Chris Bowen, Minister for Climate Change and Energy, is gung-ho for more wind despite rising power prices and evidence of frequent and extensive wind droughts across the whole of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM). Apropos the period from 11 am on August 7 until 4 am on August 9. For 42 hours wind delivered just 7.64 percent of its plated capacity. Imagine, in your wildest febrile imaginings, how many ‘big batteries’ would be needed to fill the gap.
As I reported in Quadrant Online here, the NEM, basically the whole of South Eastern Australia, used 189 TWh in 2021-22. That comes to 21,575 MW delivered, on average, each and every hour. Australian’s biggest battery in Victoria stores 450 MWh. To be clear, this means it can provide 450 MW for one hour before going flat and needing to be recharged; from somewhere. OK then, how many “big batteries” of the Victorian size would be required to fill the gap? Answer, 2014. And the cost, based on the $160 million spent to install the Victorian battery? Answer, $322 billion.
True, I have assumed nothing from wind when it would be providing a little bit and have not taken account of solar power. Then again, 42 hours encompasses a lot of night when solar is providing zilch. The point is that fiddling with the numbers would still mean that batteries can provide no effective storage solution. It’s a crock to assume otherwise. A swindle of enormous proportions.
As Mr Micawber might have said. Annual electricity requirement continuous. Annual wind and sun power intermittent. Batteries deficient. Result energy misery.
Unfortunately, Mr Bowen has not nearly the same perspicacity as Mr Micawber. We are at the mercy of someone with an obsessive personality disorder, fixated on a quixotic quest to save the planet from an illusory attack from manmade climate change. It would be funny if it were not making us all poorer and, in a reversal of progress, subject again to the perfidious elements. Over 250 years of progress built, in large part, on reliable and affordable energy put at risk for no rational reason. Based on bought-and-paid-for so-called “science.” A bodgie science which comes up with no testable predictions but, instead, spews out tenuous extrapolations and unhinged speculations. All of which have foundered on the rock of unfolding reality.
In the meantime, in case you thought insanity among the powers that be was restricted to climate change, the Australian Department of Health is still running TV ads encouraging young healthy people – shown, e.g., playing outdoor basketball – to get a free booster. If, wait for it, it has been six months since their last bout of Covid or being jabbed.
Leave aside the absence of evidence that the vaccines are at all effective in preventing death among the only cohort at material risk – those, usually elderly, with several comorbidities. How many such people who caught Covid were saved by the vaccine? It would be nice to have some hard evidence. How about healthly youngish people? Recently, the Israeli health ministry said that there were “zero reports of people 18-50 dying of Covid without pre-existing conditions.” Nothing surprising about that to those paying attention to the data these past three years and more.
Are the apparatchiks in Australia’s Department of Health paying attention, I wonder? Youngish healthy people are at no risk from the virus, yet might suffer serious side effects from the vaccine. Logical conclusion: youngish healthy people shouldn’t be vaccinated. Yes, but only in a sane world.
I haven’t spent enough time observing Turtlehead of late to get a good sense for whether he genuinely believes he’s on a mission from Gaia, or just latching onto something, anything, having failed miserably at every other Ministry he’s been assigned. Supercilious Mong.
Thanks Peter
I you have provided me with word of the week for the next two weeks:
Perspicacity
Quixotic
Bowen lacks even the wit to hope that “something will turn up”. It is historically remarkable that two such predicaments, “climate” and the CCP virus, should occur simultaneously with the crisis of replicability in science. Boredom and careerism make a trifecta when we add gender bending. What an insane generation.
It’s an insanity that has been allowed to run amok across the West for over almost two decades, with no fight back from cowardly right of centre parties. So, when you don’t fight, what do you expect will happen? This insanity is now through our schools, our universities, our media, our sporting codes, and our corporations, it’s de rigour, and if you dare protest, question, and critique, then you’re smeared as some dinosaur denier. I don’t think people here quite understand how far this rot has permeated through our banks and corporations.
“Climate” and “ESG” is now rampant.
The final capitulation was Scumbag Morrison’s absurd decision to sign up to net zero emissions, no doubt he was coerced by the unlamented Sharma, Zimmerman, Falinsky, Wilson, Martin and Allan et al, desperate to save their inner city wealthy electorates and then the joke, the big effing joke, is that these vacuous, lightweight, LINOs (who are all Greens), are gonski from parliament, trounced by Teals. Outflanked in climate zealotry.
Yes, Bowen is a Dickensian, stumbling, bumbling clown but the real villains here are the Liberals and Nationals who signed us up to this net zero catastrophe, to the dismay of their base. They could have offset that idiotic decision by going to the May 2022 election asking for a mandate for nuclear power but they lacked the spine to do that. It’s they who are lacking in any perspicacity.
There were 3 articles in Courier Mail pushing vaccine updates yesterday.
The important thing to note was that 16 6m have not had a vaccine for more than 6 months. That is a clear signal the people are sending but it is clear the CHO’S are not listening.
Remind me of the origins of that quote about “Omelettes and eggs”.
Speaking of the Khmer Rouge:
Do some digging (so to speak) about the Kampong Chhnang Airport in Cambodia
Another wonderful “joint venture” and “multi-function” project.
Welcome to the REAL world.
My power bill has gone up $20 / month over the last two months. This is on top of losing the discount for paying my bill on time. I have taken every opportunity to berate AGL over why my power bill is going up when renewables are ‘too cheap to measure’ and why they are getting rid of coal-fire power stations if they can’t replace them with renewables.
Surprisingly, no answer.
Well at least blackouts in QLD, even in winter shouldn’t result in me freezing to death. My sympathies go out to my southern cousins who may be in for a bleak winter.
The overall cost of that battery is probably higher than that once you add in infrastructure. They don’t do anything if not hooked up the grid and given substations etc.
The other thing they gloss over is that batteries decline in capacity, so that 450 MWh may be down by half when it reaches end of life. Plus the end of life is likely to be around 8 or 10 years. So after only ten years you have to spend another $322 billion for one hour of grid-wide backup. Replacement capital for a centralized power plant, be it coal, gas or nuclear, is vastly lower.
WUWT had a nice article a couple days ago, which puts paid to Bowens claims about renewables being cheapest and nuclear most expensive:
The Actual Levelized Cost Of Energy (2 Jun)
Here is the key graph, which is Fig. 3. I suspect those numbers for solar and wind are still ‘way too low, since “backup” is usually gas turbines. If you require batteries instead those numbers are going to be far higher.
The interesting implication of this is that you probably be better off in both life cycle assessed CO2 emissions AND cost per MWh if you just gave all the wind and solar stuff the boot and just run the grid using high efficiency closed cycle gas turbine plants. Of course that would require enough gas, which Bowen doesn’t want to drill for.
A simple message to sceptics of this website and commentators/bloggers:
Energy prices have gone up 20% in January this year and will go up another 20% soon.
Nuclear-generated electricity was produced in Finland recently so cheaply they had an electricity glut.
Allow coal again and allow nuclear power. Nuclear power will supersede coal; prices will come down before nuclear power is installed in Australia, in the long term we get the cheapest source of electricity and zero ongoing CO2 emissions.
Everyone is happy once they understand nuclear is truly safer than all other energy sources.
You need to understand there is a depopulation and control agenda in play all around the world. The aims are simple:
– Reduce the Earth’s population to a billion or less
– Enslave and control the remainder
Once you understand this, then all this ‘insanity’ makes sense. Do you honestly think the globalists who own the corporations, control the UN/WEF/WHO, the Central Banks, the media, the national politicians and senior levels of their bureaucracies don’t know these actions (e.g. dismantling fossil fuel industries and injecting people with dangerous experimental substances) will wreak havoc? Of course they know!
Yes, there are always a large portion of useful idiots and cowards needed to carryout their orders. Just like you needed guards and administrators at Auschwitz. But these aren’t the ones who orchestrated and executed this.
So my advice is for this site is to stop wasting time pulling your hair out trying to point out the insanity of it all, and rather concentrate on the true villains who are knowingly and deliberately trying to destroy western civilisation.
Cassie of Sydney,
Agree with you except for Bowen, he is a bumbling clown, but along with being a fwit, appendage strokes and weasel, he is also IMHO, dangerous.
Dwarf mongrel!
Thanks Peter,
I’m continually astounded by the lack of simple beer-coaster analysis of almost any aspect of the green zero dream.
2014 big batteries, for example, is more than one big battery completed every week between now and 2050 (the magic pudding date).
.. and that is just one piece of the idiotic jenga puzzle that’s not planned.
Has there been a Govt Minister who has done more damage than Bowen ???
Responsible for 1K+ deaths at sea with the boats when as Immigration Minister and now will be responsible for the collapse of our electricity/energy grid.
I’d say more as to what should be done with him but I don’t think it would pass the censors . . . But I can still think it.
You’ve omitted a major factor in your calculations. We’re every Australian petrol vehicle to convert to EVs and people use them the same as they use their petrol vehicles the total electrical usage would approximately double, doubling the battery requirements.
Of course, if the powers that be have their way, the grid will be able to call on those vehicles’ batteries to bolster the total electrical supply.
Imagine the joy of a family trip tomorrow, topping up the car from 80% overnight to ensure you have the range, only to wake up with the car at 10% because somebody else, deemed “more important” than you drained your battery.
Another reason why we should embark on a civil nuclear power program is that it would make our reliance on nuclear submarines much more credible. Some people might even believe that we knew what we were doing with them. There is no climate emergency, so we have plenty of time to set up our nuclear power program in a considered and professional way (unlike our rush to wind and solar).
In addition under Labor Government we are to receive an increased immigration surge over the foreseeable future. The number of people set to call Australia home is about to soar, with new government forecasts predicting the nation’s population will jump by 900,000 people by the end of June, 2025. Not only will we be struggling for electricity given the Bowen experiment, but also running out dams empty. Perhaps if prospective migrants knew they may likely to be crowded six to a two-bedroom home, using candles and drinking bottled water they might have a second thought about coming. On the other hand, that may be the case for all of us.
Yes, Bowen is a Dickensian, stumbling, bumbling clown but the real villains here are the Liberals and Nationals who signed us up to this net zero catastrophe, to the dismay of their base. They could have offset that idiotic decision by going to the May 2022 election asking for a mandate for nuclear power but they lacked the spine to do that.
The Morrison government was a catastrophe on a scale that few could have predicted. The scale of it was reflected in the wholesale desertion by the “faithful” at the last election.
What can you say about Bowen? For me, he is the epitome of the struggling pompous fool that you recall from high school. The one who whose scholastic performance never matched his expectations. The bore of epic proportions. Am I being too kind?
A carefully selected TOOL to implement absurd and impractical policies on behalf of the bruvers.
Bowen is not stupid. Anything but. He’s something else entirely.
But it’s handy to call him stupid.
reading about Green hydrogen lately … which appears to be the next climate scam being pushed now that solar/wind/batteries is falling apart due to basic engineering, cost and reality facts on the ground.
re Bowen. His eyes are too close and you can see him visibly attempting to think of answers when interviewed. A person who should be bought for his actual worth and sold for what he thinks is his value
Bowen buys his suits in the children’s department and is a classic example of small man syndrome.
Kaoss55
Out of interest how would you combat this insanity.
We all saw the personal physical andverbal attack on Abbot and on Morrison. We saw how a Mong pile blocked in front of Morrisons home.
We saw what happened to Sophie Mirabella in her lecture theatre.
You see how peaceful protests are allowed and innocent people can be jailed for defending themselves.
You saw what happened to that liberal female politician.
How do you beak the media monopoly.
“… just run the grid using high efficiency closed cycle gas turbine plants.”
Just replacing existing coal plants with HELE ones would reduce CO2 by 30%, and reduce coal consumption by the same amount. Of course, it would also be reliable and despatchable.
The batteries are for grid stability, as opposed to the provision of power. Aren’t they? Genuine question, that how it was when Electric a Jesus put in the SA Big Battery. Has the technology changed?
The aim is to make vehicles so impractical and expensive so the hoi polli can’t afford to own one. Bikes and public transport, no long drives, no intra-state nor overseas travel for you plebs.
No candles, they made from paraffin which is an oil based product. And you can’t have bees wax candles either because that would make you a slave owner in the eyes of the truely woke.
Yeah, Industrial scale “Green Hydrogen” is right up there with unicorns and fairies.
And on the COVID vaccines; my daughter, a RN + Midwife, is still boning bacon at sweat shop because she cannot be employed as either a RN or midwife in Victoria unless she submits to a vaccine she doesn’t want after seeing (first hand as an RN & Midwife) the problems it is creating with young women’s cycles and therefore their fertility. It f*ng insane, and infuriating.
There is currently a massive green/left thinking inertia that is impossible to affect in any meaningful way.
Bowen and his ilk all believe it will be ok on the day and they see no reason to doubt all the like minded folks who are heading the same way. There will always be naysayers for them to endure, like folks here on this tiny forum.
There’s no downside for Bowen or Labor to just keep rolling the wy they are since the media and education, research facilities are all in agreement with them on the climate thing.
Catastrophie is the only thing that will check this movement and even then, I’m sure scapegoats will be available.
We are now controlled by the left at every turn of science, education, health, politics and information.
I don’t have a solution, and I only see it getting worse, but we’re a long way from collapse. We can always pour more and more money into the bottomless pit, and that’s what we will do.
“The batteries are for grid stability, as opposed to the provision of power.”
Nah, they’re for “shaving” – buy cheap off-peak to charge the battery, then dump it back to the grid when prices are higher. Don’t forget to sell the going concern before the batteries need to be replaced.
Billie: I take some hope from the turnaround in Germany and greater Europe as people see the hollow renewable promises turn out to be false. And growing number of centrist and right governments being elected on account of the massive climate deception.
And a belated reminder about the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre.
The annual repression of memorial activities in Hong Kong proceeded as usual
“Carthago delenda est.”
As almost everyone here knows, CO2 is the staff of life. It greens deserts and fertilizes plants. Just like blessed global warming! Where does and has life teemed in the past, Chris Bowen (and your ilk on both sides): At the poles, or near the equator? He probably hasn’t a clue.
I think nuclear plants, emerging in a free market economy with competing energies, are a great idea. But certainly not because they’re “carbon neutral”. On the contrary, I would use them inter alia to manufacture more CO2, along with coal, gas, etc. For the sake of the planet.
We are living in an age of insanity. Culturally, we are emaciated anorexics facing ourselves in the mirror and thinking “I’m way too fat.”
We are suicidal. At the height of our technological powers, we have decided to shoot ourselves in the foot. With maximum ferocity.
Who is the uber psychiatrist who will diagnose and pull us out of this difficult syndrome?
It should be the Church. But … Pope Francis? God help us. I pray for his conversion to Catholicism in my rosaries regularly. So far, not much chop. Keep praying and fasting.
A fish goes rotten at the head first.
Something’s in the water.
Terry Pratchett had it right. This is the century of the fruitbat.