Solar Power – The Saltbush Club

When Green Energy Failed in Broken Hill

By Jo Nova

On October 17th a storm blew seven transmission towers over, disconnecting the Broken Hill area [in Australia] from the national grid. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants.

But instead it’s been a debacle. They had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.

The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks finally brought in food and eventually the schools reopened. Full reconnection did will not happen until November 6th.

Politicians: If Net Zero is Achievable, Why Not Give Us A Small-Scale Demonstration?

By Dr. John Happs

Imagine a company that claimed to have a battery-powered airliner that would carry 200 passengers over a distance of several thousand kilometres. Imagine also that the government funnelled a few million taxpayer dollars into the development of such an aircraft, politicians and the public would demand a demonstration of its capabilities and safety before anyone boarded for a flight.

By the same token, if anyone makes the claim that a constant, reliable, zero emissions electricity supply, based on wind and solar, is achievable, surely it’s essential that we verify this claim before rushing into such an expensive, untested nation-wide scheme.

The claim was made in the 1950’s that nuclear energy was a viable source of reliable energy and a demonstration was quickly and successfully provided in Arco, Idaho when the city was powered by nuclear energy on July 17^th, 1955. The Borax III reactor supplied the small town of Arco with nuclear power.

The Arco success was followed by another nuclear power demonstration at Shippingport, near Pittsburgh, in 1957 when the plant was completed in just over 2 years. It was reported:

“So, on December 18, 1957, after having operated the reactor and the plant’s steam systems on and off for about two weeks, it came to pass that the first full-scale atomic power station to be built in the United States was synchronized with and connected to the grid. At first, the plant was operated at just low power levels. It didn’t take long to complete some tests and reach full rated power on December 23, 1957, with the plant putting its full rated 60,000 kilowatts onto Duquesne’s commercial grid.”

https://www.ans.org/news/article-2093/atoms-on-the-grid-shippingport-1957/

Continue reading: https://papundits.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/politicians-if-net-zero-is-achievable-why-not-give-us-a-small-scale-demonstration/

The Web of Deceit

By John McRobert

Farms grow food. Solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines and access roads sterilise land, locking it away from real farming. To call these installations ‘farms’ is a travesty.

And to read that 182,000 solar panels have been approved to cover 393 ha of land near Canberra despite the overwhelming objections from nearby landholders, demonstrates the Government agenda of net-zero targets will stop at nothing.

These Net Zero targets must be challenged. They will do nothing to change the climate for better or worse but they are impoverishing our nation by closing down a reliable energy source in favour of a logistically impossible network of dilute energy collectors interconnected by a web of transmission lines – a shocking misuse of governmental and electrical power – a great web of deceit.

The SunCable Gambit

By John McRobert

Refreshing to read Nick Cater’s exposé of the SunCable gambit ‘Sun sets on renewables superpower fantasy’ (The Australian, 26/8/2024). The ‘green tick’ given to the project had the usual weasel-word caveats of strict conditions to completely avoid important species such as the greater bilby and critical habitat. But clearing and cladding with imported glass panels 12,000-hectares of land, would be more devastating to native wildlife and ecosystems than a wildfire, and with far greater long-term damage inflicted on the landscape and our economy.

One might ask what has this fanciful project already cost the Australian taxpayer in subsidies and so-called ‘carbon credits’?

A Pilot Plant for Net Zero

By Viv Forbes

Both solar and wind energy have fatal flaws – solar stops when the sun goes down or if a cloud blocks the sun; wind fails if the wind is too strong or too weak. But every day we hear of some fantastic and expensive plan to keep the lights on when these unreliable energy twins stop work.

The latest thought bubble from Mr Bowen (the Australian Minister for Generating Blackouts) is for him to be able to drain the energy from electric car batteries to back up a failing grid. He suggests that batteries could also power the house or sell energy into the grid. (They are already scheming on how to use smart technology to prevent homeowners from charging their own batteries when flicker power is fading.)

Battery Baloney, Hydrogen Hype and Green Fairy Tales

By Viv Forbes

How low Australia has fallen – our once-great BHP now has a “Vice President for Climate”, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: “No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear” while Our ABC, Our CSIRO and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy plus a bit of standby gas, plus heaps of batteries and new power lines can power our homes, industries AND the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards?

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions – the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

Grand Land Grab: Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Needs 70% of Australia’s Prime Farmland

Australia’s prime agricultural land is being carpeted with endless seas of solar panels and thousands of these things are being speared everywhere the panels can’t go.

Dilute and diffuse, wind and solar require a staggering amount of space, and way more than their occasional, weather (and/or sunshine) dependent power generation can ever hope to justify.

Taking up vast tracts of farmland with solar panels means that that land produces nothing else. While the solar panels are lucky to produce power for 5-6 hours every day (ie 20-25% of the time).

Spearing hundreds of 300 tonne, 280m high turbines into productive farmland brings its own range of special ‘challenges’ for primary producers.

Continue reading: https://stopthesethings.com/2024/03/16/grand-land-grab-wind-solar-transition-needs-70-of-australias-prime-farmland/

Brilliant Test

The Great Wind and Solar Land Grab

By Steve Goreham

US Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Domain

Which is more environmentally friendly — an energy source that uses one unit of land to produce one unit of electricity, or a source that uses 100 units of land to produce one unit of electricity?

The answer should be obvious.

Nevertheless, “green” energy advocates call for a huge expansion of wind, solar and other renewables that use vast amounts of land to replace traditional power plants that use comparatively small amounts of land.

Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Canada, extensively analyzed the power density of alternative sources used to generate electricity. He defined power density as the average flow of electricity generated per square meter of horizontal surface (land or sea area).

Continue reading: https://www.westernjournal.com/op-ed-one-simple-energy-question-devastates-net-zero-pipe-dreams/

Big solar goes Big Bust: Largest solar plant in the world dies before it can be built

From Jo Nova. Jan 11, 2023

Today the massive Sun Cable project collapsed into voluntary administration four years after promising to build the world’s largest solar power plant in the Northern Territory. Sun Cable was a $35 billion project supposedly to collect those sacred green electrons on a 12,000 hectare “farm” in Australia (120 square kilometers) and send them to Singapore via an 800 km land cable and then a 4,200km undersea cable. It was theoretically going to be nine times bigger than the largest solar plant in the world, and use a cable 6 times longer than the longest one ever built.

Full article: https://joannenova.com.au/2023/01/big-solar-goes-big-bust-largest-solar-plant-in-the-world-dies-before-it-can-be-built/