|
|
By Jo Nova
The insatiable hunger for electricity
The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did […]
Cyclone Alfred headed straight for Brisbane
It’s not often a cyclone heads straight for a big population center in Australia, and the media is running minute by minute updates:
Nullschool
It’s a slow moving category 2 storm, that won’t set any wind speed records, but will cross paths with 3 or 4 million people. Current wind speeds at 20 locations are available here. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain for too long. The latest BOM report says sustained winds are 95km / hour with gusts to 130 km/hr. (Roughly 60 to 80 mph).
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml
If “Climate Change” has any effect on Australian cyclones, it’s to reduce them:
With the usual logic and reason of top climate experts, this suggests that car engines, burgers, cows and coal can prevent cyclones. Anyone driving an EV, or eating vegeburgers clearly doesn’t care about koalas (or delicate solar panels):
BOM
These were Australian cyclone tracks 51 years ago, before mankind emitted 75% of all emissions of CO2 ––
Two cyclones went past Brisbane.
BOM — Cyclone Tracks Southern Hemisphere_
Back in days when humankind had barely started jumping on planes for hot weekends and footy finals, […]
By Jo Nova
There’s nothing like a few belligerent trade spats, and miscreant dragged anchors to ruin a brand’s reputation
After six separate incidents of underwater cables being sabotaged in the Baltic Sea, the German Defense Ministry is wondering if it is wise to buy Chinese wind turbines with all their electronic parts. A new report commissioned for the department not only suggests the government should restrict new turbines, it advises them to call a halt to an existing project.
Hypothetically, China might remotely shut down wind turbines at a key moment, creating crazy price spikes, and industrial havoc (although wind turbines seem quite good at that on their own). But seriously, if wind turbines got a bit more random, or a bit less efficient, would anyone know for sure? And if a market player had that information in advance, they could make out like a bandit — bidding at the right moment, and collecting on all the price spikes. It would be just another way to bleed a country, raise electricity prices, and reduce it’s competitiveness. (But good for business back home, eh? )
Oddly, the Defense analysts seem to worry more that China might delay projects on purpose, […]
By Jo Nova
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
There is carnage among the sacred cows…
Climate policy requires a more realistic approach
By Edward Chancellor, Reuters
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit […]
By Jo Nova
People with a good education are hard to fool, which is why the curriculum buries the good stuff until it disappears under a kiloton of culture, engagement and sustainability blah. Then the media (with US government Blob funding) repeats the hypnotic trance line “seas are rising due to climate change” until anyone who was accidentally taught real science, forgets it.
How many children (how many adults) think that sea levels have been the same for a million years? The travesty of 12 years of education is that 99% of people know nothing about 99% of history, and even less about prehistory. Every one of these defenseless souls is so easily fooled into panic attacks about seas rising a millimeter a year. “Unprecedented” they say! Don’t use the hair-dryer!
Willie Soon has some fun in his time machine zipping through ancient Greece and Roman history, where ports were built 6 crazy kilometers from the sea…
As Willie mentioned, it’s awkward that the rise started 100 years before cars, and coal power plants existed.
And after two world wars, 1.5 billion cars and 35 million planes a year, the rate of sea level rise is pretty much […]
By Jo Nova
If CO2 isn’t endangering lives, legally, there’s no reason to outlaw oil and gas
Marc Morano of ClimateDepot calls this the “holy grail” of the climate agenda. Most of the climate policies of the United States depend on “the Endangerment Finding”– so President Trump asked the new EPA head to look closely at it. This is the “finding” in 2009 that CO2 endangers the public, and that in turn means the EPA must regulate this “pollutant”. Thereby becoming the perfect excuse to allow the bureaucrats to regulate cars, trucks, planes, gas stoves and anything from hair dryers to home insulation.
The new EPA head just finished his 30 day consideration and recommends the Whitehouse rewrite the past conclusion entirely.
Ann Carlson of LegalPlanet says undoing the Endangerment Finding …”would mean full-blown warfare against all things climate.” She describes how the entire bureaucratic edifice crumbles if CO2 is not a pollutant:
If the Administration were to reverse the endangerment finding, greenhouse gases would no longer need to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Presumably, EPA would then simply move to revoke all of Biden’s major climate rules regulating cars, trucks, power plants, and oil […]
..
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
Wake up Patsy States! Trump dumps “climate change” and creates a *Council of National Energy Dominance*
Donald Trump is not wasting time unpacking the mess. In a blockbuster sweep he’s ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to immediately “stop work connected to climate change” and eliminate “climate-related terms” across the agency, and to the “maximum extent permitted by the law”. Homeland Security is supposed to be guarding the USA against terrorists, hackers, disasters and other threats, so this is a major refocusing exercise for an agency that was wandering in the dark trying to hold back the sea, and prevent droughts and floods with windmills and LED lights.
The DHS was set up in response to the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, so it was only 22 years old, yet it had already mutated into an agency that that was “working to inform the American people about climate-related risks, including extreme heat, flooding, wildfire, and drought, and to provide them with clear information about how to reduce those risks. ” In other words, it was a walking-talking scare machine to squeeze more money out of taxpayers to feed The Big Government Blob. The official webpage […]
By Jo Nova
Just another $20 billion dollars for the Climate Swamp
The New EPA chief has just tracked down another $2 billion handed out to a 2-bit nothing climate entity at the last minute. It’s only a tiny part of the Monster Swamp but it captures the spirit of bald-faced looting that was The US bloated Government.
The US voters voted to cut government spending on November 5th, so the obvious thing for Democrats to do was — the exact opposite. In the last days of the Biden pillage-n-steal campaign about $20 billion dollars was “allocated” to the EPA and parked in a bank account. Presumably in the hope of keeping the NGO activists of “climate” alive through the dark days of Trumpian hell. It may also have been a way to pay off friends, or stash funds for nice post-Trump career opportunities, who knows? But it was all a bit of a panic and the aid was jetting out through a fire hose. So much so, that, one community group with only a $100 in revenue, was given two whole billion dollars.
New York Post
The funds were set aside at an outside financial […]
By Jo Nova
The Royal Society is thinking of chucking Elon Musk out of their exclusive club. The man who caught a falling rocket, who bought electric cars to the world, who is testing chips that may heal paralysis, and runs the first private company to put astronauts in space, is not good enough for the precious collective. One day, he may well get us to Mars. Which science club would look pretty silly then?
After all, it’s not like he faked data, wasted billions in grants, sold taxpayers a hundred dodgy weather-changing-schemes, or killed people with an experimental drug is it? (Though, if he had, they’d probably give him a medal.)
It’s all about The Money
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and hasn’t chucked anyone out for 150 years, so you’d think his crime must be a serious failing in science. Supposedly, the mob say, he breached their code of conduct, was mean to other members and spread “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”. But the real truth, as even Nature explains in their subheader, is that he committed the unforgivable sin of cutting off the grant money.
We know this because even though 74 members protested last August […]
By Jo Nova “DOGE can’t be stopped because it’s a very technical team.”
Trump and Elon Musk make a killer combination — One has business and politics, the other has wildly hi-tech science (and business skills too). For decades the Blob controlled science, captured it and strangled it to make it dependent. But they crippled their own teams so badly that one man came to achieve more than NASA. So it’s fitting that the same man came back to outflank the Blob’s technical defenses and leave them bare…
Joe Lonsdale, a tech venture capitalist who made his millions selling software to the Defence department, explains why Elon Musk and his tech expertise change everything this time. According to him, when Reagan tried to get answers from the bureaucracy, he’s didn’t have the technical help. They would ask questions but “there are so many ways of obscuring and to block these things. ” As Lonsdale describes it, “– no president has done this, ever. No President has ever had tech people around him.”
Lalonde: Elon got root access
They went to the systems… and they started finding things, like “oh my goodness” and these people who work for the […]
By Jo Nova
History in the making
According to Doge.tracker Elon Musk has already saved the US taxpayer $45 billion dollars (or $300 per taxpayer). Tonight DOGE officials have entered the IRS building in DC to begin their investigation. Coming soon: The Pentagon which employs 3 million troops and has a budget of $800 billion.
President Donald Trump praised Elon Musk and his army of ‘super-geniuses’ at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as they investigate the federal government for waste and fraud. … Trump said that Musk’s group had gone from 20 people to as many as 100.
—Daily Mail
Musk has been attracting young coders to work in Washington for months. The DOGE team were looking for 100 full time dedicated people to work in Washington.
The “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” that DOGE seeks need to be willing to work “80+ hours per week,” DOGE itself posted on its official X account. “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk personally added. — Forbes
But they were attracting top guns who saw it as a career defining move, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Such is the allure of […]
9.3 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
By Jo Nova
A fork in the road…
At this moment in history, as AI takes off, France has a couple of gigawatts of reliable baseload power to spare. It has a vision of being one of the global Big Three industrial hubs of AI development along with China and the USA. The French Energy giant EDF is offering land near the power plants to build big new AI datacenters, and is already signing those deals.
With AI on the cusp of self-directed robots to transform manufacturing, transportation, medicine, research, and farming, it could be remaking whole economies soon.
Ten or twenty years ago, Australia could have joined this party. We could have expanded our economy vastly, putting us at the front of the new technology. Instead we wrecked the grid, blew up the coal plants, and ran out of gas. All so we “wouldn’t be left behind” or called mean names by someone at the UN.
France tempts AI firms with its nuclear electricity
World Nuclear News
UK-based AI cloud provider Fluidstack has signed a memorandum of understanding with the French government to construct one of the world’s largest decarbonised AI supercomputers in France. […]
By Jo Nova
If it was the end of a Big Green Bubble, it would look a lot like this…
Australia is still launching itself to Net Zero Land at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree. There was no election in Australia, and no change to the green policies. Yet, a month after the US banks quietly peeled themselves away from the Globalist Banker Blob, the first Australian bank starts backing away slowly too. They don’t explain why in any convincing fashion. Have they just lost the faith that renewables are going to work, or is this just the end of the subsidy train with the collapse of the USAID grift and graft?
Banks must hold firm on net zero
Kyle Robertson, Senior banking analyst, Australian Financial Review
This decision by Macquarie makes little sense, prioritising political expediency and short-term financial interests over the longer-term viability of its business and the economy.
Macquarie Bank has sent shockwaves around the world by quietly announcing it has quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) this week, taking the dubious honour of being the first major Australian financial institution to pull out of a global […]
By Jo Nova
Earth faces a mass extinction, 99.9% of ScientistsTM agree, yet 90% of all nations plumb forgot to update their targets. (90%!)
According to the UN, these “are the most important policy documents of this century”. Almost all nations miss UN deadline for new climate targets
AFP
Only one country on Earth has a reasonable target to keep planetary temperatures to 1.5C
Nearly all nations missed a UN deadline Monday to submit new targets for slashing carbon emissions, including major economies under pressure to show leadership following the US retreat on climate change.
Just 10 of nearly 200 countries required under the Paris Agreement to deliver fresh climate plans by February 10 did so on time, according to a UN database tracking the submissions.
Only one nation has a plan to keep temperatures to 1.5 degrees above whatever they were 150 years ago, when the weather was supposedly perfect. (That’s the UK — commiserations to the Brits).
Almost all the biggies missed — China, India and even the EU missed the deadline. The US was one of the only big nations that got in early, ….but then Trump axed the Paris deal.
[…]
By Jo Nova
Are we tired of winning yet? Not a bit…
Just like that, Donald Trump gutted the UN Green Climate Fund. Among all the blockbuster scandals this last week, hardly anyone even registered that it happened. Politico, the government funded fake news organization, mentioned it on Feb 5th, and its barely made a ripple. There’s been no parade of extinctionists dressed as red witches, and no one has glued themselves to a freeway. The mainstream media have barely mentioned it. It’s almost like they don’t want to say it, in case other countries think — “great idea“.
Instead of outrage — “think of the children” — The State Department said “no comment” and so did the UN.
The Green Climate Fund is the world’s largest unguarded bucket of money labeled “climate change”. It was founded in 2010 and so far has squandered $16 billion on renewables and adaption projects in developing countries without spending 10 cents checking the evidence and assumptions.
Trump rescinds $4B in US pledges for UN climate fund
Karl Matheisen, Politico
The U.S. had committed the most money to the global fund, which helps over 100 countries grapple with […]
By Jo Nova
Finally, the rebellion begins in the business sector
After years of silence, the first large industry body has broken the Climate Stupid Spell and said the obvious. There is a “national energy emergency” pushing up the price of food, and the cause of high energy prices is Labor’s 82% renewables target.
The Independent Food Distributors Australia (IDFA) which supplies food to 60,000 shops and markets in Australia has broken with other large industry bodies and said the government should drop the “ideological” renewables target and upgrade our coal power plants and install new gas plants.
For years, only schoolgirls were allowed to dictate national energy policy, now adults in business can too!
The food industry lives and breathes on fossil fuels for their fridges, freezers and trucks, and electricity costs have gone up 50% since Labor came into office. So two weeks after King Trump takes office, and with only weeks or months until our own election, finally they brave up enough to say the Renewables Emperor has no clothes. Give Richard Forbes (the CEO) a medal — he is blistering and blunt. He didn’t just ask the Labor Party to slow the rush, but […]
Post-modern temples to the Sun God
By Jo Nova
It was supposed to last 50 years…
The PR writers want us to believe the legendary Ivanpah has been beaten out by better cheap solar, and that this is somehow a “success”. But the truth is, it’s been killed by the same subsidies and crooked market that birthed it.
The Big Government Blob distorted the free market, and created a boom in solar power. But the business case was not that good, there was no miracle in the storage of electricity, nobody wanted fried birds, and the subsidies kept forcing more solar power generation in at the same useless time of day.
Since there were too many generators at lunchtime and not enough customers, the last surviving part of the free market has solved the imbalance.
Just another artificial boom and bust
In 2014, the project cost $2.2 billion dollars. Ivanpah has 173.000 heliostats, and theoretically could make 390 megawatts in a perfect moment. But no one in their right mind would have spent so much to get so little, so the government spent $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars as a “loan guarantee”.
I wonder how that is working out […]
Net Zero Dreams in ruins.
By Jo Nova
We’ve reached the flipping point downunder
The money is leaving the room. Australian pension funds manage assets of around $4.1 trillion, and until last week, many of them had Net Zero Targets. Certainly, there were none that tried to appeal to climate skeptics even though 70% of Australians didn’t want to even spend $1 a week on “Net Zero” plans.
This week, many of them are backing away slowly, speaking about a corporate and political backlash, like it’s a force of nature.
They won’t say the subsidies have dried up, they made the wrong bet, wasted billions of your dollars and hope they don’t get sued for a lack of fiduciary duty. They won’t say that pension funds are supposed to make money for their clients, not change rainfall patterns.
Last year, they were saying “Climate change poses a grave risk to the health, wellbeing and finances of all Australians, including retirees”. Three years ago the The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) was campaigning for national net-zero policies saying “, the superannuation industry stands to lose billions of dollars in investment returns on behalf of their members,”. Pension […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments