The principles of economics are not hard, nor are they a mystery.

Jobs require viable businesses, viable businesses require cheap and reliable electricity. Deprive businesses of cheap and reliable power and those businesses will very soon cease to exist.

Those truisms, however, continue to fall on deaf ears in Australia’s so-called ‘wind power capital’, South Australia. Its obsession with wind power has relegated it to the status of not just a national, but to that of an international laughing stock.

The reasons for that have been spelt out on these pages time and time again, such as in this post: South Australia’s Disastrous Wind Power Experiment: Business Crippled as Power Prices Double

No amount of political varnish or PR polish can avoid the conclusion that SA’s skyrocketing power prices and erratic supply are all due to heavily subsidised wind and solar power – which have not only destroyed its once…

Jay Weatherill’s dirty diesel dozen: the actual solution to his power debacle.

But for pride, arrogance and hubris SA’s vapid Premier, Jay Weatherill could have kept South Australia chugging away cheaply on coal-fired power for a paltry $30 million; the amount that Alinta wanted to keep its 520 MW Port Augusta power plant running for another five years or so.

In a fit of petulance, Weatherill rejected that offer and, instead, determined to throw $550 million of taxpayers’ money at diesel fuelled jet engines (open cycle gas turbines, which can be run on diesel or gas) and a mega-battery delivered on time (but not without drama) by Californian carpetbagger, Elon Musk.

The battery will go down as one of history’s most expensive political vanity projects, while the actual work will be done by his dirty diesels.

Irony is an art form which requires a well-tuned intellect to detect. Apparently, the…

When you pump your credentials as the world’s renewable energy superpower, it’s pretty hard to avoid the fact that your constituents pay the highest retail power prices in the world. Wind and sun worshippers can’t have it both ways: either South Australia is Australia’s wind power capital and that fact explains why its consumers are being belted, or some other alien force needs to be identified as the culprit.

The latest wheeze amongst the wind cult is to blame coal-fired power plants. Which doesn’t seem to gel with the fact that when Victoria’s 1,600 MW Hazelwood plant closed earlier this year, Victorian wholesale power prices jumped by 25%, overnight.

As they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, hey Giles?

Sure enough the owners of conventional generation plant are regularly engaged in power price gouging, whenever wind power output collapses, a point picked…

Sarah Laurie’s tireless efforts entirely vindicated by the AAT.

In a World first, Australia’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) has declared that the “noise annoyance” caused by wind turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound “is a plausible pathway to disease” based on the “established association between noise annoyance and some diseases, including hypertension and cardiovascular disease, possibly mediated in part by disturbed sleep and/or psychological stress/distress.”

The AAT also held that “The dB(A) weighting system is not designed to measure [wind turbine noise], and is not an appropriate way of measuring it.”

The dB(A) weighting system is the basis of every wind turbine noise guideline in operation around the world.

The AAT’s finding means that every one of those noise guidelines is premised on an acoustic nonsense and, therefore, entirely irrelevant.

The decision, which we deal with below, came at a time when Australia’s self-appointed wind turbine noise health ‘expert’, Simon…

Destroying underground water supplies is just another “wonderful” feature of eco-friendly wind power.  The largest of these things require a steel reinforced concrete base of around 400-500 m³.

For 3MW turbines the bottom of the base itself – depending on the soil profile and rock strata – will sit between 5m and 10 m below the surface and – if the soil is unstable and rock anchors are required – reinforced concrete pillars are drilled from 30m and up to 90 m below the surface, being literally screwed into the rock strata.  In either event, there will be obvious disturbance of – and interference with – underground water or streams percolating underground.

In their planning applications – wind power outfits routinely lie about the impact their turbine bases have on groundwater supplies.

In 2013, ScottishPower was busted in Bonnie Scotland, not only poisoning the local inhabitants drinking from their…

The weather wins: typhoon topples turbines in Taiwan

For a bit over 20 years, we’ve been berated with warnings that the climate is changing so rapidly, that ‘fixing’ it is a matter of the most pressing urgency.

Notwithstanding that, for nearly 20 years, global temperatures have stubbornly refused to budge, such that there are plenty of climate alarmists not game to bet on whether things are getting hotter or colder.

The only ‘solution’ proffered by the Chicken Littles to our self-inflicted weather-woes is, of course, carpeting the world in wind turbines and solar panels, with a few $trillion worth of mythical mega-batteries thrown in, which are all set to explode onto the power storage-stage and set the energy world on fire – quite literally (see our post here).

Then, the irony starts.

Australia’s most notorious wind power outfit, Infigen keeps telling its embattled shareholders that it can’t spin…

As 2017 draws to a close, with examples like Australia’s wind power capital, South Australia in mind, it takes a special brand of delusion to still believe that a country can run on sunshine and breezes.

The cost of subsidised wind power is staggering, the effects on the grid chaotic.

The peaceful and prosperous places where these things get speared end up as Orwellian industrial wastelands, with uninhabitable homes and deep-seated anger directed at those who elected to take their 30 pieces of silver, in exchange for the very soul of their once tight-knit communities.

Counting the cost, in more ways than one, is the mid-Western State of Minnesota.

Energy Policy in Minnesota: The High Cost of Failure
Centre of the American Experiment
Steven Hayward and Peter Nelson
October 2017

Executive Summary

In recent years, the state of Minnesota has pursued a series of increasingly aggressive renewable energy and “clean…

If you’re looking for examples on how to deliberately destroy an economy, look no further than renewables obsessed Germany and its equally deranged doppelgänger Downunder, South Australia: both are attempting to run on sunshine and breezes; both suffer rocketing power prices; and both now have grids on the brink of collapse.

South Australia has become the butt of international jokes as a result of routine mass load-shedding and repeated Statewide blackouts caused by sudden, total and totally unpredictable collapses in wind power output.

Now, Germany is headed in the same disastrous direction. Whenever the Sun disappears (Sunset will do it every time) and/or the wind stops blowing, Germany’s grid managers have to pull out all stops to prevent Deutschland returning to the Dark Ages.

German Media Report: Power Grids In Distress…Highly Unstable Due To Wind And Solar Power!
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
11 November 2017

Recently German SAT1 television…

The wind industry is always and everywhere about subsidies. The punitive cost of those subsidies are starting to appear in retail power bills, infuriating householders and driving businesses to the wall. Panicked politicians, who enabled the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time, are reacting. Their inevitable response is to cut the subsidies that created the problem in the first place.

The politics of power are always and everywhere about power prices. As the proletariat tumbles to the fact that the wind and sun ain’t entirely free, wind and solar power outfits are on the back foot.

The sense of panic and confusion that pervades among renewables rent-seekers suggests the wind industry is on the brink of collapse. German wind turbine maker Siemens has set the scene by sacking 6,000 workers. Tens of thousands more of those so-called ‘green’ jobs will soon disappear, as Europe pulls the subsidy plug.