Blackouts – The Saltbush Club

The Broken Hill Blackout

By John McRobert

Al Jolson introduced Talkies with, “You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet”.

The recent Broken Hill blackout where Wind and Sun failed to provide power when needed, demonstrates we ain’t seen nuttin’ yet. That blackout is a harbinger of big blackouts for big cities when they become reliant on unreliable green energy sources.

I have experienced what that will be like.

On St Valentine’s Day 1985, during a Union-strike power blackout, my office was on the 24th floor of a building in Brisbane CBD. After navigating roads with no traffic lights and reporting for work, lifts didn’t work and the fire-escape access staircase was unventilated. Trudging up to an unairconditioned, unlit, unpowered office, windows would not open and no power points worked.

I walked down the fire-escape to buy lunch and St Valentine’s Day chocolates for my wife. The shopping arcade was in darkness, shop-owner incandescent, stock melted. Back up 24 floors to spend a sweltering afternoon in unproductive endurance. After work, walked downstairs in gloom to renegotiate roads with no streetlights or traffic lights. Returned home to a romantic candlelight dinner of freshly-thawed steak (before it rotted), cooked on a gas-powered camp hotplate.

Reliable energy sources are essential for modern society.
We still need coal.

Green Australia: where Industry is on Edge, the grid “precarious” and electricity prices up 25%

By Jo Nova

The land that is the Renewable Crash Test Dummy is holding its breath.

This time last year, the Australian energy market turned into a kind of Hunger Games spectacle with daily feeding-fest at dinner time where prices were so burning hot that unhedged smaller retailers begged their own customers to leave them and then the whole market was suspended. The bonfire was so big we’re still paying for it, and retail electricity prices are set to rise another 25% in a few weeks.

So it’s no surprise that as the cold weather arrives downunder, everyone involved in energy is “on edge”. Suddenly Australian corporate leaders are telling it like it is — the Alinta Gas chief says there is just no way we can build enough renewables in time — he can’t even “see a way” of building enough renewables to compensate for the coal units that are being closed.

The man who used to run the Snowy Hydro Scheme agrees (and then some) — saying we need to build a “Snowy” every year, and we are being lied to (his words) and it will take not 8 years, but 80 years to get there. The head of EnergyAustralia says shutting down the Liddell coal plant means the system is “exposed”. These are people at the top (or formerly) of our biggest energy companies.

The Coming Crash of the Climate Cult

By Viv Forbes

The Climate Cult worships two green idols – electric vehicles and wind-solar energy. This is part of a futile UN scheme promoting “Net Zero Emissions” which aims to cool the climate of the world by waging war on CO2 plant food.

Green worship is the state religion of all western nations. It is promoted by billionaires with other agendas, and endlessly repeated by the UN, the bureaucracy, all government media, state education and most big business leaders.

The promotion of electric cars and trucks will cause a great increase in the demand for electricity to replace diesel, petrol and gas. Continue reading “The Coming Crash of the Climate Cult”

Rushing Towards the Wall of Blackouts

Planned Chaos in Power Generation

By Viv Forbes

Politicians are inviting electricity chaos in Australia by promoting closure of coal-fired power stations, but also promoting more electric cars – more demand, less supply.

And Green energy is a wild bull in the electricity china shop.

Around mid-day on most sunny days, millions of roof-top solar panels pump electricity into the grid, often pushing prices too low for rational generators to continue supplying power. With booming subsidised green energy, more Australian coal generators will be forced to close.

Demand for electricity peaks twice per day – once for toast and coffee at breakfast time, and again for air conditioners, dinner and TV at night. Solar contributes ZERO to this demand, and the contribution of wind power is erratic. And for long periods, our expensive sprawl of green power lines is also idle.

Check here to see where electricity comes from in Queensland (“the Sunshine State”) OpenNEM: Queensland

When faced with generator closures, the only suggestion from industry leaders is to sanitise coal power with “Carbon Capture and Burial”. This is energy-wasting nonsense, with Zero Benefits.

At the same time the Green/ALP coalition wants to see Australians buying heaps more electric cars. They promote rising demand for electricity, with falling reliability and supply.

The Green Energy Express is about to hit the Wall of Blackouts.

Further Reading:

Kevin Rudd wins the Golden Fleece Award for Carbon Capture Waste: https://carbon-sense.com/2013/05/10/golden-fleece-award/

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/carbon-capture.pdf

The Global Boom in Coal Power: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8908179/coal-global-climate-change

A Dark Day in Dubai

By Alistair Pope. From https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/07-08/powerless-dubai/

This short memoir is about the reality of life without electricity, that dream of the Dark Greens, which I lived in Dubai during the power outage of June 2005. The reports that followed made light of the reality as just a minor inconvenience. That is not what I experienced.

By 2005 Dubai had undergone a decade-long building frenzy and such an expansion of the population that they had outstripped the infrastructure’s electricity-generating capacity—but nobody stopped the developers.

I had been in Dubai for ten days and was due to fly out on a 2 a.m. flight for London. As I had a lazy day to kill, I woke at about 9 a.m. I had woken up, not because it was time to get up but because my hotel room was uncomfortably hot. My sweat was soaking the bed sheets. (I usually sleep with the air-conditioning set to “Igloo”—13°C—as I find that snuggling under a doona in the cold air leads to a better and deeper sleep, but that’s just me.) Clearly we had a problem, so I called reception and was told that the air-conditioner was off due to an electrical fault, but it should be OK in an hour or so. Continue reading “A Dark Day in Dubai”

The Blackout Agenda

By Viv Forbes

Solar power fails every day from sunset to sunrise as well as during rain, hail, snow or dust storms. No matter how much land we smother in subsidised solar panels, they will still fail.

Wind power fails often and unpredictably, sometimes for days, especially in quiet cold winter weather. It also shuts down during cyclones, heavy winds or icy conditions. No matter how many hills we uglify with their subsidised roads, transmission lines and bird-slicers, they will still fail.

No one notices when green energy fails (as it often does) because coal, gas and hydro keep our lights and heaters on, trains running, petrol pumping, batteries charging and dairies, abattoirs and hospitals operating. Continue reading “The Blackout Agenda”