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By Jo NovaBanker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel? Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned. It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it won’t be legally able to supply electricity unless the bureaucrats change the rules. So Delta has issued an urgent request for a rule change to add the words “or cash” to the current market rules. Anthony Albanese could solve this in five minutes. Apart from the banal rule change, all these banks are only allowed to trade in Australia with government approval, and their role is to serve the people, not to control the weather, or run political agendas. All the PM has to do is threaten to revoke their licenses or issue a new license to a competitor that will serve fossil fuel entities. He could also pull government contracts and pension accounts from bankers who boycott legal Australian entities for political reasons. (See how Ron de Santis did that in the US). The US Republican States have already solved this to some extent. One of Australia’s oldest coal generators refused bank guarantees, operating status under threatDelta Electricity, which operates the Vales Point coal-fired power station in New South Wales, has requested an urgent rule change from the Australian Energy Market Commission after 15 banks refused to offer it credit on emissions grounds. Chief executive Richard Wrightson said he had even offered to deposit money with an institution as security, simply to procure the financial instrument necessary under the rules, but even that offer was refused. “We’re actually not asking them to lend, we’re just asking them to issue a bank guarantee,’’ Mr Wrightson said. “This de-banking is dangerous … I won’t describe it as a crisis now, but unless we prepare for this, it’s chaotic.’’ Delta Electricity runs the Vales Point coal fired station in New South Wales. It has a capacity of 1320MW, and was marked for closure in 2029, but the Czech group that owns it said it should run at least another 4 years. The poor sods. What foreign company would want to invest in Australia any more with a rabid government that allows the banking mafia to run the electricity grid and to bankrupt legal entities on a whim? What looks, acts and smells like a banker cartel?What are the odds in a free market that 15 out of 15 banks decided to adopt the same “anti fossil fuel” boycott program at the same time? All of them are saying “No thanks” to the profits from arrangements with thermal coal. Speaking of which, why aren’t all the other private coal plants struggling? The plants owned by Alinta and EnergyAustralia are Chinese State assets, so President Xi is happy to help. But AGL and Origin Energy own coal plants and they aren’t begging for a rule change. Do they get a free pass from the bankers because they also own unreliable generators too? Is that how this works — to squeeze out the only independent coal plant with no vested interest in sabotaging coal power? The octopus grip of the big bankers spreads. All the Australian “Big Four” bankers signed the GFANZ banker cartel agreement — ANZ, CommBank, Westpac, NAB, plus Macquarie Bank, and Bank of Queensland. They serve the globalist UN, or their BlackRock and Vanguard masters, not the Australian people. All banks depend on government protection for their ability to create legal currency out of thin air. If you or I loaned money we didn’t have, it would be called counterfeiting. The money-printers have more control over our national grid than our PM seemingly has. h/t Bally, RickWill,
October 10th, 2024 | Tags: Climate Money | Category: Australia, Bankers, Global Warming, Grids |  Print This Post | |
With four weeks to go ’til D-Day for the parasitic blob (the US Election), the headlines today are biblical hellfire with photos. Earth’s vital signs have hit record extremes they tell us. In all the years we’ve been recording things, which is practically nothing, storms, floods, droughts and the mental health of jellyfish have never been worse, which is obviously why food crops are higher than ever before, the Earth is greening and more humans are alive than have ever existed. Like soothsayers with chicken entrails, captive scientists are squawking disaster like their funding depends on it: Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate expertsby Damien Carrington, The Guardian “We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardises life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” said Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University (OSU), who co-led the group. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives. It’s “like nothing humans have ever seen” says Prof Ripple, who has forgotten the Eemian, the ice ages, the Toba supervolcano, countless asteroids, and the Black Plague. We’re panicking about a couple of degrees of warming, but cavemen had it hotter and colder, and for 150,000 years their air conditioners didn’t work. It’s like the modern “scientists” are trying to erase all of prehistoryWhat we’re dealing with is nothing like what humans have already suffered through. Humans saw the seas rise by 125 meters (twice) — children used to play on the continental shelf until all their beaches disappeared, their homes washed away, and their favourite reefs were destroyed. Humans saw ice caps a mile thick roll over Manhattan and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too. Things were so bad, at some point humans waved good-bye to an entire species of hominid which had brains bigger than our own, and the vast forests of the Sahara desert turned to dust, the fish died, the rivers stopped flowing and the communities that existed for thousands of years were wiped out. Nothing we’re dealing with today is remotely as bad as what humans have already dealt with. Every kind of disaster will hit “Billions of people”:The hyperbole knows no bounds. The “millions of climate refugees” that didn’t happen, are now “billions”. No disaster is off limits to the Scare-fairies: “Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”
Every bad thing under the sun is caused by climate change. That’s how we know it isn’t science. The climate is doing just fine, but the The State of Climate Science is a tragedy.
REFERENCE (if you can call it that) William Ripple, et al including Michael Mann and Naoimi Oreskes (2024) The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth, BioScience, biae087, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087
By Jo Nova Thanks to Paul Homewood at NotAlotofPeopleKnowThat for finding this gem of a video. Commiserations to friends in the UK, where Ed Miliband, or worse, his new National Electricity System Operator (NESO) think that flywheels will save money because the UK won’t need to maintain back up power stations and import so much electricity. Ed Miliband is the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is a bit like being the Minister for War and Peace at the same time, or perhaps more like Health and Ebola. His big new plan is to set up a big new bureaucracy (NESO) and their big idea is to stop blackouts by installing giant flywheels around the country. Flywheels are good at smoothing out the frequency glitches, but the second largest flywheel operation in the world would only power the UK for a fraction of a second. It’s going to take a lot of flywheels, or as David Evans dryly remarked, if they can speed up the flywheels it might work, but to put enough energy in, they may need to get close to the speed of light. Ed Miliband reveals plan to prevent net zero blackoutsby Johnathon Leake, The Telegraph Giant flywheels are to be installed around the UK to minimise the risk of blackouts as the power system goes carbon-free. Flywheels are energy storage systems that use surplus electricity to accelerate a massive metal “wheel”… NESO said the schemes would save consumers money by cutting the need for maintaining backup power stations and importing power from overseas via interconnectors. A spokesman said: “The pathfinders alone are expected to provide consumers with savings of £14.9bn between 2025 and 2035.” As Paul Burgess explains, the flywheel sales team often talk in megawatts but rarely mention megawatt-hours (probably because they are embarrassed). The worlds second largest flywheel system has 200 carbon fibre flywheels spinning in a vacuum chamber and provides 20 megawatts. But it can only supply 1 megawatt for 15 minutes, which is a quarter of a MWh, which is a problem because the UK uses about 860,000 MWh every day. Paul Burgess estimates the second largest flywheel installation in the world can power the UK for about one 200th of a second. A flywheel is like a coal generator the second after it runs out of coal. Then there’s “The Cost”Burgess points at a study by Dongxu et al that reviews the costs of supplying energy via flywheels, and its in the ballpark of $1,000 to $5,000 per kilowatt hour. (That’s a million dollars a megawatt hour). It’s 1,200 to 4,600 times as expensive as gas in the UK, and about 100,000 times as expensive as Australian brown coal power. It’s cheaper to cook food over a pile of burning money. …the capital cost per unit power of a FESS [Flywheel Energy Storage System] with a rated power of 250 kW and a maximum expected storage time of 15 min is 250 to 350$/kW, and the corresponding unit energy cost is 1000 to 5000$/kWh. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that the unit energy installation cost of FESS will decrease by 35 % by 2030, from the current estimate of 1500–6000$/kWh to 1000–3900$/kWh [14]. — Dongxu et al. Yet NESO says it will “save consumers money”. Aren’t there laws about fraud or dishonest advertising that apply to statements like these? Then there’s “industrial accidents”The same paper mentions that things can get fairly hairy with heavy objects moving at high speeds: In order to fully utilize material strength to achieve higher energy storage density, rotors are increasingly operating at extremely high tip speeds. However, this trend will lead to severe centripetal stress and potential safety threats caused by rotor failure. In 2011, two carbon fiber composite rotors weighing 1 ton and storing about 30 kWh failed and began to disintegrate. Flywheels are also known as “Synchronous Condensers” though coal, hydro, nuclear and gas plants effectively have free flywheels built into the system. The only reason to add flywheels to the grid today is to allow the wind and solar generators to run without crashing the system. It’s yet another subsidy for wind and solar generators, and the costs should be laid at their feet. The real issue here is that the people running the country are innumerate simpletons, and the professors who know that are too afraid to say anything lest they lose their next grant, or fall off the Honours list, and the journalists are too indoctrinated, and the editors too captured for the bad news to make it to the front page. REFERENCEDongxu et al (2023) A review of flywheel energy storage rotor materials and structures, Journal of Energy Storage, Volume 74, Part A, 25 December 2023, 109076.
October 8th, 2024 | Tags: Battery, Electricity Cost, FCAS, UK | Category: Renewable | Print This Post | | UPDATE Friday: –– For readers in darkness, there is currently a G4 geomagnetic storm. Satellites at L1 suggest a spike in density (SWEPAM) coming through in minutes (5.30pm WST 8.30pm EDT). See Glendale for live reports of where the action is. Graphs and discussion at SpaceWeatherlive. Nullschool-Space (a very low resolution, generic estimate) is as colorful as it gets. This post is temporarily bumped. Keep reading → ***UPDATE: the X9 has finally arrived (Monday afternoon and evening) and is triggering auroras (briefly) as far south as Cape Cod in Florida. Keep your eyes out…. By Jo Nova Two X-class flares in two days, X7.1 and now X9I put in an order for an x class flare while I’m away from city lights. I was delighted when a big X7.1 was launched on cue a couple of days ago. It was the second biggest flare this cycle until a few minutes ago when a huge X9.05 occurred. This is now the largest solar flare in Cycle 25, bigger than the flare in May this year which caused all the auroras around the world this year in places like Florida and southern Queensland. That was an X8.7. The X7.1 flare may bring auroras Friday or Saturday which was exciting enough. The scale is logarithmic, so this latest one is effectively 100 times larger. Few details are available yet on the latest flare. The same sunspot (AR 3842) caused both x-class flares this week, and it is near the centre of the side facing us. It does appear to be Earth directed, but as with all things aurora — we won’t know for sure until it happens (or it doesn’t). Space agencies will make guesses about when these will arrive but they may turn up 8 hours early or late, and the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field needs to be “negative” for good auroras. People who want to see an aurora are best signing up for an email or SMS notification (EG Glendale App). We won’t know exactly when the best action will be until the charged particles from the Coronal Mass Ejection hit the satellites at the Lagrange point. These sit about a million miles away from Earth. When (if) that happens, aurora-hunters will have only 30 minutes to an hour to get to a dark spot. And of course, the best laid plans may be wrecked by clouds or dawn.
RESOURCES
UPDATE: The AuroraGuy has a good description here. Find a place with a dark sky to watch from. He suggests the Bortle Scale 1-5 which are country or rural sites. The darkest sites are class 1 and the brightest city is class 9.
October 4th, 2024 | Tags: Aurora, Solar Flares, Space-weather | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Sorry. I’m away from the desk for a couple of days…
By Jo Nova All those sustainable dreams, gone pfftGoogle, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to reach “net zero” with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock. In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race. It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants. Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups. The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear ComebackThe AI boom has left technology companies scrambling for low-carbon sources of energy to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI, data centers, and crypto could more than double by 2026. Even its lowball estimates say that the added demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or—in the high-usage case—Germany. Australia uses ten times as much electricity as Microsoft, but is still fantasizing about reaching 82% renewable by 2030 with no nuclear power “because it will cost too much and take too long”. Microsoft uses 24 TWh of energy a year and employs 220,000 people, and knows it needs a nuclear plant to be competitive (and reach, albeit frivolous weather changing ideals). Australia uses 274 TWh of electricity, and employs 14 million people but is going to aim for frivolous climate witchery anyway, and do it the double-hard way. Who needs to be competitive, right? Pierre Gosselin discusses how Germany risks being left behind because it has switched off all its nuclear plants. At least it has some power lines to France. Australia has no nukes, not much hydro, no mountains to spare, is the driest inhabited continent on Earth, and it has no powerlines to anywhere. We are the crash test dummy. Soon most big companies will have more reliable power than we do.
Submissions close today!It’s better to say something short than nothing at all. Let it be known that we have grave concerns, and far too little time to debate and discuss such far reaching legislation. Please read submissions posted below and add your own here too. Thank you! — Jo Upload your submission here (button on the right hand side) Committee Secretariat contact: Committee Secretary Public submission regarding: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. _____________________
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out, which is surely the main purpose of the Misinformation Bill amendments. The government can already correct any misinformation that really matters, so these amendments curtail our freedom of speech for no benefit at all. Guilty until proven innocent?The amendments turn free speech on its head — instead of having the implicit right to criticize the government, everyone now needs to prove to some judge that their views are “reasonably” satire, or reasonable dissemination for an “academic, scientific or religious” purpose, and that their “motive” is honest and their behaviour is “authentic”. When it comes to reasonableness in a democracy the highest court should be the court of public opinion, but how can the people decide if they are not allowed to hear it? How is it even a democracy still if the government is allowed to take our money to force feed us the governments view on the ABC and in every captured university (dependent on government funds), but the people cannot even reply through sheer unfunded creative wit? This legislation puts a very unfree cloud over all groups, forums, blogs, and social media.The fines (and all legal fees today) are so obscenely, disproportionately harmful to Australians that few will risk going to court, instead the platforms will be preemptively second guessing what a judge might say is reasonable, and people with serious social media accounts will be second guessing the second-guesses of their platform controllers in fear that they might be thrown off, and lose years of work if they guess wrongly. Worse, the big platforms, supposedly so “independent” will become unaccountable but de facto arms of the government. The platforms will know if they don’t perform as expected and favorably to the incumbent masters, that the rules will get more onerous, the fines bigger. And thus and verily will the unholy alliance of Big-Tech and Big-Government will become Big-Brother in your conversations, and Big Bankrupter in your nightmares. The government claim they are not censoring anyone, but it’s just done at arms length with “implausible” deniability. Obviously the laws will censor all of us who are not already controlled by ACMA or the government through a public salary, a grant, or a Code of Practice written into the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act. Who silences the government misinformation, then?
What happens when the experts are wrong, but the people who are unconvinced can’t speak up because they might “harm… the efficacy of a preventative health measure”? These health measures may take a … lifetime… to even measure the efficacy. Does the government get a free pass for 40 years? It was estimated dietary trans fats (found in margarine) were killing 82,000 people a year in the US. (Danaei et al 2009). Should we have fined all the people who talked about this, and perhaps delayed things, and killed a half a million more? Someone speaking against hydrogenated margarine could have been deemed to be spreading “misinformation causing harm to public health in Australia”. So 20 years later, they turn out to be right — will the government compensate the families of the dead who might have chosen a different sandwich spread had they heard another opinion and been able to make up their own mind? Will Facebook and Twitter need to block the accounts of experts who were wrong? Or, are there two kinds of citizens in Australia — one sort that work for the government, who can give their opinions and get things wrong without losing their right to speak, and the Untermenschen, who cannot speak, even if they are right? Confidence has to be earned, not orderedApparently the citizens of Australia are not allowed to say anything that might harm the confidence in the banking system or the financial markets. But if our banking system is so fragile, or our currency so fake, that it needs a law to force people to “feel confident” then we are in a trouble already. Nothing damages confidence like making a law to silence critics. As adults, we filter misinformation our whole lives, it’s our jobWe are all adults in this room, and we have lived our whole lives filtering out advertising spin, ignoring political lies, and reading books telling us we can stops storms if we just ride a bike. Since the stone-age we’ve spent our lives climbing from one misinformation-swamp to another, but as adults, it’s our job to figure it out. Free will and all. How dare you treat us like children. And even the children about to enter the room have to learn how to deal with misinformation. How exactly can we teach them, if the government serves up one permitted line to protect us from accidentally hearing something “wrong”? It’s not just that this misinformation bill is egregiously wrong, it’s that we shouldn’t have one at all in the first place. REFERENCES Danaei et al (2009) The preventable causes of death in the United States: comparative risk assessment of dietary, lifestyle, and metabolic risk factors, PLoS Med, . 2009 Apr 28;6(4):e1000058. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058. Epub 2009 Apr 28. The Bill: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 The 69 page proposed legislation PDF form and Word doc. Submissions close on the 30 September 2024. (General advice on how to make a submission). Submissions can be uploaded here (button on the right column) or emailed to the Committee Secretariat below.
September 30th, 2024 | Tags: Free Speech, Misinformation | Category: Australia, Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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