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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
What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?
Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?
Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:
“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”
It’s only a week without electricity…
Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)
Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]
By Jo Nova
It’s something to be proud of: Russia, Australia and USA have the biggest Greenhouse Gas Export footprint on Earth. It’s a bizarrely contrived title though, where we have to ignore domestic emissions and blame countries instead for the fuels they dig up which someone else uses. (You know they want to).
We could play this game in so many ways. If China uses Australian coal to make a fridge, do those emissions belong to Australia, or China or to the Norwegian who bought the fridge? Correct answer: “all three”. The game of emissions mobile-blame means the shame can be applied to whichever patsy is the most useful. Double counting is not a mistake, it’s a marketing tool.
In a normal world, no one is responsible for what someone does with goods they sold, but in green economics, comrade, it all belongs to the Party.
You are supposed to badger and harass the people you sold the goods to, to ask them not to use it:
[Dr Gillian Moon] said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies […]
By Jo Nova
A group of arty psychologists has accidentally shown how much skeptics can achieve if they just speak up.
The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.
Their big “discovery” was that hearing something skeptical a second time gave it a significant boost in believability, even when the audience were 90% believers. Their big conclusion was the advice to essentially never utter a skeptical word, just repeat the propaganda:
“Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”
They appear to be oblivious that their advice essentially kills the idea of open public debate. They don’t mention public debate or free speech. Possibly, since they are at an Australian university, they’ve never come across it.
But the core message comes through at The Guardian — they are scared skeptics […]
By Jo Nova
The Crash Test Dummy Nation wins a Gold Medal in Electricity Prices
And you thought last week was bad. While the single spike at $17,000 a megawatt hour in five states simultaneously was a record, just a week later we have the double spike bonfire — peaking at breakfast and dinner on the same day in our two largest states. That’s a high degree-of-difficulty (to pay the bill). This was not just a 5-minute bid rocket — it was 90 full minutes of blitzkreig twice in a day for both NSW and Victoria. With admirable supporting efforts in burning money in Tasmania and South Australia for breakfast, and then in Queensland, which joined the financial bonfire for dinner.
The average price for the whole 24 hour period of August 5th was eye-watering. Last week the spike flattened out to about $300 per megawatt hour across the day. But yesterday in NSW and Victoria, the average price was $2,150 across both states for 24 hours in a row.
It’s possible the AEMO will have to take over the market again in some states to put the fire out.
Welcome to renewable hell
At both peaks Victoria was burning […]
By Jo Nova
And the flavor of the month is “failure”
Air New Zealand announced this week that it would not be able to cut its carbon emissions by 29% by 2030. The levers were “outside their control”, they lamented, which was the polite way of saying there isn’t enough sustainable jet fuel in the world, electric planes die after a few weeks, and no one has invented a low emissions plane yet. At the moment the only kind of Net-Zero-flying is not to fly at all.
Current supplies of sacred sustainable fuel are rapidly growing but barely 0.5% of total requirements. Even though production is expected to triple this year to 1.5 Mt of Sustainable Aviation Fuel, the industry needs 200 times what is currently available.
If someone could just invent an anti-gravity machine, or a nuclear jet…
Air New Zealand pulls the plug on 2030 climate targets
By Charlotte Graham-McLay, Associated Press
Air New Zealand has pulled the plug on its climate targets saying the resources needed to meet them are unaffordable and unavailable.
In a statement the airline said it was removing its 2030 carbon intensity reduction target and will […]
By Jo Nova
Like a sabre:
This is amazing 😂 pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024
“I am the ultimate diversity hire, I’m both a woman and a person of color, so if you criticize anything I say, you’re both a sexist and a racist”
AI will destroy jobs… (hopefully one in particular).
But both sides can use this tool — to construct a narrative, as well as to destroy it.
Reality may become very hard to find with unmarked Deepfake voices “on the loose” — especially if there is no shared public forum to hammer out the truth. That seems like a brilliant but dangerous game. The thing about great satire, as opposed to deepfake lies, is that when it’s done well, and it speaks the truth (in a fake voice), the target wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by denying they said it.
But perhaps we need an AI watermark…
h/t Stephen Neil
9.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings
Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built
There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:
The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)
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 […]
By Jo Nova
Climate fatigue is upon us
Yet another survey shows most people know what to say when asked banal questions of climate dogma — “Yes they are “very worried”. But more than half the population don’t believe climate change is going to harm them and they have “no intention” of giving up meat, or their cars or their pets. And for people who only fly once a year, the idea of flying less was very unappealing. Worse, the under 35s like taking a series of flights each year is so normal now it’s “part of their identity”.
After years of this tedious preachy non-debate the report authors even had to acknowledge that “virtue signaling” was a thing, and it was turning off middle and lower class people. Rather than being seen as heroes, those who did a lot to prevent climate change were seen as boring and earnest, and either miserable martyrs or people who are “intentionally vocal” about their actions, partly as a way to show off. The working poor didn’t like being talked down to, and it reinforced the idea that “climate action” was something for people who could afford it. It’s a rich girls […]
By Jo Nova
There’s a revolt in British politics
Conservatives-in-name-only have suffered the biggest wipe-out in 200 years. Reform UK has won four seats so far, with only about 11 seats not finalized. They’ve done this in a mere matter of weeks, with no funding, no branch structure and in a snap election. From nowhere they won 60% as many votes as the Conservative Party that was the UK government. That is really extraordinary. They are running second in “hundreds of seats” which means that in a first-past-the-post system, they could pick up as many as 6 million votes but only convert that into a small number of seats. But by polling so well across the UK, they represent a large political force. Both older establishment parties will be wary of losing more voters. As the third biggest force in British politics they will change the behaviour of the two major parties in a way that is not reflected in the seat tally.
Ponder that Reform UK won more votes than the Lib-Dems, but at the moment the Lib-Dems look like winning 70 seats, compared to the Reform tally of 4 seats. There is a huge unmet desire in British […]
Coal trains in Bihar, India November 2023. by Salil Kumar Mukherjee
By Jo Nova
India is going gangbusters building coal
The need for energy in India is so dire, the Modi government just leaned on the power companies to get their act together. Instead of adding the usual 1 – 2 gigawatts of new coal power, which they have for a lot of the last decade, last year they ordered enough gear to build 10 gigawatts. And this year Modi wants them to aim for 31 gigawatts. Which is about the same capacity as the entire coal generation of the Australian National Grid (and our gas plants too).
Somewhat miraculously, they are talking of building them “in the next 5 or 6 years”:
India ‘Asks Utilities to Order $33bn in Gear to Lift Coal Output’ Rush to add more coal plants
India is rushing to add fresh coal-fired plants as it is barely able to meet power demand with the existing fleet in non-solar hours.
Post pandemic, the country’s power demand scaled new records on the back of the fastest rate of economic growth among major economies and increased instances of heatwaves.
July 5th, 2024 | Tags: Coal, Fossil Fuel, India | Category: Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, India, Uncategorized |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
The Democrats needed a reason to dump their placeholder candidate for 2024, and that convention is coming soon. Obviously they want to drop in a new candidate at the last minute with just enough time to ride home on the honeymoon glow. Debates are not usually held before the conventions.
They were always going to throw Biden under the bus, but this way they stop him being the lame duck for as long as possible while they protect their real candidate from scrutiny. Republicans counting chickens at this point are far too relaxed.
Flag: Clément Bardot
9.9 out of 10 based on 125 ratings
By Jo Nova
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia
For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.
If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?
The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]
Greenland by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We may be living through some of the best weather in the last 100,000 years
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on a new paper showing the incredible extreme climate shifts of Greenland. During the depths of the last ice age Greenland temperatures would swing abruptly by 10 to 15 degrees Celsius (or 30F) in the space of 30 years. And we’re panicking at the moment about warming at 0.13°C per decade.
These Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events occurred 24 times from 120,000 years ago until 11,000 years ago. There were no humans living there at the time, as far as we know. The best estimate is that people first arrived in Greenland 4,500 years ago. As far as we know, it’s only Greenland that was gyrating wildly in temperature but the bare truth about climate scientists is the expert models can’t predict or explain any of this. So the seismic shifts came and went and went and came, and it had nothing to do with whether you turned the airconditioner on.
If any poor sodding homo sapiens did manage to wash up on Greenland during the peaks 30 or 40,000 […]
Clearing in the Snowy Mountains. Geoff Wise on Facebook, June 4th 2024
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day on the job to save the world from man-made pollution
In a quest to make the weather a bit nicer in 100 years these trees needed to be cut down now so we can connect up a big hydropower “battery” for holy solar and wind power. The towers will be 75m high and the path through the forest, 140m wide.
When we ran off coal and gas power, we didn’t need pumped hydro. Fossil fuels protect the forests and hills of Australia.
These photos were posted by Geoff Wise on the “High Country of Australia” show us what our clean green future will look like:
“Here is where the power lines from the Snowy Hydro 2, at Lobs Hole, will cross the Tumut River ravine to go to the recently cleared site of the switching station in the Maragle State Forest, before heading north to feed into the National Power grid. The power lines will come from near the distant horizon. Look at the photos for more information. You can see this for yourself, as I was […]
By Jo Nova
The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road
Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.
Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them to, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along in the mist. The ultimate low-emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, […]
By Jo Nova
The cost problem is solved (for all the wrong reasons), but it’s still not enough
Around the world, governments are trying to force people to buy electric vehicles because they are nice people who are worried about polar bears. And since drivers out there all believe in climate change, according to all the pollsters, it shouldn’t be a big ask. (Who wouldn’t want to save the Earth?)
Supposedly, just 10 years from now, they told us, we wouldn’t be able to buy a new combustion engine car at all. Instead, not only are sales of new EV slowing rapidly, to the point where there is a glut, but as prices fall for used cars customers are not rushing out to pick up the cheaper second hand EVs either.
Look at how fast the turnaround in this market has been in the last year — a 25% price premium– gone:
Used EVs are now selling for thousands of dollars less, on average, than comparable gas-powered vehicles.
Kaya Ginsky, CNBC
The difference between the price of a used Tesla Model 3 and BMW 3 Series shows how a “premium” associated with EVs in the […]
By Jo Nova
We’ve reached a point of Maximal Bureaucratic Psychopathy in Science
That’s where committees of committees aim to improve your health by giving one human the ability to kill a billion.
NIAID image of Monkeypox
In 2015 a scientist at Anthony Fauci’s agency thought it would be neat to mix two Monkeypox strains together to make a nastier one. For no reason anyone can explain, the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board thought it would be neat too, and approved it.
A normal person might worry that doddery Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, but all along, unnamed, unaccountable countless others might have their fingers on equivalent bombs, and they won’t need to input any codes to set off the bombs, just have a bad day.
The idea was to mix a deadly but slow strain of monkey pox with a tamer monkey pox strain that spread quickly. This could have created a virus with the “best of both” — an agent with a 15% fatality rate and a reproduction rate of 2.4, which would make it very much “pandemic potential”. (With one infected person infecting 2.4 others, this was a similar rate of […]
By Jo Nova
Here we go again. It’s another round of the climate wars in Australia. It’s the issue that never dies, because global weather control is a stupid idea levitating on righteous indignation and a hundred billion dollars. As long as it floats, it’s the Hindenburg of National Energy Policy. It will only end when there’s nothing left to burn.
This time, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said what all the grown ups already know — that the 82% renewables target by 2030 that Labor legislated is doomed and we should delay it. Two years after ignition, everyone knows the NetZero rocket is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a short hole that is meant to be a long one. Worse, we’ve already got more solar power than the grid can handle and extra solar power is so useless we’re about to start charging people who carelessly add to the glut at lunchtime.
Peter Dutton is sadly still saying we should do “Net […]
By Jo Nova
The spell is broken
Thirty years of crafting a fantasy narrative was fine while countries floated on a cloud of endless easy money, but those days are over.
Counting is still underway in the EU elections, but the Greens appear to have lost around 20 seats, shrinking from 74 seats to 53. In Germany, the Green-stranglehold of Europe, exit polls suggest the Green vote fell from 20.5% to 12%.
In a shock, Marine Le Pen’s party in France doubled Macron’s party vote achieving 30% of the vote to his 15%, whereupon Macron called an emergency election, hoping to save a few extra spots in France’s Parliament before the “Far Right” really wakes up.
The “Far-Right” of course, being any party which doubts that bicycles can stop storms:
Despite 242% of Nobel prize winning experts being certain that life on Earth will be destroyed by 2034*, climate action was not a priority for most Europeans.
Newspaper journalists though have different priorities to most voters. There go those climate ambitions…
The result comes amid a broader shift to the right and a green backlash — or “greenlash” — against policies designed to tackle […]
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