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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.
[…]
The only way Climate elections are won is by keeping it a secret or telling lies. Today we wake up to find out it was a climate election. Who knew?
There was not one word, barely, about climate change in the public square in Australia the last six weeks, yet today suddenly it was “a Green-slide” and a climate election post hoc. But the whole reason the Greeny-Teals did well was because no one talked about climate change.
No one asked how expensive it might be to alter the planet’s weather a hundred years from now? Should we fund hospitals now, or slow cyclones in 2100, ya’reckon?
Whenever it was a climate election in the last 12 years, the skeptical side won.
And the more skeptical they were, the bigger the win was. Tony Abbott won a landslide 90 seats by crushing the Climate Gods. It was a Climate Election and the voters said “No”. To win in 2010 Julia Gillard had to lie “there will be no Carbon Tax”, and do 17 days of wheeling and dealing to barely scrape through. In 2016 Turnbull was barely a skeptic and barely won — losing 14 seats in the […]
If the Liberals stop trying to pander to the wealthy Woke electorates and focus on what most Australians want they can reinvent themselves to speak for mainstream Australia by the next election.
The dismal election result for the Liberals and Nationals in Australia may yet set them free. By shifting to the left on issues like Climate Change the Liberals were hobbled. They tried to be Labor -lite, but then couldn’t point out the sheer stupidity of trying to change the weather. Net Zero was a good goal they said, and so the voters voted for people who would do more of it sooner. By adopting Labor-Green ideas and just trying to be better managers of bad programs they lost their mojo. There were no battles on principles in this election, just personalities.
The Right have been bullied into submission — afraid of being called climate deniers, racists, sexist or anti-vaxxer, they fought for nothing much. And so the voters voted for nothing much — splitting every which way. Astonishingly a new government will be formed that nearly 70% of Australians didn’t vote for. The Labor Party won with the lowest primary vote ever recorded in Australian history.
The […]
A thread to discuss those results
Tallyroom
Twitter #Ausvotes
ABC Live Results
7.9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
The only Party that is rising fast is the Anti-Party
The Majors and the media ignored the biggest protests in decades, but all those voters are out there somewhere…
The system is broken and more and more people know it. Both major parties are facing very low primary votes in Australia. Fully 29% of voters are wandering around in the political wilderness looking for another option — a record in Australian politics. But just imagine how big that number of minor party voters would be if the news outlets served up more than the same-old two-party-dichotomy? At the moment the nightly news ignores every minor party unless they can mock them, or lord forbid, the journalists themselves want to vote for them — like the Teal-Green-Independents?
The only time a minor party gets interviewed is after the election and if they win the Preferences lottery.
Newspoll: Labor in front of Coalition but lead narrows
Simon Benson, The Australian
According to an election-eve Newspoll, commissioned by The Weekend Australian, Labor would be positioned to form majority government if the results are replicated at the polling booths on Saturday.
It would confirm […]
With both major parties being two sides of the same UniParty, and the media afraid to ask real questions, this election campaign has been a vacuum — more like a personality quiz in Dolly magazine than a National Debate. The Conservative government, which hasn’t conserved much, looks likely to lose to the Makeover Man from the Labor Party who wears designer black shirts and fancy rims because a marketing expert told him to. A group of sneaky-pseudo-Greens called the Teal Independents are pretending to be central, but are only running against the Coalition, not against Labor, showing exactly which side of politics they’re on. They’re funded by a billionaires son, wealthy CEO’s and people that profit from renewables money — so much so that even The World Socialist Website sees them as “bogus” corporate raiders, seeking profits and called them a “reactionary fraud”. That bad.
The best hope now is that freedom loving candidates and parties will win the balance of power in the Senate. Yes, we long for Government gridlock. Australians can still put The Majors Last. Don’t waste those preferences!
It’s not too late to volunteer to help any small party of your choice, for example to […]
It’s the day before the election and all through the house, electricity bills are doubling…
The price rises are so extraordinary one retailer is asking their customers to leave “in the next 24 hours”.
Across Australia small power suppliers are sending emails to customers right now warning them that their rates are going up next week by eye-watering amounts. Wholesale electricity prices were at a record high in April this year, and it hasn’t improved in May. Prices are hitting $200-$300 per megawatt hour, not as a peak, but as a 24 hour average. In South Australia two days ago, the average for the full day was $1,141. Futures contracts are rapidly taking off and these rises are starting to flow through to customers. Already, the small retailers are bleeding cash, just as they did in the UK, and if wholesale prices don’t come back to Earth soon, they will go out of business.
Reader Brett in South Australia shared an email from Discover Energy. As of next week the standard peak rate will rise from 39 cent per kilowatt hour to 70 cents. Off peak rates rise from 27 to 46. He also adds, “My brother lives in NSW […]
Not the kind of article we’d expect to see in Time Magazine. A 100% endorsement of the inescapable need for fossil fuels?
The Modern World Can’t Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels
By Vaclav Smil, Time Magazine
Cyron Ray Macey
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
Does any other odd factoid capture the rise of China so well?
China now produces more than half of the world’s cement and in recent years it makes in just two years as much of it as did the […]
…
8.8 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
The Swamp is not even hiding the corruption, just the exact dollar figure
Anthony Fauci is effectively King of the National Institute of Health. He gets paid $450,000 a year — the highest paid public servant in the United States. In just one year alone the NIH dished out $30 billion to more than 50,000 recipients. And there are royalty payments that flow back the other way, which amounted to $350 million dollars over the decade from 2010-2020. And here’s the weird thing, most of those royalty payments are secret.
Thirty billion dollars is an awfully big carrot, and even though $350 million seems small in comparison, it’s awfully big compared to the salaries of the few key decision-makers. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, and lives are at risk, but it’s not even being disclosed.
If Big Pharma were paying off people to get their drugs approved, it would look a lot like this. And if Big Pharma (or the asset managers that own big pharma) were also paying off the media to silence reporting of NIH corruption would the media ignore this story — exactly like it does?
In a normal world this type of corruption would be […]
What are they on? About twenty years of government funded propaganda and guilt.
Most Australian voters don’t have a clue — half of the nation thinks we make 10% of global emissions when the truth is more like 1%.
Climate change might be the greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes but most Australians are in the dark about what the real numbers are. They probably assumed that if we were only making one-tiny-percent, the government, the ABC, or even the education system might have told them. After all, we’re spending $13 billion dollars a year. What exactly are public universities for if not for letting Australians know this kind of data?
Where was the Government? The conservatives in charge keep throwing away their own best arguments. Almost like they want to hang on to a few wealthy seats while they miss the chance to ignite middle Australia.
But the ignorance is no accident. All the players — the politicians, the academics, the ABC, ANU, CSIRO, Schools, Universities, et al and all sundry, all profit from Big Government. They serve the government first, and not the people, and that’s the problem.
Liberals playing politics with pretence Australia can change global climate […]
Stick with this — step over the cheap shots at Trump and predictable hits on conservatives — Bill Maher is doing a cracker job on a soft left audience. He’s packaged up a dose of medicine about how important free speech is. His is a rare voice on the left pointing out the hypocrisy and stupidity of censorship.
“Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies is your job” (not Twitters)
We always focus on the producers and never the consumers, as if we’re all helpless dumb blondes ready to believe everything…
People lie, that’s what people do. Every age is the misinformation age, and whenever a new means of communication comes along some reach for the censor button. In 1858 the New York Times thought we couldn’t handle the Transatlantic Telegraph. “It was superficial and too fast for the Truth”…
He also tosses a cold bucket or two on the lefty willingness to believe the Covid stats, and effectively calls all the censors “assholes”.
In America you have the right to say what you think, to be wrong, and to be an asshole.
And if you […]
Market traders will be sweating. Today in the green-star renewable state of South Australia there won’t be much wind blowing, they’re weeks away from the lowest solar insolation of the year, and the extension cord to the coal plants in Victoria is limited for some reason.
This below is the remarkable AEMO prediction for South Australian for wholesale electricity today. Note the scale on the left hand side. The flat tops on the price peaks mark the cap at $15,000 per megawatt hour. The sheer width of those spike predictions is awesome — potentially nearly ten hours of the day above $10,000. Demand is only 1,500 – 1,800MW but that’s still a bill of $15 million dollars an hour for a small state.
Note the size of those peaks…
The first peak is forecast from 6.30-10am, and the second batch pretty much stretch from 6pm to midnight. Wow.
The AEMO is handing out LOR (Lack of Reserve) notices. Watch the Market Notices here. Watch prices here. For those so inclined.
9.6 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
Everyone is going to want one of these. And he’d only six lessons!
Record Jet Suit Mountain Ascent
From the Youtube:
We proved you can scale a Lake District Mountain (3100ft Helveylln) in 3mins 30 seconds, despite very poor visibility that would have grounded a HEMS Helicopter. The Mountain Rescue foot response is over 70 minutes typically. The route was 1.2 miles and 2200ft of height gain.
9.8 out of 10 based on 44 ratings […]
Generation tonight….
Just another week in the Transition we (Don’t) have to have
With 65 Glorious Gigawatts the Australian grid system has a vast excess (theoretically) of generation capacity, yet it’s so fragile that the loss of an interconnector, normal maintenance and a few coal turbines down — has triggered $100 million dollar price spikes. These burning pyres of money are so savage the average cost of wholesale electricity — across a whole day — is lately in the realm of $200- $700 per megawatt hour over most states for 24 hour periods. For the last week, daily prices have been ten times the “old normal”.
And it comes on the back of the most expensive April in the Australian grid history in every mainland state on the National Electricity Market.
Autumn and spring are supposed to be easy days in Australia with peak demand only running at 27,000 MW. Because things are lighter, generators do normal maintenance at this time of year, but at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any room for that in the network. In summer, demand is often 5,000MW higher. Where’s that going to come from?
Factories are shutting down for fear […]
by Jo Nova
What started as a minor an Australian headline turned into a glimpse of a mysterious world-wide phenomenon.
The Australian ABC tells us that Australian searches for climate change are up 5000%:
….
But even the ABC admits no one is really talking about it — apparently Australians are secretly thinking about climate change at home on their computer:
Discussion of climate policy may be conspicuously absent this federal election campaign, but Google search data suggests the warming of the planet is weighing on voters’ minds — at least more so than in 2019.
But strangely, they don’t report actual google search results for “climate change” — instead they quote some focus groups, and talk about 5000% increases in obscure questions like “What is climate change meaning?” which no one except 12 year olds doing high school assignments probably wants to know.
So here’s the last 18 years of actual Google data on Australian searches for “climate change”:
Holy Smoke!
Google Trends: Australia searches for “climate change” hits record high| Click to enlarge
But, wait, really? Is this year really that much more exciting for “climate change” than the uber hot […]
This is a remarkably prescient piece on the fourth quarter of 2020 written by Goehring & Rozencwajg Natural Resource Investors. Don’t ask me how to pronounce their names. The really interesting part is about food rather than energy.
There is a lot of dense information about the impediments to the green transition and the first part is a warning to green investors who are flooding the market to get on the bandwagon of the “great opportunities” that abound. They conclude from their research that green schemes will generally lose money and waste a great deal of investment without making a dent on the level of emissions.
As to the food crisis: on page 12. “For four years global agriculture has sat on a knife edge” with a series of good seasons and bumper crops but at the same time grain inventories have been run down to a point where any hitch in supply could precipitate fears of famine and social unrest in developing nations that are at the pointy end of the food supply chain. There was news of droughts in some major cereal providers and cold weather in other places disrupting harvests.
They expect to see global cooling and […]
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