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And the bonfire continues
As cold fronts sweep across the south east of Australia electricity prices are setting records nobody wants to set. The wholesale prices for electricity –across a whole month — soared past $300 a megawatt hour in three states of Australia. In NSW the cumulative cost of wholesale electricity for May alone worked out at $2.4 billion dollars. It’s enough to build a power plant. Back in 2015, before Hazelwood old brown coal plant closed and Australia installed more renewable energy per capita than anywhere else on the planet, the average price in NSW was $35/MWh. Back then it cost $260 million for the whole month. (And Hazelwood wasn’t even in NSW. ) The point is not about one coal plant, but about how recently the system still worked and how fast it fell apart. Hazelwood coal plant in 2017 was 53 years old and still selling electricity at $30 per megawatt hour when it was shut down. Since then the whole grid has so much more capacity yet so much less ability. There’s no resilience left. A few speed bumps wiped out the whole road train.
Wholesale electricity prices are higher across the […]
In the year of collapsing athletes, we now have the coincidental rise of SADS
Naturally, its nothing to do with new large medical programs done for emergency use. We know that because of all the detailed human trial data that the FDA and company in question wanted to hide until 2096, and which we still haven’t seen in full.
But if you hear of someone young and healthy dying there’s a word for that now — “normal”, I mean SADS.
Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register
Daily Mail
People aged under 40 are being urged to have their hearts checked because they may potentially be at risk of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.The syndrome, known as SADS, has been fatal for all kinds of people regardless of whether they maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle. The term is used when a post-mortem cannot find an obvious cause of death.
The US-based SADS Foundation has said that over half of the 4,000 annual SADS deaths of children, teens or young adults have one of the top two warning […]
So a lady tried to drive an EV from New Orleans to Chigago and back in less than four days with a car that had a battery life of 310 miles on a trip that was 2,000 miles long. She saved $100 in fuel but the fast chargers weren’t fast, the waits were inconvenient, and then there was the stress and uncertainty of just not knowing, and of wandering around unknown streets on foot, waiting for the car to charge, and trying to make appointments that failed. It took 12 hours to drive a 7.5 hour trip on the way there. But on the return as the weather got worse, so did the battery mileage. Just when you need it, it isn’t there… they ended up getting only 4 hours sleep on the last night so they could allow long enough to fit in the charges on the last leg.
Remember, you’re suffering so your great-grandchildren won’t have too.
Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on a four-day road trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric vehicle (EV) that ended up as a disaster — one that left […]
Great Headlines in Science:
“Climate crisis could make humans shrink in size, says fossil expert”
Where science is just like a movie set
It’s another great moment in science leaving beleaguered teenagers wondering if their kids will be shorter than them. Perhaps if they can buy an EV, they wonder, Johnny will be as tall as his dad?
Or maybe the journalist could have said “in five million years” because that’s the kind of time-frame this scientist is talking in:
Nicola Davis, The Guardian
The climate crisis may lead the human race to shrink in size, as mammals with smaller frames appear better able to deal with rising global temperatures, a leading fossil expert has said.
Let’s make that “in five million years without air-conditioning”. Because the whole story applies to humans living au naturel, like Eocene Horsies did.
Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.
He likened the potential plight of people as similar to that […]
Ted Nordhous argues powerfully that Climate Change is simply not the main event anymore, and the climate punters are shellshocked. Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It
by Ted Nordhous, Foreign Policy
Tactical exercise with the withdrawal of the Topol mobile ground-based missile system in the Serpukhov branch of the Strategic Missile Forces Military Academy
Virtually overnight, the war in Ukraine has brought the post-Cold War era to a close, not just by ending Europe’s long era of peace, but by bringing basic questions of energy access back to the fore.
If recent months have demonstrated anything, it is that war, insecurity, and economic crisis are merciless teachers. Climate advocates and their political allies have often engaged in the policy equivalent of smoking one’s own supply: They have confused the subsidy-driven growth of renewable energy with evidence that the world is ready to rapidly transition off fossil fuels. Hence, they discouraged the production of oil and gas wherever they could and chronically underinvested in other sources of clean energy, such as nuclear power. But while there has been technological progress, the global economy is still very far […]
Shh. The Renewable Crash Test Dummy is at work
Another coal fired turbine blew this weekend and will be out for a month, adding to the problems facing the Australian grid, where gas was the main filler-of-gaps in the forced transition but gas now costs a fortune, and we don’t have much else to fall back on. If only we had vast reserves of brown coal that was close to power stations?
If only we looked after those power stations and treated them like our lifestyle depended on them instead of like they were evil Storm Machines Mogambo!
The warnings are growing louder — our aluminium smelters are already going on standby to save us from rolling blackouts and it’s only the first week of winter. Retailers are going broke, asking customers to leave. The market system rides on long term futures contracts which hold the monster prices at bay, and everyone prays a storm doesn’t break an interconnector…
Manufacturers in peril as energy crisis deepens
Perry Williams, The Australian
Delta Electricity, which operates NSW’s Vales Point station, said it was concerned by the precarious situation, with fuel costs rising and tight supplies of coal. […]
Australia has no shortage of hot rocks, but it turns out to be harder to capture than people expected:
Click to enlarge | ABC
Seven years ago everyone was excited in Winton Queensland. The new Geothermal project would only cost $3.5 million but it would save “$15 million” in electricity bills over the next twenty years and “should be operational by the end of 2016”.
Now in 2022:
Council launches legal action over $4m geothermal plant that’s never delivered power
The renewable energy project was set to be the only operating geothermal power plant in the country and was touted as the start of a geothermal windfall in the region. But more than two years since construction finished, it has never delivered power and is not operational.
“It’s bloody disappointing, to put it mildly, for such a great potential for the water that comes into town,” Winton Shire Council Mayor Gavin Baskett said.
What went wrong? “Technical issues”. The ABC doesn’t get to the bottom of this, but the water was just not close enough to boiling.
Martin Pujol, principal hydrogeologist at Rockwater, said at 86C, the Winton project would […]
Children won’t know what a cyclone is
Hurricane activity, after human emissions and CO2 levels reach highest ever recorded, is now close to lowest ever recorded.
Based on a trend starting in 2019 major hurricanes may disappear entirely by 2035. What if Net Zero means “no cyclones”?
h/t ClimateDepot and NotalotofPeopleKnowthat
Spot the effect of Chinese coal plants on global hurricane frequency.
@RogerPielkeJr
If the situation were flipped, try to imagine that the media would not write headlines like “Hurricanes near highest level ever recorded” and “Signs of Climate change seen in near record hurricane season”, or “Worst Cyclone season for thirty years!
Here’s The Guardian a year ago. But it could have been Forbes, The New York Times, the Washington Post. All of them..
The Guardian
It’s just one more Redpill moment to share with friends.
REFERENCES 2022 Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) Accumulated cyclone energy: Wikipedia 9.9 out of 10 based on 41 ratings […]
It’s a cult: Another Woke Dilemma
Should women in childbirth be warned that their anesthetic might heat the climate a hundred years from now? You know, toss it around, will I or won’t I? On the one hand, there’s hours of what some consider the worst pain they’ll ever feel, or there are other pain-killers which might not be as safe (but it’s only a baby right?). On the other hand, it’s possible that when their baby turns eighty the world might be 0.000 degrees cooler thanks to Mum? You Go Girl!
Frankly, if they wait to ask this in the labor ward – it’s far too late. Women need to hear this on the phone while booking their first appointment. That way they can run, don’t walk, run and find a real doctor — one that looks at data — not the ones scoring points in a science fashion contest.
Is nitrous oxide a climate risk?
Elios Visontay, The Guardian
A report in Australasian Anaesthesia notes that while nitrous oxide – known as laughing gas when used as an anaesthetic – is an effective method of pain relief during labour, the gas represents 7% […]
It’s a grid on the edge
Like a meteor-shower, the dinner time performance today may or may not be a spectator event. The fun may start at 4:30pm in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and Tasmania — a full quinfecta at $15,000 per MW/h. The first wave of winter cold is about to wash over the grid, and those solar panels will fail just as people plug in their heaters, ovens, dryers and kettles and there is a four hour spike at $15,000MWh forecast. The graph below is the forecast for NSW, but it is essentially the same tsunami shape and dimension in every single state of the National Energy Market. Right now I presume there are engineers in the control rooms sweating over alternatives and they may well pull it off. These wildly high spikes have a way of resolving at the last minute. But think for a moment what kind of stakes we’re playing with. Hypothetically, if there was a 12,000MW demand for 4 hours in NSW at $15,000, that’s $720 million dollars worth of electricity. A few days like that would pay for a new coal plant, but no one seems to be listening to that price signal…
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Strategically, this seems like it matters.
The French nuclear power plants are the backbone of the EU grid, but this winter, just when Europe is trying to not-buy-Russian-Gas, the French might need to import power instead of export it.
France runs off 70% nuclear power — it’s highest proportion in the world, and the second largest fleet — after the USA. For some reason, known only to international bankers or Renewable Gods, Early in Macron’s reign, he decided to reduce the carbon-free reliable nukes to just 50% by 2035 and fill the gap with short-lived, unreliable generators that cost a lot, need storage, backup, rare metals from China and slave labor from the Congo. Perhaps he was afraid (or whoever it was that helped him get elected) that France would show up all the schmuck-countries going to renewables?
But then the gas crisis started in Europe last October, and like clockwork, in November President Macron muttered the words “energy independence” and belatedly announced that it wasn’t such a bad idea to build some new nuclear plants. As things got more serious, in late February the French nuclear safety authority decided to extend the life of the 32 oldest reactors for […]
In Australia a Woke tech-billionaire has decided to “keep” the coal assets in AGL in order to destroy them (like that’s the “free market” at work) . But in the rest of the world, coal is $400 a ton and everybody wants it.
Maybe Australians will get so rich selling coal they can afford to use electricity from unreliable generators instead?
Not behaving like a stranded asset. Trading Economics
Britain could keep coal-fired power plants open this winter
LONDON (Reuters) -Some of the British coal-fired power plants slated for closure this year might need to stay open to ensure electricity supply this winter, the government said on Monday.
Countries across Europe are drawing up contingency plans against potential disruption to flows of Russian gas because of the war in Ukraine. Russia typically supplies about 40% of Europe’s gas.
Britain can generate about 50% of its electricity from gas. Although Russia only meets about 4% of Britain’s gas needs, a significant disruption in supply would affect prices in Europe and make it harder for Britain to secure gas from others.
How screwed is that market when they have to “devise” a framework to […]
We can hear the angst and confusion — Another “nasty La Nina?”, “Something weird is going on”, “They (La Ninas) don’t know when to leave”. Oh no!
These are not the words we’d expect to hear from experts who can 97% predict the climate a century from now. The bad news for the modelers is that the climate on Earth seems to be controlled more by the Pacific Oscillation than anything else and they have no idea what drives that pattern, so they can’t predict it more than a few months ahead, and sometimes not even then. And if they can’t predict the Pacific — they can’t predict anything. The hottest of hot years are El Nino, and the coldest years are La Nina and the greatest modelers the world-has-ever-known still get their barbecue summers wrong. The droughts, the floods and the bushfires follow the swinging surface water of the worlds largest ocean. Whenever they happen, the models say “climate change” but the models never tell us which will hit us this time next year.
So here we are with hints that there might be another La Nina, a third in a row, and Oh-the-disappointment! The modelers thought there […]
In Germany, praise be to Gaia, it’s Green to knock down a forest that has sat undisturbed for a thousand years to put wind farms in, and then plant saplings in a fake forest somewhere else as a carbon sink.
When will the environmentalists realize they have been taken for a ride by investment bankers and the renewables industry? Let’s help them speed up that “transition”. There’s a Red-pill moment here. File the story of the Reinhardswald, “fairy-tale forest” away for those moments when a teenager turns up to tell you how important it is to save old growth forest. Exactly, you can say… would you like too help stop the latest rapacious attack on rare heritage forest?
Being “Green” is nothing more than a badge people wear to their weekend dinner party.
NoTricksZone has reported on this environmental crime in February 2022 when the access roads started to go in. In the latest news Swiss NZZ Daily has described it as the absurdity of the German energy transition:
In the fall, the Documenta management planted oaks in the fairytale Reinhardswald near Kassel to save the climate. Now the forest is to give way to wind turbines, which […]
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9 out of 10 based on 9 ratings
It’s the usual apocalyptic headline, hyped from a press release smoked out of a Nature paper, which was pumped from a climate model:
“Climate change already causing storm levels only expected in 2080”
An Israeli study published on Thursday found that climate change is already causing a “considerable intensification” of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere to a level not anticipated until 2080.
It’s bleak I tell you:
“New data reveals climate change might be more rapid than predicted”
In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.
Yet again we see true mastery of confirmation bias at work: When the climate models underestimate things it means doom is coming faster. When they overestimate things, it means the equipment is faulty. What would 28 million radiosondes know?
There must be 1,000 permutations of climatoid factors that could be measured across regions of the Earth, but Lo — there has been an intensification of Winter Mid-Latitude Storms in the Southern Hemisphere! Not summer storms, spring storms, […]
Baseload futures for electricity on the Australian market used to sell for $60 a megawatt hour last year. Now prices are rising by $30 in a single day. Paul McArdle at WattClarity calls it “staggering”. Prices rose from $260/MWh at the end of Tuesday 24th May to $291.20/MWh at the end of Wednesday 25th May 2022.
…. Click to enlarge
It’s a bloodbath. It appears that no one wants to provide a guarantee they can sell electricity in Quarter 3 for much less than an astonishing, heartbreaking $290/MWh. Unless this situation resolves, the forward prices will soon flow through to the retail prices. At the moment, the number crunchers don’t seem to think it will be fixed soon.
So far, with several coal turbines out of action, and one turbine recently closing (Liddell) it appears to be a network on the brink, with no spare capacity anymore. The situation on the Australian grid isn’t improving. After record April prices, May will also bring in medals of the wrong kind. Current prices of wholesale electricity on the spot market are averaging a blistering $200 — $300 per megawatt every day for all the mainland states of Australia on […]
Last week small electricity retailers were bleeding so badly they doubled their prices and asked their customers to leave.
This week it’s a big gas retailer, as Australia belatedly faces the same pain that hit and wiped out UK energy retailers:
Gas retailer Weston Energy’s collapse stirs call for Labor intervention
Perry Williams, The Australian
Weston Energy, which provides gas to more than 400 companies and government agencies, ceased trading with immediate effect on Monday, creating uncertainty for major manufacturers with 7 per cent of the east coast’s commercial and industrial market forced to find a new supplier.
The company said it could no longer finance cash flow requirements of its trading portfolio “on a timely basis” with prices rising over 180 per cent since April, and almost three times higher than at the start of the year.
These are blistering rises in costs:
With spot gas prices up to four times higher than normal levels and wholesale electricity prices in NSW on track to finish the June quarter twice as high as the previous record, Mr Willox called on the Albanese government to respond.
It’s a cult.
[…]
Conrad Black does a summary of the situation in the US that other media outlets forgot to mention:
The Epoch Times
Whatever anyone thinks of Trump, he’s the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt for whom people in any part of the country will stand outside in falling snow for hours to see and hear him. No one who saw the immense ovation given Trump at the Kentucky Derby of Churchill Downs earlier in May by 150,000 people across all socio-economic groups could doubt the force of his political popularity. All but three of the approximately 70 candidates he endorsed have been elected.
Even the Great Replacement may have run out of voting power
For some reason Democrats assumed that immigrants would always vote for infinite continuing immigration after they arrive (thus creating exactly the conditions they had escaped from).
The policy area where they seem most satisfied with the administration is immigration, where all will concede, except the surrealistically implausible Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that the administration is getting on admirably in allowing anyone who wishes to enter the country to do so. The presumed underlying ambitions for this policy of national suicide are […]
Hopefully Elon Musk will give him a job.
Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible investing” for HSBC let rip at the doommongers of finance with a speech called “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”. He was speaking at A Moral Money Europe Summit, held by the Financial Times and is clearly fed up with listening to hyperbole and being told to analyze and worry about trivial long term future events. “Last night Target fell 25% — twentyfive!” … but I’m being told to worry about something coming 20 – 30 years down the track.” Other speakers were unceremoniously dispatched. He complained climate risk has become so hyperbolic no one knows how to outdo it. “Sharon [a speaker from Deloittes] said “we’re not going to survive!” But no one even looked up and ran from the room.”
Dangerously (for him) he also explained how the central banker models bury massive GDP and interest rate shocks in their economic forecasts of climate risk, otherwise they can’t generate bad news and headlines. Apparently, it’s all in the fine print that nobody mentions. They’re sounding more and more like climate models all the time.
That was last week. This week he’s been suspended.
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