Australians probably feel like they’re stuck in the MA+ sequel to The Never Ending Story – a horror movie in which a band of lunatics, driven by greed, stupidity and ideology took a little under a decade to destroy a once wealthy and prosperous Nation, while their renewables rent-seeking mates pocketed more than $60 billion in subsidies, paid for by power consumers, punished with ever rocketing power bills.

Forget ‘jobs and growth’, in Australia it’s a fight for survival, more like the Hunger Games.

While Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have clearly lost the plot, Judith Sloan continues to impress with her detailed insights into Australia’s self-inflicted power pricing and supply calamity.

‘Power prices: the sequel’ still fails to generate heat
The Australian
Judith Sloan
31 August 2017

It’s like watching the sequel of a bad movie. The title of the first movie was: Pretending to do something about power…

Finally, the message is starting to get through: Australia’s Renewable Energy Target is a $60 billion tax on all Australian power consumers and, therefore, a guaranteed business and job killer.

However, those tuned in to the PM, Malcolm Turnbull and his hapless sidekick, Josh Frydenberg wouldn’t know it.

Frydenberg continues to rail about Labor’s ‘aspirational’ 50% RET; go into hysterics about notional State-based targets; while holding the renewables-rent seeker line that all that’s needed to run the country entirely on sunshine and breezes are a few billion dollars’ worth of Elon Musk’s (as yet to materialise) mega-batteries.

Turnbull, on the other hand, is stuck with the deluded belief that berating Australia’s power retailers into offering discounts of a few percent on retail power bills (or at least telling their customers that they might get a ‘better deal’) is somehow going to correct the destruction wreaked by a $3 billion a year

For those, like STT, attempting to expose the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time, it sometimes feels like bashing our heads against a brick wall. 

However, every now and again, it feels like our masonry masochism has paid off.

Last Friday we awoke to see the top story on the front page of Australia’s only National broadsheet, The Australian spelling out the insane cost of Australia’s Renewable Energy Target.

STT has been laying out the numbers for years, while those profiting handsomely from the greatest government mandated wealth transfer in the history of the Commonwealth, have worked overtime to suppress them.

Indeed, in the same edition, wind-scammers, AGL ran a full-page ad featuring its stock smarmy hipster git standing in a paddock next to AGL’s public health calamity at Macarthur in western Victoria.

Hilariously, the ad claimed that the only way to cut power prices is to…

STT followers might have twigged to our sense of irony which, on the odd occasion, drifts all the way to sarcasm.

Sometimes a wry line requires considered imagination. But, other times, this stuff literally writes itself.

This saga from Saga in Japan is almost too funny for words.

Anti-nuke scaremongers rave on about the purported dangers of nuclear power, all the while pumping up the ‘clean, green’ credentials of their beloved wind turbines.

Anyone with the temerity to point to some of the obvious dangers of these things is either forced to wash their mouth out with soap or called a right wing fu@*wit.

To the wind power propagandists that determined to locate a giant wind turbine right next to a nuclear power plant, their strategy must have seemed like a stroke of genius, at the time.

However, the tendency of these things to self-immolate without warning has left…

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and other books on the environment.

Here’s Paul unpacking the myth that wind and solar are both clean and green.

Fair trade for thee, but not for me
Watts up With That
Paul Driessen
22 August 2017

“Nobody wants to buy something that was made by exploiting someone else,” Ben & Jerry’s and Fair Trade co-founder Jerry Greenfield likes to tell us. Let’s hope he doesn’t drive an electric vehicle, doesn’t use a laptop or cell phone, and doesn’t rely on wind or solar power.

We’re constantly confronted with slogans and lectures about fair trade, human rights, sustainability, environmental and social justice, little people versus Big Corporations. Most of these subjective terms reflect perspectives and agendas of the political left, and are intended to advance…

Time and time again we’re told that wind and solar power are not only competitive with conventional generators, but they’re practically free, and getting cheaper all the time.

That myth in the mouth the protagonists lasts about as long as it takes their antagonists to retort, that if wind and solar power really are competitive, then there’s no further need for government mandates, punitive targets and massive subsidies.

The pesky paradox for wind and sun worshippers is that without subsidies that continue from now until kingdom come, there would be nothing for them to venerate, at all.

The wind and solar ‘industries’ are always and everywhere the product of subsidies paid directly from taxpayer’s pockets and/or drawn from power consumers, via renewable energy certificates, tax credits, guaranteed feed in tariffs and the like.

In the video above and the pieces below Alan Moran targets the only meaningful solution to undoing…

It was the weather that drove sailors to steam.

The well-chewed ‘chestnut, about wind power being cheaper than coal or gas-fired power is a nonsense. For a start, the Operations and Maintenance costs of running wind turbines is in the order of $24 for every MWh dispatched – see our post here and this from our favourite whipping boys, Infigen:

The wind might be ‘free’, but wind power is anything but.

Then there is the fiction that wind power is actually ‘competing’ with conventional generation sources.

‘Competition’, in the wind industry’s eyes, is a pretty fluid concept: for most of life’s endeavours, it means a head-to-head race between all competitors, starting at the same time and traversing the same course, from start to finish. Not so with wind power.

In this piece, David Brewster pricks that bubble, beautifully.

The idle Conversation about wind power
Catallaxy Files
David Brewer
18 August…

The wind industry will never be accused of transparency or honesty.

Every new wind power project is going to power 100,000 homes and suck millions of tons of CO2 gas from the atmosphere [note to Ed, please check what plants will do with less CO2?] and create hundreds of new jobs.

Notwithstanding that the occupants of the apocryphal 100,000 ‘wind powered’ homes would be left sitting freezing or boiling in the dark 70% of the time, if actually left to rely on the wind farm in question. Or that the wind industry never counts the extra CO2 pumped out of power stations forced to ramp their plant up and down like a yo-yo to accommodate the chaotic occasional delivery of wind power into the grid. And, in this country, at least, permanent wind industry jobs number a few hundred, rather than the tens of thousands promised.

In short, wind industry…