Recent Posts
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Monday
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Sunday
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UK facing devastating 36 degree heat — can’t decide whether to use air conditioners or rip them out
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Saturday
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Batteries failed on day One: A four day wind drought in South Australia wreaks havoc, high prices
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Friday
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The UN wants to be One World Government and it starts with a carbon tax on ships and planes
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Thursday
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What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
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Wednesday
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Friday
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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Wednesday
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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Saturday
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Friday
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Thursday
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Wednesday
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
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Saturday
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China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
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Friday
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The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
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Thursday
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To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
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Wednesday
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On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
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Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
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Friday
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By Jo Nova
The invisible shrinking solar industry
Quietly, the world manufacturing base for solar panels has been shrinking for nearly two years and yet hardly anyone knows. Especially not the Prime Minister of Australia who set up the the $1 billion Solar Sunshot a year ago to artificially create an Australian solar panel manufacturing industry, twenty years too late, and with the worst possible timing.
China has already captured the solar market and killed it.
Gluts have consequences
The CCP is making twice as many solar panels as the world wants to buy. The latest trend is from bad to worse.
Let’s remember this story, the next time the propaganda media try to tell us solar panels are setting new records. Isn’t this the sort of thing our investigative sleuths at the ABC-BBC-CBC should have been digging out before elections were held? Doesn’t this change everything?
Australia is supposed to be going gangbusters “leading the world” and installing 22,000 panels a day to meet our Net Zero target, but no one else in the world is doing that.
China’s solar giants quietly shed a third of their workforces last year
Reuters
Over 40 solar firms have […]
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
In a nasty shock, the VNI West interconnector price has doubled and doubled again
The whole renewables fantasy is unraveling before our eyes.
In 2023 the Victorian NSW interconnector was supposed to cost $1.8 billion. By May this year the price-tag had doubled to $3.6 billion, and now a mere two months later, the estimate has been revised again up to $7.6 billion and that’s plus or minus 30 to 50%. So it could cost as much as $11 billion. (And who knows where this trend ends?)
Without this transmission line, many future wind and solar farms evaporate, not just ones that wanted to connect to it, but other ones further away. Even offshore wind farms are less profitable without the VNI and other mainland connectors. Intermittent generators make more profits when there are bigger mainland lines to spread their erratic surges of electricity through.
“The Jacobs review also notes that without VNI-West, other significant renewable energy generation and network projects like offshore wind off the coast of Victoria will be less effective.”
— Summary of the Independent Assessment of Plan B
This […]
By Jo Nova
Another day — another setback for the Mega Green Hydrogen Dream
The The Australian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) started at 6GW, grew to 11GW and then to 26GW as the mania spread. Such was the vision — it would produce five times the power of the whole Western Australian grid system. It would be the star of “exported renewable energy”.
Once pitched as the largest renewable project in the world — the fantasy is that 1,753 wind turbines, and nearly 11,000 megawatts of solar power will fill 6,500 square kilometers of the Pilbara in Northwest Western Australia.
The cable plan of 2018 to Jakarta and Singapore
Originally, the plan was to build a giant DC undersea cable to Jakarta or Singapore, but when that didn’t work they decided it would churn out 1.6 million tonnes of green hydrogen and 9 million tonnes of ammonia every year for export to Asia. The project was so ambitious they were going to have to build a whole new small town on the coast, with it’s own desalination plant — because rainfall is so low. “We need to have lakes” he said. Sure.
Funny how the same thing […]
By Jo Nova
It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?
Governments waved their magic wands to declare the renewable transition would “bling” into existence, but they didn’t bother doing the sums on whether we could mine the vast resources in time, and what would happen to the prices of everything, if every other stupid fashion-obsessed western nation tried to do the same thing at the same time.
At the academic safe-space known as “The Conversion” Thomas York explains to baffled renewables fans why wind farm developers are mysteriously pulling out at the last minute. He doesn’t spell out the baby-nature of the economic reality, but we can read between the lines. The ship called The Infrastructure-Bill has arrived and it’s killing them: the price of steel, copper and aluminium has doubled and tripled; we can’t make the right boats fast enough to build the towers out at sea; everyone wants high-voltage cabling at the same time, and they all need the rare metals for the magnets, which are well, rare. Then, the delays in arranging all this mean the developers fall over their contract agreements timelines, so they […]
By Jo Nova
That was a hellfire price spike yesterday. It’s not so much the height, but the width of the spike is shocking. Prices lifted off in NSW at 4:45pm and didn’t come back down til 9pm. That’s a four hour nightmare at around $10,000 per MWh. I rarely, if ever, have seen so much area under the red line — so many dollars flowing under the bridge.
“We could have bought a whole new gas plant instead”
Hypothetically, there was around 11,000 megawatts of demand at $10,000 a megawatt hour for over 4 long hours which is a $450 million “price signal” (and that’s just NSW). In Victoria a similar spike consumed another $200 million*. The market — sick, injured and rigged, it seems, is beating us over the head. The average price for the whole 24 hour period in NSW, Victoria and South Australia was a red hot $2,000 per MWh. (A 24 hour average!)
This is not a free market, it’s a fixed market — designed to change the global climate and maybe also keep the lights on. A free market would fix itself, but the government banned the good options, so all we’re left […]
By Jo Nova
Repowering with intent to deceive…
When the subsidies run out, and an old industrial wind plant is due to be demolished and rebuilt, there are perfectly good English words the industry could use like demolish, rebuild or replace, but instead they call it “repowering” — as if we could just plug a bigger extension cord in and let those turbines grow.
In the headline above, Reneweconomy could have just as easily have said the cost of “rebuilding” the old wind farm was too high, and most of the country would know exactly what that means. Instead “repowering” sounds like a minor low cost maintenance job. Nothing to see here!
Think of the difference between someone saying they want to repower your house compared with saying they’re going to demolish and rebuild it…
You might agree to a little repowering without thinking about it. And that’s the point isn’t it? To sneak in a giant civil works operation and a set of 200 meter towers with blades bigger than the wingspan of a Jumbo Jet. Those new foundations will need 3,000 tons of concrete each. Just call it repowering!
Old industrial wind turbines are only 1MW or […]
By Jo Nova
The Victorian state electricity grid is running close to the wire
They’ve run their largest coal plants into the ground — to the point of neglect where an air duct “detached from the boiler end and fell to the floor”. So one 380MW unit will be out of action at Yallourn for two weeks. And it’s just the latest in an ongoing series of failures.
We are the Renewable Crash Test Dummy — this is what the unfree, fixed, forced market produces when the best assets in a system are treated like planet-wrecking trolls.
A Hi-Tech transition, my foot…
An Air duct collapses at Yallourn Power plant. ABC News https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-09/yallourn-power-station-outage-air-duct-collapse/105394406
The Net Zero forced transition is just vandalism of a perfectly good electricity grid.
The whole 1,450 MW plant at Yallourn makes 20% of the state’s electricity, but has been described as “limping” along into retirement –– (a lot like Victorian manufacturing.)
One report on the power station found that at least one of its four generators was out of action for a third of the time last year. Yallourn was supposed to close in 2032, but under siege from heavily subsidized unreliable generators, […]
By Jo Nova
New AI Data Centers need so much energy, so fast, they’re are going off-grid
Such is the blistering race to get ahead in the global AI battle, that the industry is not waiting for the bureaucrats to build new power plants anymore, they are doing it themselves. And the leading edge of data engineers are not choosing the clean green wind or solar power of the future — they’re building gas plants. The sun and wind are free, but the battery back up, high voltage lines, long approvals, and unreliable supply cost the Earth.
What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants
Dylan Baddour, Arcelia Martin, Ars Technica
The plant would be big enough to power a major city, with 1,200 megawatts of planned generation capacity fueled by West Texas shale gas. It will only supply the new data center, and possibly other large data centers recently proposed, down the road.
The project is one of many others like it proposed in Texas, where a frantic race to boot up energy-hungry data centers has led many developers to plan their own gas-fired power plants rather […]
By Jo Nova
If the UK had kept the old gas policy, skipped “renewables” — they’d be £220 billion better off
Since there are 67 million Britons, that means every man, woman and child would be £3,283 richer today. For a family of four that’s £13,000 of savings spread over 20 years.
Kathryn Porter has painstakingly unpacked the bureaucratic polyglot to add up the ghastly bill, and published “The true affordability of net zero”
“..had Britain continued with its legacy gas-based power system in the period since 2006, consumers would have been almost £220 billion better off (2025 money) even taking into account the impact of the gas crisis.“
Even if the fuel is free, every other thing about collecting, storing and distributing “free energy” is very expensive.
Ed Milliband might blame fossil fuels for the train-wreck that is UK electricity — but the prices have been rising in the UK ever since vainglorious politicians first dreamt of fiddling with the weather. In the UK, even though wholesale prices remained the same largely, all the other costs of renewables snuck in to household prices to inflate them like the Hindenburg.
Renewables “profits” come from trickery, […]
By Jo Nova
The latest news is that power has been restored in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, but the economic loss of a blackout that affected up to 55 million people for half a day is estimated at 2-4 billion Euro. Even Red Electrica, the Spanish Grid manager now says the initial event was a sudden power loss that was “likely solar”. And to top it off, the group that own the Spanish grid manager warned in February that with so many “renewables” the grid faced the risk of disconnections.
Meanwhile the billion-dollar-ABC is so far behind the times, on prime-time news tonight they were still saying the blackouts in Spain were a complete mystery — and did not mention renewables once, even though energy experts had warned this would happen for years, and were asking that question yesterday.
We are three days from an election and the ABC are running cover for the Labor-Greens party, and hiding from Australians that too many renewables and a lack of stable thermal or nuclear power plants were a front running cause. Even yesterday we knew that solar was supplying 60% of the Spanish grid, and that there was almost […]
ESG Today/
By Jo Nova
Renewables are so over
Just like that — the renewables bubble went phht.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say […]
By Jo Nova
Nishant Gupta set up a green energy hedge fund last year managing about $100m in assets, but he probably wishes he hadn’t.
His words are about as blunt as any hedge fund owner could possibly get.
Hedge Fund Built on Energy Bets Says ‘Clean Is Dead for Now’
Bloomberg
“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.
Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.
Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.
So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.
S&P Global […]
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By Jo Nova
The iconic 120 year old company shares fall as rumors of a takeover spread
BP has lost a quarter of its share value in the last two weeks. The fall started when company profits turned out to be just $9 billion, down from $14b a year ago and $28b in 2022. As The Telegraph reports, “BP’s shareholders had realized that the green spending they supported in 2020 had halved their dividends.” But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon — the other oil giants — they were all doing much better.
Twenty years ago BP changed its branding to “Beyond Petroleum”*. By 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. Suicidally, the oil company pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, (which did nothing except help all their competitors) and promised to pivot into renewable power. BP set itself a target to increase renewables generation by a factor of twenty this decade. The media gushed — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico. BP supposedly shone a light on “stranded oil and gas”!
Thus and verily, in mid 2020, with exquisite timing, BP management leapt headlong in the magical energy pit. They were […]
By Jo Nova
Going Green with Diesel
Back in February, South Australia was the Renewables Wonderland basking in the thrill of driving two diesel plants out of business. The remarkable transition had claimed two new fossil fuel scalps. But the farce of last week’s near blackout in Sydney must have scared the management in South Australia. Suddenly this week, the government announced it wants to change the rules and force those mothballed diesel plants back into action.
The Frankenstein economy fails (again)
The government created a monster — an artificial market that favoured random energy and drove dependable power out of business. So, not surprisingly, now they have to do emergency market surgery and spend even more money, to force Engie to reopen these uneconomic plants.
The fact that essential plants are “uneconomic” only shows what a Quasimodo market this is. If the rules favored the cheap reliable electricity (that customers want) instead of hobgoblin-electrons that change the future weather (maybe), no one would have to order Engie to restart the plants. They wouldn’t have gone out of business. Instead, a bunch of unreliable wind farms and fields of glass would never have been created. No one could afford […]
Image: Keppel Prince
By Jo Nova
More proof that wind power can’t be used to make wind turbines
The one and only Australian manufacturer of wind turbine towers is going out of business, despite Australian electricity reaching 35% glorious renewable, and the Prime Ministers big plan to have the $22 billion dollar Future Made in Australia, as well as our galloping Net Zero fantasy to reach 82% renewable by 2030. We are, in theory, supposed to install 40 new wind towers a month somewhere in Australia, but none of the towers, it turns out, will be Australian made.
Imagine what we could do if Australia were the largest exporter of iron ore and coal in the world? The government could still screw it up.
Right now, we ship the iron and coal 7,000 kilometers away with heavy fuel oil, to be made into windmills to save the world, only to ship them right back, rather than make them here.
Renewables are the cheapest source of electricity on Earth, they say, and Australia has twice as much as China (proportionately). But China makes 65% of all wind turbines globally, and soon Australia will make 0%.
OWID
[…]
Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.
The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.
Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’
By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian
Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without […]
By Jo Nova
Soon every tech billionaire will have their own nuclear power plant
Two weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.
Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it’s against the religion).
The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber rich get that kind of luck.
Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
Hiding the costs of renewables until after the next election
The largest coal plant in Australia was supposed to close in August next year, but the NSW government decided to buy a two year extension until a few months after the next state election. Now the modeling comes out showing that they decided to keep the Eraring coal plant running to prevent the shocking price spikes from disturbing the voters. Keeping the coal plant will reduce wholesale electricity bills by a few billion dollars. (Why don’t we keep it open for ten years?)
Presumably his reelection chances would be worse if “saved the planet”, and shut the coal plant a few months before the election instead.
They know the voters don’t want the transition. They know it will cost more. And yet they do it anyway…
Bizarrely, this news comes from the renewable industry site Reneweconomy, where Giles Parkinson doesn’t seem to notice this shows coal power is cheap and renewables are hideous. Apparently he doesn’t mind inflicting costs on hapless homeowners, he is just bummed that they couldn’t force more unreliable energy and battery packs on the grid even sooner:
NSW confirms Eraring closure delay […]
By Jo Nova
There is hope: Despite the censorship, and the partisan bias in the media, more than half the country has shaken off the propaganda.
All our institutions and experts have been telling us “renewables are cheaper” for twenty years, yet two out of three people don’t believe them. In a similar vein 58% of people could believe electric cars were just as bad for the environment as petrol cars. 50% believe renewable energy leads to blackouts, causes harm to whales and takes away our best farmland. And half the country agrees there is no consensus among the experts either.
We haven’t had a strong election battle on the renewables transition, but statistics like these suggest that if the Opposition picked up on this fear, they would be pushing on an open door.
The IPSOS survey (n=1,000)
And despite higher prices being exactly what happens in every country on Earth, IPSOS arrogantly labels this belief as “Misinformation”.
(Click to enlarge).
They also asked people whether they had “seen or heard anything in the social media about this?” But only 39% said they had seen something on this in the mainstream media. So most of the population hadn’t […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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