Baseball Player, Manager and great American philosopher, Yogi Berra was famous for his in-eloquent, but somehow prescient and folksy quips. Lines such as “If you come to a fork in the road, take it” and “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them”, might leave many scratching their heads, but his observation about repeated occurrences out on the ballpark – “It’s like déjà vu all over again” – seems perfectly designed to capture South Australia’s unfolding (and now inescapable) power pricing and supply calamity.

Contrary to Yogi’s warning about how tough it is “to make predictions, especially about the future,” STT has been (correctly) forecasting routine load shedding and mass blackouts for South Australia for years now. Once lauded as “Australia’s Wind Power capital”, thanks to its wind power obsession, SA has become an international laughing stock.

After a mass blackout…

Microsoft Buys Tons Of Wind Power, Complete With Back Up Generators
The Daily Caller
Andrew Follett
14 November 2016

Tech giant Microsoft announced Monday that it has signed a deal to power its American data centers with wind energy, despite the inherent unreliability of the technology.

The tech company announced two new contracts representing 237 megawatts of wind power generating capacity, backed up by several natural gas generators to compensate for the unreliability. Microsoft did not disclose the amount of money they spent purchasing the wind power or the natural gas backup.

“These agreements represent progress toward our goal of improving the energy mix at our data centers,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in the company statement.

Microsoft isn’t the first tech company to purchase large amounts of wind power. Google made a similar purchase back in 2013, but didn’t end up actually using any of the energy because it wasn’t…

More turbine mayhem, this time it’s Siemens turbines – less than 4 years old – collapsing on Maui – an island in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Parts fall off wind turbine
The Maui News
Lee Imada
4 October 2016

The blades, hub and nacelle of one of eight Auwahi Wind turbines in the Kanaio area separated from the tower and fell to the ground Sunday, an official with the wind-power generation company said Monday.

There were no injuries, and the damage was limited to the one turbine, said Jill Howard, manager of communications and marketing for San Diego-based Sempra U.S. Gas & Power, the owner of the wind farm.

“We are in the very early stages of investigating the situation and gathering facts,” Howard said in an email Monday night. “This includes working closely with Siemens, the turbine manufacturer, to determine the root cause and corrective actions.”

As a precaution, all of…

When a mass blackout thrusts your State onto the international stage, as an outrageous possibility, there just could be a little something wrong with your energy policy. Here’s the view from the USA.

Australia Has Serious Problems With Green Energy Triggering Blackouts
The Daily Caller
Andrew Follett
23 November 2016

South Australia is still struggling to figure out how to keep green energy from triggering blackouts and crashing the electric grid, according to an article published by Inverse Tuesday.

The Australian state invested heavily in solar and wind power, but those power sources’ inherent reliability issues place a massive strain on the state’s power grid, according to the article.

Australia’s Energy Council noted in early September that increasing use of solar and wind power in the state “has not only led to a series of technical challenges” but “also increased wholesale price volatility as the state rebalances its supply from dispatchable plant to…

Now, that got their attention: lights out, Adelaide, 28.9.16.

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In the 1940s, South Australian Legend, Tom Playford (Premier for 26 years from 1938 to 1965) took a natural gift, in the form of vast untapped reserves of brown coal located at Leigh Creek, directed it through power plants at Port Augusta and, with its cheap and reliable power supply, built a mining, manufacturing and industrial power house: from 1946 to 1965, the proportion of South Australians connected to electricity increased from 70% to 96%; and over that time the population almost doubled from around 600,000 prior to WWII to over 1.1 million when he hung up his political gloves in 1965 (see our post here).

Fifty years on, how times have changed.

Isolated, parochial and run by morally bankrupt idiots, South Australia is at a crossroads: its hapless Labor government – utterly obsessed with wind power – is incapable…

Plenty of what Westerners know about the Middle Kingdom is more marvellous myth than solid fact. Fitting squarely within that category is the idea pedalled by wind worshippers that China is working at a furious pace to carpet itself with millions of these things.

In truth, instead of squandering billions on a technology that was abandoned around the time the rot set in for the Qing Dynasty in the 19^th century, China has built a phenomenal capacity in hydro power; and is building nuclear and high-efficiency coal-fired plant in order to bring affordable and reliable power to the masses: at present, China is building a coal-fired plant every other day, with plans to export their electricity to power starved Germans.

Just like everywhere else, the wind industry in China overstated its case; claiming that its costs were far lower than those actually realised; and, conversely, claiming…

What wind farm neighbours have to tolerate is nothing short of criminal: incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound drives neighbours nuts and, where they have the option, out of their homes altogether. The most common adverse health effect caused by wind turbine noise emissions in sleep deprivation, which brings with it a grab bag of other even more serious health effects.

One of the wind industry’s hackneyed myth is that these well-known adverse health effects are all a figment of the countless victims’ febrile and readily suggestible imaginations.

The so-called ‘nocebo’ theory – cooked up by a former tobacco advertising guru – also has it that it is only those people who are not being paid who complain of ill effects from turbine noise and vibration; their runaway ‘jealousy’ being the cause.

However, that theory doesn’t seem to sit all that well with people like Clive and Trina Gare…

Turbine blades that broke were first two to be turned on
Huron Daily Tribune
Brenda Battel
4 November 2016

BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP — The two blades that broke on separate wind turbines last month were the first two to be turned on in the startup phase of the Deerfield wind project.

The first turbine broke and bent in half during the afternoon of Oct. 22 while “in the process of the startup procedure,” said Chris Edwards, project construction site manager for Deerfield Wind Energy, which is owned by Algonquin Power.

The second blade broke at its midway point, and stayed attached, just as the first one had on Oct. 22, after about 24 hours of run time, Edwards said.

“This is somewhat unusual,” he told the Huron County Planning Commission on Wednesday night during an update on the malfunctions.

Every blade of every turbine in the park will be inspected before…