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.
One of nuclear energy’s biggest selling points is its claims of reliability. “Nuclear energy is the only large-scale power source that can be tapped in even the most extreme weather conditions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” boaststhe American energy company Constellation. “Nuclear power plants are very reliable, and can run for many months without interruption, providing large amounts of clean electricity, regardless of the time of day, the weather, or the season,” says the World Nuclear Association. At a public meeting in June, Keith Ammon, a pro-nuclear Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, echoed these claims: “Nuclear doesn’t care about the weather,” he said. “It just runs.”
Over the next few months, several countries in Europe had to shut down nuclear plants because of hot weather and drought—proving that nuclear power does, indeed, care about the weather. Coming at a time when demand for electricity was high, these countries were faced with an imminent failure of the electricity grid. Citizens and businesses in Hungary and Romania had to reduce their consumption. Ironically, it was solar power—often critiqued by nuclear boosters as unreliable—that provided additional electricity and staved off shortages in some countries. A further irony is that these heat waves are more likely and more severe because of climate change, which is often advanced as the reason to expand nuclear power in the first place.
…
Underlying most of these shutdowns is water, or lack thereof. Nuclear reactors need even more water than other thermal power plants for regular operations and to ensure vital safety functions. As the Nuclear Energy Agency explained, nuclear “power plants have in general greater cooling needs than other thermoelectric generating technologies. This results from the lower efficiency of the power conversion cycle, as well as from the latent safety function cooling water plays, for instance to evacuate residual heat during planned or unplanned shutdowns.”
…
Climate change is already causing “more frequent and intense extreme events.”Unanticipated shutdowns will increase in frequency as extreme weather events driven by climate change become more common. One study found that “the average frequency of climate-induced disruptions” grew from “0.2 outage per reactor-year in the 1990s to 1.5 in the past decade” (i.e., 2010s). Going by the record so far, this decade will likely record a higher number of outages.
So, how is it reasonable to blame shutdowns of nuclear plants due to lack of water on the reliability or otherwise of nuclear power? Fix the water underinvestment and you fix the nuclear plant shutdown issue.
Trying to paint solar energy as a reliable alternative for heatwaves and extreme weather resilience is even more absurd – one hailstorm and you lose your solar plant. At least nuclear plants can if necessary be armoured against weather damage, solar not so much.
The climate scare is failing fast, but the damage it has done could take a long time and a lot of money to fix.
In How to Cut the Electricity Price in Australia, it was shown how a day-ahead market could stabilise the electricity grid and start to bring down the price of electricity. For the price to come down more in future, there needs to be political courage, because it is not too hard to imagine mass protests against new coal-fired or nuclear power stations.
Looking into the future for Australia’s electricity supply, what is the best that could be expected?
Australia already has a lot of wind and solar supply in place. In the latest quarter, renewables (including rooftop solar) provided 42.7% of total supply. That isn’t going to go away quickly, but as the wind and solar equipment ages and needs replacement, facilities will close if more cost-effective sources of supply are allowed to compete. The media tell us that we face rapidly growing demand from AI, which will need a lot of cheap reliable electricity. Well, that’s true of course, but why have they kept so quiet for so long about the need for humans to have a lot of cheap reliable electricity?
With an efficient market, and with no subsidies, targets or mandates, how could Australia’s electricity supply change? I asked Grok, which replied that with …
“… streamlined approvals (e.g., one-stop federal permitting, no state bans), $50-100B public-private funding, and workforce training. No delays from protests/lawsuits.
Short-term (2026-2030: 5 years): Repower/extend coal (2-3 years/construction); build 5-10 GW gas (1-2 years). VRE [Variable Renewable Energy] closures begin (1-2 years wind-down). Prices fall 30% by 2028. Achievable: Similar to QLD’s gas expansions.
Medium-term (2031-2035: 7-10 years total): First nuclear (1-2 GW SMRs) online by 2035 (lead time cut from 15+ years via modular fab in Australia). Full coal/gas optimum by 2030.
Long-term (2036-2040: 10-15 years total): 10-20 GW nuclear fleet (parallel builds); coal peaks then plateaus. Full transition: 12 years to 80% dispatchable mix.
Risks: Supply chain (nuclear fuel fab) or labor shortages could add 2-3 years, but political will mitigates this via imports/training. This beats Coalition [the opposition in parliament] projections (2037 first plant) by fast-tracking regs.“.
A lot of the expense and delay (“12 years to 80% dispatchable mix“) is simply because we have been going very expensively in the wrong direction – we should have been at 80%+ dispatchable all the time. To put a 30% price fall in 5 years into context, the price is up 37% in just the last year. Compared with where Australia is heading right now, a 30% price fall would feel like a miracle.
“$50-100B public-private funding”. That is a lot, but it’s similar to the current rate of spending on renewables. Like I said, the damage that the climate scare has done could take a long time and a lot of money to fix.
PS. “modular fab in Australia” – it’s tempting to be cynical, but hey!, why not???
Australia’s retail electricity price has gone through the roof and is still climbing. This is a proposal for how to bring it down again. Something like this proposal already operates in many other countries, so this is not a step into the unknown. Actually, I would claim that over the last few years the Australian system has been forced further and further into a dark hole, and this proposal is for a large step into the light. Although large, the step is simple, rational, and inexpensive.
Australia’s retail electricity price has gone through the roof and is still climbing. This is a proposal for how to bring it down again. Something like this proposal already operates in many other countries, so this is not a step into the unknown. Actually, I would claim that over the last few years the Australian system has been forced further and further into a dark hole, and this proposal is for a large step into the light. Although large, the step is simple, rational, and inexpensive.
The Basic Principle
The basic principle behind this proposal is:
The purpose of the electricity grid is to meet demand at minimal cost.
This is very important, and the present disastrous situation is in large part because this basic principle has been discarded. Note that there is no mention in the basic principle of any need to pander to the needs, wishes and vagaries of electricity suppliers. The suppliers’ only purpose is to meet demand profitably, and the proposed system’s only purpose is to enable that at minimal overall cost.
The Present System
The present system uses an auction mechanism to match supply to demand. Each supplier submits bids to supply certain amounts of electricity to given regions for upcoming 5-minute trading intervals. The Australian Electricity Market Operator (AEMO) runs a dispatch auction every 5 minutes and accepts bids cheapest first until they have enough to match expected demand. From this, they set a spot price for all accepted suppliers and all users. This system is known as the National Electricity Market (NEM).
As currently operated, bids can be submitted day-ahead (or earlier) but remain re-biddable up to dispatch. This fuels volatility, because effectively there is just one short-term 5-minute-based system. It has been observed that: “… regional electricity markets in Australia are characterized by relatively low levels of annual, weekly and intra-daily seasonal patterns, but are by far the most volatile markets in this study.” [1].
The Proposed System
The proposed system is based on the fact that most demand is fairly well known in advance – AEMO know roughly what tomorrow’s demand will be, they just don’t know exactly how it will pan out minute by minute. So if AEMO can cater for most of the demand in advance, then they only need to be flexible for the relatively small part of demand that varies. The proposal is: There should be a binding day-ahead auction, by region, for specified quantities of electricity for specified periods of the following day. The specified periods would range from an hour to the full 24 hours. In other words, AEMO can work out its expected requirement by region for each part of the following day, and lock supply in for most of that. The next day’s 5-minute auctions then only need to deal with variations in demand, not the whole of demand.
Variations of this proposed Day Ahead Market (DAM) system are used by many countries [2], and significantly reduce volatility – “We also find that electricity markets organized as day-ahead markets exhibit a significantly lower overall price variation compared to markets with real-time trading.” [1]. For suppliers, a day-ahead market also increases certainty. Businesses can plan better with certainty, and this factor alone will, in time, reduce overall cost [3].
The present system already has mechanisms for handling situations like a successful supply bidder failing to deliver, expected demand failing to materialise, and organisations trying to game the system by eg. cartel operation or withholding supply. All of these mechanisms can continue. Some new provisions might be needed for the day-ahead market, such as deviation charges [4] and ‘gross’ bidding [5]. The present system also allows suppliers to have backup arrangements with each other, and these can continue too. So, for example, a solar company could put in a bid for several hours’ supply to a nominated region for the next day and protect themselves by having a backup agreement with a gas company in case there are more clouds than expected.
The point of this proposed system is that it matches the market mechanisms more closely to the patterns of demand. In other words, it aligns the market with the basic principle as stated above. No kind of supply is favoured or penalised. Wind and solar companies, for example, whose supply is unpredictable, can still participate fully by getting backup agreements. The main difference from the present system is that suppliers become more responsible for variations in supply, allowing the market operator to concentrate more on meeting demand.
The processing logic for the day-ahead auction is far from simple, but it isn’t new – it has already been done. The USA’s PJM, for example, optimises diverse bids into a least-cost 24-hour plan [6], and typically clears about 95% of the next day’s demand. This forward-clearing approach has delivered estimated 10-20 % system-cost savings through better planning and lower volatility.
Oh, and one more thing: there are no government subsidies or mandates in the proposed system. Removal of those, in time, cuts overall cost too.
Implementation
It really should not take long to get the proposed system up and running.
AEMO already uses linear programming (LP) for security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED). Extending it to a day-ahead market should not be all that difficult. In any case, equivalent commercial software – like GE’s PROBE or Hitachi’s Network Manager EMS – is readily available and licensed to other operators. At $A20-30M, the cost pales into insignificance beside Snowy 2.0’s overruns. But it could make sense for one state or region to pilot it first before national rollout.
With the greater understanding that should come from using a day-ahead system, it should be possible to improve the long-term planning (“Capacity Market”). In future, will a nuclear plant be cheaper in total than more renewables, for example? Certainly, Australia should use much more of its own gas and coal [2].
Acknowledgement. Grok helped a lot with finding information, reviewing the article, and suggesting improvements. Please note that any errors are mine alone – I still have to check everything.
[2] Countries using a version of DAM include Canada, Norway, Finland and USA (‘PJM’ states). Their electricity prices are mostly lower than Australia’s, and less volatile. Norway and Finland do have the advantage of plentiful hydro, but Australia has the advantage of cheap domestic gas and coal. It is noteworthy that Finland and the PJM states have some nuclear power, which is competitive in a DAM. See also [3].
[3] Some countries that use a DAM have higher electricity prices than Australia, so some other things have to be in place (or absent) as well. Grok pointed out that these countries’ high prices typically stem from external factors like high taxes, heavy renewables subsidies/mandates, and gas import dependence.
[4] Imbalance settlement price – This example is from France. A price is applied to deviations from agreed supply. Note that there can be rewards as well as penalties.
[5] PJM Operating Agreement §1.10.01(b) (FERC Docket ER24-1234, filed Jan. 30, 2024: https://elibrary.ferc.gov/eLibrary/document/20240130/5073). “Each Generation Owner shall offer into the Day-Ahead Energy Market all of the output of each of its Generation Capacity Resources up to the Economic Maximum for such Generation Capacity Resource for each hour of the Operating Day, unless such Generation Capacity Resource is on a planned outage or derated for maintenance or other reasons.“. NB. I am assured that this citation and quote are correct, but I couldn’t check them because I couldn’t open the link. I could find Energy Market Must Offer Requirements for Generation Capacity Resources which does show that suppliers must bid all their available capacity. This is called ‘gross’ bidding.
That was a hellfire price spike yesterday. It’s not so much the height, but the width of the spike is shocking. Prices lifted off in NSW at 4:45pm and didn’t come back down til 9pm. That’s a four-hour nightmare at around $10,000 per MWh. I rarely, if ever, have seen so much area under the red line — so many dollars flowing under the bridge.
That was a hellfire price spike yesterday. It’s not so much the height, but the width of the spike is shocking. Prices lifted off in NSW at 4:45pm and didn’t come back down til 9pm. That’s a four-hour nightmare at around $10,000 per MWh. I rarely, if ever, have seen so much area under the red line — so many dollars flowing under the bridge.
“We could have bought a whole new gas plant instead”
Hypothetically, there was around 11,000 megawatts of demand at $10,000 a megawatt hour for over 4 long hours which is a $450 million “price signal” (and that’s just NSW). In Victoria a similar spike consumed another $200 million*. The market — sick, injured and rigged, it seems, is beating us over the head. The average price for the whole 24-hour period in NSW, Victoria and South Australia was a red hot $2,000 per MWh. (A 24-hour average!)
This is not a free market, it’s a fixed market — designed to change the global climate and maybe also keep the lights on. A free market would fix itself, but the government banned the good options, so all we’re left with is outbreaks of electromania.
Even with all the subsidies and the rigging, the Renewables-Wonderland of South Australia was also hit by the exact same price smash as NSW and Victoria. All that wind, solar, synchronous condensers, batteries and renewable smuggery can’t save the state from the 6 o’clock bonfire. This is a message from the future to Victoria and NSW. If South Australia can’t save itself now, how will the big states manage when they turn themselves into South Australia?
All the savings of renewables are illusory.
The wind stopped across the whole continent
The problem was a normal wintery cold blast from Antarctica combined with the collapse of wind generation across the entire east coast “national grid” — reduced to about 400MW out of 13 gigawatts of generators. The whole wind industry in Australia was working at a capacity factor of 3%. Or, as a cruel commentator might say, 97% useless.
Obviously, on a day like this, it doesn’t matter how many twenty billion dollar interstate transmission lines we build, the solution is reliable power plants. That, or stopping those damn high pressure cells.
Retailers will have hedging contracts to (sort of) cover these price spikes. However the price of future contracts will rise over the coming months. The people who cover the other side of those hedging contracts got burnt today and they will want to recover their costs. Thus events like this flow through to retail prices sooner or later.
Ironically, Paul McArdle of WattClarity notes that wind powered generation set a new record all time high on Monday this week, reaching 9,491 MW. It proves only that any money saved by wind power one day can be vaporized in an instant a few days later.
Batteries are starting to work so hard on the Victorian grid we can even see them on the daily chart (above in spiky pink). If people only knew how pathetically small their contribution is compared to fossil fuels.
They’ve run their largest coal plants into the ground — to the point of neglect where an air duct “detached from the boiler end and fell to the floor”. So, one 380MW unit will be out of action at Yallourn for two weeks. And it’s just the latest in an ongoing series of failures.
The Victorian state electricity grid is running close to the wire
They’ve run their largest coal plants into the ground — to the point of neglect where an air duct “detached from the boiler end and fell to the floor”. So, one 380MW unit will be out of action at Yallourn for two weeks. And it’s just the latest in an ongoing series of failures.
We are the Renewable Crash Test Dummy — this is what the unfree, fixed, forced market produces when the best assets in a system are treated like planet-wrecking trolls.
One report on the power station found that at least one of its four generators was out of action for a third of the time last year. Yallourn was supposed to close in 2032, but under siege from heavily subsidized unreliable generators, and a rigged market, that’s been brought forward to 2028.
It doesn’t help that it is owned by EnergyAustralia which is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Light and Power (CLP) Group. Presumably the CCP won’t mind at all if Victoria burns less coal, loses more smelters and can’t compete with it in the race to build data centres?
Things got so hairy last week, Paul McArdle of WattClarity has written nine articles about “June 12th”, when the wind power (marked in green) produced virtually nothing of the state’s electricity. (Graph from Anero.id)
The transmission giant delivering the roll-out of renewables infrastructure has advocated for authorities to accelerate the development of gas plants and retain a buffer of coal after warning the power grid has been “stripped thin” of supply.
Transgrid chief executive Brett Redman, a former boss of AGL Energy, said it was time to prioritise putting “buffer” back into the system.
“We’ve really stripped the system very, very thin. And so, the events a couple of years ago where we nearly saw widespread outages and even what’s happening in Victoria in the last couple of weeks, we are in this world now where you cannot predict exactly when it will happen.
Meanwhile China Light and Power (who own EnergyAustralia) effectively said they are committed to “Net Zero” (in other countries):
EnergyAustralia told The Australian it had made a pledge for net-zero emissions by 2050 and “closing Yallourn by 2028 is part of that commitment”.
Why aren’t EnergyAustralia committed to keeping the lights on, keeping electricity prices low, and serving Australians? Hmm?
Does anyone really believe energy companies care about fixing the planetary weather a hundred years from now, or that it is appropriate for them to pursue their storm-stopping-witchcraft with essential public infrastructure?
What kind of lunacy is this? Not that they say it, but that we accept these ridiculous lines?
Yesterday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposed repeal of the Biden-era’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, which ruled that coal-fired and many new natural gas power plants must capture and store over 90% of their carbon emissions by the 2030s—or shut down by 2040. It’s a costly mandate, resting on shaky legal and technical foundations. Americans would be fortunate to have it repealed.
Yesterday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposed repeal of the Biden-era’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, which ruled that coal-fired and many new natural gas power plants must capture and store over 90% of their carbon emissions by the 2030s—or shut down by 2040. It’s a costly mandate, resting on shaky legal and technical foundations. Americans would be fortunate to have it repealed.
President Biden issued his Clean Power Plan 2.0 after the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that President Obama’s Clean Power Plan 1.0 exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) statutory authority. The Court’s 2022 decision concluded that the EPA had overstepped by attempting to reshape the nation’s energy grid without clear congressional approval.
In a world where energy security and affordability are paramount, one might assume that when the Supreme Court strikes down a sweeping environmental regulation, the EPA would reconsider its approach. But in Washington, ideology often trumps reason, and undeterred, the Biden administration returned in 2024 with a sequel that EPA now proposes to end.
The Clean Power Plan 1.0 attempted to force states to overhaul their energy systems entirely, compelling them to adopt renewable energy and shutter fossil fuel plants, regardless of local needs or economic consequences.
Its successor, the Clean Power Plan 2.0, imposed an estimated $15 billion in regulatory costs over 20 years, and greater costs through increases in prices of electricity and slower economic growth. EPA argues “that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”
Just as Chief Justice John Roberts warned in 2022 that the EPA had claimed “an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority,” the EPA was trying to do through regulation with the Clean Power Plan 2.0 what Congress had repeatedly declined to do through legislation.
Fifteen years ago similar legislative proposals—the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Lieberman bills—failed in the U.S. Congress even when Democrats held strong majorities. That should have signaled to regulators that such sweeping changes lacked democratic legitimacy.
Yet ideology brooks no dissent, and the Biden administration’s Clean Power Plan 2.0 pressed ahead, relying on technologies that are neither commercially viable nor widely demonstrated. Carbon capture and storage, the linchpin of the Biden plan, remains prohibitively expensive and technically uncertain. Hydrogen, another favored solution, is not cost-effective. The EPA’s cost-benefit analysis glossed over these realities, assuming generous tax subsidies and benefits from reduced CO2 emissions would bridge the gap.
The consequences of this regulatory ambition are stark. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned in 2024 that the Biden plan’s disincentives for baseload power would destabilize the electricity grid, increasing the risk of blackouts. Spain’s recent 12-hour blackout offers a cautionary tale: rapid transitions to solar without reliable baseload power can lead to lack of backup power, causing the grid to crash.
Moreover, the Biden plan was regressive. It would raise electricity prices, disproportionately affecting low-income households, farmers, and small businesses. It would also undermine a reliable electricity grid and economic growth. By constraining energy supply and inflating costs, it would drive economic activity and jobs offshore, where goods would be manufactured with coal-fired energy in China.
The dirty secret, which Mr. Zeldin forced into the open, is that the Biden plan would not have helped the climate. The greenhouse gases emitted by the power sector do not significantly affect human health, and moving energy intensive manufacturing overseas where it is made with coal-fired power using older technology would have raised emissions, not lowered them.
There is also a deeper constitutional issue at play. The EPA is misusing its authority under the Clean Air Act to pressure states into adopting policies that lie outside its jurisdiction. The plan’s emissions targets are so stringent that no state has voted them into law.
The Clean Power Plan 2.0 amounts to a form of federal commandeering. States are faced with a loss of a significant portion of their electricity generation capacity, and their manufacturing base, by restructuring their energy systems to align with the EPA’s vision. This is not cooperative federalism; it is coercion.
And it is unnecessary. America’s carbon emissions have declined by about a billion metric tons over the past 15 years without such mandates. This progress has been driven by technological innovation, not federal diktats. Cleaner air and efficient power generation are worthy goals, but they must be pursued within the bounds of the law and with respect for democratic processes.
The lesson from West Virginia v. EPA is clear: transformative policy changes require legislative backing. Agencies cannot conjure sweeping powers from ambiguous statutes. The rule of law demands clarity, accountability, and restraint.
As America grapples to ensure grid reliability, there is a cautionary tale here. The path to a reliable energy future lies not in top-down mandates, but in innovation, cooperation, and respect for the institutions that safeguard our freedoms. Administrator Zeldin should be congratulated.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
The United Kingdom will need approximately 175 TWh of storage capacity when domestic space heating is fully decarbonized, according to new research from the University of Nottingham in England. The claim is based on an analysis of future storage requirements for the electricity grid at different stages of heat pump deployment.
The United Kingdom will need approximately 175 TWh of storage capacity when domestic space heating is fully decarbonized, according to new research from the University of Nottingham in England. The claim is based on an analysis of future storage requirements for the electricity grid at different stages of heat pump deployment.
“Currently we don’t feel the storage challenge that much because the gas network is there and it has a huge amount of storage. You can store more gas in the pipes simply by increasing the pressure,” said Cardenas.
The scientists found that when domestic heat demand is 100% electrified, average annual electricity demand and peak load in the grid are 26% and 70% higher than current levels, respectively. The total cost of energy also increases by around 4% under the scenario modelled, due to the storage capacity needed. This means that a fully decarbonizing UK heating system will require significant investment in long-duration energy storage, according to Cardenas.
The researchers modelled a scenario in which underground hydrogen caverns and compressed-air energy storage (CAES) provide a combined 175 TWh of storage capacity. Hydrogen storage with 160 TWh capacity would cover around 220 days of UK demand plus 15 TWh of CAES to cover around 10 days, according to the scientists.
At average efficiency of 80%, we would need 200 TWh of electricity to produce that hydrogen via electrolysis. That would mean an extra 50 GW of offshore wind power.
The researchers also estimate an increase in peak demand of 70%, raising it to over 100 GW. This clearly has massive implications for national and local grids, as well as household wiring.
The paper is specifically about how much storage we would need if heat pumps are rolled out in scale. What it does not mention is the amount of hydrogen burning power stations tat would be needed, to produce the energy needed for those heat pumps.
But their calculations suggest we would need at least 40 GW, on top of the 30 GW we will need to replace existing CCGT fleet.
Today’s magic trick is how to make electricity look cheaper by taking money from children
Tomorrow — we pretend to control inflation by printing more money.
The Labor Party tried to control the weather with our power stations and promised us it be would cheaper. For some reason that every engineer can explain, they damaged the electricity grid and electricity got more expensive.
In order to hide this, they have to borrow money to pay us so they can pretend electricity is slightly less expensive, and inflation figures are not so scary. Since our children will pay off that debt one day somehow, the Labor Government is nicking the money from babies and telling us how compassionate they are.
There’s no intellectual merit in the rebate, it’s not like it’s an incentive scheme for homeowners to “stay alive” or use more or less electricity. The sole point of the rebate is to hide the failure of the governments energy plan. It’s to bury the market signal which is screaming “bad, bad, bad” so the Labor Government can do more of the same “bad things” that got us into trouble in the first place.
The PM also thinks giving away money reduces inflation:
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the cost of living measure would put downward pressure on inflation.
We wonder why any country ever suffered inflation when the solution is so easy?
$8 billion in Rebates could have made electricity cheaper for 30 years
Unfortunately a “rebate” doesn’t reduce real electricity prices or inflation, except in advertising and ABC news (sorry, I repeat myself). If the government is going to incur a debt on our behalf, it could have used this $8 billion to buy at least four new gas plants and an advanced efficient coal plant, any or all of which would have reduced the price of electricity for 30 years to come (or 60 years in the case of a coal plant).
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things’ Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things’ Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure. Despite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80% of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute. Coal, oil and natural gas production are at record highs. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise inexorably. The financial markets were already losing confidence in the energy transition before Donald Trump returned to the White House. A more realistic approach to climate policy is urgently needed.
What they don’t say is that all this was unmistakably obvious for a decade or more, that thousands of engineers and scientists have been telling the world this would happen, and that Reuters wouldn’t report them, not even when they had a Nobel prize.
Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.
Why now? Because reality is making Reuters look stupid — it’s not the reality of high costs or blackouts, but the reality that Trump won, and set fire to the “transition” fantasy by dumping Paris, dropping subsidies, opening gas fields, and installing a corporate energy CEO as the US Energy Secretary. Chris Wright and JD Vance are dropping truth bombs in speeches that can’t be ignored. Word is spreading fast, and if Reuters don’t report this, they risk being turned into the same irrelevant wreckage the US mainstream media channels already are. As the US economy ramps up, other countries will have to let go of their green delusions in order to keep up. The game changed. There’s no point upping the ante in the UN-poker game if the main player has played a Royal Flush.
Even the graph! An actual graph!
Source Reuters and Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2024
Two graphs!
Presumably the owners of Reuters have sold out of their renewable stocks. (Readers here read about this trend in October 2023.)
Source: Reuters, and S&P | P.Thal Larsen.
So this is arse-covering, forgive the language, but this is also an escape clause for allies and believers
The owners of Reuters (whoever they are) — are presumably part of The Blob, since they have covered up its failures for decades, and gave millions to Hillary. This article is also an escape clause for allies and a warning to jump ship. It’s full of excuses — we were misled by an era of low interest rates; we had good intentions; we didn’t realize China made all our stuff with coal, you know, and Energy transitions take a very long time. What a shock!
The way Edward Chancellor writes, anyone could have got this wrong. Even the oil giants made mistakes, you know, and are now looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business. Never is there any question that say, National Energy Managers ought to have done their homework, or that Energy Ministers should have done due diligence before recklessly trying to transform electricity grids based on what Al Gore and a teenage girl told them to do:
Not long ago, investors worried that traditional energy companies would be left with “stranded assets” – oil and gas fields abandoned as demand for fossil fuels dried up. Yet earlier this month Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab announced a near-$1 billion writedown for its investment in a wind project off the New Jersey coast. BP (BP.L), opens new tab is scrapping targets for increasing generation of renewable energy and cutting oil and gas production. As Lees writes, “across the sector, oil majors that shifted their portfolios to green energy are now realising their mistake and are looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business.”
The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels.The energy expert Vaclav Smil has likened the costs of the planned energy transition to those incurred by a nation fighting total war for decades on end. The era of zero interest rates created a sense that the supply of capital was infinite and its cost negligible. Rising interest rates dispelled that illusion. The economics of wind and solar power, with their large upfront investment costs and relatively low operating expenses, have been upended. Wood Mackenzie calculates that every 2 percentage point increase in the risk-free rate raises the levelised cost of renewable electricity by around 20%.
I’ve always said there will come a day when everyone says “I was always a skeptic”
This is the start of that normalization. It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning of the end in the energy battle.
But it’s not even the start of the science battle. They’re still “believers” of big-gov bad-science. The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels….
What the world still urgently needs are real journalists and honest media. It needs accountable Ministers, and bureaucrats that get sacked. If we don’t learn from the last mistakes, the next episode of parasitic loot-and-pillage is just around the corner.
Energy from the wind and the sun — they’re clean and green and free. OK, there’s the small problem of intermittency. But clearly the intermittency problem can easily be solved with a few batteries to store some power for the occasional calm nights.
Energy from the wind and the sun — they’re clean and green and free. OK, there’s the small problem of intermittency. But clearly the intermittency problem can easily be solved with a few batteries to store some power for the occasional calm nights.
Or is that solution really so easy? Regular readers here will know that I wrote an energy storage Report, titled “The Energy Storage Conundrum,” published by the GWPF back in December 2022. After some straightforward calculations based on elementary-school-level arithmetic, that Report concluded that the amount of storage needed was so large, and the costs so completely unaffordable, that energy storage was totally infeasible as a way to make wind and solar work as the main power sources for an electricity grid. Calculations set forth in that Report concluded that the amount of energy storage needed to enable a predominantly wind/solar grid to get through a year without hitting a blackout was in the range of 500 to 1000 hours of average electricity usage. Keep that range in mind for the rest of this post.
Paying no attention whatsoever to my warnings, and not troubling themselves to do any simple arithmetic of their own, the states of New York and California have chosen to forge ahead with plans for predominantly wind/solar grids backed up by batteries. Multiple years into the project, neither state is anywhere near to building 1% of the energy storage that would be needed to make their fantasy systems work. But even in these very early stages, they have both blundered into an additional and unanticipated problem: catastrophic fires.
Lithium-ion batteries have an unfortunate downside that they occasionally catch fire spontaneously. This can be a notable problem for your cell phone or computer, and a bigger problem for your electric bicycle or car. But the batteries for those things, even the electric car, are tiny compared to the huge batteries needed to back up the electrical grid. Grid-scale batteries must store thousands of megawatt-hours of electricity, compared to maybe 100 kWh for an EV. It seems that the frequency of these spontaneous fires increases with the size of the battery. Can this problem be solved? I have no idea. But it certainly has not been solved yet.
In March 2024, I had a post titled “New York and California Getting Totally Lost With Energy Storage,” reporting on the efforts of those two states to build gigantic battery farms to back up their planned wind/solar adventures. At a stage of having built only a fraction of one percent of the amount of batteries that would be needed to support the project, both had run into a situation of repeated huge and catastrophic spontaneous fires in their newly-built battery farms.
New York (State) has average electricity demand of about 17,000 MW, meaning that the storage capacity it would need for the predominantly wind/solar system of the future would be 500 to 1000 hours of that, or 8,500 to 17,000 GWh. Governor Hochul has set a (ridiculous) goal of 24 GWh of energy storage for the State by 2030, and my March 2024 post reported that by August 2023 all of 1.2 GWh of that had been built. And yet, between May and July 2023, New York had had three large fires at the grid battery storage facilities built up to that time:
On May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire.
On June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire.
On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.
Over in California, their average electricity demand is around 30,000 MW, meaning that the range of 500 to 1000 hours of battery storage they would need to back up their dream of a wind/solar system would require 15,000 GWh to 30,000 GWh of batteries. Here from the State of California is an Energy Storage System survey from October 2024. The amount of energy storage built so far is stated as 13,391 MW. Of course, they use the wrong units. These people are completely innumerate. However, we know that they are talking about 4-hour lithium-ion batteries, so multiply by 4 and divide by 1000 to get 53.564 GWh of storage built so far. That would be between about 0.18% and 0.36% of the amount of energy storage they would need to back up a predominantly wind/solar system.
And yet with this teensy amount of storage built so far, California too has had repeated spontaneous fires. My March 2024 post reported on two of these fires (sourced from an LA Times piece from October 2023):
In September 2022, a Tesla Megapack caught fire at a battery storage facility operated by Pacific Gas & Electric in the Northern California town of Moss Landing.
A fire broke out at the Valley Center Energy Storage Facility in San Diego County on Sept. 18 [2023].
And now we have the biggest fire of all, this time again at the Moss Landing facility. According to Energy Storage News in August 2023, after a 2023 expansion to 3 GWh capacity, the Moss Landing facility became the world’s largest energy storage facility. The fire broke out yesterday, January 16, and appears to be still burning to some extent at the time of this writing. I can’t find an estimate of how much of the facility is getting destroyed, but it is not a small part. Here is a picture of the fire from NPR:
NBC News reports today that there was a mandatory evacuation of an area of 7600 acres surrounding the facility. 7600 acres is about 12 square miles. Approximately 1200 to 1500 residents living in that area were evacuated, according to NBC.
NBC quotes Monterey County District 2 Supervisor Glenn Church calling this “a worst case scenario of a disaster” that nobody predicted. Church continues:
“This is really a lot more than just a fire, it’s really a wake up call for this industry, and if we’re going to be moving ahead with sustainable energy we need to have safe battery systems in place,” Church said.
Church is further quoted as stating that this is the fourth fire at this facility going back to 2019. Besides the current one and the one in 2022 reported in the LA Times story linked above, there were additional fires at Moss Landing in 2019 and 2021.
Back here in New York, my friend and co-author Richard Ellenbogen sends me an email pointing out that we have a large grid-scale battery storage facility moving toward construction on the East bank of the East River right across from Midtown Manhattan. I don’t find whether construction has actually begun, but this project has been in the works for years, and has gotten multiple regulatory approvals. Here is a piece from the New York City Economic Development Corporation indicating that the financing for the project was closed in May 2024. My friend Ellenbogen points out that the technology is the same as the Moss Landing facility in California, and a 12 square mile evacuation zone around this facility would include a big chunk of Midtown Manhattan and another big chunk of densely-populated Western Queens — hundreds of thousands of people, instead of the paltry 1200-1500 just evacuated out in California. What are our New York pols thinking? Actually, the EDC press release quotes a bunch of them. Here are a couple of quotes:
“Large-scale deployment of battery storage helps New York City advance its PlaNYC goal to achieve a clean, reliable, and equitable future,” said Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice Director Elijah Hutchinson. “NYCIDA’s support of this 100 MW project will help reduce our reliance on polluting fossil fuels and when completed, be one of the largest battery storage installations in the state.”
“For decades, residents of historically disadvantaged communities in Queens have suffered the negative effects of peaker plant pollution,” said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. “The battery energy storage facility coming to Astoria will help address this longtime injustice and result in a healthier environment for all of us in Queens. I commend the NYCEDC and the NYCIDA for taking decisive steps to bolster our city’s green economy by facilitating projects like this one that produce clean and renewable energy.”
OK then. This is the level of incompetence we are dealing with.
You would think that the latest Moss Landing disaster would be big news, but not so much. I find pieces at NPR, CBS and NBC, but not, for example, The New York Times. I guess this news is not “fit to print.”
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