The hundreds of $billions paid in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar constitute the largest wealth transfer in economic history.

In Australia, the Federal Government’s Large-Scale RET gouges $60 billion from power consumers over the life of the scam, and redirects it to such worthy outfits as AGL and our favourite whipping boys, Infigen. In the history of the Commonwealth, no other single industry subsidy scheme comes anywhere near it in value.

When motor manufacturers, General Motors Holden and Toyota put their hands out for a measly $500 million to maintain their Australian operations, then PM, Tony Abbott told them would “not chase them down the road waving a blank cheque at them“.

A mere half $billion would have saved something like 20 or 30,000 jobs across the sector.

At present, the combined subsidies to wind and solar exceed $4 billion a year, and the number of…

Blind panic doesn’t cover it: Australia’s energy crisis has MPs and rent-seekers running around like chooks with their heads cut off.

Retail power prices (see above) have jumped anywhere between 20 and 28% in the last 12 months, in those states with major wind and solar capacity – adding to 13-20% increases, the previous year.

Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg – who can’t come to grips with the hard numbers above and keeps on telling porkies on that score – has slammed into a brick wall, as he tries to sell his version of the National Energy Guarantee. The Green/Labor Alliance and its PR wing, GetUp! are determined to wreck it. While plenty of Liberal and National MPs have worked out that it is simply the RET on steroids, will cross the floor to vote against it. Then there’s the Senate…

Try as he might, Frydenberg’s NEG is a dead…

The wind industry continues to deliver up a bevy of eco-irony, a gift to those sick to death of the moral piety dished up by its deluded acolytes.

Turbines exploding into flames, blades exploding into the ether and turbines, well, just plain exploding – make a mockery of claims by cultists that wind power is clean, green and as safe as houses.

Every time a wind worshipper starts praising their beloveds, yet another catastrophic turbine failure pops up somewhere in the world.

The likelihood of such calamities has reached a form of certitude in the world’s wind power Mecca, Germany.

Barely a day goes past without some form of pyrotechnic meltdown or exhilarating disintegration, providing neighbours with plenty of cheap thrills.

Aside from the mortal threat these things pose to those unfortunate enough to be lumbered with them in their backyards, there’s the broader environmental threat posed by tens of…

Business operators have just worked out that Australia’s renewable energy policies are deliberately designed to destroy them. Concepts such as ‘demand management’ (state-ordered deliberate blackouts) are the natural result of seeking to run an entire economy on sunshine and breezes.

This country wouldn’t be debating Josh Frydenberg’s National Energy Guarantee, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commissioner’s report on price gouging or the latest demand by AEMO’s Audrey Zibelman for coal-fired power plants (which her favoured policies are deliberately designed to destroy) to keep chugging away for at least another 20 years if it was not for the weather and the daily rotation of the planet.

When the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in wind and solar power output collapses, like night follows day.

When wind and solar capacity represented a tiny fraction of total demand, their daily disappearance was just a minor irritant to grid managers – and of…

The causes of Australia’s self-inflicted renewable energy disaster are all political; and have nothing to do physics, engineering, the weather or some kind of fossil-fuelled conspiracy.

The policies were deliberately designed to destroy Australia’s affordable and reliable power supplies. And, according to their purpose, they’ve done just that.

Last week, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission delivered a report on the causes and consequences of the disaster. Its conclusion was the same as that reached by STT years ago: renewable energy policies created the debacle, for which federal and state governments are entirely responsible.

A mix of inertia and feigned indifference pervades in Canberra: the PM, Malcolm Turnbull and his gormless Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg seem stuck like bunnies in headlights.

However, the ACCC has provided them with the perfect escape route. Whether or not they have the wit and temerity to take it, is another matter.

And that’s the…

The adults have just taken control of Australia’s renewable energy debacle: the ACCC’s investigation into RE subsidies and power market gaming spells the end for subsidised wind and solar.

As STT has pointed out on more than one occasion: when a policy is unsustainable it will either collapse under its own imponderable weight, or its creators will be forced to scrap it, in shame and ignominy. The demise of Australia’s renewable energy policies will probably be a result of a mix of both.

Ontario’s new Progressive Conservative government has just done what our political betters claim is impossible – slashing subsidies and cancelling 758 wind and solar projects that were in the pipeline: Ontario to Cancel Energy Contracts to Bring Hydro Bills Down: Keeping election promise will save $790 million to help lower electricity bills

There is nothing ‘inevitable’ about endless subsidies and mandated targets for wind and solar. Ontario’s voters/power consumers…

It was only a matter of time before Australia’s ruinous renewable energy policies imploded and implode they just did.

Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity is the inevitable consequence of the so-called ‘transition’ to nature’s wonder fuels. And yet the wind and sun cult and renewable energy rent seekers continue to behave as if the results can be hidden from plain view: avoiding grid collapses is now a daily occurrence, based on what the weather might be doing at the time and where that fiery ball sits in the sky. More on that in an upcoming post.

With retail power prices jumping another 20% or more this year (on top of a 20% hike last year), those with an interest in maintaining Australia’s wealth and prosperity have hit the panic button.

The beginning of the end for heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar came in the form…

There are good deals, there are bad deals and there are disastrous deals. For Australia the Paris Climate ‘deal’ is a monstrous disaster.

The realisation that an energy superpower found itself enmeshed in what is – for all intents and purposes – an international suicide pact, has just hit home.

The only justification (if it be a justification) for the trillions of dollars in subsidies thrown at intermittent, unreliable and chaotic wind and solar is that the purported reductions in carbon dioxide emissions associated with that pair will automatically prevent the planet from overheating.

The wind and solar industries are yet to produce a single shred of evidence to support their claims of substantial CO2 emissions reductions.

And it’s not just an absence of evidence, the world’s leading exponent of wind and solar, Germany, has squandered hundreds of billions of euros on subsidies and yet its CO2 emissions continue to…

Judge William Alsup delivers inevitable verdict on intermittent renewables.

A class of miserable human-haters detests the idea that energy should be freely available, to all. Instead, they go out of their way to promote costly, unreliable and intermittent wind and solar: a pair that will only ever deliver power at the margins; which depend upon massive, never-ending subsidies; cost a fortune to deliver; and do so only according to the time of day and the weather.

The same class of misanthropes seems to hate Western Civilisation, with an equally unhinged form of passion.

The Industrial Revolution freed Europe and later North America from grinding, agrarian poverty. Sure, the process was not without its trials (it was a ‘Revolution’, after all) but millions were, forever, lifted out of poverty and misery.

At the heart of the most rapid progress seen in the advancement of the human condition, was thermal energy: principally…