Remember all those glowing stories about wind power outfits being welcomed into rural communities with open arms? You know, tales about how farmers are dying to have turbines lined up all over their properties? How locals can’t wait to pick up some of the thousands of permanent, high paying jobs on offer? How developers are viewed with the kind of reverence reserved for Royalty?

No?

We’ve forgotten them too.

If such a place ever existed? – it was probably just a case of one too many Single Malts, causing the usual senses to take an unscheduled break.

After years of being lied to, bullied, berated and treated like fools (at best) and “road-kill” (at worst), for most, the ‘gloss’ comprising wind industry PR efforts to ‘win hearts and minds’ has well and truly worn off.

These days, the communities aren’t so gullible; they aren’t so welcoming; and…

Soon, New Yorkers won’t get to choose their ‘Earth hour’.

New Yorkers are about to reap what their wind and solar obsessed Governor, Andrew Cuomo has sown. As South Australians and Germans are acutely aware, adding utterly unreliable and inherently intermittent wind and solar to a power grid, designed entirely around dispatchable sources, leads to chaos. That wind and solar superpower, South Australia, has become the butt of international jokes; after a run of mass load shedding events and Australia’s first-ever statewide blackout.

Those in the know, knew from the outset that adding wind and solar capacity (beyond a trivial percentage of total capacity) was always going to destroy grid reliability; resulting from an inability to match loads (demand) with supply, because supply would be increasingly dictated by crazy little phenomena, like the weather and sunset.

The warnings are now being laid out that those New Yorkers…

There are several immutable laws, such as the furious reaction that erupts whenever plans emerge to spear wind turbines into the heart of rural communities.

A few weeks back, we covered the outrage that’s erupted among South Korean farming communities over a wind farm, the noise from which is not only driving neighbours nuts, but, by killing bees, has destroyed the livelihoods of both apiarists and orchardists, who depend upon pollination services, once reliably delivered by bees: Beeline to Fury: Korean Farmers Declare War on Wind Power – For Wrecking Communities & Killing Bees

Now, a veritable war against Big Wind, has broken out in Vietnam.

Having crushed their French colonial oppressors at the battle of Diên Biên Phu in 1954, the North Vietnamese (in cahoots with the old Việt Minh and Việt Cộng in the South), went on to draw so much blood and treasure from the world’s…

‘Green’ job promises nothing more than hot air.

Remember all those stories about the wind & solar industries providing millions of groovy, well-paid ‘green’ jobs – as secure as Fort Knox? No?

Sure, you’ll hear those pitching RE promise loads of ‘sustainable’ jobs, as they wail about dreaded ‘uncertainty’ – causing bankers to baulk and investors to flee; and as they demand (with menaces) that governments maintain essential, massive and endless subsidies until the end of time.

But, this is the same crowd who tell us that the ‘transition’ to nature’s wonder fuels is ‘inevitable’ and that they’re not really getting any subsidies at all.

There are a few inescapable truths: cut subsidies to wind and solar power and the jobs those ‘industries’ have ‘created’ evaporate like snow in Summer. Funny about that!

Bloodbath in the German solar “industry” — without subsidies 80,000 solar jobs are gone
Jo Nova Blog
Jo…

Those pumping wind and solar only ever talk about capacity, which is like being told that the cheque is in the mail. The kind of fantastic promise made by those who hope it never collides with reality. But, like the cheque that never arrives (and bounces when it does), promises that wind power delivers are not just hollow, they’re a delusion.

Coal and nuclear power generation don’t need a second system like pumped hydro, mythical mega-batteries or prayers to Mother Nature in order to deliver power 24 x 365, whatever the weather. These are ‘systems’ and, by definition, systems work.

What’s depicted above is taken from Aneroid Energy and shows the entire output of every wind turbine located in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia connected to the Eastern Grid, with a combined notional capacity of 4,675 MW during April this year.

Up and down like a…

Wind and solar power were both founded on lies and myth, and can only exist when and where massive subsidies are practically perpetual.

Now that it’s become impossible for them to hide the obvious relationship between intermittent wind and solar and rocketing power prices and grid instability, the pleading to maintain the subsidies that sustain them, has gone from the usual sanctimonious bleating to an apoplectic, maniacal rage.

For all their talk about being competitive (even cheaper) than fossil-fuelled generation sources, the merest hint of tinkering with their subsidy stream sends them into orbit.

Here’s a nice little roundup of their latest internally inconsistent rantings from the team at JoNova.

Renewable snowflake investors false tears for “certainty” (Gimmedat guaranteed income!) – When investors cry for certainty, what they really want is “no risks” and “your money”
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
7 May 2018

The renewables industry only exists because of…

Bitcoiners come to where the power is: Redbank, NSW

For power consumers searching for the cheapest and most reliable power, coal is the only answer. Crypto-currencies, like Bitcoin, have been a bonanza; not only for risk-hungry techie investors (not to mention risk-averse drug smugglers and money launderers), they’ve been a windfall for power generators – provided those generators can deliver it reliably and at 1970s prices.

The servers used to run the block-chain programs upon which these virtual currencies depend, chew up veritable mountains of electricity. Hence their operator’s interest in sourcing the cheapest power there is. And, in Australia, that means coal-fired power.

The 151 MW Redbank Power Station, located near Singleton, in the Hunter Region, NSW, was built using private money by Babcock & Brown, started operating in 2001 and was mothballed in October 2014, after a messy liquidation of the entity in control, Redbank Project Pty Ltd.

Now, power…

The next generation of Australians will be eager to string up those responsible for turning an energy superpower into an international joke.

Coal, gas and uranium rich Australia shouldn’t be paying the highest power prices in the world; and it shouldn’t be cutting power to businesses and hospitals during hot weather, when demand spikes and the wind stops blowing. The renewable energy cult calls that ‘demand management’ or even ‘demand resources’, as if chopping your business or home from the grid is like striking oil or gas.

All those dismal features of Australia’s self-inflicted power pricing and supply calamity are the natural product of an obsession with sunshine and breezes.

Peter Mitchell, one of the founding members of the Waubra Foundation, is eager to start the roundup early, with a name and shame list of the renewables rent seekers, and those in government who pander to them, most…