Nothing is safe from climate change – not even the moon
via The Deplorable Climate Science Blog
September 14, 2017 at 09:02AM
Month: September 2017
By Paul Homewood
From the Herald Sun in Melbourne:
Does this perhaps explain why we’re running out of electricity yet paying through the nose?
New coal-fired generators being built:
China: 299
India: 132
Indonesia: 32
World: 621
Australia: zero
The data was requested by Nationals senator and party whip John Williams, who has argued that the carbon emissions produced by the new plants worldwide would eclipse Australia’s total carbon emission profile.
“We don’t have a tent over Australia … emissions are going up around the world because of these generators being built,” Senator Williams told The Australian. “We are bowing down to the green agenda which will make no difference to the world’s emissions.
“It makes no sense. We will de-industrialise Australia and let everything be manufactured overseas with higher emissions.”
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 14, 2017 at 08:54AM
The Arctic is not melting. Arctic sea ice extent is normal.
Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graph | Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis
Over the past decade, mid-September sea ice extent has increased.
There is no trend over the past decade.
masie_4km_allyears_extent_sqkm.csv
Yet the idiots on the left still insist that the ice is disappearing. They are impervious to facts and data.
The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone
No matter how many times they have been wrong in the past, they keep coming back with the same idiocy over and over again.
Expert: Arctic polar cap may disappear this summer_English_Xinhua
North Pole May Be Ice-Free for First Time This Summer
Star-News – Google News Archive Search
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’
Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014
The Argus-Press – Google News Archive Search
You really can’t fix stupid.
via The Deplorable Climate Science Blog
September 14, 2017 at 08:32AM
We have gone from having close to the cheapest electricity in the world to among the most expensive. We have all the feeder stock we need — coal, gas and uranium — yet electricity prices have doubled in a decade.
The Australian Energy Market Operator report released this week on the reliability of the electricity system points to the reasonably high likelihood of demand exceeding supply in South Australia and Victoria in the coming summer, with reliability a continuing issue for the next few years in these two states. After 2022 and in the event of the closure of the 2000-megawatt Liddell coal-fired power station in the Hunter Valley, the reliability of the supply of electricity in NSW becomes increasingly problematic.
These predictions of the AEMO come notwithstanding a veritable torrent of investment in intermittent, renewable energy in recent years. At the present rate, we should hit the target of 33,000 gigawatts hours by 2020, although the requirement of back-up for these projects will generally be observed in the breach.
What has happened is a higgledy-piggledy flow of projects, mainly bunched in SA and Victoria and generally located a long way from the established grid. The early wind farms, which were encouraged by virtue of renewable energy certificates and various state government incentives (enabling planning approvals and payroll tax concessions), actually made the system more unstable because of their failure to incorporate the required software.
But here’s the thing: the greater the penetration of renewables, the more unreliable the system becomes even with the latest software being in place. This is not just about the laws of physics (which AEMO emphasises) but the fact that most of eastern Australia shares the same weather patterns, so any gains from heterogeneity (dissimilar weather patterns) are very small.
However, the kicker is the fact renewable energy, with its preferential dispatch status and low operating costs, sends dispatchable power plants into early retirement and kills off the incentives to build new ones. Note that since 2011 nearly 6000 megawatts of coal-fired plant capacity has been withdrawn from the market, or close to 12 per cent of total capacity.
Now the point is often made that we have reached this appalling position — high-cost, unreliable electricity affecting, in particular, the competitiveness of our heavy industries — because of very poor government policy.
But whether the outcome was entirely unintended is not so clear-cut. From the time John Howard introduced the first version of the renewable energy target, it was a one-way street to more subsidised, intermittent renewable energy and an investment strike in dispatchable energy. This was the aim; it could not have been otherwise.
To be sure, there has been plenty of toing and froing in the policy space. The carbon tax, at the ludicrously high figure of $23 a tonne of carbon dioxide-equivalent in 2012-13 (rising to $24.15 the next financial year), was a high water mark of stupidity. Don’t forget this tax, which was nearly three times the EU price, was imposed in combination with a ludicrous RET of 41,000 gigawatt hours.
That the tax was abolished and the RET wound back by the Abbott government meant that imminent disaster was averted, but the future possibility was not removed entirely.
Sadly, most of the expensive apparatus attached to the carbon tax policy, such as the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, survived, chowing down taxpayer money at the rate of knots to be handed out to the green panhandlers that have flourished in this environment. We also have to put up with the pointless but prejudiced Climate Change Authority.
There have been some major porkies told about energy policy, such as the one about wholesale electricity prices falling upon the renegotiation of the RET in 2015. The assumption there was that there would be no retirement of coal-fired power stations until 2040. Yes, pigs might fly; it’s just unclear why the politicians didn’t cotton on….
Forget all that tosh about needing investment certainty: this is just code for a continuing subsidy arrangement for renewable energy.
The most pressing need of the government is to secure the future of dispatchable electricity generation and to do so at reasonable prices. Everything else is a side-show.
Full post
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
September 14, 2017 at 07:01AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 