Dead-calm weather is NOT news!

With the wind always blowing somewhere, it’s claimed that if turbines are spread far and wide, there’ll be a constant supply of wind ‘energy’. Except whole countries and indeed vast tracts of whole continents face dead-calm weather on a routine and regular basis.

South-eastern Australia is home to 5,000MW of wind power capacity, spread across four states (NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia), which often struggle to produce more than 5% of that figure for hours, and sometimes days on end.

The same phenomena applies right across Western Europe, as detailed by Roger Andrews below.

Quantifying wind surpluses and deficits in Western Europe
Energy Matters
Roger Andrews
7 November 2018

This posts updates my January 2015 Wind blowing nowhere post using 2016 rather than 2013 data. The 2016 data show the same features as the 2013 data, with high and low wind conditions extending…

Bill Shorten: economic wrecking ball in waiting.

Anyone wanting to understand what a 50% RET can do to an economy, look no further than South Australia. Once upon a time, thanks to cheap and reliable coal-fired power, it was a manufacturing heartland.

In the 1970s, Adelaide was home to 2 (General Motors Holden and Chrysler – taken over by Mitsubishi in 1977) of the 5 motor manufacturers building cars in Australia at the time (the others being Ford, Leyland and Nissan).  Adelaide also hosted a raft of components manufacturers, making tyres (Uniroyal – later Bridgestone), mag wheels and rims (ROH) and shock absorbers (Monroe-Wylie) – employing thousands. At their peak, Holden and Chrysler employed over 11,000 between them. South Australia also supported manufacturers producing textiles, furniture, white goods and a whole range of other products.

Back then, South Australian businesses provided meaningful jobs for a predominantly working-class population centred in…

Nyrstar’s Pt Pirie Smelter: Bill Shorten’s economic wrecking ball awaits.

Australia was once an energy superpower, supporting mining, mineral processing, manufacturing and energy-intensive agriculture (think irrigators, dairies, aquaculture and horticulture). Pretty soon, if Bill Shorten’s Labor Party gets anywhere near the controls, power prices will be driven to astronomical levels and those industries driven out of existence. Hundreds of thousands of well-paid, meaningful jobs are under threat.

And this from what was once called the ‘Worker’s Party’.

Sure, there’s an aspect of infantile ideology driving this.

Witness the climate cult’s cynical indoctrination of four-year-old kindy kids, last week forcing them and their older siblings to march in the streets, placards in their tiny little hands.

Mum says I can have my Lego back as soon as I can read it.

Instead of worrying about My Little Pony and Lego, little Leopolds and Clemmies are being brainwashed about carbon dioxide…

The wind industry has been firmly attached the subsidy teat for more than 30 years. Talk about being competitive with conventional generators is patent nonsense: cut the subsidies and this so-called ‘industry’ would disappear in a heartbeat.

Whether it’s in Western Victoria, South Australia or in the midwest of the USA, wind power is always and everywhere about massive and endless subsidies.

Janna Swanson and her husband, Paul, live in Clay County, Iowa and farm together in both Clay and Palo Alto Counties. Janna is the president of the Coalition for Rural Property Rights, a large statewide grassroots group of farmers, residents and landowners standing against the onslaught of industrial wind in Iowa. She is also a board member of National Wind Watch and a member of the Preservation of Rural Iowa Alliance.

PTC still going strong
National Wind Watch
Janna Swanson
20 October 2018

In the political debates recently…

When energy policy is driven by ideology, rather than engineering, physics and economics, expect mixed results. Unmitigated disasters, like Australia’s wind and solar capital, South Australia are just the most obvious examples of what happens when lunatics take charge of the asylum.

Germany is right up there, too. With rocketing power prices and a grid on the brink of collapse (just like South Australia) Germany’s inevitable ‘transition’ from all wind and sun powered future (aka the Energiewende) has slammed into reality.

Attempting to run on sunshine and breezes is an attempt to turn pure chaos into order. As Germans are now learning, tackling that chaos has a price: and the price is staggering.

Here’s Dr John Constable detailing the latest on Deutschland’s self-inflicted death spiral.

Has the Cost of Germany’s Energiewende Entered a Critical Phase?
Dr John Constable
The Global Warming Policy Forum
8 November 2018

Electricity system management costs in…

South Australians know the summertime drill…

In renewables obsessed Australia these days, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets, the talk inevitably turns to blackouts.

Last summer, load shedding caught power consumers short in South Australia, Victoria and NSW. Energy hungry businesses such as aluminium smelters and even hospitals were forced to power down during run a scorching days and nights, when temperatures soared and wind power output plummeted: Australia Closes Coal-Fired Power Plants: Hospitals Forced to Cut Power Use & Power Prices Rocket

This summer, the barbecue stopper will literally be another round of what’s euphemistically called “demand management”: Soviet era power rationing, an integral part of Australia’s ludicrous attempt to run on sunshine and breezes. If it wasn’t deadly serious, it’d almost be hilarious.

STT made the point a week or so back – Summer Holiday-Hell: Power Consumers Face Staggering Bill Whenever Wind Power Goes AWOL – here’s…

BHP’s Olympic Dam ships uranium to the world.

The dividend from Australia’s obsession with wind and solar is rocketing power prices and a grid on the brink of collapse. This summer, mass load shedding events are guaranteed, although those responsible for Soviet-era power rationing – the new ‘normal’ in what was once an energy superpower – are trained to refer to it as “demand management”. The cause will be, as always, collapses in wind and solar output – thanks to those pesky phenomena: sunset and dead-calm weather.

With Labor and the Greens trying to outdo each other about their visceral hatred of coal and the myriad of benefits it produces (not least being reliable and affordable electricity), carbon dioxide gas will remain the bogeyman for years to come.

The only, indeed the perfect, foil to the anti-CO2 mob is nuclear power.

While coal-fired power plant currently provide around 85% of…

Musk hoodwinked SA, now Bill Shorten
wants to hoodwink the entire Country.

Despite the hype from RE zealots, the chaotic and occasional delivery of wind and solar won’t be cured with batteries, large or small.

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…

No country has ever powered itself entirely on sunshine and breezes. But that doesn’t deter the delusional from claiming it can be done. With the kind of fanatical zeal that led to virgins being thrown into volcanoes, politicians announce their commitment to an all sun and wind powered future, as if such a thing was a given and unicorns were a real thing.

Ignoring pesky phenomena, such as calm weather and sunset, the latest wheeze is that – when wind power output collapses on a total and totally unpredictable basis (see above the output from every wind turbine connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid in June) and/or the sun goes down and solar output plummets with it – giant batteries will, somehow, save the day.

Attempting to defy the laws of physics, nature and economics, a growing number of American politicians are dragging their states and cities down the rabbit hole.

Thanks to an obsession with wind and solar Australians now pay retail power prices among the highest in the world. The wind and solar capital, South Australia suffers the highest, bar none.

The reasons it got that way are hardly a mystery. Dr Michael Crawford’s graphic should help the uninitiated.

The staggering cost of the subsidies is born by power consumers, and so is the enormous cost of the chaos delivered in the market place whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.

This is a Country that was once renowned as an energy superpower. Now its people are virtually energy paupers. How it got that way is a travesty. Indeed, as Alan Moran puts it, the causes and consequences of Australia’s renewable energy policies are utterly diabolical.

The Diabolic Policy Dilemmas Created by Previous Energy Policies
Catallaxy Files
Alan Moran
14 November 2018

Regulatory measures – subsidies for…