Day: March 17, 2024

Icy blast of bankruptcies loom for Swedish wind-power sector, experts warn

Two Swedish economists have issued a warning that the country’s wind-power industry is on the brink of a wave of bankruptcies.

FURUDAL 2010-12-14Vindkraftverk p Hedboberget i Furudal i vintermiljˆ.Foto Trons / SCANPIX Kod 6995

From Brussels Signal

By Carl Deconinck

Two Swedish economists have issued a warning that the country’s wind-power industry is on the brink of a wave of bankruptcies.

Christian Sandström and Christian Steinbeck analysed wind-power companies’ annual reports in Sweden and their work revealed “significant financial problems”, they told Swedish media outlet Kvartal on February 28.

“The total loss for the years 2017–2022 amounted to 13.5 billion Swedish krona [€1.2 billion], which meant a loss margin of 39 per cent,” they said about the sector.

Such heavy losses seem to be the rule rather than the exception for wind-power companies in Sweden, according to the annual reports.

The Swedish Government has been pushing its national energy policies in a “green” direction, promoting wind power and decommissioning nuclear power plants. But the cost appears to be much more painful than previously thought, the economists stressed.

Sandström and Steinbeck have been pointing towards profitability problems in the wind sector for some time “despite suppliers benefiting from Government support through electricity certificates and being exempt from covering the entire expenses associated with grid adaptation for wind energy or the depreciation of properties near installations”.

Since the economists’ initial findings, Markbygden Ett, Sweden’s largest wind-farm installation with 179 turbines, is already facing bankruptcy, stacking up hundreds of millions of krona in debt.

The firm is not alone – many other alternative-power companies in Sweden are in trouble.

Sandström and Steinbeck pointed out that the sector as a whole has not made a profit in any year since 2017.

Company losses have ranged from 19 per cent to 90 per cent of turnover between 2017 and 2022, they said.

“The losses are simply because the industry cannot produce electricity at a cost below the market price, despite extensive subsidies,” the economists noted.

“That would put any other industry out of business, [although] the rate of investment has been very high.”

Both newer and older plants in the heavily subsidised industry shed cash, while economies of scale are also a limitation. The biggest farms make the biggest losses and only moderate-sized wind farms, with between 20 and 30 turbines, are turning any profits and those are at best described as “modest”.

Costs have failed to come down despite growing experience among those operating in the sector and the researchers did not observe any correlation between time elapsed and increased electricity production from existing turbines.

“Just as sailors on sailing ships once had to pray to higher powers for wind to get somewhere, wind farms can only wait for the right amount of wind,” they added.

On top of that, just 20 per cent of wind turbines in Sweden are Swedish owned. The rest are operated by foreign enterprises. Some 13 per cent of the reviewed turbines are Chinese.

Sandström and Steinbeck said the Chinese investors made their calculations based on “wind mapping” carried out by the Swedish Energy Agency and they have doubts about the accuracy of the data.

Also hammering profits is the fact that large parts of the Swedish wind-power industry cannot transfer or save power over-generation, meaning electricity needs to be consumed instantly or not at all – making it effectively unsustainable.

A few wind farms in the South of the country have gained financial momentum in recent years but all the others are stacking up more losses.

The academics noted that the change in the Swedish energy mix – decommissioning nuclear plants in favour of wind power – was politically driven and that no robust, financial independent industry has subsequently emerged.

A peculiar paradox also haunts the sector, the economists stressed. Low levels of wind leads to high electricity prices yet it also hinders electricity delivery.

On the flip side, when the wind is more powerful, oversupply drives down prices when there is ample electricity for sale.

“It is difficult to see a way out of this dilemma,” Sandström and Steinbeck concluded.

Arctic Ice Breaks Max Ceiling Mid March 2024

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post UAH January 2024: Ocean Warm, Land Cooling.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Arctic Ice Roaring Back in Max Month of March

The animation shows growing Arctic ice extents over the last two weeks. Of course central Arctic basins are frozen solid, and the additions are visible on both the Atlantic side (right) and the Pacific (left).

The graph below shows March daily ice extents for 2024 compared to 18 year averages, and some years of note.

The black line shows during March on average Arctic ice extents nearly reach 15 Wadhams (15M km2) on Day 62, March 2.  A slow decline is normal until Day 75, March 15.  However, that period in 2024 saw Arctic ice increase 430k km2, nearly half a Wadham.  Note also that this year ice extents rose above 15M already in February, and now in March ice has been well above that threshold for the last week.  2006 was the first year in this dataset and on Day 75 was 704k km2 less than yesterday.  As usual in transitional months like March and September SII (Sea Ice Index) shows a similar pattern with generally lower extents.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post UAH January 2024: Ocean Warm, Land Cooling.

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See USCS Warnings of Coastal Flooding

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

The table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice on day 75 across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2006.

Region2024075Day 75 Ave2024-Ave.20060752024-2006
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere151249871489504022994714420679704309
 (1) Beaufort_Sea1070983107031766710697111273
 (2) Chukchi_Sea9660069658911159642271779
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea10871371087110271086702435
 (4) Laptev_Sea897845897837889777371
 (5) Kara_Sea9350239205551446992142813595
 (6) Barents_Sea6718266431802864664619625630
 (7) Greenland_Sea771468621747149721613161158308
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence13368971529678-1927811134817202080
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago85486085321416468527152145
 (10) Hudson_Bay12609031258048285512513609543
 (11) Central_Arctic32438653222218216473244243-378
 (12) Bering_Sea723227735481-1225463525287975
 (13) Baltic_Sea7874180321-1580175063-96322
 (14) Sea_of_Okhotsk1215262990338224924874372340890

The overall surplus to average is 230k km2, (2%).  The only major deficit is in Baffin Bay, more than offset by surpluses in Okhotsk and Greenland seas.  Everywhere else is maxed out.

Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring Arctic ice extents.

Media Obsessions Dishonestly Link Every Hardship to a Climate Crisis: Now the Salisbury Beach Sand Dunes!

Salisbury Beach is part of a barrier island in the northeast corner of Massachusetts (Graphic C). It sits between the Atlantic Ocean to the east, extensive marshlands to the west and the Merrimack River to the south (graphic A). Such barrier islands consist of easily eroded unconsolidated sand and gravel.

By Jim Steele

Salisbury Beach is part of a barrier island in the northeast corner of Massachusetts (Graphic C). It sits between the Atlantic Ocean to the east, extensive marshlands to the west and the Merrimack River to the south (graphic A). Such barrier islands consist of easily eroded unconsolidated sand and gravel.

Growing up just north of Boston, we often visited Salisbury Beach and adjacent Plum Island Beach each summer. As a bad little boy, I was enthralled with catching prehistoric looking Horseshoe Crabs that were common there, but I confess I enjoyed scaring little girls with them. I also noticed the beaches were never exactly the same 2 years in a row, but never gave it much thought. I assumed storms and currents were always constantly eroding or incrementing those beaches.

Salisbury Beach just made headlines a few days ago. Expanding beaches during the 1950s to 1970s had encouraged people to build beach-front homes on this unstable barrier island. But ever since the Blizzard of 1978, Salisbury Beach has been eroding, and protective sand dunes were vanishing. To protect their homes, about 150 residents chipped in to import a half million dollars’ worth of sand from Maine and erect protective “sacrificial” dunes. Those artificial dunes did protect the homes from a storm 3 days later, but their costly sand was almost entirely washed away.

I feel sorry for the owners’ expensive remedies, but like people building on flood plains, they knew they had put themselves in harms’ way. They would always battle the ocean for shoreline.

The dishonesty I hate, is how click-bait media turns this battle with nature into evidence of a climate crisis, while history clearly suggests otherwise.

For example, blaming climate change for making things worse, The Weather Station wrote, scientists say all of it “is likely to get worse due to rising global temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is linked to more intense storms packed with more rain, and more extreme weather in general.” Others claim rising sea levels exacerbated the situation, but there has not been any significant regional rising sea level trend in the last 25 years. (Graphic B)

The media fails to inform the public that the Salisbury Beach region has naturally experienced periods of massive beach erosion since the 1700s, long before rising CO2. The Fort at Salisbury Point was built to protect Newburyport, and manned from 1863 to 1865 during the Civil War. It disappeared shortly afterwards due to beach erosion.

A 2018 study of 100-year shoreline changes along Salisbury Beach does not reveal any trend correlated with rising CO2 (Graphic D). The greatest shoreline extent was seen in 1928 (red line). By 1952, the coastline eroded and moved inland (yellow line). However, by 1978 the coastline expanded again and exceeded the 1928 expanse in the most southern part of Salisbury Beach (green line).

Other researchers mapped shoreline changes as far back as the 1800s (Graphic E). Their research determined the Salisbury Beach coastline had been eroded to its greatest inland extent in 1827 (Graphic E’s red line).

Clearly, the current Salisbury Beach erosion has happened independent of any modern climate change. However, humans may still have a hand in the problem. Salisbury Beach is nourished by sand and sediments transported southward along the coast. To protect Hampton Beach just to the north, jetties were constructed to catch the sand and grow Hampton Beach. But that remedy starves Salisbury Beach of sands that could replenish its shores.

These competing effects of sand transports must be understood to better guide efforts intended to protect Salisbury Beach. Blaming CO2 warming is a distraction. Bad analyses encourage worthless and expensive remedies.

Let them eat–snake?! Python farming could offer one of the most sustainable sources of meat in the world – ‘Much less carbon intensive’

Python farming could offer one of the most sustainable sources of meat in the world, according to a new study – Python produces large slabs of white meat similar to chicken filet.

From Climate Depot

By Marc Morano

https://abcnews.go.com/International/python-farming-offer-sustainable-sources-meat-world-new/story?id=108084507

By Julia Jacobo

Python farming could offer one of the most sustainable sources of meat in the world, according to a new study – Python produces large slabs of white meat similar to chicken filet.

Scientists are learning more about what sources of meat could serve as more sustainable alternatives to beef, pork and chicken.

Python meat could offer a form of meat much less carbon intensive than the current options, according to researchers who studied farms in Southeast Asia for two species of pythons — reticulated and Burmese — for 12 months.

Farmed python meat may offer a more sustainable alternative to other farmed meat because they can reproduce rapidly, even when food is not abundantly available, according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday.

Pythons have an “extreme biology and evolutionary slant toward extreme resource and energy efficiency,” Patrick Aust, conservation specialist at nonprofit People for Wildlife and co-author of the paper, told ABC News. Since pythons are an “ambush predator” that chooses prey up to 100% their own weight, they can survive for prolonged periods of time between meals, Aust said.

“These animals are extremely good converters of food and particularly protein,” he said. “Literally, they are specialists and making the most of very little.”

The pythons were fed on a weekly basis a variety of locally sourced proteins, such as wild-caught rodents and fishmeal, and were regularly measured and weighed over a 12-month period, according to the paper. The authors found that both species of python grew rapidly — by up to 46 grams per day — with females seeing higher growth rates than males.

Pythons are also able to survive extreme events, Aust said. When supply chains get disrupted — as displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic — it can have a “catastrophic impact” on global livestock systems.

“During COVID-19, there were a large number of chickens and pigs that had to be culled because there were minor disruptions in supply chains,” Aust said. “Farmers couldn’t handle even that disruption.”

Pythons, however, were shown during the study period to survive prolonged periods of disruptions, or extreme weather events, without suffering any ill effect,” Aust said, adding that they were at the “whims of the seasons” in southern Vietnam and Cambodia.

“They can pick up at the end of those periods,” he said.

The world is in need of high-quality protein with much less of a carbon footprint — especially as the effects of climate change continue to worsen, the researchers said.

“We really are running out resources, whilst at the same time, the demand for high quality nutrients is going up,” Aust said.

…

While Aust and his family regularly eat python meat — often fried with a “nice crispy crunch” — he added that it will take a long time for the Western world to culturally adapt to the thought of eating snakes.

“This isn’t going to be a cure-all for our protein needs, but perhaps will play an important role in the future in terms of acceptability palatability in the Western palate,” Aust said.

…

“Pythons can feel pain and fear, and they don’t want to be slaughtered any more than a cow, pig, chicken, or dog does,” Danielle Katz, PETA senior director of campaigns, told ABC News in a statement. “Experts agree that vegan eating is crucial for stopping the climate catastrophe in its tracks, so adding more animals to the already billions who suffer and die for food every year would be as misguided as it is cruel.”

Offshore Wind Bribe Falls Short

The $2 million bribe was turned down–flatly, by the mayor of Ocean City, Rick Meehan. This “opportunity” spread out over 20 years came with this request from US Wind: “local government officials… [refraining] from making any negative comments or objections.”

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Respectfully, the future of the Town of Ocean City cannot be bought [by offshore wind interests] and we intend to continue to do what is necessary to protect the interests of our residents, property owners and future generations.” – Mayor Rick Meehan, Ocean City, Maryland

The $2 million bribe was turned down–flatly, by the mayor of Ocean City, Rick Meehan. This “opportunity” spread out over 20 years came with this request from US Wind: “local government officials… [refraining] from making any negative comments or objections.”

Here is the story reported in UtilityDive:

“In December 2023, I received an email from Jeff Grybowski, Chief Executive Officer for US Wind, offering Ocean City the same opportunity that has been extended to the Delaware Beach Towns,” [Ocean City Mayor] Meehan said. “My response was, ‘Respectfully the future of the Town of Ocean City cannot be bought and we intend to continue to do what is necessary to protect the interests of our residents, property owners and future generations.’” …

The story continued:

Meehan said he found the idea “unconscionable.” ….

That leaves US Wind as the only company currently developing a wind project offshore near Ocean City, and the town’s only opponent in its “battle of the proposed construction of wind turbines off our coast,” according to Ocean City’s official website. “As of January 2024, The Town of Ocean City does not support any turbines built off our coast,” a release from the town said. “As of January 2024, US Wind is the only company with proposed plans to build turbines off the coast of Ocean City.”

Ever the crony, US Wind tried to paint a happy face on the situation.

Nancy Sopko, US Wind’s senior director of external affairs, said in an email that while Ocean City chose not to discuss a community benefit agreement, the company wants to continue to work with the city as “good neighbors.” … “As a member of this community, we believe it’s important to do what we can to help it thrive,” Sopko said. However, she added, “Ocean City’s position on community benefits has no impact on our project plans.”

Final Comment

Nancy Sopko is quoted at the end of the story: “We’re very confident that we will build Maryland’s first offshore wind farm and deliver clean energy to the people of Delmarva for years to come.”

Nope. Real environmentalists are standing up, knowing also that the electricity rate increases from offshore wind will be substantial, even after U.S. taxpayers get soaked via the U.S. Department of Energy grants and the Production Tax Credit.

Report: Bill to End Colorado Oil, Gas Permitting Could Have $2B Impact on Tax Revenue

A bill to substantially restrict oil and gas permitting in Colorado would result in widespread financial and environmental impacts, according to a new report by a research group.

From ClimateREALISM

By Anthony Watts

Guest essay via The Center Square, reprinted with permission.

A bill to substantially restrict oil and gas permitting in Colorado would result in widespread financial and environmental impacts, according to a new report by a research group.

The report, published by the Common Sense Institute, a free-enterprise think tank, says Senate Bill 24-159 would negatively impact the state’s economy as well as tax revenue at the state and local levels.

The legislation also would result in increased emissions, according to the report, which referenced the recently published Colorado Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap 2.0 Report to support its point.

“More fuel would be imported to Colorado, primarily by heavy trucks carrying oil and gas products, which themselves produce local air pollution,” the state document says.

SB24-159 would mandate the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission to adopt regulations ending the issuance of new oil and gas permits by Jan. 1, 2030. It would reduce the number new wells in 2028 and 2029 and require companies receiving permits after 2024 to stop operating by 2032.

The bill is scheduled for a hearing by the Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee on Thursday.

CSI found $1.9 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2022 from the oil and gas industry was the largest single source of revenue, an average of $321 per Colorado resident.

The $1.2 billion in property taxes paid by the industry was the largest source of revenue for local taxing districts, according to the report. Schools received $432 million in oil and gas property tax revenue, and fire and police departments, cities, counties and other local services received $768 million. It amounted to 6% of all property tax revenue and 7% of all school property tax revenue.

“The economic impact of banning oil and gas drilling in Colorado would be devastating and goes beyond lost production, tax revenue, and job losses,” CSI Energy Fellow Trisha Curtis said in a statement. “At a minimum at risk is $2 billion in state and local tax revenue, over $400 million which funds Colorado schools, and nearly 200,000 jobs.”

If the bill becomes law, CSI estimates a total of 34,700 jobs would be lost in Colorado during in the first year and 181,800 during the next 10 years. It projects 70% of the jobs lost will be in the metro Denver area. The state’s gross domestic product would be reduced by 5.4% or $48.5 billion in the 10th year and a total of $321 billion during the decade.

The report emphasized the proposed law would only shift where energy is produced.

“This action would likely result in more pollution, higher methane emissions, more air pollution in our neighboring states, increased transportation emissions from increased imports of fossil fuels for use in Colorado, increased risk of accidents and spills of oil and gas products through increased interstate trucking, and price disruptions and less certainty of supply for all Coloradans without a meaningful long-term impact on fossil fuel consumption,” the report stated, referencing Gov. Jared Polis’ roadmap.

AI chat bots are automated Wikipedias warts and all

Having worked on the I side of AI, off and on, for over 50 years, I am fascinated by the wave of chatbots that are getting so much debate beginning with Chat GPT. To get my fair share of abuse, here are some thoughts on it.

From CFACT

By David Wojick

Having worked on the I side of AI, off and on, for over 50 years, I am fascinated by the wave of chatbots that are getting so much debate beginning with Chat GPT. To get my fair share of abuse, here are some thoughts on it.

Just like Wikipedia, these machines are there to answer your questions. But their corpus is probably enormously larger—how big I have no idea. An interesting question is: One would like to know what body of documentation a given chat bot is working from, and how this differs from bot to bot.

Question-answering systems have been around for a while now. They really hit their stride when a bot called IBM Watson creamed two human champions in a 2011 Jeopardy match.

What is impressive is that the new bots provide long form answers along the lines of a Wikipedia article. But then you can also question the article, asking for more. You can even disagree and debate the issue. This is truly amazing.

What seems to surprise or disappoint a lot of people is that these bot answers can be wrong, or biased, or even deliberate lies. I am sure this is not deliberate, but when it comes to emulating humans, which is what AI is supposed to do, it is right on the money.

After all, there is a lot of bad information out there for the bot to use. And being biased by your training is nothing new. The lying looks at this point to be a mystery which is very interesting. Certainly a good research topic.

In fact, there is a lot of research going on into these bots and their potential (for good or evil). Google Scholar says there are already over 15,000 journal articles that mention Chat GPT, with about 600 that have it in the title making it the central focus of the research.

See https://scholar.google.com/

All of this means that one must be cautious in using a chat bot, just as with Wikipedia or any source for that matter. Bias and falsehood are constant companions of human affairs.

In particular, Chat GPT is heavily biased in the climate and energy area, being basically an artificial alarmist. The other bots likely are too. But so is Wikipedia and for the same reason. All are controlled by alarmists.

But unlike most alarmists, these chat bots are happy (can I say that?) to discuss and debate the climate and energy issues. They will even admit being wrong, which might be a rare human trait. So one use is for skeptics to test their arguments, learning and overcoming the false alarmist counter-arguments. This could strengthen skepticism.

Unfortunately, while a bot can be convinced to agree with a skeptical argument, they do not seem to learn from that experience. They give the same alarmist response the next time queried. Maybe the next wave will do better.

I have no idea how the bots actually work, but from my side, it is not hard to go from simple question answering to long-form answers. Back in 1973, I discovered how sentences fit together when we write and speak.

At the simplest, each sentence after the first is answering an unspoken question posed to one of the prior sentences. Since there can be multiple answers to a given question and multiple questions posed to the same sentence, this generates a tree structure I named the “issue tree”.

There are two major exceptions. One is objections, and the other is when we start talking about what has been said instead of talking about the subject under discussion. These can make issues complicated and thus confusing.

So, to craft a many-sentence response to your question, the bot just has to repeatedly pose questions to the sentences it has so far and add the answers as new sentences. To do that, it just needs a question generator to complement its answer generator.

However they do it, chatbots are amazing to me. Each is a Wikipedia-like machine that, unlike Wikipedia, is not bound by what has already been written for it. Of course, they can do damage, just as Wikipedia can, so caution is called for.

Wikipedia changed the world of knowing, and chatbots are likely to also, only more so.

Electric Transmission Buildout Could Cost Americans Trillions of Dollars

Though windmills and solar panels get the headlines, the big energy topic in Washington is electric transmission.

From Watts Up With That?

By Bernard L. McNamee

March 14, 2024

Though windmills and solar panels get the headlines, the big energy topic in Washington is electric transmission. Whether it is Congress’s newfound interest in permitting reform, the U.S. Department of Energy’s new Grid Deployment Office, or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) upcoming final rule on transmission planning and cost allocation, how to build and pay for long-range transmission to connect generators to customers is considered the final piece in the quest to meet net-zero goals.   

Like so many issues in Washington, the need for more transmission lines is accepted without question and the costs are not considered. But for American consumers, especially low-income and elderly, as well as small businesses and energy intense manufacturers, building new transmission lines could result in much higher monthly bills and leave them on the hook for stranded assets.

Traditionally, high-voltage transmission lines, consisting of 150-foot lattice towers crossing the landscape for hundreds of miles, were planned for by local utilities to meet their customers’ energy needs and subject to approval by state public utility commissions. But public policy goals to promote renewables are changing how the grid is being developed.

Over the past few years, States established renewable energy mandates; Congress enacted over $1 trillion in taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy; and President Biden issued an executive order setting net-zero goals for electricity generation by 2035. To fulfill these policies, the grid needs new high-voltage transmission lines—lots of them—and they will be expensive.

According to the “Net-Zero America” analysis published by Princeton researchers, achieving net zero goals with 100% wind and solar by 2050 will require an additional $3.5 trillion in capital spending for new transmission lines. If net-zero goals are pursued with a mix of renewables, nuclear, and natural gas generation (which may include carbon capture), then a significant portion of this transmission investment would be unnecessary. Furthermore, a balanced resource mix of dispatchable and renewable resources would enhance grid reliability without overbuilding renewables or transmission.

Contributing to the cost is that renewable projects are often built far away from where the electricity will be consumed. For example, the Midwest is a great place to build windmills, but long-distance transmission lines are needed to deliver their electricity to big population centers on coasts. Not only are these lines capital intensive, but they also require purchasing or condemning private property to site them. Adding insult to injury, many of these transmission lines will not serve the people whose land is used.       

Renewable power developers see the potential for selling their electricity in higher priced power systems near urban centers, while also being able to harvest generous taxpayer subsidies. But having to pay for transmission cuts into profits. Furthermore, property owners impacted by the transmission lines are objecting. The solution: a wave of lobbyists and special interests pressing policy makers to eliminate permitting barriers and to socialize the $3.5 trillion cost of building new transmission lines to more Americans.   

In response, FERC is engaged in a rulemaking to change transmission planning and cost allocation.Among the proposals is requiring grid planners to consider factors like “geographic zones”, such as wind potential in the Midwest; state and federal “public policy goals”; and “trends” in technology. If adopted, these factors would provide more subjective ways to justify building big, expensive, long-range transmission projects that would be paid for by a broader number of Americans.  

With public concerns about costs, transmission advocates now argue that more transmission is needed for grid reliability. Yet, the threat of blackouts is the result of the very net-zero policies that now require more transmission. For example, Maryland’s recent decision to shut down the Brandon Shores coal plant will cause customers across 12 states and the District of Columbia to pay $796 million for new transmission projects to support reliability.  

Customers may also be left paying for transmission projects that are no longer needed. New technology, such as small modular nuclear reactors that can be built at existing power plants that already have transmission access, may negate the need for new transmission lines to serve renewable generators. The current push for transmission reform may be another expensive example of Washington trying to solve yesterday’s problem. This is not mere speculation, since 2008 customers have paid $250 million for the PATH transmission line that crossed three states, even though it was never built and never served customers.  

It is time for policy makers to reaffirm that the electric grid exists to serve customers, not developers and investors. Transmission planning and cost allocation should be driven by the needs of customers and overseen by the state regulators who are best suited to protect their citizens. At a time when inflation is making its tougher from families and businesses to thrive, imposing additional costs for transmission buildouts for special interests makes little sense.  

Bernard L. McNamee was a Commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2018-2020. 

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

Fancy Fins Didn’t Help with the Visibility

According to the mainstream media it’s the southern Great Barrier Reef that has been hit hardest with coral bleaching, and particularly the corals in the Capricorn region that includes Great Keppel Island.

According to the mainstream media it’s the southern Great Barrier Reef that has been hit hardest with coral bleaching, and particularly the corals in the Capricorn region that includes Great Keppel Island.   I have a home in Yeppoon, which is just a short ferry ride away. I have been keen to go see for myself, but the weather has been less than ideal.

Looking down at the ferry anchored in Fisherman’s Beach bay, Great Keppel Island. The water is looking rather grey-blue, because the sun is behind a cloud. (Photograph taken by Jennifer Marohasy, 15th March 2024.)

The dive shop on the island has been telling me there is some bleaching, but it’s hard to see because visibility is a problem.  That has been the situation for the last week – since John Abbot and I drove back to Yeppoon from Noosa.

By ‘visibility’ they mean the distance one can see under-the-water.

Yesterday, Friday, I nevertheless caught the ferry across to the island and made my way around to Monkey Beach reef.

Great Keppel Island is located just to the northeast of the mouth of the Fitzroy River, so when there is a lot of wind and particularly a lot of rain, the water can become murky to the extent you cannot see the corals even if they are just, one metres below, which was the situation yesterday.

Just got out of the water at Monkey Beach, the reef is a good distance out, and visibility was so bad I couldn’t see the corals.  The water nevertheless looked very blue from the beach when the sun was out.  (Photograph taken yesterday, 15th March 2024.)
The view from Wreck Point, Yeppoon, looking across Keppel Bay to Rossyln Bay marina and beyond to Great Keppel Island far in the distance on the horizon. The water at the moment is so muddy in the bay.  At other times of the year and depending on wind direction this bay can be so blue. (Photograph by Jennifer Marohasy, 16th March 2024.)

While the coral bleaching has been blamed on elevated sea temperatures, which may be the situation, it’s hard to know for sure.

The coral bleaching could be from freshwater runoff, from the Fitzroy River.

The Fitzroy River drains the single largest area (approximately 143,000 km2) of the Great Barrier Reef catchments and discharges into the largest estuary and then into Keppel Bay. The Keppel Islands within the bay have many fringing inshore coral reefs, including Monkey Bay reef.

When I look at the data for Rosslyn Bay marina, just across from the island and around the bay from where I live in Yeppoon, the most remarkable thing is the drop in sea-level at the end of last year, 2023.

Note the monthly data for Rosslyn Bay Marina, just across from Great Keppel Island.
From The Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Array Monthly Data Report – December 2023. The most recent report available as at March 2024.

Low tides associated with low sea levels can also cause corals to bleach; particularly if the low tides occur on sunny days when there is significant incoming solar radiation and not much wave action.

The lower than usual sea levels are perhaps due to the El Nino, with all the water sloshing across to the other side of the Pacific because the trade winds haven’t been blowing as hard as usual.

Sooner or later, I will get back out to Monkey Beach reef, and I will report what I see, once visibility has improved and I can see the corals again.  In the meantime, consider subscribing for my irregular email newsletter so that I can keep you in the loop.

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To get to Monkey Beach reef I had to walk across the island from the southern end of Fisherman’s Beach all the way to Long Beach and then cut across that headland back to Monkey Beach. The more direct route is badly eroded, and not maintained.  Photograph of Long Beach by Jennifer Marohasy, 15th March 2024.
The walking tracks on Great Keppel Island are in disrepair. This map shows theoretically how it should be, https://hikingtheworld.blog/national_park/woppa-great-keppel-island/

Can anyone find me some location specific up-to-date sea temperature data for anywhere at the Great Barrier Reef?  Not the colour maps, that are variously based on homogenised satellite records.

Acropora (branching hard corals) and painted sweetlip (fish) photographed at Monkey Beach reef on 28th December 2023, by Jennifer Marohasy when visibility was much better.
Acropora corals at Monkey Beach reef, December 2023.

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The feature photograph is of Jennifer Marohasy sitting in Fisherman’s Beach waiting for the ferry later in the afternoon on 15th March 2024.