After 20 years of subsidies, intermittent renewables account for just 3.6% of total energy generation. That’s the tiny purple sliver in the graph. Global power means not just electricity, but also fuel used in transport. And this is where wind and solar power are respectively old and slow, or modern but useless.
Category: Renewable Energy
The Choke Point in the Wind Supply in South Australia
The SA story in pictures. http://catallaxyfiles.com/2020/05/05/the-choke-point-in-the-wind-supply-in-south-australia/
Given the “choke” problem no amount of good days save the grid from dying on a bad day. No feasible storage is in sight to get over the troughs between the peaks of wind and sun.
Much talk of our great resources of wind and sun. Great land resources as well, but how much is arable? The BOM records probably indicate limits to farming, were they consulted to check the continuity of wind and solar supply?
Australia on the cliff approaching the shuttering of Liddell power station.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/30/australian-energy-security-on-the-brink/
AEMO data demonstrate that wind and solar cannot work without storage and should never have been subsidised to increase the cost of power and destabilize the grid.
Providing 100 Percent Energy from Renewable Sources Is Impossible
By David Wojick. First published by https://www.heartland.org/.
Lately, many politicians at the federal, state, and local levels have unthinkingly bought into the talking points of radical environmentalists, pushing policies to require 100 percent of the electricity used in the United States to come from politically favored renewable energy sources, primarily wind and solar power.
Generating all of America’s electric power through wind and solar industrial facilities is an expensive pipedream. Continue reading “Providing 100 Percent Energy from Renewable Sources Is Impossible”
The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
This was originally published by “The Manhattan Institute:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-near-impossible
A movement has been growing for decades to replace hydrocarbons, which collectively supply 84% of the world’s energy. It began with the fear that we were running out of oil. That fear has since migrated to the belief that, because of climate change and other environmental concerns, society can no longer tolerate burning oil, natural gas, and coal—all of which have turned out to be abundant. Continue reading “The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”
Wasting Australia’s Resources
By Viv Forbes
Foolish politicians driven by extreme green ideology are wasting Australia’s resources.
Australia’s nuclear resources are largely wasted. We have abundant geological potential for uranium and other nuclear fuels, we know how to explore and extract them, but with bans and restrictions that change every election, and approval processes that take either some years or forever, only three mines are operating. And Australia is the only G20 country to ban clean silent low-emission nuclear power.
Australia’s waste and sterilisation of coal and oil shale resources is also an international disgrace. Solid hydro-carbon resources are very concentrated stores of value, but cannot be used without temporarily disturbing other resources such as soils, vegetation and stored water. Continue reading “Wasting Australia’s Resources”
Tackling Climate Change
By Dr D Weston Allen (MBBS, FRACGP) Aug 2019
Earth’s complex climate is always changing, sometimes rapidly. Greenland’s temperature rose ten degrees Celsius (10⁰C) in a single decade 11,500 years ago. Earth has been warmer than now and the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) level much higher than now for most of its 4.5 billion years. Natural sequestration over 200 million years reduced it ten-fold from 2,000 parts per million (ppm) to just 200ppm 2.58 million years ago when Earth entered the cold Quaternary ice-age.
Continue reading “Tackling Climate Change”
Snowy Mk 2 – a Symptom of a National Subversive Malady
By Bob Brock
The lack of critical comment on the recently announced Snowy Mk 2 in the mainstream media is seriously disappointing, but perhaps understandable since it is not generally understood.
The attraction of Snowy Mk 2 rides on the back of the iconic name of the truly heroic 1940s to 1970s Snowy Mountains Scheme that, with the St Lawrence Seaway in North America, was one of the world’s great civil engineering projects of the 20th century. Snowy Mk 2 is an opportunistic plan to use that iconic name to gain public support for an expensive project to make the Government’s flawed renewable energy policies workable. It has none of the nation-building qualities of its original namesake.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme.
The original Snowy Mountains Scheme was predicated on diverting some of the easterly flowing water from the Snowy Mountains that went into the Tasman Sea to the dry western plains for irrigation. The diverted water was to be distributed on the basis of five thirteenths to each of NSW and Victoria and three thirteenths to South Australia, and was to be provided free. The scheme was to be financed at least in part by electricity generation.
Continue reading “Snowy Mk 2 – a Symptom of a National Subversive Malady”
Zero Emissions Australia?
By Viv Forbes
It may be possible for a perpetual committee of green bureaucrats to electrify Australia with a vast but flimsy spider-web of power lines connecting consumers to wind turbines, solar panels, lithium batteries and pumped-hydro batteries. In this wonder-world, electric scooters and mini-cars will be mandated and demand rationing will be imposed. Continue reading “Zero Emissions Australia?”
Nutting-out Nuclear: Why Cost & Reliability Mean Wind & Solar are No Match for Nuclear Power
From “Stop These Things”:
If carbon dioxide gas is your poison, nuclear power is your antidote. STT promotes nuclear power, because it works. For those characters getting jumpy about our so-called climate ‘emergency’, nuclear power has the added benefit of being the only stand-alone power generation source that doesn’t emit CO2 during the process.
Quite apart from its safety and reliability, there’s another very solid reason to promote nuclear power: and that’s cost.
Of course, comparing never-reliable wind and solar with ever-reliable nuclear power, is no comparison, at all. But those that pump the purported benefits of wind and solar will continue to compare ripe, rosy apples with rotting oranges.
Read the original: https://stopthesethings.com/2019/05/29/nutting-out-nuclear-why-cost-reliability-mean-wind-solar-are-no-match-for-nuclear-power/
Long Way to Run: Warren Buffet Rejects All-Renewable Future With $10 Billion Bet on Oil & Gas
From “Stop These Things”:
Australian voters just shredded the notion that the proletariat is wedded to heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar.
Labor’s Bill Shorten sought to ram a 50% Renewable Energy Target down voter’s throats; a concept which the vast majority of them duly rejected.
Sure, there were plenty of other issues that sank the Green/Labor Alliance. However, it should be remembered that 2019 was billed as the ‘Climate Change Election’, with wind and solar pitched up as the only panacea to what has now become a ‘climate emergency’.
Read the original: https://stopthesethings.com/2019/05/31/long-way-to-run-warren-buffet-rejects-all-renewable-future-with-10-billion-bet-on-oil-gas/