Wind and solar ‘powered’ South Australians know what it is to do without power for days on end. Having experienced plenty of load shedding lasting for 5 hours or more, South Australians got a real taste of the dark ages in September 2016, when the whole State went black.

A sudden collapse in wind power output during a vigourous spring storm (wind turbines automatically shut down in high winds) delivered what’s known as a ‘system black’.

Some parts of the city of Adelaide had power restored within about 5 or 6 hours, while some suburbs were without power for 24 hours or more.

Regional centres like, Port Lincoln, Whyalla and Ceduna were without power for days and more remote towns and rural properties were powerless for more than a week, some for close to a fortnight.

BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam gold, copper and uranium mine (the backbone of…

Ever rocketing power prices were what scuttled Australia’s suicidal renewable energy policies. The National Energy Guarantee was an effort to expand (exponentially) and extend (indefinitely) Australia’s already crippling Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target.

A mixture of hubris and overreach by those championing the NEG – which included the ex-PM (we seem to recall his name was Turnbull or Trumble or something like that?) – meant that the policy that was meant to save wind and solar in Australia, has ended in tears.

Claiming that doubling the capacity of subsidised wind and solar would lead to 1970’s power prices, the AEMO’s Audrey Zibelman and her co-conspirators called in an airstrike on their own position. You see, everyone, almost everywhere, has heard of South Australia.

The NEG is dead (STT certified it is a corpse weeks ago). The new PM, Scott Morrison gets the pleasure of plunging a stake through its heart, on…

How ironic it is that a wholly weather dependent power source has such a bitterly hard time coping with the … ahem … weather.

When Hurricane Maria visited Puerto Rico last year, she managed to splatter wind turbine blades all over the island, leaving residents completely powerless: Weather Dependent Wind Power: Leaves Hurricane Victims Powerless

A typhoon in Taiwan did much the same:

And lightning has been laying them to waste in Ireland:

It’s almost as if Mother Nature has got it in for these things? This time a little blow in Japan managed to knock another one out of the game.

Awaji Island wind turbine topples over as typhoon cuts through western Japan
The Japan Times
Kyodo
24 August 2018

KOBE – A 60-meter-high wind turbine erected in a park on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture toppled over in the early hours of Friday as powerful Typhoon Cimaron…

Despite the hype from RE zealots, the completely chaotic and very occasional delivery of wind and solar won’t be cured with giant batteries.

Sure, at a technical level, it is possible to store large volumes of electricity for a period, such that it might be released when power consumers need it.

However, were such a thing ever attempted, the cost of the electricity generated, stored and later released would be astronomical and beyond the reach of all but dot.com billionaires and rock stars.

The world’s largest battery cuts a lonely figure in a paddock near Jamestown in South Australia’s mid North; it doesn’t generate power; it stores a piddling 100 MW worth; it consumes power during each charge/discharge cycle, lost as heat energy; it cost taxpayers $150 million; and would satisfy SA’s minimum power demand for all of four minutes. On those hard numbers, anyone talking about batteries providing…

Malcolm Turnbull’s downfall resulted from stratospheric power prices, sent into orbit by unreliable and intermittent wind and solar.

His fate was sealed when he started spinning the line that his National Energy Guarantee (which would have effectively doubled wind and solar capacity) would result in power being delivered at 1970s prices. The same line is currently being spun by wind and solar outfits and their propaganda wings, in an effort to forestall the end of the world as they know it.

The problem for that line of argument is that everyone, almost everywhere, has heard of South Australia.

SA is the place renowned for setting and then meeting its own ludicrous 50% Renewable Energy Target – blowing up a perfectly good coal-fired power plant along the way – and, funnily enough, equally renowned for routine load shedding, statewide blackouts and the world’s highest power prices.

Large swathes of Adelaide

Angus Taylor’s elevation to Energy Minister is the beginning of the end for subsidised wind and solar in Australia. And the merry mix of zealots and profiteers that people the anti-carbon dioxide industrial complex, surely know it.

As every history buff knows, the French Revolution kicked into gear when an angry mob overran the Bastille on 14 July 1789. But the fun and games didn’t really commence until Maximilian Robespierre launched his Reign of Terror. ‘The Terror’ was clearly a nervous time for those who had fallen out of favour with Robespierre and his revolutionaries. Old certainties and aristocratic manners gave way to the brutal efficiency of the guillotine, and the public squares in Paris were quickly filled with the panicked screams of condemned ‘aristos’ and anyone else deemed to be an apologist for the Bourbon King’s slights and tyrannies.

Sure, things got out of hand and way too bloody…

Where the cost of onshore wind power is staggering, the cost of offshore wind power is astronomical. Of course, in either case, in the absence of massive and perpetual subsidies, there would never have been a single turbine constructed on land or at sea, ever, period.

New York State’ Governor, Andrew Cuomo is just the latest in a long line of politicians in bed with crony capitalists the wind and solar ‘industries’. His obsession with wind power is sending New York’s power prices into orbit.

And his plan to spear thousands of turbines off the New Jersey coast has incensed local fishermen who are literally told developers to get f*%#@d: Deepwater in Deep Trouble: Fishermen Tell Off-Shore Wind Farm Developers to F@*#K Off

The kind of character that opposes wind turbines in their own backyard – always prefacing their lukewarm and self-interested opposition with the phrase “I’m all in favour of…

It takes a special brand of delusion to believe that the world can run on sunshine and breezes. For wind and sun worshippers, disastrous examples like South Australia – where mass blackouts and load shedding have become the new normal – require not just practiced delusion but a form of self-flagellating stoicism, as well. Oh, almost forgot to mention, that RE superpower suffers the world’s highest power prices. And it reached that infamous status after it blew up its last coal-fired power plant.

The wind industry has had more than 30 years to get its act together. It was built on subsidies and wouldn’t last a minute without them. But, still, there are plenty happy to roll out the excuses and plead for more of the same.

When STT kicked off in December 2012, it was hard to find anyone with a harsh word to say about wind power. However…