Tag Archives: Australia

Did the Aussie Opposition Leader Just Call for Cancelling the Paris Agreement?

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Does “there’s no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving” translate to a commitment to dump Australia’s Paris obligations?

Dutton to pull Australia out of Paris Agreement if elected

By Mike Foley
June 8, 2024 — 2.27pm

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has signalled he will scrap the nation’s legally binding 2030 climate target and risk Australia’s membership of the Paris Agreement on climate change, following his vow to deploy nuclear energy to reach net zero by 2050.

Dutton declared on Saturday that a Coalition government would not pursue Australia’s legally binding climate target to cut emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 – a significant escalation of Australia’s long-running climate policy war ahead of the next federal election due by May next year.

Dutton told The Australian on Saturday that the government’s renewable goal was unattainable and “there’s no sense in signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”.

The opposition has said if it forms government it would build up to seven emissions-free nuclear power plants to replace the energy supply from Australia’s dirty coal plants, which have begun to shut down across the country. He would also pause the rollout of wind and solar farms.

“You can’t have the prime minister saying we aren’t going to have coal, we aren’t going to have gas and were not going to have ­nuclear power and we are going to keep the lights on – that’s just fantasy. We now have a debate about energy which I think we can win,” he told The Australian.

…Read more: 

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/climate-change-dutton-to-pull-australia-out-of-paris-agreement-20240608-p5jk91.html

Suggesting Dutton’s statement is a commitment to pull out of the Paris Agreement seems a trifle exaggerated.

WUWT has repeatedly criticising the Aussie opposition’s Frankenstein climate policy. While on the surface Dutton’s nuclear push might seem a good idea, in my opinion it is actually a weak attempt at appeasement politics.

CPAC Australia – Coal Overboard, Nuclear to Appease the Greens? – Watts Up With That?

At last year’s Aussie CPAC MP Keith Pitt, formerly a staunch defender of coal, made a bizarre speech about the need to demolish coal plants and build nuclear plants in their place, to take advantage of all the distribution infrastructure which has already been built for the coal plants.

The problem is there is still plenty of coal, mostly brown coal, in the ground in the proposed nuclear sites. Building a nuclear plant on top of a coal field risks sabotaging remaining stocks of coal – even a low level radiation leak which seeped into the coal layer would make burning the coal even more controversial than it already is. Building a coal plant and using the available brown coal would be far cheaper and would offer almost immediate cost relief to business and domestic energy consumers.

Nuclear plants, however desirable in the long term, do not offer short term benefits in most locations. Aside from the high upfront capital costs, and the lack of local expertise, greens would immediately launch a tsunami of well funded lawfare. I have no problem with nuclear plants being built in locations where they offer an economic benefit, but the decision should be based purely on economics, such as installing a nuclear plant to service a remote location and save on fuel deliveries. The decision to go nuclear should not be because mainstream Aussie politicians are too timid to challenge the greens head on and fully exploit Australia’s abundant coal resources.

The one silver lining of the opposition nuclear push is it has sabotaged the renewable plans of the current Aussie administration. It’s hard to get a bank loan when the opposition leader is promising to withdraw the subsidies which are your basis of your business profitability.

What can we conclude from all this? On this issue I believe claims Aussie Conservative leader Peter Dutton is trying to leave the Paris Agreement are exaggerated. As far as I can tell Peter Dutton is just as onboard with Paris as other mainstream Aussie politicians, he just wants a different approach. I’m glad Dutton has taken a stand against absurdly unrealistic emissions reduction targets. But I’m saddened that Dutton still hasn’t found the political courage to do what he is being accused of – ditch all emissions targets and tear up Australia’s participation in the Paris Agreement.

VW takes €60 billion out of the EV budget and puts it back into combustion cars

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

EV manufacturers are backing away slowly from the Great EV Debacle

The government commanded the EV bubble, but even with billions in subsidies, schemes and advertising the chemistry didn’t obey. Somehow, even with legislation, the right discoveries didn’t discover themselves on cue.

VW has decided to use one third of its EV development money to develop a better fuel car instead.

Hey, it’s only 60,000 million Euro.

VW Will Spend Billions of Its EV Development Budget on Gas Engines

By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com

Of the €180 billion ($196 billion) set aside in 2023 primarily for next-generation EVs, the German brand will now use one-third to continue the development of combustion engines. The announcement comes from Arno Antlitz, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at the Volkswagen Group. The company intends to spend roughly €60 billion ($65 billion) to “keep our combustion cars competitive.”

It’s a stark departure from the previous plan announced in late 2022 to build and sell only electric cars in Europe from 2033.

Only a year ago Volkswagon was confident it could build a cheaper EV. But a month ago they reported a 20 percent fall in first quarter profits.

Meanwhile Australia joins the EU with footage of “EV Graveyards” collecting at Port Melbourne

Australia remains  far behind the rest of the developed world in EV sales but is obviously catching up on the latest trends quickly. Sales have fallen 44%:

And, apparently even those with money to waste don’t want to waste it on an “electric supercar”:

Lamborghini Doesn’t Think Electric Supercars will Catch On

By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com

Speaking with Automotive News Europe, Lamborghini’s head honcho Stephan Winkelmann argued electric supercars are “not something that is selling so far.” He went on to mention this genre might never catch on

Supercars are for rich folk but Rimac CEO Mate Rimac recently admitted that high-end buyers don’t want electric supercars. It’s why the Nevera is still for sale, despite the hype around it and the limited production run of only 150 cars. The electric hypercar developed in Croatia set no fewer than 23 records last year, but it looks as though wealthy people weren’t impressed enough to sign their names on the dotted line.

There is talk now of all kinds of variations of sustainable fuel to run combustion engines on. The CEO of Bugatti has even floated the idea of selling their bespoke customers their very own fuel station as well, so they can generate and fill their sustainable cars at home. Possibly the brag-able-value of owning a sustainable biofuel car that “charges at home” using some wildly expensive combination of solar panels and batteries won’t seem so brag-worthy in a few years time. Who wants to look like the loser who got car advice from a teenage girl?

Aussie Government Grudgingly Retreats from Dictating Content Moderation to the Entire World

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t observa; “… the online watchdog “considered this option (abandoning legal action) likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children”. …”

‘Dog whistle’: Regulator accuses Musk

Story by Nathan Schmidt

Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she was subjected to death threats after taking up the fight against social media platform X and its owner Elon Musk.

“He issued a dog whistle to 181 million users around the globe which resulted in death threats directly to me and which resulted in doxxing of my family members, including my three children,” Ms Inman Grant told the ABC.

“With great power comes great responsibility and exercising that restraint in terms of targeting a regulator who is here to protect the citizens of Australia is really beyond the pale.

“But it is not surprising. This is his modus operandi. I will not be cowered but those threats.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Ms Inman Grant announced she had dropped the legal fight against X over its refusal to remove videos depicting a stabbing attack against a Sydney bishop.

The eSafety Commission was attempting to force X to remove videos of footage of an alleged terror attack in which Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was stabbed during a live-streamed sermon.

Ms Grant said the online watchdog “considered this option (abandoning legal action) likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children”.

…Read more:

 https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/elon-musk-s-big-win-over-australia/ar-BB1nDVNT

What a whiner. At least President Biden’s choice for Ministry of Truth czar Nina Jankowicz was entertaining.

Thank you again Elon Musk for standing up to this outrageous attack on global freedom of speech.

And just to show there are no hard feelings Aussie eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, if you ever publish a whacky Mary Poppins disinformation singalong like former US Disinformation Governance Board head Nina Jankowicz, you can be assured WUWT will publish it.


Update (EW): A lot is happening in the global digital censorship space. The United Nations is pushing hard to purge online platforms of narratives they consider disinformation. Australia is arguably the Western leader of the current censorship push, with threats to impose a digital ID on Aussie citizens, and a push to develop a Chinese style firewall around all Australian internet access. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern appears to be a major player in the digital censorship push – in 2022 Ardern made a wild speech which apparently attempted to link uncensored climate skepticism to mass shooting atrocities. Ardern currently has two concurrent fellowships at Harvard related to online disinformation, which in my opinion implies significant US academic interest in restricting online freedom.

My point is, it is funny to laugh at the serial frustrations of wannabe online censors, but watching them fail and complain is only funny so long as they keep failing to curtail our freedoms. Even the USA isn’t immune from these attacks on freedom – in my opinion, the significant US academic participation in the online censorship push, as personified by Ardern’s dual Harvard fellowships, is a warning of the scale of the attack.

If online content is captured by vested interests to the extent I believe establishment media has been captured, the age of free speech will be at an end, regardless of constitutional guarantees of free speech. As President Obama said in 2022, “The first amendment does not apply to … facebook and twitter”. A voluntary cartel of internet service providers, engineered by putting the “right” people in charge of all these organisations, would be just as effective at curtailing our freedom as tearing up the First Amendment, without the embarrassment of an obvious violation of the US Constitution.

Propaganda Overdrive: Wind & Solar Industries Desperate to Prevent Nuclear Powered Future

From STOP THESE THINGS

Crony capitalists, overfed on massive wind and solar subsidies, are pulling out all stops to cruel the chances of a nuclear-powered future.

Nothing sharpens an entrepreneur’s mind like real competition. And, usually, the first move is to knock out the competition before it reaches the field. Which is where Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) comes in.

CSIRO was once committed to advancing science and technology using objective and critical analysis, and all for the benefit of the Country. These days, it’s become the home for wind and solar obsessed activists ready to do the bidding of the rent-seeking class and their political masters.

Last year, they put out a piece of wind and solar propaganda masquerading as ‘research and analysis’. The analysis in their GenCost report was something you’d expect from a struggling high school student: the underlying assumptions were simply risible; the conclusions had those in the know rolling in the aisles; and left CSIRO’s reputation in tatters.

Now that the Liberal/National Federal Opposition are openly backing nuclear power, the Labor/Green Alliance is looking to run as much interference as possible (their wind and solar obsession is purely mercenary, of course) in an effort to assist their paymasters (construction and electrical trade unions and wind and solar outfits etc).

Having been lambasted for their first GenCost report, CSIRO went back to the drawing board and doubled down, with even more nonsensical claims about the cost of nuclear power generation and completely ridiculous claims about wind and solar’s purported capacity to generate electricity. One of the more ludicrous assumptions is that onshore wind power operators are generating power 48% of the time (on average) – across the Eastern Grid the figure is around 28%.

As Judith Sloan outlines below, the latest effort demonstrates that CSIRO has become little more than a propaganda wing of the wind and sun cult, with the singular object of denying Australians safe, reliable and affordable nuclear power.

Deck was stacked as CSIRO estimated the cost of nuclear power
The Australian
Judith Sloan
28 May 2024

The cost of nuclear energy is twice the cost of renewables, so sayeth the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. But why is the CSIRO in the non-scientific game of providing assumption-driven estimates of the cost of generating electricity in different ways?

On the face of it, it looks like a bit of buck-passing by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which enlisted the assistance of the CSIRO some years ago. This is a task for engineers, economists and accountants – not scientists.

Modelling is not science, and ­estimating costs is also not science. By rights, the CSIRO should have declined the request. Its reputation has been markedly sullied.

Let’s consider the latest version of the CSIRO’s GenCost report. As with all modelling, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out. The assumptions in it range from the plausible to the absolutely ridiculous.

The most glaring errors in the report are the assumptions about the upfront costs of nuclear plants, their rates of utilisation and their lifespans. The assumption on the capacity of wind power is also laughable and the assumed life­spans of both wind and solar are too long.

It looks suspiciously like a tail-wagging-the-dog exercise: how to ensure that nuclear power looks extraordinarily expensive compared with the preferred renewable energy option of the federal and state governments.

The fact that Australia is the only country of the largest 20 economies in the world not to have nuclear power didn’t seem to awaken the curiosity of the CSIRO team. Should we be assuming that all their governments are simply stupid by having such an expensive form of generation?

And how could it be the case that a very large number of countries are now aggressively in­vesting in more zero-emissions nuclear plants?

Indeed, our main ally, the US, has a target of tripling the amount of nuclear power by 2050.

The international figures are clear: countries with high wind and solar shares in their generation of electricity actually have relatively high electricity prices. They include Germany, Britain, Spain, Denmark and Italy, as well as the states of California and South Australia. By contrast, those countries with very low renewable shares have the cheapest electricity: Russia, United Arab Emirates, Korea and India.

It is worth pausing here to briefly outline the methodology of the GenCost report. It uses levelised cost of electricity, or LCOE, as the key metric – a measure that includes both the cost of installation as well as the expected lifetime of the asset. The cost of the fuel is added, which is zero for wind and solar but material for other means of generation.

The capacity factors of different means of generation are then taken into account. They should vary between 25 and 33 per cent for wind and solar but the GenCost report has onshore wind at 48 per cent and offshore wind at 52 per cent, which are both clearly errors. The capacity factor for nuclear should be in the 90s but in one scenario, the CSIRO puts the figure at 53 per cent, another clanger.

But the key is this: the LCOE is the wrong measure to use. What is required is a system-wide LCOE because of the inherent intermittency of wind and solar and the inviolable objective of 24/7 power. When the wind blows and the sun shines, the cost of generating electricity by these means is very low. But because the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun sets, ­expensive back-up (or firming) is required.

This back-up must be added to the cost of both wind and solar. And account must be taken of both extended wind droughts and cloudy periods – short-duration batteries will simply be inadequate. In practical terms, the option of long-­duration, affordable batteries simply doesn’t exist and affordable pumped hydro is not possible in this country.

Last year’s GenCost report was a major hit job on the highly prospective Small Nuclear Reactors which are still being developed, although Canada is further down this path than other countries.

By choosing just one pilot scheme in Utah that was subsequently abandoned, the report was based on the worst-case scenario. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was quite deliberate. This time, the decision was made to include tried and tested large-scale nuclear plants in its comparison of generating costs. The upfront costs of building nuclear plants are very substantial and they can also take some years to complete. There are also quite a few examples of cost blowouts and delays – in Finland and the UK, for example.

The GenCost report uses the relatively successful example of Korea’s nuclear program to estimate the expected capital cost of a large-scale plant. The figure is put at $8700 per kilowatt, which sounds reasonable enough. But the figure is then arbitrarily doubled because it would be the “first-of-a-kind” in Australia. It is simply asserted that “FOAK premiums of up to 100 per cannot be ruled out”.

This is absurd. After all, Australia would be importing the expertise from experienced players were nuclear plants to be built here. And as the nuclear energy industry enjoys a significant renaissance around the world, the number of companies and the depth of talent involved are increasing markedly. By the time Australia is in a position to consent to nuclear plants, it is inconceivable that the FOAK would be double. This assumption makes a substantial difference to the final results.

Stung by the criticism that previous GenCost reports failed to take into account the cost of transmission needed to get renewable energy to the grid, this latest version makes some effort to do so. But instead of focusing on the entire cost of transmission, which feeds into retail prices, only the cost of additional transmission is included in the analysis. Again this is a bias in favour of renewable energy.

Of course, one of the advantages of nuclear plants is that they can be located where existing transmission lines exist; the cost of foregone investment in transmission by rights should be included as reducing the cost of nuclear.

They can also last more than 80 years, even though the GenCost report bizarrely gives them a lifespan of 30 years. Solar and wind are assumed to last 25 years, which is far too long.

Of course, no serious investors would take much notice of the GenCost report or any of the other selective pieces of analysis put out by various government departments. Their analysis would be based on carefully derived figures subject to sensitivity analysis. The key now is for both the federal and state government bans on nuclear power to be lifted so the potential investors can sharpen their pencils and get to work.
The Australian

Does a country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables?

From Trust, yet verify

On this blog, I already looked in some rather confusing fact-checks. There is for example the fact-checker who was struggling to find an example of someone actually making the claim he is fact-checking and the fact-checker who fact-checked a entirely different claim than he was set to do. I think there is a new contender in the latter category. This post will be about the ABC news fact-check titled:

Dick Smith says no country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables. Is that correct?”.

That is an interesting question! Although it would be simple to answer this question (just name the countries that have been able to run entirely on renewables), I had not much hope that it would be answered in this fact-check.

First some background. The claim comes from Dick Smith (an Australian entrepreneur and aviator) who made this claim in a 2GB radio interview as a reaction to the news that former labor MP Jennie George stated that Australia needs to look at nuclear because you can’t run a first world economy on renewables alone. This is Dick Smith’s reaction:

Look, I can tell you, this claim by the CSIRO that you can run a whole country on solar and wind is simply a lie. It is not true. They are telling lies. No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables – that’s impossible. So, we should be making a decision to go nuclear now.

So, to me it seems when Dick Smith talked about “renewables”, he meant solar and wind. I think most will know the answer to the question being fact-checked, but I became very curious how the fact-checker could wiggle himself out of that.

To his credit, the fact-checker asked feedback from Dick Smith and amended the fact-check accordingly, but unfortunately even that didn’t help his case whatsoever.

Tasmania
Let’s look at the first expert that the fact-checker presents. It is Mark Diesendorf who teaches sustainable energy and energy policy at the University of New South Wales. He obviously disagrees with Dick Smith, saying that “several countries (and Tasmania) already run their electricity grid on 100% renewables” and adding that they heavily rely on hydro power to achieve that.

Sure, but the fact-check is about the claim whether an entire country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables (meaning actually done that for all energy needs), not whether a country’s electricity grid could possibly run on renewables (meaning potentially just powering the grid). Which are two different questions.

But then, does Tasmania runs entirely on renewables, even when just focusing on the electricity grid? Looking at the energy in Tasmania, besides the combo solar/wind/hydro, there are also gas and import of electricity via the Basslink interconnector, connecting Tasmania with Victoria (which currently relies for more than half on coal).

Yet, their energy minister declared Tasmania entirely self-sufficient on renewables:

In a statement released on Friday, Tasmanian energy minister Guy Barnett said that state had effectively become entirely self-sufficient for supplies of renewable electricity, provided by the state’s wind and hydroelectricity projects.

How a grid could be 100% self-sufficient on renewables while gas and import are also in the mix, is explained a bit later in the article:

“When the final two turbines are commissioned at Granville Harbour, Tasmania will have access to 10,741 GWh of renewable generating capacity – well above our average annual electricity demand of 10,500 GWh,” Barnett added.

Aha! The “entirely self-sufficient for supplies of renewable electricity” doesn’t mean that Tasmanian grid could run on solar/wind/hydro alone, it means that solar/wind/hydro in Tasmania produce more than the annual average electricity demand, irrespective of the generated electricity actually is consumed in Tasmania. I would not call that 100% self-reliance on renewables.

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Science or Advocacy?
The second expert is Adrew Blakers, a professor of engineering at the Australian National University’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster solutions.. I recognize that name and unfortunately he seems to make a habit of making misleading statements.

The paper “100% renewable electricity in Australia” started with a graph showing the rapid growth of the installed capacity of solar PV and wind compared to other energy sources between 2014 and 2016. Fossil fuel capacity additions decreased while solar strongly increased and wind somewhat increased. Although the article is about Australia, the data in that graph is about the worldRecreating the graph for Australia showed that additions in that same period decreased, so referring to world data in a paper on Australia seem to be the better option to keep up the narrative.

He did similar things in a Conversation article, in which he compared (worldwide) additions of solar and wind capacity (60%) to all other power sources (40%) in order to prove the “dominance of PV and wind”. He however didn’t explain that the capacity factors of the other power sources are higher than solar and wind, so the actual production of those additions are lower for solar and wind compared to the rest.

In that same article, there is a graph showing the extrapolated exponential growth of (worldwide) solar and wind. However, the trend until that point showed a decreasing growth. That increasing exponential growth was most likely obtained by using the average of a decreasing growth and then use this average to extrapolate an increasing growth trend

The advocacy seems strong in this expert and I don’t know where his science ends and his advocacy begins in his articles and paper. Also, the fact-check is not about whether a country can power its grid by renewables, but whether a country has ever been run on renewables for all its energy needs.

The four proposed countries
The third expert is Mark Jacobson who provides a list of four countries having a grid that is 100% powered by solar, wind and hydro in 2021: Albania, Bhutan, Nepal and Paraguay. Fine, but that is not the claim that is being fact-checked.

Dick Smith replied in the article that in 2021 renewables in Albania contributed 33.7% of the energy supply, 37.5% in Paraguay and 6.1% in Nepal.

AEMO chimes in
The fact-checker also gives the floor to the Australian Enery Market Operator (AEMO). They assured him that “renewables will be able to meet the entire demand of the national electricity market (NEM) by 2025, albeit for short periods of time (for example, 30 minutes)”.

Wonderful, only pity that there are 24 hours in one day, that they are talking about a forecast (not something that has already been done) and only about powering the grid (not all energy needs).

The wiggling out
That is pretty bad for the fact-check. How does the fact-checker finally wiggle himself out of this pickle? Well, by saying that it doesn’t matter anyway. He brings up the Grattan Institute claiming that Australia should only commit to “net zero emissions” (not “absolute zero emissions” or “100% renewable energy”) and this doesn’t require that all electricity used within a country comes from renewables (some might even come from coal or gas).

That is really ingenious, but there is however one tiny little problem with this fact-check. Remember, this is the statement that is being fact-checked:

The fact-check is about a statement of Dick Smith and none of those experts brought up in the fact-check showed that this statement is wrong. The only answer to the question “Which country has ever been able to run on renewables alone” is that no country has ever been able to do that yet, but the fact-checker skillfully evaded answering that question.

Basically, the fact-check is a most elaborate way of explaining that Dick Smith is correct, while avoiding actually saying that Dick Smith is correct.

Night Time Wind Power Fails Across the Entire Continent of Australia

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

First published JoNova; Remember all those assurances that the wind always blows somewhere? Not so much on the night of the 27th.

Another wind drought pulls combined renewables output below last year

The story of Australia’s green energy transition is mostly one of new peaks in output and share of renewables, but there inevitably ups and downs.

The last few days have seen another so-called wind energy “drought” – the second in as many months. Autumn is “traditionally” the season with lowest wind outputs, but the lull this year has pushed the combined output of renewables below its level of last year. 

The graph above from ITK Services principal David Leitch, a contributor to Renew Economy and co-host of Renew Economy’s popular and weekly Energy Insiders podcast, shows that the share of variable renewable energy (VRE, or solar and wind), has fallen below last year’s levels.

Another data provider, OpenNEM, puts the share of wind over the last three days at just 4.1 per cent, and five per cent for the past seven days, compared to more than 13 per cent for the past year. 

…Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/another-wind-drought-pulls-combined-renewables-output-below-last-year/

Let’s see, if wind power drops to below 5% normal for 3 days and counting, does this mean we’d need at least 72 hours of battery backup, and counting? Or is the green solution to build 2000% overcapacity?

Large scale wind droughts are not exactly rare. A similar event occurred in 2022;

Blocking high pressure system which covered Australia on 16th June 2022. Very little wind that day. Source Bureau of Meteorology / JoNova, Fair Use, Low Resolution Image to Identify the Subject

Longer outages over vast areas can also occur, such as the 2017 season long wind drought which afflicted South Australia.

Obviously we could always keep all the coal and gas infrastructure on rolling standby, ready to jump in every other year when the wind completely fails over the entire continent, but how much would it cost to keep an entire second electricity generation system operational, just in case the renewable system fails?

Actually we don’t have to ask that question – consumers are already learning the hard way what the renewable circus costs, through skyrocketing household energy bills.

Or maybe we’ll all just have to get used to multi-day power blackouts, like South Africa is currently experiencing.

We have World Class windless weather: Today 95% of wind turbines on the continent of Australia are failing

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell

Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste

Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working.  Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.

The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).

Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.

The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.

Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re surrounded by vast oceans which make interconnectors prohibitively long, expensive and a strategic security risk for communist ships that might drag anchors accidentally-on-purpose through a region with long sub-sea cables. (Which is apparently what happened in the Baltic Sea last year).

So where exactly can we build another thousand wind turbines that would work on a day like today? Macquarie Island or Antarctica?

And it’s not just one day. So far for May 2024 wind generation has been unusually low about half the time.

On May 25th at one point the entire generation was just 221MW or 2% of total wind power capacity. So that’s 98% useless.

There’s no extension cord long enough to get to the land at the top of The Renewable Faraway tree where we have dependable wind

Over in Western Australia, total wind production this minute (1pm WA time) is 30MW. So even a new cable 2,000 kilometers long from Perth to South Australia won’t save the national grid. It’s not blowing in WA either. Wind power is only supplying 1.5% of the total electricity on the Western Wholesale Market for Perth and South West Australia. The total installed capacity of wind power in the West is about 1 GW, so it is supplying only 3 to 5% of that.

Macquarie Island is 2,500 kilometers from the closest Australian capital city, and Casey base Antarctica is 3,500 kilometers away.  It’s 2,000 kilometers direct to New Zealand, which is bad enough, but parts of the Tasman Sea are 5km deep. They don’t call it the “abyss” for nothing.  In any case, wind speeds over New Zealand right now are only 1 – 7 km/hr. (At about 3pm EST Australia).

For the record, the National Energy Grid connects the Eastern five states of Australia and 90% of the population and is running at about 25GW in late autumn. The South West grid is a tenth of that, and all those other dots, apart from Darwin, are “microgrids”. In some parts of Australia all we need is one diesel generator, and we’ll put it on the national map. Kings Canyon, for example is just 1.1MW. The square is vastly larger than the town.

Today the 24 hour fuel mix on the NEM is 72% coal, and 9% gas.

Source: 2009 Map.

Solar power at midday is so useless, they plan to start charging homeowners for generating it

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

The glut in solar power in Australia is so big that next year solar panel owners in Sydney will have to pay 1.2c a kilowatt hour to offload their unwanted energy between 10am and 3pm. Nearly a million homes in Sydney have solar panels, but only 7% of them have batteries, which means basically, thousands of homes installed hi-tech generators that aren’t very useful. Worse, other homes were forced to pay part of the costs for them. The only winner was China.

Finally, a tiny part of the strangled free market is re-asserting itself, which might slow down future installations, or trick a few people into installing a $9,000 battery. Naturally this unpredictable rule change will hurt the poorest solar owners, but benefit those wealthy enough to afford a battery.

Solar panel owners slugged by Ausgrid for generating too much power

by Caitlin Fitzsimmons, Sydney Morning Herald

The biggest electricity distributor on the east coast plans to charge households with solar panels to export their electricity to the grid during the middle of the day.

Ausgrid will impose a penalty of 1.2¢ a kilowatt-hour for any electricity exported to the grid between 10am and 3pm above a free threshold that varies by month. During peak demand times, between 4pm and 9pm, Ausgrid would pay 2.3¢ an hour as a reward to customers exporting solar to the grid.

The tariff will be charged by Ausgrid and the retailer will decide how to package it. It is opt-in from July this year, and mandatory from July next year.

The Sydney Morning Herald naturally thinks this is backwards and unfair, and in a sense it is, homeowners were led up the garden path. No one was given realistic information before they purchased another useless panel. But where was The Sydney Morning Herald? — it was selling the garden path. If they interviewed a few skeptics they could have told the hapless homeowners that the forced transition was artificial, unmanageable, and the conditions were doomed to be “adjusted” sooner or later.

Solar power at noon is electrical sewage

The wholesale market was trying to send the message. Negative spot prices show that solar is essentially a waste product at lunchtime which needs to be disposed off, a bit like electrical sewage.

Negative spot revenues didn’t really occur until we installed the last two million solar panels that we didn’t need. It is obviously a growing problem now, which suspiciously peaks in spring and summer and falls in winter months –matching the solar output profile by month.

https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/negative-prices-and-revenues-in-the-nem-over-the-past-decade/

You might wonder why any generator would keep generating during a glut so bad they had to pay for every watt they generated. But it’s logical in a screwed market — the negative prices are close to the value of the “Renewable Energy Certificates” the government forces us all to pay to solar and wind operators.  So solar owners can produce a product the market essentially doesn’t want, but the government forces us to pay to make it profitable. See how this works?

The point of a free market is that stupid ideas are supposed to be free to lose their own money. That’s a signal to stop doing it.

And if there was some use for solar power at midday, negative prices would have found it. If there was an AI supercomputer that needed to sleep 18 hours a day and only work at lunchtime, the owners would have been beating down the door to get paid to use that solar juice. It didn’t happen.

Here’s the solar power contribution to the NSW grid this month.

https://anero.id/energy/2024/may

During the solar spikes, hundreds of tons of exquisitely tuned infrastructure that could have kept running, just sits around and waits in case a cloud rolls over. And efficiency gained by solar is lost by the rest of the system.

h/t David of Cooyal in Oz

Faking It: Why ‘Cheap’ Wind & Solar Power Claims Never Stack Up

From STOP THESE THINGS

Like any ideological cult, wind and solar acolytes bury troublesome facts and replace them with oodles of helpful fiction. Start with the supposed cost of the electricity occasionally generated by wind turbines and solar panels.

The usual trick is to invent some model said to capture the unique benefits of running on sunshine and breezes. The model ignores critical variables (such as sunshine and wind and wear and tear on turbines and deterioration of panels) thereby overstating output and understating the actual cost of generation.

Once upon a time Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) was renowned for advancing science and technology using objective and critical analysis, and all for the benefit of the Country. These days. Not so much.

CSIRO is just another government institution overrun by ideological crones obsessed with the conceit that they alone can change the weather 50 years from now and that if we don’t ‘act’ now the world will incinerate some time later next week.

Well and truly captured by wind and solar rent seekers, part of their brief is to put up fictional accounts of the (always understated) costs and (always overstated) benefits of wind and solar: its GenCost report sits somewhere between Science Fiction and rubbery accounting, as Nick Cater explains below.

We now know Labor’s renewables dream is based on economic modelling that isn’t as ‘unimpeachable’ as Chris Bowen claims it to be
Sky News
Nick Cater
4 May 2024

A scan of Chris Bowen’s media archives on his ministerial website shows that he has claimed that the cheapest electricity comes from renewable energy at least once a week for the last two years.

“Facts are facts,” he told ABC’s Sabra Lane last December.

He cited economic modelling by the CSIRO describing it as “unimpeachable and very, very clear”.

If the Energy Minister is beginning to sound screechy, it is probably because he’s losing the argument.

An Essential poll for the Guardian last month found that 40 per cent of Australians think renewable energy is the most expensive form of energy, up from 38 per cent last October.

Only 36 per cent said nuclear was the most expensive, and 24 per cent picked fossil fuels.

For the first time in an Essential poll, a clear majority supported nuclear energy, 52 per cent in favour compared to 31 per cent against.

The findings should trouble not just the government but the CSIRO.

It has suffered self-inflicted repetitional damage by venturing outside its area of scientific expertise into the complex microeconomic world of energy pricing.

Despite Bowen’s insistence, most Australians know that computer modelling of future prices are not facts but predictions that must be truth tested against observations made on the ground. Observations of the upward trend in household electricity bills, for example.

This week, the Centre for Independent Studies published a devastating critique of the CSIRO’s modelling which shows it to be unworthy of the paper it’s printed upon.

The CIS’ conclusions confirm that our peak scientific body has been wading out of its depth, cherry-picking data and making rookie calculation errors.

Significant costs attached to renewable energy are conveniently ignored in the CSIRO GenCost analysis.

The cost of storage and associated transmission lines incurred before 2030 are treated as sunk costs, even though investors will expect a return over the asset’s life.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan – Bowen’s roadmap of the transition to renewables – requires considerable rooftop solar and home battery investment.

Householders and businesses bear this cost, but it is not included in the GenCost analysis.

The cost of decommissioning turbines, solar panels and batteries at the end of their life is also excluded.

In estimating the carbon emissions savings that are said to come by adopting renewals, AEMO’S roadmap excludes emissions from the manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and the other paraphernalia required by intermittent renewable energy, making them seem cleaner than they are.

CSIRO’s method of evaluating individual projects doesn’t consider the energy system as a whole but as separate parts.

This approach allows financially unviable projects to get approval, leading to costs being transferred to consumers.

Most egregiously of all, the CSIRO cherry pick the data to make other forms of electricity generation appear more expensive.

It bases its cost estimate for Small Modular Reactors for example on the cost of a failed project in Utah, which faced peculiar cost overruns, technical challenges and regulatory hurdles.

It includes the finance costs for SMRs but not for wind and solar, where the assumption is that money is borrowed for free.

The GenCost report would likely have found nuclear was considerably cheaper if it had examined a mass-produced reactor like GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, which is about to start production in Canada for installation at Darlington Point in Ontario.

Previous nuclear reactors have been one-off projects.

SMRs like the BWRX-300 will be made on production lines similar to those used to manufacture aircraft.

GenCost uses unrealistic assumptions about the construction costs of new coal plants, making them appear more expensive than renewables.

The ISP selectively chooses specific future years in its cost-benefit analysis to justify transmission projects and ignores years where reliability breaches are likely to occur.

In its determination to stack the cards against fossil fuel generation, the CSIRO assumes that the current price spikes for coal and gas caused by the Ukrainian war will remain constant throughout the lifespan of new plants.

In reality, world gas prices have already returned to levels close to those before Russia’s invasion.

The complete list of errors and biases in the CSIRO GenCost is extensive.

The CIS report is available online.

The CSIRO’s errors are forgivable in part.

The organisation’s expertise is in scientific research and innovation, not microeconomics.

It is hard to fault its work on insect control, fine wool processing, radio astronomy, WiFi protocols or polymer banknotes.

Yet its work on energy pricing is not just economically naive but a departure from the established scientific method.

It commits the most egregious error in the scientist’s rulebook: a priori reasoning, the formation of conclusions based on deductive logic or pre-existing knowledge in which the search for empirical evidence becomes superfluous.

The CSIRO researchers knew what the answer should be and proceeded to torture the evidence until it made a false confession.

A priori reasoning can be helpful in mathematics and logic, but it should never be applied to empirical questions or phenomena in the natural or social sciences.

It leads to confirmation bias, where investigators selectively interpret evidence to support their preconceived notions.

It encourages logical falsehoods and oversimplification, where conclusions are drawn from established principles and ignores the complex, dynamic systems that operate in the natural world or human behaviour.

It cannot cope with complexity or uncertainty, is inherently speculative and runs a high risk of error.

It leads to the delusion that computers are intelligent and that the ability to compile a spreadsheet is the path to omnipotence.

These are increasingly common symptoms in the laptop class.

It’s a condition that might be called Excel syndrome, the delusion that the ability to put a spreadsheet together is a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.
Sky News

And check out Nick’s interview with Alexandra Nicol on the extortionate costs of wind and solar subsidies:

Australian “Local Manufacturing” Solar Subsidies to Go to China?

Shi Zhengrong

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“I think you definitely need collaboration [with China]”.

The ‘Future Made in Australia’ plan for solar panels relies on a crucial ingredient: Help from China

By James Purtill May 6, 2024

Twenty-three years ago, a Chinese-Australian solar scientist moved from Sydney to Wuxi to build China’s solar panel manufacturing industry from scratch, using technology developed in Australian universities.

Shi Zhengrong became the world’s first clean energy billionaire, nicknamed “The Sun King”. China went on to dominate global solar panel manufacturing and, thanks to a mix of innovation and cut-throat competition, made solar the cheapest source of electricity in history.

Australian science graduates filled the top technology roles at the biggest Chinese solar companies. And a solar cell design developed in Australia became the global standard.

Meanwhile, Australia mostly stopped building its own solar panels.

Now, with the federal government preparing to ramp up Australia’s own tiny solar manufacturing industry, Dr Shi sees the story coming full circle.

“It’s an exciting opportunity for Australia,” he said, speaking to the ABC from China.

“I think you definitely need collaboration [with China], but I think Australia is in a better position compared to 20 years ago in China.”

The public reaction in the weeks since has been mixed. Many energy experts welcomed the plan as a way to ensure supply of a critical energy resource (solar will soon generate most of Australia’s electricity) and carve out a slice of a growing global industry.

But some economists and the federal government’s own Productivity Commission warned it could lead to the government wasting money by subsidising the production of panels that China can make more cheaply.

…Read more: https://johnmenadue.com/the-future-made-in-australia-plan-for-solar-panels-relies-on-a-crucial-ingredient-help-from-china/

What did we do wrong, to be cursed with such a parade of economically incompetent politicians? The government’s own productivity commission is warning it’s a bad idea, but politicians would rather listen to an Australian trained Chinese scientist who has already made billions of dollars off Australia’s economic incompetence, and stands to make billions more if this plan goes ahead.

The following article is from 2006 – why Shi Zhengrong, the Sun King, chose China over Australia;

Arise the Sun King

September 12, 2006 — 10.00am

Many factors, including China’s determination to attract its brightest minds back from overseas to help create new high-tech businesses, have contributed to Shi’s good fortune. His company’s rapid expansion has also been fuelled by rising global demand for solar cells, as governments in countries such as Germany and Japan, unlike here, have embraced clean energy.

“He was the right person at the right spot at the right time to move in both Chinese and Western cultures,” says Professor Martin Green, of the University of NSW, about his former student. “He was successful because of his own personal skills as a technologist and his ability to handle the managerial and political aspects of setting up and manufacturing in China.”

Content with his comfortable life in Sydney, he took Australian citizenship, but his homeland kept a close eye on this rising solar expert. At Chinese New Year and other festive occasions Shi was invited to celebrations at the Chinese embassy. “It was the policy of the Government to attract people like me – overseas scholars – to come back,” he says. In 2000 representatives of the Wuxi region approached him with an offer of $US6 million to establish a conventional photovoltaic solar cell manufacturing plant. Shi was sceptical that he could turn a profit in China. “The system was corrupted. I didn’t have any confidence [in returning],” he says.

He was also reluctant to give up his work on thin films – the technology of the future. But a two-week visit to China changed his mind. The infrastructure had improved and he could see that the handful of solar cell manufacturers there were losing money because of a lack of good technology.

With his experience and plentiful ideas for how to set up a plant, he realised the business could be a winner. “There was already a great demand for solar panels.”

…Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/national/arise-the-sun-king-20060912-gdoddr.html

I’m not criticising Shi Zhengrong’s choices or actions. In Shi’s place, if I had his skills and background, I might have made similar choices. He is undoubtably a brilliant scientist and a Chinese patriot who made a good decision for himself personally and for China, which made lots of Chinese people, including Shi, very rich – “the right person at the right spot at the right time”.

What I am criticising is the economic incompetence of Australia’s politicians. Shi had sound economic reasons, in addition to the subsidy cash, to relocate to China. But what is the competitive advantage which suddenly makes solar in Australia a good idea?

China dominates solar manufacturing because they have cheap coal energy. Low wages helped their competitive advantage, but the real key advantage is their low cost energy.

But Australia still has higher wages, higher energy costs, more environmental regulations and higher taxes than China. None of the economic advantages which convinced Shi to move to China have changed – China is still the more cost effective location to manufacture solar panels.

Even if you believe Australia is the better place to deploy solar panels, and there are arguments for and against this position, this doesn’t change whether China is the best place to manufacture solar panels.

If there was a real economic opportunity to manufacture solar panels in Australia, Australian businesses would be jumping all over it, leaping to fill the gap in the market. No government subsidy would be required to convince Aussie businesses to take advantage of a big profit opportunity.

The only competitive advantage Australia is publicly offering right now is lots of free money. But free government money is not enough to build a sustainable business, because solar manufacturing in Australia will dry up the moment the money stops. Giving away subsidy money with every sale of subsidised Australian manufactured goods would impoverish Australia, not give us a competitive advantage.