Renewable Energy – Page 2 – The Saltbush Club

The Green Road to Blackouts

by Viv Forbes

California leads the way to electricity blackouts, closely followed by South Australia.

They both created this problem by taxing, banning, delaying or demolishing reliable coal, nuclear, gas or hydro generators while subsidising and promoting unreliable electricity from the sickly green twins – solar and wind. All supposed to solve a global warming crisis that exists only in academic computer models.

Energy policy should be driven by proven reliability, efficiency and cost, not by green politics.

Wind and solar will always be prone to blackouts for three reasons. Continue reading “The Green Road to Blackouts”

The Rising Costs of the Climate War

By Alan Moran

Rio Tinto’s [Paywall] announced closure of its aluminium smelter in New Zealand due to uncompetitive power prices is a reminder of the vulnerability of Australia’s four remaining smelters, all of which face sharply higher prices courtesy of government energy policies. With energy costs comprising about a third of their total costs, smelters are industry’s bellwethers of future energy competitiveness and all four of Australia’s are on national suicide watch.

As a result of subsidies to wind and solar, these expensive and unreliable energy sources have caused high customer costs, both directly and indirectly, while also diverting the nation’s investment resources into avenues that actually damage the economy. Continue reading “The Rising Costs of the Climate War”

Greens Deliver US Security to China

By Paul Driessen and Dr. Ned Mamula

Excerpt from https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2020/07/18/hold-china-accountable–or-give-it-even-more-control-n2572706

The United States is also beholden to China for metals and minerals in energy, aerospace, defense, telecom and other industries. Joe Biden, AOC, Democrats and environmentalist groups would not just shut down fossil fuel production, pipelines and fuels for power generation and manufacturing. They would effectively turn our energy systems, manufacturing, defense, livelihoods and living standards over to China.

Continue reading “Greens Deliver US Security to China”

Renewables Hit a Record High of Global Energy Production – 3.6%. The World Still Runs on Coal, Oil and Gas

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.

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”