Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The pushback against ESG, or corporate environmental, social, and governance policies is fully on — and it’s working.
CFACT and our allies are working to poke, prod, and shame companies into backing away from destructive policies of appeasement of leftwing climate and social pressure groups.
Greg Neff spearheaded CFACT’s efforts to make full use of the spring shareholder meeting season for publicly traded companies to put corporate CEOs on the spot.
Greg publicly asked JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon about his megabank’s involvement with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. Agriculture officials from at least 11 states have said that ideologically blinkered net zero policies will lead to food shortages and huge price increases for consumers. “Is it wise for this board to step outside its expertise and make commitments to push forward the NZBA’s extreme agenda?” Greg asked.
Greg asked the CEO of State Street, another megabank, his first question of the day, “State Street was wise to pull out of Climate Action 100+. Can we now expect to see the company also start backing more viable energy sources like oil, gas, and nuclear as opposed to costly and unreliable solar and wind?”
Greg asked the CEO of Ford, “Despite the CEO’s assurances that the next generation of EVs will be profitable, the fact is Ford’s EV Unit lost $1.3 Billion in the first quarter of 2024. How is this not putting good money after bad when the American people have clearly shown that most have no interest in transitioning to electric?”
Greg asked the CEO of GM, “Global Cadillac Vice President John Roth recently announced that the company was no longer pursuing a goal of eliminating the production of internal combustion engines by 2030. This is great news for many motorists who are not excited by electric vehicles. But is this about-face just a temporary thing, or will GM continue to resist the political pressure to impose electric vehicles on an unwilling public?”
Greg asked the CEO of Blackrock, “Barrons reported that in 2023, investors pulled more than $13 billion from US sustainable funds, and BlackRock saw a 12% reduction in gains compared to 2021 in this area. Is seeking to become a global leader via a sinking investment strategy that’s on a downward trend a wise idea?”
Greg asked the CEO of Citibank, “In light of bank failures such as Silicon Valley Bank that prioritized ‘climate and sustainability’, shouldn’t Citigroup consider scaling back or eliminating its ‘$1 Trillion Sustainable Finance Goal’ in order to better protect its shareholders?”
This is important work, and companies are listening. Often, companies start by dodging, for instance, by dropping terms such as ESG while keeping the negative policies in place. However, increasingly, companies are making substantive changes and bringing their policies more in line with good sense, reality, and the interests of their shareholders and customers.
CFACT is working to ensure that we can wave goodbye to peak leftism in our rearview mirrors.
Even the proles have worked out that wind and solar aren’t cheap, they aren’t clean and they most certainly aren’t green.
Their rocketing power bills are enough evidence to dispose of the ‘cheap’ wind and solar myth. Millions of tonnes of spent solar panels and toxic wind turbine blades being ground up and heading to landfills are sufficient to dispose of the clean and green myth.
Even the proles have worked out that wind and solar aren’t cheap, they aren’t clean and they most certainly aren’t green.
Their rocketing power bills are enough evidence to dispose of the ‘cheap’ wind and solar myth. Millions of tonnes of spent solar panels and toxic wind turbine blades being ground up and heading to landfills are sufficient to dispose of the clean and green myth.
Add to that the massive and ever-increasing subsidies to intermittent wind and solar and the big renewable energy lie is laid bare – as David Pearl outlines in the first piece. And Alan Moran confirms in the second.
The big renewable energy lie The Spectator David Pearl 8 June 2024
Always be suspicious of an expert report that appears to serve a crude ideological purpose. Always be on the lookout for the big lie dressed up in the language of science.
On May 22, the CSIRO’s latest GenCost report was released. It claimed that large-scale wind and solar are the lowest-cost electricity generation technologies, significantly under-cutting nuclear power alternatives. Chris Bowen was quick to seize on this: ‘Our reliable renewables plan is backed by experts to deliver the lowest cost energy,’ he said, on the day of its release.
Debate on the GenCost report has focused on its treatment of nuclear power. But commentators have missed a fatal flaw in the report’s methodology. Its reliance on a cost metric (the so-called Levelised Cost of Electricity or LCOE) that, by its authors’ own admission, is no ‘substitute’ for ‘more realistic’ ways to analyse electricity generation costs, including cash flow analysis.
Buried on page 64 of the report, this gives the game away. LCOE is an accounting metric, not an economic one. It measures the total unit costs a generator must recover to meet all expenses – plant, equipment, land, raw materials, and labour – including a return on investment. It says nothing about the revenue side of the commercial equation: What prices can the generator earn on the wholesale market and, given their costs, what profits can be earned?
For economists, nothing sensible can be said about a service’s economic value, and therefore economic cost, without this additional information.
Think about it. An unreliable car that costs far less to make than a reliable one could not be said to be ‘cheaper’ than the latter if it has no value for consumers. If, as is almost certain, it could not be sold at a profit, society would be in fact worse (not better) off for devoting capital, land and labour to its production. It is value-subtracting from an economic point of view, not value-adding (unless any external benefits it brings outweigh them).
By the same logic, an inherently unreliable source of power, like solar or wind, cannot be said to be cheaper in an economic sense than a reliable source of power, regardless of how much it costs to supply when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, which as we know is only 20 to 40 per cent of the time.
To make the same point in a different way. For the 60 to 80 per cent of the time when intermittent power cannot be supplied at any price, its economic cost can be said to be infinite.
As the eminent MIT economist Paul Joskow has pointed out, the LCOE metric ignores the decisive commercial advantage dispatchable power, in whatever form, enjoys over wind and solar generation.
An operator of a coal, gas, and indeed nuclear power facility can gear their operation to meet expected consumer demand as reflected in wholesale market prices. In contrast, for intermittent wind and solar, consumer demand can only ever be satisfied – and profits earned, leaving subsidies to one side – by accident. Literally as a quirk of prevailing weather conditions.
In this respect, wind and solar are more akin to agriculture than manufacturing, liable to suffer from gluts (when it is sunny and all solar capacity is operating), droughts (on cloudy or windless days), and mismatches (when it is windy at times when power demand is minimal). Intermittent revenues, absent guaranteed returns, are inherently unreliable.
When combined with the very high fixed capital costs of renewable projects, this fact explains why wind and solar developers need huge subsidies despite their very low marginal costs. Why, in the absence of this taxpayer support, large-scale wind and solar operators would go out of business.
The GenCost LCOE measure blinds us to this inconvenient truth. It asserts that wind and solar are cheap, but cannot explain the subsidies they need. On this ground alone, it should be rejected. From the public’s perspective – from the point of view of consumers – it obscures and indeed misleads rather than enlightens. A private business using this marketing trick would never get away with it, yet government ministers go uncriticised.
When the Australian economy was collapsing under the economic weight of protectionism in the late 20th Century, the Productivity Commission’s predecessor agencies courageously publicised the economic costs of this policy. At first these reports were ignored, as both the Coalition and Labor politicians proudly boasted of being protectionist (the term didn’t become a pejorative one until the 1970s), but eventually they were taken notice of and influenced policy.
Today, the same critical spotlight should be applied to the costs of wind and solar power, which include: 1. the direct cost of subsidies for them; 2. the system-wide costs – including transmission, storage and back-up dispatchable power – they impose (this would include the cost of subsidies to keep coal-fired power stations operating); 3. the uncompensated economic, social and environmental losses wind, solar, and new transmission lines are inflicting farmers and others living in regional communities (an unprecedented expropriation of property rights); and 4. the welfare costs of a more volatile and less reliable grid (given that additional storage, with current technologies, cannot smooth things over if the renewable share continues to rise).
This renewable energy audit should be embraced by all in the community, regardless of their views on climate change, Net Zero and the merits of nuclear energy. It should be demanded by not only the opposition, but all Labor people who worry about the mounting economic pain being caused by the government’s renewable-only crusade.
Of course, the renewable industrial complex – which reaches deep into the bureaucracy, corporate world, the media and our academic institutions – can be relied on to bitterly oppose such an exercise.
For them at least, this form of sunlight would not be the best form of disinfectant. Rather, it would lay bare the billions of dollars of rents a select few are extracting from the rest of the community, possibly the biggest deliberate transfer of wealth from low to high-income Australians we have ever seen. The Spectator
Renewable energy subsidies undermine our economy The Spectator Alan Moran 5 June 2024
Australia has seen a 20-year downward trend in productivity. Many other nations have seen similar trends and the cause is common: burgeoning growth of government squeezing out productive investment and an unrelenting surge in regulations, especially and notably so in Australia, covering fossil fuel both in its extraction and in its domestic use.
The Productivity Commission depicts the generally downward trend in productivity since the mid-1990s, punctuated by a mini recovery that petered out about a decade ago. In 2022-23 productivity actually fell by 3.7 per cent and remains below its 2021-22 level.
Australia has greater natural wealth per head of population than anywhere else in the world. With good government focused on protecting property rights, ensuring law and order, we would have the highest living standards in the world.
The fact that we are falling short – and increasingly so – of our potential is due entirely to government. The Commonwealth, over the past few decades, has increased its share of the nation’s spending from under 20 per cent to over 26 per cent of GDP and has run up half a trillion dollars of debt. We have seen similar increases from state governments – increases that have actually been accompanied by reduced service provision as a result of many former roles having been privatised.
An additional drag on real growth is regulation – the Institute of Public Affairs reports that the number of regulatory restrictions in federal law has increased by 88 per cent since 2005. Regulations have been exacerbated by judicial activism facilitating a well-financed green anti-development movement in preventing, delaying and seriously adding to costs and to investor confidence. Impediments to coal development are seen in all states. For gas, premium anticipated returns are now required for projects. This is a corollary of the travails like the dozen years it has taken Santos to get its Narrabri through a labyrinthian regulatory approvals system and the Victorian government’s layered moratorium on gas exploration.
The dominance of mining in national investment, especially in the last 20 years, is evident, as is its collapse over the past 10 years.
Disturbingly, the age of the national capital stock has also increased over the past decade – in the case of manufacturing from 11 to 13 years; for mining from 7 to 10 years and for agriculture from 12 to 14 years. It can be of no consolation that the age of capital has not increased in the electricity, gas, and water sectors since a major component of that sector’s new capital is wind/solar electricity, which is highly subsidised and displaces far more productive coal generation, making apparent investment actual disinvestment.
Complementing the assault on mining are the progressively growing regulations that subsidise renewable energy.
These regulations commenced with an obligation that retailers ensure ‘2 per cent of additional’ electricity to be provided by renewables, comprising wind and solar that then, as now, are both high cost and unreliable. Although no longer tabulated in the budget papers, the aggregate level of subsidy can be derived from published material. This shows from just a few hundred million dollars a year, the support for renewables is now over $15 billion a year.
The latest budget announced an upgrade in this support with $22.7 billion for Labor’s ‘Future Made in Australia’ agenda, much of which the Opposition has said it will retain.
These subsidies are, unlike other government direct spending and regulatory measures, actually designed to destroy one supply source, coal, and replace it with renewables. The increase in these subsidies bells the cat in claims that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity.
The subsidies have brought about a displacement of coal generation, which now provides about 56 per cent of electricity compared with 77 per cent historically. While initially bringing downward price pressures, the subsidies, in forcing coal generators’ closure and sub-optimal operations, have resulted in the ex-generator electricity price rising from under $40 per megawatt hour in 2015 to over $100 today. In addition, the diffuse and intermittent nature of wind and solar requires massive expenditures on duplicating back-up plant, batteries and a threefold expansion of the transmission network. And governments are now subsidising coal generators to prevent them closing ‘prematurely’ and thereby threatening the entire network.
This increased cost of electricity is already driving out businesses, especially the energy-intensive industries which have been the backbone of the nation’s productivity. And Barnaby Joyce asks, ‘Name me one global manufacturer who wants to move to Australia – just one. They’re all running for the door – aluminium, steel, plastics, oil refining, manufacturing, even food processing now with Cadbury.’ The Spectator
Nuclear power is a government-created and government-enabled industry. It was born of government largesse and regulatory favor, led by these five policies:
Federal research & development by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, founded 1946)
The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limit on accident liability
Five years of ‘free’ enriched uranium from AEC
Federal jawboning to parties to construct plants
State utility commissioners granting rate-base status for new plants
“Absolutely I think they should build another [nuclear plant], because I think they’ll get better at it, It’s the cleanest energy you can possibly have out there, and we’re gonna need a tremendous increase in energy production.” [Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), quoted in Politico. June 27, 2024]
Nuclear power is a government-created and government-enabled industry. It was born of government largesse and regulatory favor, led by these five policies:
Federal research & development by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, founded 1946)
The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limit on accident liability
Five years of ‘free’ enriched uranium from AEC
Federal jawboning to parties to construct plants
State utility commissioners granting rate-base status for new plants
Nuclear’s history of cost overruns, construction delays, and in-progress cancellations speaks for itself. Suffice it to say that the free market would have never allowed this industry to jump from military applications to civilian ones. The “peaceful atoms” as a palliative for military-side destruction was a mistake.
More than a half-century later, the debacles of V.C. Summer (cancelled in 2017) and Plant Vogtle #3 and #4 (completed) forgotten, the apologists and rent-seekers out in force. The 2,200-megawatt, $35 billion Plant Vogtle project was more than double the original estimate ($14 billion) and seven years late. In terms of opportunity cost, the same capacity from natural gas combined cycle would have cost around $2 billion and been in operation for a decade.
“Lawmakers from Georgia are still all in on nuclear energy, even after the state weathered one of the most costly and delayed nuclear projects in American history.”
“… Georgia’s Capitol Hill lawmakers … are already wondering when Southern Co., the utility that owns Georgia Power, might start plans to build a fifth reactor.”
“… Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) … enthusiasm speaks to the win streak nuclear energy is having on Capitol Hill. Last week, the Senate passed a compromise nuclear energy bill that eases Nuclear Regulatory Commission restrictions on smaller next-generation reactors. … On top of that, the administration recently announced it was injecting $900 million to boost the small reactor industry. The NRC expects two dozen applications for new and advanced nuclear over the next five years.”
“Republicans from the Conservative Climate Caucus took a tour of Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, south of Augusta, in May and held a panel discussion on the ‘importance of nuclear power’.”
“Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and several Biden administration officials also visited the plant earlier this month. Granholm even said that other states should follow Georgia’s example in building nuclear mega-projects like the AP1000 units at Vogtle. ‘Southern Company and Waynesboro, they have led the way here. But it is now time for others to follow their lead,’ Granholm said. ‘To reach our goal of net zero by 2050, we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country.’”
“Gov. Brian Kemp agreed with Granholm in a visit a few days prior: ‘Now, let’s start planning for Vogtle Five,’ the Georgia Republican said.”
“‘There were a lot of incidents that occurred that interrupted and delayed the final coming online, but we got through all of that,” said Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), a senior appropriator who was one of the original champions of the project in 2008. “I think it’s turned out to be a success, and hopefully it will ring true for years to come’.”
“’We learned some important lessons, and hopefully we won’t repeat those,’ said Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.). ‘I don’t think that’s the reason why we shouldn’t at least try and go in that direction.’”
But, the article continued, there is dissent:
The overwhelming bipartisan love for Vogtle is drawing shock from environmental advocates and some lawmakers, especially due to the massive costs the project incurred on Georgia ratepayers. Out of the Georgia lawmakers interviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News, progressive Rep. Hank Johnson, was the only member to express real concerns with nuclear. “Ratepayers having to pay the price, and at the same time record profits for the owner of the reactors, something is not right with that,” Johnson said. “We need to invest in new ways of energy production that are clean and renewable and also cost-effective.”
“Georgia Power is one of the richest utilities in the nation,” Patty Durand, a Democrat running for the Public Service Commission, testified on behalf of the group Concerned Ratepayers of Georgia at the time of the agreement. “Georgia Power should be required to use their huge profits to pay for the cost overruns rather than allowing Georgia Power to pass these billions of dollars onto its captive customers,” Durand added.
Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said upcoming hikes in electricity rates for Georgia consumers due to the Vogtle project are why no utilities are moving forward with plans to build a new large reactor. “Given the experience at Vogtle, it’s going to take a lot more than happy talk to convince more utilities to take on that kind of a gamble,” Lyman said. “Putting one’s faith in such unrealistic scenarios is not going to help the U.S. achieve its carbon reduction goals and could well undermine them.”
More government will be required, the article continues:
Despite the growing bipartisan support for nuclear energy in Georgia and elsewhere, some are arguing that Congress will have to deliver even more money to the industry if new mega-reactors are to be built anytime soon.
Tim Echols, a member of Georgia’s Public Service Commission, suggested that a federal backstop would be necessary for utilities to make plans for new large reactor projects to limit ratepayers’ liability for ballooning costs.
“What makes sense is to build another AP1000 somewhere while the workforce is fresh,” Echols said on social media platform X. “And to do it, a federal backstop is essential.” Such a proposal would entail Congress doling out more money, likely in the billions, to provide utilities leeway in covering over-budget costs on new large reactor projects.
Nuclear backers are hopeful that Vogtle, despite the drawbacks, will portend a wave of new construction.
But the Hail Mary of nuclear power is very irresistible to some “Net Zero” advocates who do not care about cost (economics). In fact, higher rates might be seen as good, even great, for forced energy conservation. (Ouch!)
I can’t believe it! It doesn’t feel real! Mark W. Nelson is posting from Vogtle, Georgia that the US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm just called for “hundreds” of large nuclear reactors to be built: “We need two hundred of these by 2050. Two down, one hundred and ninety-eight to go.”
I believe it was 2022 when I first made myself an absolute pest on US DOE folk’s mentions and inboxes. But why? But why? But why aren’t we building more AP1000’s? Why is it all “SMR and advanced” when we’ve got a proven design and large reactors are the most cost-effective way to build nuclear? But Vogtle wasn’t done yet and we weren’t ready for that conversation….
More than 150 comments followed, some critical.
Thomas Eiden: “I’ve been in this industry long enough and have lived through enough “nuclear renaissances” to have learned to believe it when I see it. If you believe anything a politician or government agency spokesperson says, you *will* be disappointed.”
David Gaier: “Vogtle’s obscene cost overruns (screwing ratepayers of course) and years behind schedule to make COD was inexcusable. SMRs have fallen flat on their faces and AP1000s may indeed be the best way to go. But such incompetence and most likely, corruption that we saw in Georgia was Monty Python-esque absurdity.”
Eric Lemmons: “[Secretary Graham] is not exactly all that sharp. She has bought into the EV nonsense from day one! She literally had staffers blocking an EV charging station so she could virtue signal.
It’s been the exorbitant costs associated with building the large plants that have caused a lot of issues., look at VC Summer. They were in the process of building 2 AP1000’s and stopped dead due to gross construction mismanagement. Vogtle was 7 years late and $17 Billion over budget! That literally sounds like it was built for the government! That is not a sustainable model!”
Johann Lindner: “The simple universal Law of Scale for Nuclear Powerplants of all sizes including factory produced Submarine reactors (=SMRs) – for total overnight Construction Cost – has been the same since 1960’s and worldwide for aml types and designs: (MW large NPP / MW small NPP)**0.6 is the ratio how much more an SMR costs (Overnight Construction Cost). That is why civil NPPs increased from SMR size (1960’s) to large 1300 MW size just 10 years later. Means there are still plenty of special markets, countries, different industries, isolated grids, district heating, etc – were SMRs are ideal.
Making basic large scale national electricity will still be best done by large NPPs. Finally – an important safety observation: – a few large NPP sites can be safely protected (incl by military) – 1000’s of SMRs especially in 3rd world countries will be a nightmare for protection and a paradies for terrorists.”
John Hockert: “We are not going to build 200 large nuclear plants by 2050. The technical infrastructure is not in place. We do not have enough nuclear plant constructors familiar with NQA-1 to build at that rate. We do not enough NRC construction inspectors to oversee that level of construction. We have many politicians who seem to believe that calling for the impossible and throwing money at it will succeed. We do need nuclear plants but sensible planning is required instead of calls for pie in the sky schedules that are doomed to failure.”
Adam Link: “I think Big Nuke is worse than Big Oil.”
To her critics, Oung replied: “Big or small, we will build them all.”
As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on or continued using our winter duvets, there is one certainty – in a few weeks time, the good folk at Met Office and the BBC will tell us that we’ve just had the “warmest June on record”. After all, the Met Office and the BBC made the same claim about appalling April and miserable May.
In an article I wrote for the Daily Sceptic on June 20th 2024 I predicted:
As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on or continued using our winter duvets, there is one certainty – in a few weeks time, the good folk at Met Office and the BBC will tell us that we’ve just had the “warmest June on record”. After all, the Met Office and the BBC made the same claim about appalling April and miserable May.
In the article I proposed three possible tricks which the Met Office and the BBC could use to justify their claim of June being “the hottest ever”:
Will they have the gall to say that June in the U.K. was the warmest on record even though everybody else knows it wasn’t?
Or will the Met Office and the BBC choose somewhere which had a bit of decent weather – perhaps Greece or Spain or India – to justify their climate catastrophism?
Or will they instead try to fob us off by claiming that, although June in the U.K. was a disaster weatherwise, global temperatures (if such a thing can even be measured) were at record levels?
To justify this claim, the ‘experts’ used the third trick: “claiming that, although June in the U.K. was a disaster weatherwise, global temperatures (if such a thing can even be measured) were at record levels.”
The key words are “on record”. What the ‘scientists’ used as the start of records this time is the year 1980 – a few years after satellites began to be used to measure the Earth’s temperature. Before the late 1970s, there was no way of measuring the Earth’s temperature as temperatures were not recorded in many places.
But let’s remind ourselves of what happened to the Earth’s climate in the 1960s and 1970s. Temperatures were so low that even the climate-catastrophist Guardian newspaper predicted a new Ice Age:
Crop failures and mass starvation were expected:
The CIA was commissioned to write a report for the U.S. President about the consequences of the coming Ice Age:
And the experts worried that the global cooling would never stop:
Of course, the predicted Ice Age never happened and, quite naturally, the cooling 1960s and 1970s have been followed by a period of warming. The climate catastrophists have never got around to explaining to us how global temperatures could have cooled for around 20 years in the 1960s and 1970s while levels of atmospheric CO2 were increasing. I guess that’s a question we’re not supposed to ask, otherwise we might conclude that the climate king has no clothes.
Moreover, there are strong indications that the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s, the years of the U.S. “Dustbowl” featured in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, were much hotter than today’s supposedly “record” temperatures:
It was predicted that sea levels would rise 40 feet and half of England would disappear beneath the waves:
Because the glaciers and ice caps would melt:
Just to conclude, there’s one more of many charts which suggest that the 1920s and 1930s, when atmospheric CO2 levels were the lowest they’ve been in the last 100 or so years, were much hotter than today’s supposedly “record” temperatures. That’s the chart of the acreage of forest fires in the U.S.:
Was June 2024 really the hottest since records began as our rulers claim? I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon
The Sunrise Movement, a progressive, youth-led climate group, is calling on President Biden to step aside from the 2024 race after his abysmal debate performance spurred Democratic anxiety about his ability to beat former President Trump.
The Sunrise Movement, a progressive, youth-led climate group, is calling on President Biden to step aside from the 2024 race after his abysmal debate performance spurred Democratic anxiety about his ability to beat former President Trump.
“To young people: losing this election could alter the rest of our lives,” Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay said in a written statement.
“Joe Biden’s next climate legacy-defining act must be to pass the torch to a new nominee,” Shiney-Ajay added.
The statement appears to make Sunrise the first major climate or environmental advocacy group to publicly call for Biden to step down.
It also represents a rare break from some of the group’s top political allies, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), both of whom are backing Biden despite calls from other Democrats for him to drop out.
The Sunrise Movement has been withholding a formal endorsement from Biden. While the group has backed a number of the president’s climate policies, it has said he should go even further, including by declaring a national climate emergency.
The Big Green Grift, the Energiewende and all the other green energy scams are about to be slowly shuttled aside because we need massive amounts of new energy these schemes cannot deliver. Moreover, we can no longer afford the virtue signaling, power seeking and money-grabbing nonsense these ventures involve. Indeed, there’s a big wreck about to happen at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence Boulevard and Net Zero Avenue.
The Big Green Grift, the Energiewende and all the other green energy scams are about to be slowly shuttled aside because we need massive amounts of new energy these schemes cannot deliver. Moreover, we can no longer afford the virtue signaling, power seeking and money-grabbing nonsense these ventures involve. Indeed, there’s a big wreck about to happen at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence Boulevard and Net Zero Avenue. Future AI data center demand is forcing energy discussions to suddenly get very real.
Google, of course, is already facing the fact the two streets it’s simultaneously traveling are not parallel roads, but, rather, two routes that intersect and the company will be forced to stop and decide which direction it wants to go. Net Zero Avenue, taken to the end of the highway leads the end of Google’s AI dreams, while Artificial Intelligence Boulevard promises huge rewards.
It just doesn’t get much more clear; renewables cannot begin to supply the energy needed for AI data centers. Only fossil fuels and nuclear can get the job done. It’s that simple. AI is not something global elites are going to let slide by. They’ve had a good run with the Big Green Grift but those days are going to gradually (maybe not so gradually) come to an end, as the demand for energy to power AI forces a reconsideration.
AI may be the catalyst, but this article highlights a much wider issue.
As societies grow and develop, they need ever increasing amounts of energy.
Mechanisation and automation has been the driver of increasing human wealth in the last couple of hundred years, and there is still plenty of potential to improve our lives further still as human effort is replaced by machines and computers. But they will need energy, that renewables cannot begin to provide.
Viv Forbes’ article on this subject is at Canadian Free Press under the title First Aid for Flicker Power. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Wind and solar energy have a fatal flaw – intermittency
Big batteries bring big problems
Solar generators won’t run on moon-beams – they fade out as the sun goes down and stop whenever clouds block the sun. This happens at least once every day. But then at mid-day on most days, millions of solar panels pour so much electricity into the grid that the price plummets and no one makes any money.
Can your solar project weather a hailstorm?
Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution to green power failures – “Big Batteries”
Turbine generators are also intermittent – they stop whenever there is too little, or too much wind. In a wide flat land like Australia, wind droughts may affect huge areas for days at a time. This often happens when a mass of cold air moves over Australia, winds drop and power demand rises in the cold weather. All of this makes our power grid more variable, more fragile and more volatile. What do we do if we have a cloudy windless week?
More big batteries storing renewable energy to be built around Australia The batteries will come online by 2025 with sites in Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.
Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution to green power failures – “Big Batteries”.
But big batteries bring more big problems – they have to be re-charged by the same intermittent green generators needed to keep the lights on, the trains running and the batteries charged in all those electric cars, trucks and dozers. And if anyone has been silly enough to build some power-hungry green hydrogen generators, they too will need more generation capacity and more battery backups. How long do we allow them to keep throwing our dollars into this green whirlpool?
Collecting dilute intermittent wind and solar energy from all over a big continent like Australia and moving it to coastal cities and factories brings another “green” energy nightmare – an expensive and intrusive spider-web of power-lines that are detested by landowners, degrade the environment, cause bushfires and are susceptible to damage from lightning, cyclones and sabotage.
They call them solar “farms” and wind “parks” – they are neither farms nor parks – they are monstrous and messy wind and solar power plants And these very expensive “green” assets are idle, generating nothing, for most of most days.
In late July 2021, a fire broke out at the Victorian Big Battery in Moorabool, which was undergoing testing when the incident began. Image: CFA
Big batteries sitting in cities have proved a big fire risk and no one wants them next door. So our green “engineers” have another solution to these problems caused by their earlier “solutions” – “Mobile Batteries” (this is a worry – no one knows where they are – maybe they will be disguised as Mr Whippy ice cream vans)?
Near elimination of air pollution from diesel-electric freight trains by 2025 is now possible by retrofitting them with battery tender cars. BeyondImages/iStock
Train entrepreneurs want to build “batteries on tracks” – a train loaded with batteries, which parks beside a wind/solar energy factory until the batteries are full. Then the battery train trundles off to the nearest city to unload its electricity, preferably at a profit. They can also play the arbitrage market – buy top-up power around midday and sell into peak prices at breakfast and dinner times when the unreliable twins usually produce nothing useful. This will have the added advantage of sending coal and gas generators broke sooner by depressing peak prices. Once coal and gas are decimated, then the battery trains can make a real killing.
But battery trains may be the perfect answer to supplying those energy-hungry AI data centres. Let’s start a pilot project and park a battery train beside the National AI Centre near CSIRO in Canberra.
“Big Batteries on Boats”
Lithium-ion batteries ‘keeping the fire alive’ on burning cargo ship carrying luxury cars 2022
A more ambitious idea is the BBB Plan – “Big Batteries on Boats”.It would work like this:
The Australian government places an order with China to build a fleet of electric boats (sail-assisted of course) that are filled with batteries (and lots of fire extinguishers). The batteries are charged with cheap coal-fired electricity at ports in China. They then sail to ports in Australia where the electricity is un-loaded into the grid whenever prices are high or blackouts loom.
Australian mines can profit from the iron ore used to make the boats, the rare minerals used to build the batteries and any Australian coal used by the Chinese power plants to charge the batteries.
This solution allows Australian politicians to go to world conferences boasting that Australia’s electricity is “Net Zero”, and more tourists can be enticed to visit our endangered industrial relics – coal mining and steam generator museums.
Of course there is another danger in the BBB solution – some entrepreneurs may load their boats with nuclear generators plus enough fuel on board for several decades of operation. Or they may even site a small nuclear reactor beside a closed coal power station and make use of all the ready-to-go power lines already in place.
Concerns over how transmission lines are ‘impacting’ prime land. Sky News Australia
This sort of dangerous thinking could well demolish another Queensland green dream – “CopperString” – a $5 billion speculation to build 840 km of new transmission line from Townsville to Mt Isa. We are not sure which way the power is expected to flow. They will probably not get there before the great copper mine at Mt Isa closes.
Why not just send a small nuke-on-a-train to Mt Isa?
Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.
Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.
This is a two-part post. The first part is to correct an oversight in my recent post entitled Rainergy.
The second part is to use that new information to analyze the effect of clouds on the El Nino region.
So, to the first part. In my post Rainergy, I noted that it takes ~ 80 watts per square meter (W/m2) over a year to evaporate a cubic meter of seawater. Thus, the evaporation that creates the ~1 meter of annual rain cools the surface by – 80 W/m2.
Then the other day I thought “Dang! I forgot virga!”
Virga is rain that falls from a cloud but evaporates completely before it hits the ground.
Figure 1. Virga diagram
Here’s the thing. When the virga evaporates, it’s just like evaporation from the surface. It cools both the raindrops and the surrounding air.
That’s what leads to the cold storm winds entrained by the rain that hit the ground vertically and spread out around the base of the storm. You can see all of that happening in this amazing time-lapse video, with the vertical entrained wind striking the surface, spreading out across the lake, and finally agitating the trees in the foreground. On the left of the video you can also see virga falling and evaporating before it hits the ground.
And it’s not just the virga. The raindrops are all evaporating as they fall, which is why rain is almost always so cold.
So I set out to see how much rain evaporates completely before hitting the ground. I couldn’t find a whole lot on the subject, but a few papers said 50% to 85% of the rain evaporates. See e.g. Sub-cloud Rain Evaporation in the North Atlantic Ocean which says 65%
This makes sense, because the huge surface area of the hundreds of thousands of tiny droplets of water allows for large amounts of evaporation.
And here’s the reason why all of this is important. I had estimated the evaporative cooling associated with a meter of rain to be -80W/m2 per year. That’s the energy it takes to evaporate that meter of seawater.
But I had overlooked the additional cooling from the evaporation of the rain itself. Given that something on the order of half of the rain evaporates, it would provide an additional 40W/m2 of cooling. And more to the point, it’s not included in the rainfall data—it can’t be, it has evaporated.
Now as I said, there are not a lot of studies, and the evaporation rate depends on a host of variables. So what I’ve done is take the estimate that not half, but a quarter of the rain evaporates before hitting the ground. That gives a conservative value for the evaporative cooling of the rain before hitting the ground, although it is likely higher.
This gives a revised estimate of the evaporative cooling associated with a meter of rain as not -80 W/m2 for a year per meter of rain as I’d thought, but -100 W/m2 per meter of rain.
Thus endeth Part The First.
With my new estimate of the relationship between rainfall and evaporative cooling, and mulling over some ideas of Ramanathan, I decided to look at the variations in total cloud cooling of the sea surface in the area of the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon. To start with, blue box below shows the location of what’s called the “NINO34” area—5°N to 5°S, and 170°W to 120°W. The sea surface temperature in this area indicates the state of the Nino/Nina alteration.
Figure 2. Average surface temperatures and the location of the NINO34 area. Average from Mar 2000 to Feb 2023
And here is the temperature of the NINO34 area over the CERES satellite period. Note that the phenomenon is known as “El Nino”, a reference to the Christ child, because it peaks around December or November. And when there is a full Nino/Nina alteration, it hits the bottom around December/November one year later (blue areas). I discuss this further in my post “The La Nina Pump“.
Figure 3. Monthly sea surface temperatures in the NINO34 area. Note the large swings from ~25°C to 30°C, which make this area valuable for investigating the relationships between sea surface temperature (SST) and various cloud parameters.
Now, those familiar with my work know that my theory is that clouds act as a strong thermoregulator of the surface temperature. When the ocean warms, my theory is that cumulus fields form earlier in the day and cover more of the surface, reflecting more of the sunlight back into space.
And when the ocean warms further, thunderstorms form that cool the surface in a host of ways. This keeps the earth from overheating.
Let me start with the issue of the increase in the strength and duration of the cumulus fields. This is reflected in the cloud area expressed as a percentage of the surface area. Here’s that chart.
Now, this is most interesting. As the temperature rises from about 26°C to its maximum just under 30°C, the total cloud area doubles, from 40% to 80%. This greatly affects the amount of sunshine reaching the surface, as we’ll see in a graph below of the net cloud radiative effect. And as is clear from the close correspondence of temperature and cloud coverage shown in Figure 4, the amount and strength of the cloud cover is clearly a function of temperature and little else.
Next, cloud top altitude. This is an indirect measure of the number of thunderstorms in the area. Here’s the graph showing the change in the number of thunderstorms with the changing sea surface temperature.
Figure 5. NINO34 monthly cloud top altitudes and sea surface temperatures.
Again we see a very large change. As sea surface temperatures go from ~26°C up to just below 30°C, the altitude of the cloud tops almost triples, from 5 km up to almost 15 km. And again, the number of thunderstorms is also clearly a function of the temperature and little else.
With these changes in mind, we can look at the cooling effects of these cloud changes. Figure 6 below shows the changes in the net surface cloud radiative effect. The net surface cloud radiative effect is the full effect of the clouds on the radiation reaching the surface. Clouds cool the surface by reflecting the sunshine back out to space and by absorbing solar radiation. They also warm the surface by increasing the downwelling longwave radiation. The net surface cloud radiative effect is the sum of these different phenomena.
Figure 6. NINO34 monthly net surface cloud radiative effect and sea surface temperatures.
Note that at all sea surface temperatures, the clouds cool the NINO34 sea surface. And as the temperature goes up the radiative cooling increases, and not by just a little—cooling goes from -10 watts per square meter (W/m2) to almost -60 W/m2 of cooling.
It’s also worth noting that the effect is not linear—small deviations in temperature don’t cause the amount of increase in surface net radiative cooling that is caused by large temperature increases. This is shown by the large peaks in the blue line extending higher than the peaks in the black line.
Then we can also look at the cooling effects of the rain. As discussed above, one meter of rain involves evaporative cooling of the surface on the order of 100 W/m2. This allows us to convert rainfall figures to evaporative cooling figures, as shown in Figure 7 below.
Figure 7. NINO34 monthly rainfall evaporative cooling effect and sea surface temperatures. Note that the dataset is a year shorter, because the rainfall data ends in 2021
Here we see the same fivefold increase in cooling with the increasing temperature, but on a larger scale. The rainfall evaporative cooling goes from -50 W/m2 when the NINO34 area is cool to -350 W/m2 when the area heats up. And this effect is non-linear as well, as shown by the peaks in the blue line.
And finally, we can combine the separate effects of the net surface cloud radiative changes and the rainfall evaporative cooling to get the total cooling effect of the clouds on the NINO34 area, as shown in Figure 8 below.
Figure 9. NINO34 monthly total cooling due to clouds. This is the total of rainfall evaporative cooling effect and surface cloud radiative cooling. Again the dataset is a year shorter because the rainfall data ends in 2021
As this shows, the clouds have a very strong cooling effect on the NINO34 area. At the peak temperatures, the clouds are cooling the surface at the rate of -400 W/m2. In addition, the cooling increases faster and faster as the temperature rises, putting a hard ceiling on how hot the NINO34 area can get.
… and the alarmists are concerned about a change in CO2 forcing over the same period of 0.7 W/m2?
That’s lost in the noise compared to the 400 W/m2 peak cloud cooling.
Finally, please be clear that this huge increase in cloud-related cooling is not just happening in the NINO34 zone. It occurs anywhere in the ocean where the temperature exceeds about 25°C. Looking at the NINO34 zone is valuable because the temperature changes so much there, revealing the close connection between temperature and total cloud cooling. For the larger view, here’s a scatterplot of average gridcell sea surface temperatures from 2000 to 2021, versus average gridcell total cloud cooling. Note that in addition to the rapidly increasing cooling at temperatures warmer than ~25°C, the effect of the clouds is cooling over all parts of the ocean.
Figure 10. Scatterplot, total cloud cooling versus sea surface temperature. Blue dots are 1° latitude by 1° longitude gridcells.
And that’s the sum total of what I learned today …
My very best regards to all,
w.
AS ALWAYS, I ask that when you comment you quote the exact words you are discussing. This avoids endless misunderstandings.
Charging station operator now levying extra fee if you take too long to charge your electric car. The aim: “fairer distribution”.
Germany’s online BlackoutNews.de here reports how Dutch charging station operator Allego is imposing a “blocking fee” at all its European fast chargers.
The fee went into effect on July 1st.
For example, in Germany, if drivers take more than 45 minutes to charge their electric cars at an Allegro fast-charger, then they will have to pay an extra 25 cents-euro for each additional minute of charging beyond 45 minutes.
“This measure is intended to ensure a fairer distribution of the charging infrastructure and prevent unnecessary over-parking, writes Blackout News. “So if you stand at the charging station for an hour longer, you pay almost 15 euros extra,” according to elektroauto-news:.Apparently, the fee is designed to reduce the long charging lines occurring at charging stations, especially as millions of Europeans head out on their summer holidays.
“According to Allego, the introduction of this fee is necessary to ensure fair and timely access to charging stations,” reports Blackout News. “Allego explains that the charge is intended to prevent e-car drivers from occupying the charging stations for longer than necessary.”
This just means more burden on e-car drivers. Either they leave the charging station not fully charge and look for another charging station, or they pay extra to charge fully.
Another reason: power grid limitations. Blackout News reports further: “Due to grid restrictions in many European countries, Allego cannot install as many charging points as desired everywhere. In Germany, grid capacity is considered a bottleneck in many places, which could cause electromobility projects to be severely delayed or even fail.”
Ed Miliband has been accused of endangering the nation’s food security after giving the go-ahead for Britain’s biggest solar farm on green land despite the objections of officials.
Ed Miliband has been accused of endangering the nation’s food security after giving the go-ahead for Britain’s biggest solar farm on green land despite the objections of officials.
The Energy Secretary’s decision to overturn the planning inspectorate and give the green light to the controversial project in rural eastern England has sparked fury from MPs and campaigners.
The scheme will see Sunnica, an energy firm, building a 2,792-acre solar farm and energy storage infrastructure around several villages in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, providing power for 100,000 homes. Mr Miliband has also given the go-ahead along to two solar farms in Lincolnshire.
It is feared this will be the first of many further decisions that will sacrifice vast amounts of farmland to net zero energy projects.
The danger is that the fall in domestic agricultural production will compromise the nation’s food security, meaning it will face the prospect of greater dependence on food imports and increasing vulnerability to price rises on international markets.
The decision suggests it is likely that Mr Miliband will make meeting net zero targets a priority over preserving agricultural land in the dozens of other solar farm decisions making their way through the planning system.
The Sunnica project, which is equivalent to the size of 2,115 football pitches, was one of three solar farms Mr Miliband waved through on Friday evening.
Critics have decried the size of the solar farm on agricultural land and the potential danger of the large lithium-ion battery units needed to store the electricity generated by solar panels before transfer to the National Grid. In recent years, similar units have been involved in fires and explosions in Britain and abroad.
Dr John Constable, the director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, said Mr Miliband was already “looking like a liability to his party’s growth agenda because he simply does not understand how damaging these renewable plans are to the economy. This is beginning to look like it is some kind of dogmatic ideology”.
He added: “There are dozens of solar projects across the UK at all stages of development. If this is a sign of things to come, it looks to me as though developers are going to get a free hand.
“Any concern for planning balance and environmental impact for reasonable decisions is being thrown to the winds. Food security matters – why not let the land make good food rather than second or third-rate electricity?”
Hypocrite of the day award has to go to this Lib Dim:
The solar farm is expected to be up to 500MW, enough to provide about 0.1% of the UK’s electricity. Forget about the fake claims of powering 100,000 homes – as usual they ignore the fact that residential customers only use about a quarter of the country’s electricity.
When all these other users are taken into account, the real figure is more like 25,000 homes. And in winter, all they can expect is power for a few hours a day!
At current CfD strike prices, Sunnica can expect to receive about £180 million in subsidies.
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