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.
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