The Hydrogen Titanic just sank in Australia because renewable electricity costs too much

By Jo Nova

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 […]

July 19th, 2024 | Tags: | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Renewable energy is too expensive to make “green hydrogen” — Twiggy goes to Arizona instead

Image by Manuel Angel Egea

By Jo Nova

Only 18 months ago the Australian government gave $14 million dollars to Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest to figure out if his team could build a 500MW electrolyser to make hydrogen gas on an island near Brisbane. It was going to be a glorious Australian green-techno future, the largest hydrogen plant in the world, but it’s missed three deadlines in the last three months to greenlight the project. Instead the Australian company is going overseas.

As Nick Cater points out this part of the made-in-Australia renewable superpower is going to be made-in-Arizona because they still have cheap electricity — a miraculous 7.5c a kilowatt hour!

Australia’s manufacturing decline is a story of broken promises and failed industry welfare programs

Nick Cater, The Australian

Bowen described the project’s success as “critical” to Australia’s ambition to be a green energy superpower.

It turns out abundant sun was not such a competitive advantage in the manufacture of green hydrogen. Low taxes, fiscally responsible government and cheap and reliable carbon-free energy are far more appealing drawcards for investors.

The future is already being built in Buckeye, […]

April 30th, 2024 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Holy Battery Powered Australia: Chris Bowen thinks we can store electricity “like water in a dam”

Someone needs to tell the Australian Energy Minister the bad news about batteries

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says we just need more renewables and more storage:

Bowen says we can store water, we should be able to store power

“You can say the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Well, the rain doesn’t always fall either but we managed to store the water,” Bowen said.

Chris Bowen isn’t having any of Uhlmann’s ‘wind doesn’t always blow’ rhetoric.

“the rain doesn’t always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment”#auspol pic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy

— Squizz (@SquizzSTK) June 16, 2022

Is this Chris Bowen’s Zuma-numbers moment with electricity?

He doesn’t seem to realize that electrons won’t politely sit in a shoe box waiting for the day they run your toaster. When South Australia got the worlds biggest battery in 2017 everyone got excited but few realized it would only power the state for two whole minutes before it ran out. South Australia is just 6% of the total National Energy Market, but if we were trying […]

June 17th, 2022 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Great civilizations are built on good fuel (not on hydrogen)

A week ago the Australian Government released their Technology Investment Roadmap Discussion Paper. Presumably they want a map because they’re lost. They’d like submissions by June 21.

David Archibald lets rip on why hydrogen fuel is not going to save us, but coal, gas, and nukes will. He has wondered for years why Australia is so concerned with talking about a thirty year energy plan when we don’t even have a 90 day supply.

Australia’s Energy Plan

Guest Post by David Archibald

Image: Gus Pasquerella

Global warming is the new state religion and Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is its high priest…

The fad of the moment is hydrogen. To recap, when global warming started out the villains among us realised that the easiest way to make money was to turn Australia from being a low-cost power producer to a high cost one and take a slice of the action on the way through. So the likes of AGL and Macquarie Bank concocted solar farm and wind farm schemes and sold them on to people wanting a high, government-enforced rate of return. They then used their own money to generate a yet higher return on equity by taking […]

May 29th, 2020 | Tags: | Category: Australia, Energy, Global Warming, Hydrogen, Renewable | Print This Post Print This Post | |