations, which began construction in 2019, but then suddenly changed the rules in 2020, and wouldn’t let the solar plants connect to the main Darwin-Katherine grid. Unbelievably, 64 megawatts of solar panels that cost $40 million dollars have sat, doing nothing, for four long years.

“It’s just reflecting back into space, not being used to power the grid and to substitute for diesel and gas turbine production,” said local vet Peter Trembath, who leased his land to energy company Eni Australia for the solar project.

“It’ll be some technical issue, but you’d reckon they would have sorted that out before Eni spent $40 million to erect it.” — Max Rowley, ABC News June 2022

It’s always the Grids fault…

The reason they […]

Another day on the road to Green Energy Ruin, and the posterchild of Green Manufacturing collapsess

By Jo Nova

It’s just another signpost on the way to the Great Green Economy Downunder

We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.

The Driven, explains just how big it was:

The company says it has sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in more than 40 countries. At its peak it claimed to be the biggest maker of fast chargers in the US with a 30 per cent market share (unclear if this included the Tesla network), and a 75 per cent share in Australia, and one of the top three in Europe.

When it launched in 2021, shares were selling for $2,500 each. The current price is $1.35.

Tritium Share Price. NASDAQ

Tritium is the perfect emblem for the Technocratic Planned Economy

Only one year ago the Prime Minister of Australia was raving about them, and using Tritium as the posterchild to sell […]

Global glut in solar panels so bad, people are using them for garden fences, just as Australia looks to jump in

By Jo Nova

There is such a glut in solar panels, the Financial Times reported that people in Germany and the Netherlands are using them as cheap garden fencing, even though the angle is not good for catching the sun. Though given that there is also a glut of solar power at lunchtime this is probably a “good” thing.

Solar Panels

Great time for the Australian Government to spend a billion dollars setting up a giant solar panel production industry, eh?

With exquisite timing the Australian Labor government has just announced a Solar Sunshot for Our Regions. It our Prime Ministers ambition for us to be a “Renewable Energy Superpower” twenty years too late. One third of homes in Australia already have solar panels, but only 1% were made here. The NSW State government will also lob $275 million to support the embryonic industry and workers, most of whom will presumably be doorknocking to give away the panels with lamingtons. After we finish building garden fences, we might be using them to build sheds and cubby houses.

The big solar rush is over…

The global frenzy to install solar panels has suddenly flattened out last year when it […]

How cheap postage from China is another UN bureaucratic scam

By Jo Nova

As Winston Sterzel says: Seriously? Why does it cost more to send a postcard to my neighbor than it does for a Company in China to send a package right across the world? He explains how an old intergovernmental committee — the Universal Postal Union (UPU) — sets the rules so that rich nations subsidize the poor ones. Like all government committees it clings to a good idea for so many years it kills it. It was set up in 1874, and now in 2024, a nation with a space station is draining money from our postal systems and from our local jobs. What a rort… Everyone paying for postage in the West is also paying the post for businesses in China to send cheap things which undermine local sellers. It is very difficult for a business using postal delivery to compete in the West — even in its own domestic market. The UPU is — naturally — another subsidiary of the United Nations. What else do we need to know? It works as well as we’d expect any 150 year old unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy to work — like napalm on a free market.

The […]

Next frontier in government waste: Giant space mirrors could beam the sun onto solar panels

By Jo Nova

We know it’s a cult when we have thousands of years of nuclear power available but scientists want to build giant mirrors in space to reflect the sun onto solar panels on Earth.

We know it’s corrupt when governments won’t pay for research into the suns role in our climate but they’ll give 2.5 million Euros to a wild idea that might rescue their banker and investment friends last technological white elephant. This was funded under “EXCELLENT SCIENCE – European Research Council (ERC)” don’t you know?

They figure we could get teams of robots into space to assemble vast mirrors about 1 km across that would reflect the sun from 900km above Earth onto solar plants so they make electricity a bit more often. What could possibly go wrong, apart from mishaps that blind drivers, hurt wildlife, screw body clocks and waste gazillions of dollars?

As the huge reflectors pass over a solar plant, they will spin around and point at it to illuminate it “and it’s immediate surroundings”. Thus theoretically extending the working day of the solar panels, and delivering energy at breakfast and dinner time when the peak hour demand is killing our new fragile […]

Is 2024 “The Turnkey year”: The UN wants to decide what to inject you with

By Jo Nova

What looks, smells and acts like a World Government?

An invisible legal cage is being built around us in full view. We know they want it. The UN keeps trying to control quarantine, vaccines and travel. They’ve been pushing for disinformation enforcement since 2021. It’s a trillion dollar business model, and lifelong sweet careers. A bureaucrat would have to be mad to say “no”.

Bret Weinstein, former professor of evolutionary biology, talks to Tucker Carlson in the video below, and argues that we are in effect, living inside a coup. In May this year the World Health Organisation (WHO), a UN committee, will put forward a few modifications “to protect us all”. These harmless amendments will mean the WHO could effectively be in the room when you visit your doctor. In the event of an “emergency” foreign unelected non-representatives will decide what your doctor can and can’t prescribe for you and what vaccines you need to have, and you can’t vote them out. What could possibly go wrong?

These amendments used to be called “the Pandemic Treaty” but like a shapeshifter, it now has a different name. This is part of the language battle — it’s so […]

Former German Minister warns government is using CO2 “like the virus” to create a tyranny

By Jo Nova

The Pandemic woke up a lot of people

Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone who lets us know that Kristina Schröder — a minister in the Angela Merkel government for four years, has written in Der Pragmaticus, of her fear that the German government is copying the dark pattern of the pandemic to create a nation where the government controls what people eat and wear, and whether they can travel.

It would have helped if she had seen this coming ten years ago, when she was a Minister, but she says, she did not believe Germans would accept drastic restrictions for the “collective good” until the pandemic hit. Now she asks why there is a blindness to the costs of climate action, and why there is indifference to the losses of freedom. (Obviously, the German media and industrial censorship complex is just like the rest of the West, and there is no outrage allowed, no node for protests to gather on, and a constant stream of gaslighting — “renewables are cheap”, the “world is hotter than ever” and “climate change makes goldfish alcoholic”, that sort of thing).

The good news is that word is spreading…

Kristina […]

A Technocratic Superclass of Earth Saviors seek to manage every aspect of our lives

By Jo Nova

Now rice controls the weather too:

Meat, dairy and rice production will bust 1.5C climate target, shows study

Damien Carrington, The Guardian

Emissions from food system alone will drive the world past target, unless high-methane foods are tackled. The study showed that 75% of this food-related heating was driven by foods that are high sources of methane, ie those coming from ruminant livestock such as cattle, and rice paddy fields.

The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, treated each greenhouse gas separately for 94 key types of food, enabling their impact on climate over time to be better understood.

Rice is the primary staple of half the world’s population, and mostly the poorer half. They are not normally the target of the do-gooder set, but as Marc Morano argues below, it’s all about creating a technocratic superclass of elite managers — both bureaucratic and business types who decide the winners and losers, who control the purse strings and the profits with regulations. They cannot handle a decentralized world. They need to control the means of production, the distribution of food, and control of the movement of people.

[…]

Hiding behind teenage girls again — so they can’t be ridiculed for saying silly things

By Jo Nova

The Pagan Witchdoctors send forth their girlie pawns

The science is so overwhelming they need 16 year old girls to evangelize for them. The girls are human shields sent to deliver the agitprop and protect it from scrutiny. If a man asks a girl a hard question they’re a misogynist, and if a women does, she’s rude. Grown-ups can’t even laugh at their transparent hypocrisy. That’s bullying you know, say the same people who call half the world “climate-deniers”.

Izzy Cook is the 16 year old version of Greta Thunberg in New Zealand. She unraveled spectacularly as a political leader and a climate star during a radio interview last September. Right after telling everyone that it wasn’t really necessary for people to travel to Fiji because of the climate crisis, Izzy Cook had to admit under questioning that she had just got back from a flight to Fiji. Interviewer Heather du Plessis-Allant laughed out loud at her vapor-thin dedication to the cause. As anyone would.

Apparently Izzy couldn’t really get out of the trip because her parents wanted her to go. Well, shucks.

But now some government Watchdog in New Zealand has declared it was an unfair […]

Did the US Air Force just use an F-22 fighter jet, and a sidewinder missile to destroy a $13 Hobby balloon?

F-22 Raptor

By Jo Nova

It’s unconfirmed, but there’s a possibility that the US Commander in Chief used an Air Force F-22 fighter jet that costs $80,000 an hour to launch a $400,000 sidewinder missile to shoot down a $13 hobby balloon.

President Biden has been industriously shooting down balloons, almost as if he is trying to distract everyone from noticing how slow he was to deal with the Communist Party balloon, or the Pfizergate video, and the Nordstream leak, or something else. But no one is quite certain what they’ve shot down.

Meanwhile a hobby group called The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) have sadly reported their K9YO balloon has stopped sending messages. The K9YO picoballoon had been aloft for 123 days and was on its sixth lap of the world. It was last heard from at around 37,928 feet, south of Alaska and headed towards the Yukon. Whatever the mystery object was that got shot down was described as “foil” at 40,000 feet, so it’s in the right ballpark, but it’s still a big sky.

After all the attention starting to grow on this the NIBBB has clarified that even though they expected to hear […]

Soviet electricity: UK faces blackouts, blistering costs and still has to pay wind farms £1b to do nothing

By Jo Nova

Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told them they would still have to pay the generators even when their product was useless.

Britain wasting ‘millions a day’ in energy as wind farms told to turn off while bills soar

The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced.

By ANTONY ASHKENAZ, Express

Imagine that the government told The People that this would make their electricity cheaper (and people believed them!).

In the UK people are forced to pay unreliable generators for electricity that comes when no one wants it. No doubt this was built into the contract from the start to stop investors from fleeing for the hills.

Imagine an investment so bad that the seller has to pre-arrange payments for all the times their product is useless or it wouldn’t be worth building in the first place. There’s a message in that. (Don’t build it.)

To put arsenic-icing on this cake, the wind farms that […]

Net Zero produced the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages

If we measure the vibrancy of an economy by its energy use, the EU peaked in 2006 and is down 10%. The UK, alas has fallen even further and faster and is down 30%.

John Constable at the GWPF has produced a damning report on Europe’s Green Experiment and remarked that there hasn’t been a fall in energy this large “since the end of the late middle ages”.

Effectively, the EU paid €770 billion to export it’s carbon emissions and jobs to China and import nearly everything else.

The study shows that up until 2005 the EU’s energy consumption was on a rising trend, but it has now fallen by over 10% on the 2006 peak, and is now back at levels last seen in the 1990s. The UK is even more severely affected, with consumption falling by about 30% on its peak in the early 2000s and is now at levels last seen in the 1950s. Further analysis reveals that electricity generation productivity has collapsed, with system load factor falling from an adequate 56% in 1990 to a worryingly inefficient and expensive 37% in 2020. A trillion dollars in subsidies to renewables — mostly paid by the EU

It […]

Another UN WHO power-grab — Global Pandemic Treaty is “a trillion dollar business deal”

Failure is Success!

Like a cancer, big-government begets bigger-government — and failure is not something that gets in the way, it’s an essential ingredient. Failure is success, because if the bureaucrats accidentally solved the problem there would be no need for more funds, more staff and more rules, geddit?

The WHO is the greatest failed bureaucracy in the world

The World Health Organisation had only one job, to prevent pandemics, and instead it helped kill at least six million people (so far), and spread disease and chaos to every corner of the world. WHO made sure nations kept flying in the bioweapon from Wuhan when they could so easily have stopped it. And Tedros, of course, is a devoted minion of President Xi, and a former Minister of Ethiopia during the time the Chinese Belt and Road expanded there. Even as China lied about the human spread and risk of Covid in January 2020 — Tedros worked as a one-man advertising man to cover the bad news and promote the leader of the CCP.

It’s just a $10 billion UN “preparedness fund”

The WHO wants a Pandemic Treaty like an IPCC committee for viruses. And both sides of politics […]

IEA wants Energy Lockdowns: drive slower, ban cars on Sunday, ride share, and blame Putin

The new (old) recipe for goodliness, and to save Ukraine now, is just like the climate change rules.

Thanks to The Putin Excuse, the IEA suggests we cut oil use, so we need to drive 10km per hour slower, go “car free” on Sundays, catch the bus, work from home, avoid business travel and share our car with strangers.

We’ll start right after you — Dr Fatih Birol — Executive Director of the IEA. We’re keen to hear how the 7th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency in Denmark will become a Zoom call instead. Do send pics of your bus trips and ride-shares!

The IEA have already whipped out a handy Report called A 10 Point Plan to Cut Oil Use also known as, Let Them Eat Cake.

The report goes so far as to suggest that car driving be rationed so only odd or even number plates could drive each day.

As Marc Morano says: “Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government […]

Still no free lunch: 62,000 people bankrupted by Spain’s solar subsidy-industry

The Socialists in Spain offered bonanza subsidies to build solar plants. People accepted them. Too many people accepted them.

Then the Socialist-rulers realized they could not pay them all. But the solar panels had been built. The debts were all accrued. All that was left was for investors to learn the true value of surges of surplus energy at the same time of day.

Sadly people faced losing their homes, in what must have been a grueling realization.



If only Socialists could do maths, they could have seen this coming. It’s not even quantum mechanics, it’s just arithmetic.

If only investors researched their investments and remembered that if it looks too good to be true, everyone else will pile on, and supply will wildly exceed demand, especially because no one really wants extra electrons for lunch.

Teach the children. The government should not be picking winners, but if it does, buy something else.

h/t Jim Simpson

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