Last Chance Hotel: Australia’s Energy Crisis at the Crossroads

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Anyone who fondly imagines that wind and solar power are about to become as cheap as chips in some glorious renewable future, should read this tale of Australian woe.

STOP THESE THINGS

No way back from here: Malcolm muddles & Frydenberg fudges.

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Australia’s energy crisis is a self-inflicted calamity with no apparent end in sight.

The PM, Malcolm Turnbull seems intent on protecting his son, Alex’s investment in Australia’s most notorious wind power outfit, Infigen (see our post here).

While his gormless Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg behaves like a punch-drunk boxer, who cannot land a punch and with absolutely no idea what’s going on around him.

Into that mix strides Alan Finkel; a boffin tasked with trying to rescue Australia’s power grid from imminent collapse, the consequence of loading it up with intermittent, chaotic and erratic wind and solar power.

Some see Finkel as the Great White Hope.

STT will reserve its judgement on that matter: bright and shiny ideas are one thing, implementing them over a pack of rabid, salivating rent-seekers out to prevent you from doing so is…

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Clive James: Climate alarmists will never admit they’re wrong

Via GWPF, an abstract from a brilliant essay by the evergreen Clive James.

When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean, they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true. The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end.

Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a hurry.

I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has finished collapsing all the cards are still there.

British Airways blames ‘power surge’ for IT meltdown & travel chaos

Airport chaos for BA passengers

BA moves in mysterious ways, its blunders to perform – but with dire results for a lot of unlucky customers.

BA chief executive Alex Cruz says the airline’s flight disruptions had nothing to do with cutting costs but were caused by a power surge that “only lasted a few minutes”, reports BBC News via the GWPF.

BA chief executive Alex Cruz says he will not resign and that flight disruption had nothing to do with cutting costs.

He told the BBC a power surge, had “only lasted a few minutes”, but the back-up system had not worked properly.

Labour party energy/climate policy revealed in leaked manifesto

_____Image Credit: Matt.______

The UK Labour party has a leak, and its election manifesto has escaped into the wild. Here’s what it says about energy and climate.

Sustainable Energy

Labour’s energy policy is built on three simple principles:

• To ensure security of energy supply and ‘keep the lights on’

• To ensure energy costs are affordable for consumers and businesses

• To ensure we meet our climate change targets and transition to a low carbon economy

The UK energy system is outdated, expensive and polluting. Privatisation has failed to deliver an energy system that delivers for people, businesses or our environment.

One-in-ten households are in fuel poverty, yet according to the Competition Markets Authority customers are overcharged an enormous £2 billion every year.

Labour understands that many people don’t have time to shop around, they just want reliable and affordable energy. So the next Labour Government will:

Millions of UK smart meters may have to be replaced

‘Smart’ meter [image credit: heartland.org]

H/T GWPF

Existing not-so-smart meters could be a big problem in the UK when a new system is introduced later this year, since they can’t handle a change of supplier.

Six million smart electricity and gas meters installed in homes since 2012 may have to be replaced to make them work with a new communications network which was switched on in November but is still not being used, Paul Lewis Money reports.

Despite that, energy companies are busy installing more of them to try to meet a government target to get one in every home by the end of 2020.

How Political Lunacy Sabotaged Australia’s Once Reliable & Affordable Power Supply

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You couldn’t make it up. Insisting on spending a fortune when much cheaper and better options are available makes no sense, but climate obsessives plough on regardless.

STOP THESE THINGS

If what Australia’s political brains trust has done to its once reliable and affordable power supply had been done by external agents, it would have been branded an act of terrorism.

The so-called ‘wind power capital’ of Australia, South Australia has become an international laughing stock: statewide blackouts, routine load shedding and rocketing power prices might be enough, you would think, to make its Labor government see sense.

Far from it, it is now looking to spend $150 million on a giant battery that will return power to the grid and ‘power’ SA for all of four minutes and to set up somewhere between 200 and 250 MW of diesel generation capacity to keep the lights on, whenever the wind stops blowing.

The absurdity of throwing $550 million at a perfectly avoidable problem, when Jay Weatherill had the option of paying a mere $30 million to Alinta to keep its…

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Not so smart: ‘Smart meter said I owed thousands’

Electricity usage – one of these may cause a shock.

A woman has spoken of her surprise when her smart meter quoted thousands of pounds for a day’s usage of gas and electricity, due to a system error, reports BBC News.

Jane Allen was one of many confused customers who posted the strange readings from their SSE smart meters on social media. One customer’s display showed more than £30,000 for a single day.

SSE apologised and said no customers would be charged “the extra amounts resulting from errors”.

Smart meters send information on energy usage back to the supplier. They let the customer know how much electricity or gas they are consuming each day – and how much it’s costing them – in real time.

But for some customers, the readings have been somewhat higher than usual over the past week.

Wind Power Disaster Means South Australian Labor Government ‘Gone with the Wind’

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South Australia has found out the hard way that relying too much on wind turbines is bad news for everyone, including the politicians who ordered it.

STOP THESE THINGS

Jay Weatherill’s political future all but blacked-out.

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While the power pricing and supply calamity that is South Australia is down to the subsidies awarded to wind power under the Federal government’s Large-Scale RET, the state Labor government has done plenty to create the unfolding disaster and nothing to mitigate it.

It’s vapid Premier, Jay Weatherill must know that, as a wind power champion, he’s yesterday’s ‘hero’ and, as a so-called political leader, today’s fool.

Third world beckons as Weatherill plays the fool
The Australian
Nick Cater
14 February 2017

It would be wrong to give Mike Rann and Jay Weatherill all the credit for turning South Australia into wackadoodle windmill world. We should recognise the contribution of those who egged the premiers on, like Al Gore, auteur of An Inconvenient Truth. When it came to showing leadership on renewable energy, said Gore, South Australia was “one of best examples…

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Carlisle Floods Due To Poor River Maintenance, Not Climate Change

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Once again the ‘climate change’ card is played by authorities to excuse their own failings.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

cflagfloodreport_12monthson

It is just over a year since Storm Desmond brought devastating floods to Carlisle.

Soon after the Carlisle Flood Action Group was formed, and they have now published a very full and highly technical account of the floods.

This is the first part of the Executive Summary:

Although Storm Desmond was severe by any account (and the report later accepts that it may have been exacerbated by global warming), the real problem was lack of river maintenance and poor management. This of course is a rerun of the Somerset floods in 2014.

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Britain hit by another climate policy fiasco: £168 million up in smoke

Credit: Scottish Power

When does the UK climate fiasco budget run out? Not any time soon it seems, unless the Treasury squeezes out mad and/or bad ideas like unilateral CCS projects.
H/T GWPF

The UK government spent £100m on a competition to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes but it all fell apart. This was even after £68m had been spent on a previous competition for CCS, which it cancelled in 2011.

NAO’s report finds that the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s plan to use a second competition to develop and deploy carbon capture and storage was ambitious, but ultimately, unsuccessful when the Treasury pulled the rug away because of uncertainty over costs.

Australia’s ‘Wind Power Capital’ – South Australia – Becomes the ‘Blackout State’

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Replace reliable power with unreliable power and – guess what – you get problems. The more you do it, the bigger the problems become. Who knew?

STOP THESE THINGS

Wind powered capital: Adelaide 28.9.16

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While STT was taking a well earned summer break, South Australians found themselves, yet again, groping around in the dark.

In the lead up to Christmas, South Australians living on its West Coast in places like Ceduna were left powerless for close to 3 days, said to be the result of storm damage to transmission lines and equipment.

Immediately after Christmas, huge swathes of South Australia found themselves without power for days on end.  We’ll start with a roundup from the ABC.

SA storms: Thousands still without power as businesses suffer losses in blackout
ABC
29 Dec 2016

Thousands of South Australian properties remain without power after a day of wild storms, as businesses count the costs of blackouts and lost trade.

Crews were continuing to repair widespread damage to the electricity distribution network caused by the torrential storm that hit South Australia late…

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Flemish (onshore) windmills have almost the same capacity as a nuclear reactor

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So where does this obvious nonsense come from?
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TYV says: ‘Installed capacity is not the same as production. Why is that so incredibly hard to understand for journalists?’

Because such realities would ruin their story perhaps? Either that or they are not up to their jobs. Maybe they aren’t up to the job anyway if they are having to resort to distortion of facts.

Trust, yet verify

The journalists of our beloved Flemish media seem to go ballistic lately. Yesterday there was the item in the VTM news about the current “drought” that was “direct result of climate change”. Today the VRT news felt it had to compete with that and went full stupid in an article with the sensational title:

Flemish windmills have almost the same capacity as a nuclear reactor

Apparently the onshore windmills in Flandres have a total capacity of 920 MW, which is only slightly below the capacity of (some of) our nuclear turbines (at somewhat above 1,000 MW).

Hurraaaah!!!

I am afraid that I have to spoil that party…

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Green Britain: Electricity bills set to rise by £30 a year and power rationed to keep lights on

Credit: telegraph.co.uk

Penalising coal and gas generation has led to reliance in emergency on things like diesel generators, hardly what was intended by so-called ‘green’ policies as MPs warn the UK grid system is edging ever nearer to breaking point. Words like ‘dangerous’ and ‘desperate’ are being used.
H/T GWPF / Daily Telegraph

Electricity bills could go up by £30 each year by 2020 and power “rationed” due to “mismanagement” of the UK’s electricity networks and the increasing cost of emergency supplies, MPs have warned.

The British Infrastructure Group, led by former Conservative minister Grant Shapps, warned lights could go out across the country next winter because there is not enough spare capacity in the system to cope with higher demand.

There is just 0.1 per cent spare electricity in the current system, a dangerously small amount of headroom in case of emergencies over the winter months, the report warned.

Europe’s green energy policy is a disaster for the environment.

H/T to ‘Wanstead Weather’ for this story from New Scientist

By Michael Le Page

The European Union’s proposals for revising its renewable energy policies are greenwashing and don’t solve the serious flaws, say environmental groups.

The EU gets 65 per cent of its renewable energy from biofuels – mainly wood – but it is failing to ensure this bioenergy comes from sustainable sources, and results in less emissions than burning fossil fuels. Its policies in some cases are leading to deforestation, biodiversity loss and putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than burning coal.

“Burning forest biomass on an industrial scale for power and heating has proved disastrous,” says Linde Zuidema, bioenergy campaigner for forest protection group Fern. “The evidence that its growing use will increase emissions and destroy forests in Europe and elsewhere is overwhelming.”

GWPF: UK Electricity Reform Stalls

• Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor

The UK’s new secretary of state for Business, Greg Clark, has just given his first public speech on energy. It suggests, unfortunately, that he is not yet sufficiently confident of his brief to resist the views of his civil servants. Indeed, this speech could easily have been written for Ed Miliband, or Chris Huhne, or Ed Davey, and suggests that the rent-seeking green interests in the electricity sector are re-injecting themselves into the national bloodstream through an interventionist industrial strategy. This will result in overcapitalisation and reductions in productivity.

It is now a year since Amber Rudd, then Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate  (DECC) gave her “reset” speech. I was in Japan at the time, and showed the text to an impressed but disbelieving colleague from the University of Tokyo. “This is an ENERGY policy”, he said, as if anything from a British politician would obviously focus on climate change and little else besides.

Jamie Foster: #Brexit Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Reposted from the blog of Jamie Foster

Remember, remember the 4th of November, it’s the day the legal profession took leave of its senses. Hopefully temporarily but certainly noticeably. It was perhaps unsurprising. It is not often that a constitutional law case which could help define our political future appears on the front of our national newspapers with such a barrage of fireworks. It is easy to be drawn in by the pretty explosions.

The 3rd November marked a win in the High Court for a wealthy fund manager, Gina Miller. This modern-day Guy Fawkes placed her barrels of gun powder directly under the Government, rather than Parliament this time. Her explosive case determined that the Government had no right to trigger Art 50 and inform the EU of the UK’s desire to leave without a vote in Parliament. The sparks from the case caused explosions across the press, with the Mail and the Sun calling the three judges who took the decision ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people.’

Clark needs to ‘reset’ the UK energy system, says Helm

UK electricity supply – approaching the cliff edge? [image credit: Wikipedia]

Utility Week highlights an expert’s view of the dire state of the UK’s electricity network, largely driven by the climate dogmatism of government policies. Urgent action is advised, with Brexit in mind.

UK Business and Energy secretary Greg Clark needs to “reset the balance between the market and the state” and avoid “more patching up of what he has inherited”, [Professor] Dieter Helm has said.

The energy sector is “not in good shape,” and is unable to fulfil the needs of a major industrial economy, “especially for one doing Brexit”.

Growing electricity demand, as heat and energy are electrified, will make the “current capacity margin of roughly zero even more alarming than it is now”, the Oxford economist said in a paper.

Ed Hoskins: Incredible waste on solar installation knowingly overseen by defunct DECC

Ed Hoskins has sent me a summary of his latest post on ‘green energy’ profligacy, which well worth a click and read.

It seems that the UK with the least performant solar energy environment  in Europe has allowed to be invested about £30 billion with an output of less than 1 GW as and when the sun shines.

This amounted to a total of about   9.6GW nameplate solar installations yielding the equivalent of about 0.9GW of power, but only when the sun shines.  The capacity factor for Solar energy in the UK is only ~9%.  This is the least performant solar power in the whole of Europe.

Even though according to David Mackay DECC well understood that solar energy should never have been considered viable in the UK, the department still oversaw these huge continued expenditures and dispensed with about £19,000,000,000 in 2014 and 2015.  That amounted to more than the full cost of Hinckley Point C:  the wasted expenditure seems never to have been questioned or discussed.

Serial climate disinformer Michael Mann waffles about “extreme weather” again.

In a recent interview, Prof ‘taking the Mickey’ Mann said this about floods in the US:

NOOR: So we’ve seen this historic flooding not only in Louisiana but more recently in West Virginia, even right here close to Baltimore in Ellicott City. Is it, are we seeing more and more of this and is this connected to climate change?

MANN: We often hear about events being characterized as thousand year events and what that means is just given the usual statistic of the weather, we wouldn’t expect such an event to happen more than once in a thousand years. Meaning we probably wouldn’t expect to see it during our lifetimes. And yet we are seeing a plethora of these thousand year events. Whether it’s the flooding events in South Carolina, in Arizona, in Texas as I said and of course this latest event in Louisiana and Alabama. We are seeing thousand year events far too often to be able to attribute them just to randomness. We are seeing the loading of the random weather dice by climate change.

Mann is disinforming the public here. 1000 year or 100 year flooding events measure the likelihood of that event occurring on a specific stretch of river, not in a selection of whichever random states happened to get a flood that year.

Wiki: In the United States, the 100-year flood provides the risk basis for flood insurance rates. Complete information on the National Flood Insurance Program is available here. A regulatory flood or base flood is routinely established for river reaches through a science-based rule making process targeted to a 100-year flood at the historical average recurrence interval.

Regarding ‘1000 year’ events. How long have we been keeping flood records in the US. It’s unlikely they predate Columbus’ discovery of the continent in 1493, so, not more than 500 years. How well established is the basis of characterising a flood as ‘once in 1000 years’ then? You can be sure there’s a model for it…

It’s also worth remembering that there’s around a 60%chance of seeing more than one ‘100 year flood’  in a specific location during a 100 year period anyway.

Wiki: A common misunderstanding exists that a 100-year flood is likely to occur only once in a 100-year period. In fact, there is approximately a 63.4% chance of one or more 100-year floods occurring in any 100-year period. On the Danube River at Passau, Germany, the actual intervals between 100-year floods during 1501 to 2013 ranged from 37 to 192 years.^[4] The probability P_e that one or more floods occurring during any period will exceed a given flood threshold can be expressed, using the binomial distribution, as

where T is the threshold return period (e.g. 100-yr, 50-yr, 25-yr, and so forth), and n is the number of years in the period. The probability of exceedance P_e is also described as the natural, inherent, or hydrologic risk of failure.

There is of course the possibility that Mann simply doesn’t understand the stats, given his previous record. There again, if that’s so, he shouldn’t be professor of rubber ducks, let alone a science with such enormous cost implications for public policy.

Wind power debacle: South Australia an international joke

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Renewable energy: fantasy meets reality in South Australia and it’s not pretty, as STT reports.

STOP THESE THINGS

Tom Koutsantonis: the ‘Joker’ in the pack, but SA isn’t laughing.

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South Australia is, thanks to its ludicrous attempt to run on sunshine and breezes, now on the World stage: for all the wrong reasons.

With total and totally unpredictable collapses in its wind power output, SA is now accustomed to routine load-shedding (dropping suburbs and whole regions off the grid to keep the rest running) and the odd state-wide blackout. Then there’s the small matter of retail power prices which, for businesses have doubled in 12 months and which are all set to double again.

A suite of consequences which have energy experts around the globe quietly giggling and saying ‘we told you so’. One of them is London based Senior Research Analyst with the World Nuclear Association, Ian Hore-Lacy.

Here’s the yarn being spun from London about South Australia’s perfectly avoidable energy calamity.

South Australia’s green dream…

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