The EU is fracturing over energy, and not a day too soon…
Signs of hope. Just as Germany recently pulled the pin on the EU’s Electric Vehicle mandate, France is now threatening to scupper the EU’s new Renewable Energy Directive unless they include a role for nuclear power. It was supposed to be signed off on Wednesday. Despite nuclear being the only reliable baseload source of “Net Zero” energy, France has had to fight for its inclusion at every step.
France is gathering 16 European nations into a Nuclear Alliance
France’s Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, brought together her counterparts from member countries of the Nuclear Alliance on 16 May at the Ministry for Energy Transition. A total of 16 countries were represented. In addition to the host country, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden, plus Italy with observer status, were represented. The UK was present as a guest country.
“Nuclear power may provide up to 150 GW of electricity capacity by 2050 to the European Union (vs roughly 100 GW today),” the statement says. “This represents the equivalent of up to 30 to 45 new-build large reactors and small modular reactors in the EU and such new projects would also ensure that the current share of 25% electricity production be maintained in the EU for nuclear energy.”
Nuclear energy generates electricity in 14 of the 27 EU Member States, and currently provides 25% of Europe’s electricity and 50% of its low carbon electricity.
We know this matters because Team-Renewables are angry
“France is crazy, ”said a diplomat from one EU country, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about country dynamics, adding that there was “a lot” of anger at Paris “from all sides.”
BRUSSELS — Anger at France boiled over on Wednesday as EU countries accused Paris of taking a key piece of EU climate legislation “hostage” at the last minute to extract further concessions in the text.
EU ambassadors were due to sign off on the Renewable Energy Directive on Wednesday, an integral part of the bloc’s flagship Fit for 55 climate package that aims to slash greenhouse gases by 55 percent by 2030 and ramp up the share of renewables in the EU’s energy mix to 42.5 percent.
Ostensibly, France is asking for its industrial production of ammonia to be partially exempted from meeting green hydrogen targets, according to three diplomats. But that could also be a front for extracting further demands, including on nuclear, they said.
“This is the Renewable Energy Directive, not the Nuclear Energy Directive ” fumed one diplomat, apparently forgetting that the aim was meant to be “low carbon”, not just jobs for the Renewables-Boys.
They’re supposed to be rescuing the world from CO2 aren’t they?
The Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear plant completed the transition from testing to regular output last month to become Finland’s first new nuclear plant in more than four decades. It is expected to produce up to 15 percent of the country’s power demand.
And while the plant’s production is still in its early days, its launch has had a considerable effect on Finland’s energy prices, lowering the electricity spot price in the country from €245.98 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in December to €60.55 per MWh in April, a reduction of more than 75 percent, according to physical electricity exchange, Nord Pool.
A wonderful chance to discuss some of the heavier aspects of EV cars, more dangerous car parks and car accidents, the fun of fires on cargo ships, novel ways to douse a smoking car, and the delusional need for more metal than anyone can dig up on Earth. Heavier cars means more wear and tear, more road noise, more latex in the air, and more costs to rebuild our car parks and bridges.
Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War II, clueless public servants wanted expert reviewers to make sure they weren’t wasting money on something embarrassingly stupid, or fraudulent. They weren’t search for the truth, just protecting their own necks.
Scientifically, there’s no evidence supporting peer review:
Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?
It doesn’t. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.
In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time. If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published. Only later does some good Samaritan—often someone in the author’s own lab!—notice something weird and decide to investigate. That’s what happened with this this paper about dishonesty that clearly has fake data (ironic), these guys who have published dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent papers, and this debacle:
Gotta love this graph!
Wait a second, these are not real error bars … the author literally just put the letter “T” above the bar graphs 😭 pic.twitter.com/KKtTGRHFaw
That graph was published, in Advances in Materials Science and Engineering. After peer review failed, but “Twitter Review” succeeded in discovering the error bars were deliberate typos, so-to-speak, it has been retracted. But how much other junk got set in print in 4.7 million articles a year?
Why don’t reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don’t require you to make your data public at all. You’re supposed to provide them “on request,” but most people don’t. That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.
Mastroianni makes the case that the whole point of peer-review was to deal with the explosion of new government funded papers. Once the bureaucrats took command of science the main aim was not “brilliant discoveries” but just not to fail embarrassingly. Thus peer review was merely a bureaucratic safety value that cost no dollars but gave a rubber stamp to “government science”. It became the committee cover that “protected” jobs — but in a sense all of science became a bureaucratic protectorate:
Why did peer review seem so reasonable in the first place?
I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place. You don’t mind if you whack a few good ideas in the process, because it’s so important to bury the bad stuff.
But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work.Better ideas don’t always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they’re more useful. You can’t land on the moon using Aristotle’s physics, you can’t turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can’t build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton’s laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t. We didn’t need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.
Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat.
Mastroianni argues that having a meaningless rubber stamp is worse than no rubber stamp at all — as if the FDA inspected meat just with a sniff, and then put on sticker saying “Inspected by the FDA”. It’s dangerous…
If you want to sell a bottle of vitamin C pills in America, you have to include a disclaimer that says none of the claims on the bottle have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Maybe journals should stamp a similar statement on every paper: “NOBODY HAS REALLY CHECKED WHETHER THIS PAPER IS TRUE OR NOT. IT MIGHT BE MADE UP, FOR ALL WE KNOW.” That would at least give people the appropriate level of confidence.
“Hooray We Failed” he says. No one was in charge of this experiment, so no has the job of saying it’s over. Mastroinni appoints himself, and declares it “done”.
What should we do now? Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet. I wrote it in normal language so anyone could understand it.
Then thousands of people read it, retweeted it and he got more reviews and feedback than he’s ever had. NPR asked him for an interview, and professors offered him ideas. The free market in ideas will always beat the bureaucratic committees. Blog science, substack articles and tweets may yet rescue science from the government funded strangehold. The only formula for finding the truth is free speech.
In his followup article he talks about the response to his article: the fears and the inevitable rage and yelling from the people who’ve worked so hard at climbing the ladder of citations.
Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, commented:
It’s fascinating to me that a process at the heart of science is faith not evidence based. Indeed, believing in peer review is less scientific than believing in God because we have lots of evidence that peer review doesn’t work, whereas we lack evidence that God doesn’t exist.
It’s a long feature article and well worth reading. Though it’s no accident, of course, that archaic bad systems of publication still control science 30 years after the spread of the internet — the gatekeepers of science and government don’t want to lose control of the monoculture they created.
The left side of politics is fracturing over climate and energy. The Green Party of France is calling Macron irresponsible and accusing him of “climate denial” for the sin of daring to suggest the EU already has enough environmental regulations:
[Macron] insisted that, when it comes to the regulatory side, the EU is “ahead of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world.” During a speech on how to revive the French industry on Thursday at the Elysée, President Emmanuel Macron called for “a European regulatory break.” “We have already passed lots of environmental regulations at European level, more than other countries,” he said. “Now we should be implementing them, not making new changes in the rules or we are going to loose all our [industrial] players.” — Politico
Macron was not suggesting anything as radical as actually unwinding Green legislation. But the mere act of not pandering 100% to sacred Green goals meant pushback for apostasy was swift and hard and a complete overreaction:
“…from the left there has been only rage. ‘Absolutely irresponsible’ cried the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who said it wasn’t fewer environmental regulations that were needed: ‘On the contrary, we have to increase them.’
Her party colleague Sandra Regol levelled that most damning of accusations at Macron, that of ‘climate denial’, adding that he was ‘taking France back to the 1980s’.
Notably, these quotes are so toxic that the rest of the media are not mentioning them. After all, if Macron is a “climate denier” for not racing full tilt on the Green Express, it says something about the cult of Green. Let the absurdity shine.
“Build Back Better” has suddenly become “Build Back Factories“
Macron is clearly trying to speak the language of the jilted working class (even if he may not do much to live up to it). He was not trying to woo the Green voter. No wonder the Greens felt outraged. He threw an event on Monday for 200 foreign business leaders to attract investment and was even talking to Elon Musk…
While Macron woos investors to help re-industrialize France and reduce Europe’s dependence on China and the U.S., protesters follow him around the country, banging saucepans to protest economic injustice and his leadership.
More than 200 international business leaders are expected Monday at the Choose France’ event staged at the palace of Versailles to promote foreign investment.
[ABC News (US)] Elon Musk was a surprise visitor, meeting first with Macron at the Elysee Palace with discussions about “significant progress in the electric vehicle and energy sectors,” as well as digital regulation, the president tweeted.
By far the most interesting write up was from Gavin Mortimer of The Spectator:
Is Macron finally taking on the cult of net zero?
The far-left France Insoumise were also outraged. ‘It’s not as if there’s a [climate] emergency’, tweeted a sardonic Damien Maudet. One of the party’s MEPs, Manon Aubry, thundered that Macron ‘is now using the same rhetoric, word for word, as the European right and far right, who want to kill the implementation of the rest of the European climate package’.
At the same time that the CGT and the French Socialists have been shedding supporters, Marine Le Pen has been attracting followers, many of them blue-collar workers who once voted left. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Front in 1972, growing it from a fringe party to one that reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election by latching onto the two preoccupations of the working-class: immigration and deindustrialisation.
This same sense of grievance accounted for the success in April of the newly-formed Farmer Citizen Movement in the Dutch regional elections. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek wrote in TheSpectator, the Movement had tapped into the ‘larger conflict between the authoritarian green agenda being pushed by our government and the silent majority paying for it all’.
The truth is that net zero has become a bourgeois cult, and their self-absorbed domineering has been tolerated for too long.
As the yellow vests told the environmental lobby as they took to the streets in 2018 to protest against a green fuel tax: ‘You talk about the end of the world while we are talking about the end of the month.’
Years of protests have achieved some kind of deferred pain for Macron, adding to the pressure for him to get back to reality:
Credit rating agency Fitch last month downgraded France’s sovereign credit rating, citing the protest movement. “Political deadlock and (sometimes violent) social movements pose a risk to Macron’s reform agenda,” the agency wrote. –– ABC News USA
But make no mistake, only last week Macron was giving tax credits to all the fashionable Green causes:
It follows a series of incentives announced by Macron last week to support innovative industries and transition towards greener technology. They include tax credits in fields like battery production, electric cars, hydrogen and wind power, as well as accelerating authorization for industrial projects. — Business Standard
So the new talk of a pause is a good but tiny step. It’s merely a deceleration on the race to Green Hell, but perhaps the momentum is shifting?
More heartening than anything is that Macron appears to care at all what French voters think.
We’re so used to voters being irrelevant to the UniParty — perhaps the recent Dutch elections have rattled the cage?
In terms of civilization, Niall Ferguson is speaking simple maths. The arithmetic of resources. Something which is almost never said.
Niall Ferguson:
“For an enormous island that is thinly populated, with enormous resources — for such an island to be ill-defended seems like the most spectacular folly…
Empires, at some level, are about acquiring commodities at below market prices, or at least not trusting to the market to supply you — not to be at the mercy of the market, or the mercy of a navy, the US Navy, which China currently is.
To have security China cannot be dependent on imported commodities and market prices, when you think about what that implies for Australia, its really quite scary…
Australia is a prize…
“If you want Peace, prepare for War.
If you want War, act like it will never come. Allow your defense capability to atrophy.”
The rulers of China would be irrational not to want more land to feed people, and control of more resources. Australia has the largest known uranium reserves in the world, the 2nd largest cobalt, lithium, tungsten, vanadium resources. It is in the top five for world economic resources of black coal, brown coal, gold, copper, ilmenite, magnesite, manganese ore, silver, tin.
Australia has 0.3% of global population but is currently producing 27% of global bauxite, 36% of the world’s iron ore, and 53% of it’s total lithium. It is often the largest exporter of coal and sometimes the largest exporter of LNG, and the second largest producer of gold.
It turns out that replicating a cow in a laboratory is not as simple as expected. A new study points at some very major and potentially very hard to solve problems with laboratory meat. We can scale up vats of bacteria in factories easily, but animal cells are very different. Muscle cells not only need a sterile complicated broth but they are basically a sitting-duck feast for any bacteria.
Quote of the day:
“USD 2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t really know if it will be better for the environment,” Risner said.
Think of a cow as being an entire industrial production campus for meat — to deal with chemical toxins it comes with a customized chemical factory (a liver) and two industrial filter systems (kidneys), and a full immune defense force on a 24 hour watch to deal with the constant flood of microbial contaminants. Cows also have nutrient intake systems to break down grass into separate chemical components which are stored, transported and chemically tweaked to suit. All departments are self repairing, and are equipped with their own laboratory testing, messaging and alert service. The sterile growth conditions of muscle are maintained most of the time in close proximity to dirt and poo. The biological machinery has been road-tested and refined for a half a billion years. Yet somehow we thought we could replicate all that and do it more efficiently in a couple of decades.
Instead of thirty factories, 200 labs, 2000 trucks and sterilized vats of heated pharmaceutical grade goo, we could just use a cow.
It’s not enough to kill bacteria in the growth broth, we have to remove the dead body parts of the bacteria too. The outside shell of many bacteria breaks up into is what we call an endotoxin. You may not know it but these are just bad, bad, bad — they are lipopolysaccarides that sometimes leak from our intestinal walls and trigger fever, nausea, inflammation, shivering and shock. So the dead parts of bacteria have to be cleaned out of the broth — which means chromatography, or ultrafiltration, or ion exchanges, and fine membranes. All of which uses lots of energy.
Factory made meat practically eats fossil fuels:
The three red bars on the right are different scenarios for creating growth mediums. The PF stands for Purification Factor (meaning highly purified).
GWP means Global Warming Potential. ACBM means artificial meat or “Animal Cell-Based Meat”.BH means Beef Herd, and DH means Dairy. Risner et al
The broth itself must contain salts, sugars, amino acids, and vitamins, and the production of each of these elements involves an expenditure of energy.
This “pharmaceutical” level of purification is essential as animal cells will not grow in a broth that is “contaminated” with bacteria. Experts involved in improving the process are testing to what extent it is possible to move away from purification.
The paper’s first author, Derrick Risner of the University of California (U.S.), in a commentary for “New Scientist”, expressed doubt that moving away from “pharmaceutical” levels of broth purification would be possible since even trace levels of contamination can destroy animal cell cultures.
From the paper — we used to use serum from baby cow blood to grow cells in culture but that is an 18 step process and energy intensive…
Animal cell culture is inherently different than culturing bacteria or yeast cells due to their enhanced sensitivity to environmental factors, chemical and microbial contamination. This can be illustrated by the industrial shift to single use bioreactors for monoclonal antibody production to reduce costs associated with contamination (Jacquemart et al., 2016). Animal cell growth mediums have historically utilized fetal bovine serum (FBS) which contains a variety of hormones and growth factors (Jochems et al., 2002). Serum is blood with the cells, platelets and clotting factors removed. Processing of FBS to be utilized for animal cell culture is an 18-step process that is resource intensive due to the level of refinement required for animal cell culture. Thus, the authors believe that commercial production of an ACBM product utilizing FBS or any other animal product to be highly unlikely given this high level of refinement.
The authors say they might be underestimating the costs.
The requirement of endotoxin removal would also contribute to the environmental impact of ACBM products which makes our LCIA results for the minimum scenarios to be underestimated minimums. Utilization of commodity grade growth medium components such as glucose for animal cell growth is unlikely unless the components undergo an endotoxin separation process. The effect of endotoxin can vary greatly depending on cell type and source; however 25 ng/ml of endotoxin was shown to cause cell apoptosis when coupled with non-lethal heat shock (Corning, 2020).
Endotoxins kill cells at just 25 nanograms per ml. The purity required in a complicated mixture on a commerical scale needs Olympic level chemistry. It’s like feeding pharmaceutical grade drugs to your cows instead of grass. This isn’t going to scale up well.
REFERENCE
Risner et al (2023) Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment, bioRXIV, bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.04.21.537778;
Matt Taibbi and a team of writers have created a 70 page report on the “information cartel” — the new conglomerate cabal of Big Money, Big Government and Big Tech that wants to censor and nudge you into servitude and obedience. Facebook promptly censored his report on censorship. Taibbi tweeted that out, and Facebook realized they were proving his point, and reversed it. It was “just a bug” said a Facebook executive, unconvincingly.
Click to enlarge (twice even) Illustration by mrmooremedia.com
The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.
The wannabee rulers seek to craft a battle against a foreign enemy seeking to control the US through “mis-, dis- and malinformation” and to frame free speech itself as “outdated”.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” [CIC] is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
The report should become the next go-to document for anyone wondering who is linked to what when yet another Disinformation Institute appears to tell us that black is white, that freedom is slavery and that your car causes storms. Just for examples, the report covers groups like Centre for Countering Digital Hate, the Trusted News Initiative, and to name a random few… ClaimBuster, DisinfoCloud, MythDetector, DisinfoWatch, FactCheck.me, and the Global Disinformation Index.
The Wall of Money feeding the Disinformation
It takes a lot of cash to keep the lies levitating so the report describes large funders and central players like “Craig Newmark Philanthropies” which gave away as much as $419m between 2018 – 2022 to disinformation initiatives and schools of journalism.
In entry number 26 Newmark is described as the “anti-disinformation” elite of the elite.
What they do/What they are selling: The idea that his money can be a “force multiplier” for battling disinformation. Craigslist’s free classified ads helped destroy local newspapers, but Newmark has found friends in journalism with gifts of $10 million to the Columbia Journalism School and $20 million to CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “You can manipulate a person by manipulating a person’s feed. You can tell a person what to believe and maybe tell a person what to do.”
Connected to: Almost everybody, including, probably, anyone currently in the room with you.
In sum: A mega-fund core to power the explosive growth of the Censorship-Industrial complex.
But it’s not just “philanthropists” at work, the US government is funding it too:
The Aspen Institute is a fundraising powerhouse, receiving over $140 million in contributions and grants in 2021. According to USAspending.gov, the Aspen Institute has received tens of millions of dollars in grants and contracts from the U.S. government, primarily from the State Department, but also from USAID.
The following entities and foundations are listed by Aspen as donors of over $500,000 or more, with many donating over $1 million: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Johnson & Johnson; JP Morgan Chase Foundation; Walmart; Blackrock; and the Open Society Foundation.
Millions of dollars is paying salaries of people to write lies about how climate skeptics are funded by fossil fuels, anti-vaxxers are conspiracy theorists and to pat journalists on the back with comforting pap like: “Don’t face the Information Apocalypse alone.”
It looks daunting, but this is where it starts — shining the light on the Big Money behind the lies. Spread the word, share the message. Know the enemy.
And tell the journalists,the good guys are not the ones on the same side of the censors. Those who call themselves brave while defending The Powers That Be. Just call them minions…
Just another catch on the road to Green Heaven. EV’s are heavier than petrol cars.
Where a full tank of gas or fuel is 70kg, a full tank of battery (or an empty one) weighs half a ton, or in the Tesla Model Y league — 771kg. That’s more than a whole Toyota Corolla weighed in 1967 (just 690kg). Now a Tesla Model X weighs 2,500kg and some of the newer EV’s weigh 4,000 kg.
That poses a problem for many structures that were designed with normal cars in mind. The odd EV is fine, but if the whole national fleet starts to become electric, suddenly loads on 50 year old bridges and shopping centre carparks are beyond the expected bounds. The infrastructure may have been designed when a normal car was just a 1970’s corolla.
In the UK, as many as 1 in 20 bridges may be too weak to handle the load. Perhaps it’s lucky then that there aren’t enough minerals in the world to make all those EV’s. If it takes us 200 years to dig up the copper required, that may give us time to rebuild the carparks and bridges.
Given the higher wear and tear from EV’s obviously their registration costs and licensing and some tax on charging should be more expensive than lighter normal fuel cars. Someone has to pay for the road damage and rebuilds.
A heavier “fuel tank” needs a heavier chassis to hold it. And a heavier car means heavier buildings and bridges for it to drive on, and all that means more concrete and steel and more emissions.
Councils should check the weight limits on bridges to ensure they don’t collapse with heavier electric cars travelling across them, ministers have suggested.
Analysis by the RAC Foundation earlier this year, found that one in 20 bridges across the country were deemed to be substandard. While one in 24 could not carry the heaviest vehicle on the roads, mainly lorries.
33 per cent heavier
[Tory MP Greg Knight] said: “Electric vehicles can be up to 33 per cent heavier than the equivalent petrol propelled vehicle and it is important that those, who ensure our roads and bridges are safe, factor them into account.
Russell Simmons, chair of the British Parking Association’s structures group, told The Telegraph that he had carried out inspections of multi-storey car parks in the UK over the last six months which would not have been able to withstand new EV weights.
Earlier this year, Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the US National Transportation SafetyBoard, found that the best-selling EVs in the US were on average 33 per cent heavier than petrol counterparts. The difference will likely be similar for vans and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs).
The average EV weighs significantly more than traditional petrol or diesel cars, largely due to their battery systems. As an example the top-spec Tesla Model X has a kerb weight of 2467kg, which means its Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) of 3069kg would far exceed most expectations of weight requirements in the past.
Other models that may eventually find their way to Australia such as the GMC Hummer EV weigh over 4000kg, which makes its GVWR an incredible 4800kg. The battery pack alone weighs over 1300kg, about the weight of a small car equipped with an internal-combustion engine.
Sales of electric cars across Australia nearly doubled in 2022 to 33,410 vehicles, equal to about 3.0 per cent of the total new vehicle market
As an example, here are some of the major shopping centres in Australia and their ages:
Chermside, Brisbane – opened in 1957, last major reconstruction in 1999 followed by minor updates in 2005, 2015.
Chadstone, Melbourne – opened in 1960, last major redevelopments in 2007 and then 2016
Macquarie Centre, Sydney – opened in 1981, last major redevelopment in 2012 with additional work in 2014.
Wind plants fail all the time and wreak havoc on the grid. It’s just “business as usual” or rather “subsidies as usual”. The rainbow list of acronyms below the graph shows every single wind plant in five states of Australia was accounted for in this dismal tally.
Billions of dollars rests on whether we can stop high pressure cells forming near Adelaide…
As Tony points out, the more wind towers we build, the worse this mayhem will be. Weather comes and weather goes but when the doldrums hit, it wipes out all 79 industrial plants together. Only wind plants built outside the high pressure cell could smooth out this failure. Offshore wind farms would have failed at the same time as onshore ones too unless they were built halfway to New Zealand. To put that task in perspective, most offshore windfarms in the UK are built within 40km of the coast, but New Zealand is 4,000 kilometers away. Even floating windplants are built in 120m of water, but the Tasman Sea is 5,000 m deep.
Normal weather causes wind turbine weather mayhem on the NEM
The whole grid in the Australian NEM (National Energy Market) is roughly a 22GW enterprise, so more than a quarter of the total generation came and went — another quarter had to sit by and twiddle its thumbs waiting to quietly take over. No wonder Australian electricity is so expensive now. We pay unreliable generators to produce sacred green electrons and then pay another set of reliable generators to sit around and wait for when they will be needed. Who thought this would be cheaper — communists, maybe.
Indeed, if we include solar power variation, it’s even worse.
Australian Unreliable Renewables fell from 62% to 4% of national energy generation in 18 hours
Total renewable energy generation from all forms of solar and wind reached a peak at lunchtime Weds 3rd of May of 16.7 GW of generation. By 6am the next day that had fallen to 0.9GW. In a total system with an average of about 22GW of generation nearly 16 gigawatts was lost in 18 hours. Roughly 60% of total national generation failed and the system coped, but backing up this grid to cater for this huge failure comes at a massive cost.
That’s 95% of peak renewables output lost in less than a day.
As TonyfromOz points out, this is like a whole state fleet of coal plants failing at once
Imagine one of our largest states lost their entire coal fleet overnight?
For some perspective, ALL of the coal fired power in Victoria have a Nameplate of 4960MW, for three power plants with 10 Units, and that’s lower than the loss of power from ALL of these wind plants. If something like that failed (all 10 Units of the coal fired power in that State of Victoria) the State would be totally blacked out.
The same would apply for the State of New South Wales, where the total Nameplate for all of its coal fired plants is now 6149MW from four power plants with 12 Units (and that total is now lower since the recent closure of the Liddell plant, removing 2000MW for that coal fired total Nameplate for that State), and if all those 12 Units shut down, then that State would also be blacked out.
These are the two most populous States in Australia, and if something like that happened, it would be quite literally catastrophic, and it would be screamed about in the media (when the power did come back on) about the absolute and stupendous unreliability of coal fired power.
Luckily, in this case, with wind generation, there were many natural gas fired plants, and hydro power plants to take up the slack of such an immense loss of power, and because of that, and the fact that this is renewable power, now the sacred cow of the media, no one even knew, and it was not reported, huh, not that anyone even knew of this correlation in the first place.
The media silence on this is a lie by omission, but it’s still a lie, still dishonest, and we need to start protesting outside the ABC and SBS headquarters to draw attention to this deliberate deceit to hide the failures of their sacred totem and co-dependent industries. Those who depend on the government lie for each other all the time. It’s no accident.
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Millions of dollars is paying salaries of people to write lies about how climate skeptics are funded by fossil fuels, anti-vaxxers are conspiracy theorists and to pat journalists on the back with comforting pap like: “Don’t face the Information Apocalypse alone.”
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