Australia’s energy crisis was perfectly predictable and perfectly avoidable. Just over 20 years ago, sound engineering gave way to delusional ideology, obsessed with the notion that wind and solar would provide all the power we could ever need. The rest, as they say, is history.

Over time it’s getting harder to convince youngsters that Australia once had a perfectly reliable and affordable power supply. Explaining that it was deliberately destroyed by renewable energy rent seekers aided and abetted by a cynical political elite might take some doing, as well. For now, those implicated have been able to point all sorts of causes for Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity, such as Vlad Putin’s march into Ukraine.

But one thing they can’t blame on Putin is the deliberate closure and planned destruction of perfectly functional coal-fired power plants, like NSW’s Liddell that until last week delivered reliable and affordable power (2,000MW thereof) to the Eastern Grid for more than 50 years.

In our last post, we noted that its closure resulted in an instant 80% jump in wholesale power prices.

The other inevitable consequence – which will soon follow – is load shedding (aka ‘demand management’) and mass blackouts (aka ‘supply mismanagement’) every time the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, during midwinter and at the heart of summer, when demand is at its peak.

We’ll cross the team from Jo Nova and Eric Worrall for a closer look at the consequences of Australia’s utterly insane energy policy.

Vale Liddell coal: given away for nothing and destroyed by predatory capitalism and a screwed Green market
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
29 April 2023

Yesterday, for the last time the final turbine was switched off at Liddell Coal plant after 52 years of operation. The NSW government gave it away for free in 2014 — bundled like a McHappy Meal in with the sale of Bayswater Coal, valued at $0. Governments saw old coal as worthless, at least until 2017 when everyone saw the bloodbath when the Hazelwood coal plant suddenly closed and electricity prices suddenly rose 85%. Then they started to panic a little — even Malcolm Turnbull (our Renewables lovin’ PM) started openly pressuring AGL to sell Liddell so it could keep running until his pet project the Snowy Hydro 2.0 could start.  Chinese owned Alinta turned up with $250 million dollars and was willing to put in a billion to repair the station and extend its life up to 2030.  Despite that bonanza, AGL refused to take the money. It was determined to run it into the ground and shut it down instead. Now it’s determined to blow it up as well. The Demolition crew is already appointed for early next year.

David Archibald notes the insanity:

The experiment is to close the Liddell power station in NSW and see what happens. Liddell’s operator, AGL, has applied to the NSW Government to blow up the power station rather than leave it in a form that can be restarted. This is the military equivalent of burning your bridges behind you — the expedition succeeds or you die.

Liddell’s big value to AGL was not to generate electricity but to buy and sabotage “the competition”
Like so many parts of the Western economy, the predators buy up the cheaper end of the market in order to destroy them. AGL are the largest single generator in Australia. They own a portfolio of gas, hydro, wind and solar power, all of which will likely make higher profits with Liddell out of the way.

The year after Hazelwood closed AGL profits launched up from $539 million to $1,600 million.  No wonder they didn’t want to sell.

Liddell was worth more dead than alive
It shows how screwed our electricity market truly is when billion-dollar assets producing cheap electricity are better off destroyed. Hello, AEMO our energy market operator — are you listening? And ultimately, Hello Anthony Albanese (the current PM). He commands this ship of crazy rules. The market is just doing “what makes sense” — and generators are not rewarded for making cheaper electricity as much as they are rewarded for destroying it.

AGL wouldn’t sell Liddell because NSW electricity might get cheaper. Oh the travesty?

As I wrote in 2018, the analysts at JP Morgan were frank about AGL’s strategy — let’s translate their investor-speak: if AGL sold it to Alinta and Liddell kept operating, it might “unfortunately” keep electricity prices lower which would hurt all of AGL’s other generators. We can’t have that…

Selling the power station to Alinta would hurt the wholesale prices that AGL can charge for energy from its other assets, the analysts said, while also helping a rival that is determined to eat into AGL’s market share. Operationally, Liddell and AGL’s nearby Bayswater power station are supplied with coal from a single coal loader and are subject to a number of contracts that would need to be unwound.

“Extending (Liddell) would likely have a negative impact on wholesale prices, and therefore the value of the rest of AGL’s generation assets; it would support the growth of a competitor in electricity retailing; and a separation from Bayswater would be complicated with the two assets intrinsically linked,” JPMorgan said. — Paul Garvey, The Australian.

Lower wholesale prices means “good news for customers” but “bad news for expensive retailers” — like owners of renewable generators.

How wiping out cheap generators makes all other generators richer
This, below, was the bid-stack of our national grid ten years ago. The AEMO (market operator) accepts every bid from the cheapest on the left up to the last bid needed to meet the current demand. All successful bidders are paid whatever the top successful bid was. By taking out the cheaper providers on the left, the whole stack shifts “left” and higher bids must be accepted to meet demand.

Liddell is the third “brown” supplier from the left. *( Not graphed: most diesel plants costing more than $350/MWh because they blow the scale away.)

The cross ownership of assets makes predatory capitalism possible
Once upon a time governments were meant to protect consumers from this sort of thing. If 20 separate companies colluded together to rig the market so they’d all be better off but at the consumers expense, we’d call that a cartel. But if one company buys 20 smaller companies then doing the same thing is just “managing the portfolio”. See how this works?

On the Australian national grid there are three large conglomerate players who make most of our electricity (and who also do retail sales of electricity). AGL is marked in blue, and the market dominance is obvious — singlehandedly generating around 40% of the electricity required in our two most populated states.

We wouldn’t be in this mess if each separate power plant was competing in the free market to make a profit for itself and there weren’t holy subsidies for intermittent green electrons too.

State of the energy market 2022 – Full report ( PDF 12.94 MB ) page 205.

Some are blaming the privatisation of an electricity generator — if you can call it that, when it was given away for free like a toxic frog. But the bigger crime was nationalizing our electricity market and issuing pagan commandments that we use our generators as giant weather changing machinery.

But thank your central banker for keeping interest rates artificially low for years so the rich could do the takeover and merger dance to remove the competition.

Last word to John McRobert:

With the closing of Liddell power station and other closures pending, we might as well cut back on our defence budget. Soon there will be nothing left to defend.

Despite the courageous words of our Energy Minister Chris Bowen that there will be no power shortages – he who believes that climate can be controlled by legislation – the words of an old, sad song resonate: “Hello darkness my old friend.”

Vale Liddell, and may those you have served so well never forget you.

Jo Nova Blog

“A couple of hours after Liddell [Power Station] Closed, AEMO … Issued a Market Notice”
Watts Up With That
Eric Worrall
2 May 2023

Life without coal? Within hours of the final closure of Liddell Coal Plant permanently removing 10% of New South Wales’ baseload power, an electricity reserve shortfall notice was issued.

Hilights from the video;

“A couple of hours after Liddell Closed, AEMO, which is Australian Energy Market Operator, well they issued an electricity Market Notice, forecasting a lack of reserve, level one energy supply, New South Wales”

“There’s not one of your viewers, I can tell you right now, which has seen a decrease in their power prices”.

“The reality is coming, that light you see in the distance Peta, that is the train of reality coming to run us all over, and as you said, AEMO has already issued warning notices on the reserve, there’s not enough there”

“What can a battery of that size do? — Well firstly it doesn’t exist, so nothing. But secondly, if they do manage to build it, from the reports I’ve seen, it’s got a capacity of 2GWh. The actual capacity in hours by MW is the important bit. So if it has a 500MW maximum capacity, it can do 4 hours at 500MW, to apparently replace roughly 1300MW of good, reliable coal fired power which runs 24×7. These are not tough numbers to get your head around … I had a good look at all the solar farms in NSW, assuming you had 4 hours of good sunlight, they couldn’t charge it anyway”

“… There is no reliability on intermittent wind and solar…”

“What’s the latest on the gas caps? — Well this is just another shambles, I mean it’s communism 101, from what I can see of the current proposal, it comes to down to the two ministers, Madeleine King and Chris Bowen, to decide if they like your gas company or not … We’ve seen the Japanese Ambassador screaming about sovereign risk …”

Watch the video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1238552883720592

It’s good to see my local MP Keith Pitt picking up the ball on Net Zero and renewables again. We at WUWT were disappointed in 2021, when Pitt stayed silent as his then party leader publicly embraced Net Zero, in a desperate attempt to save a few of their useless inner city “conservative” colleagues in the 2022 federal election. That last minute green posturing didn’t convince anyone, the Conservative seats they tried to save mostly ended up falling to the Teals (well funded green independents).

Unfortunately, despite these warnings and words of common sense, I now believe it is inevitable that Australia will hit the green energy wall WUWT described a few days ago. Unless there is a radical change of course, sometime before the end of this decade, Australia begin to suffer South African scale blackouts.

Even if there is a desperate last minute awakening, an attempt to prevent the closure of Australia’s remaining coal plants, there will be nothing left worth saving.

None of the legacy fossil fuel power plants have been properly maintained. Australia’s “reliable” energy infrastructure is no longer reliable, all the plants have all been run into the ground, by owners who believe fossil fuel energy has no future in green Australia. The Australian government’s recent introduction of a carbon tax in my opinion just seals their fate.
Watts Up With That?

[More crap from ideologically captured social scientists who couldn’t tell you the atomic weight of a Hydrogen atom. ~cr]

Reasoning about climate change

Bence Bago, David G Rand, Gordon Pennycook 

Author Notes

PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 5, May 2023, pgad100, 

https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad100

Published: 02 May 2023

 Article history

Abstract

Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change common despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely held explanation involves politically motivated (system 2) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover the truth, people use their reasoning abilities to protect their partisan identities and reject beliefs that threaten those identities. Despite the popularity of this account, the evidence supporting it (i) does not account for the fact that partisanship is confounded with prior beliefs about the world and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior beliefs and (ii) experimentally manipulating participants’ extent of reasoning using cognitive load and time pressure while they evaluate arguments for or against anthropogenic global warming. The results provide no support for the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account over other accounts: Engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior beliefs about climate change—a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning—and did not exacerbate the impact of partisanship once prior beliefs are accounted for.

Issue Section:

 Psychological and Cognitive Sciences

Editor: Michele Gelfand

Significance Statement

It is commonly argued that reasoning exacerbates political bias via identity-protective cognition. This theoretical account has had a particular influence on the explanation of partisan differences in the context of global warming. According to this account, people exert mental effort to defend their political identities by disputing identity-inconsistent information. However, our results provide no support for this account over other accounts. Beyond raising theoretical questions about how people reason about climate change, our findings suggest a potential alternative pathway for addressing it. Instead of focusing on interventions that try to decrease partisanship saliency when communicating about science, interventions aimed at providing accurate information about climate change may be effective in the long run.

Introduction

Skepticism about climate change and its human origins represents a major impediment to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies (1–3). One of the most commonly cited reasons for climate change denial is political partisanship or ideologies (4). In the United States, for example, people on the political right are more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax or that it is not caused by human activities (2, 5–8). What is more, people with greater numerical ability and cognitive sophistication show more pronounced partisan differences in climate change beliefs, rather than greater agreement with the scientific consensus (9–13). That is, having stronger cognitive ability appears to not protect against climate misperceptions but instead bolster views that align with one’s political identity.

The most popular explanation of this result is provided by the motivated system 2 reasoning (MS2R) framework (11, 14–16). Motivated reasoning has been used in connection with a number of processes and motivations, but in this research, we specifically focus on political motivations, as they have been argued to be the primary drivers of climate change disbelief (11). This MS2R framework can be interpreted from the point of view of the dual-process perspective (17–19), which distinguishes between two types of reasoning processes: intuition (system 1) and deliberation (system 2). While intuition is considered a low-effort, quick, automatic response to stimuli, deliberation is a more effortful, time-consuming process. The MS2R framework asserts that cognitive abilities are linked to greater polarization because deliberation facilitates politically motivated reasoning: When faced with new evidence, engaging in deliberation better allows one to discredit the evidence if it is not congenial to one’s identity and partisan commitments (and vice versa when it is congenial). As a result, there are large partisan differences in what evidence is deemed credible, eventually leading to substantial polarization in beliefs. In the language of dual-process theory, deliberative reasoning processes are triggered to rationalize or justify identity-consistent intuitive impulses. In the context of climate change, this would mean that deliberation leads Republicans to reject evidence in favor of climate change (to protect their partisan identity), while deliberation leads Democrats to reject evidence questioning climate change (10, 11, 20–23). If more cognitively sophisticated people engage in more deliberation, they will be better at aligning their judgments of evidence about climate change with their respective political identities.

This theory has enormous practical importance because, if it is true, common strategies such as educating people or making them more reflective will not be effective against climate change denial. In fact, such strategies will only serve to increase partisan differences (10, 23, 24) (although there is evidence questioning this assumption (25–27)). Furthermore, from a theoretical perspective, this “MS2R” account stands in stark contrast to a common dual-process perspective—the “classical reasoning” view—whereby system 2 reasoning is thought to typically facilitate accuracy in a variety of decision-making tasks (18, 28, 29). Put differently, the classical reasoning account posits that when people engage in deliberation, they tend to form more accurate beliefs, regardless of the partisan or identity alignment of the propositions that they are deliberating about (29, 30).

However, there are two serious limitations of the prior empirical research in this area. First, political identity is correlated with—but meaningfully separable from—people’s prior beliefs about climate change (31). In particular, Democrats are much more likely to believe that climate change is caused by human activity than Republicans. Yet, many Republicans do believe in anthropogenic climate change, and some Democrats do not, meaning that partisanship and priors are meaningfully distinct constructs. For example, a recent Pew survey found that 53% of conservative Republicans believe that human activity contributes to global warming to at least some degree, while 8% of moderate Democrats think that it does not (5). Yet most studies claiming to provide evidence of politically motivated reasoning have not measured these prior beliefs, which is highly problematic for making strong claims about politically motivated reasoning (31–33). Although partisanship might influence prior beliefs, many other factors also contribute to beliefs, such as who people judge trustworthy as well as family environment or life experiences (12), and prior beliefs may also influence partisanship. Thus, effects driven by prior beliefs do not provide positive evidence in support of politically motivated reasoning.

Indeed, recent correlational work finds that controlling for prior beliefs related to climate change nullifies the correlation between cognitive sophistication and partisan bias; instead, higher cognitive reflection was associated with placing greater emphasis on prior beliefs when evaluating new information (31). While evaluating new evidence in light of prior beliefs is sometimes called “confirmation bias” and can be a vehicle for politically motivated reasoning in so much as political identities influence prior beliefs, it is also possible that such evaluation can be entirely rational and unbiased from a Bayesian perspective¹ when there is uncertainty about the reliability of sources (34–38). When considering evidence that is inconsistent with your prior beliefs, it can be rational to conclude that it is more likely that the information source is unreliable than it would be to take the stance that everything that (or much of what) you know about a topic is wrong. It is therefore essential to account for prior beliefs when attempting to test for politically motivated reasoning. Any relationships with identity that are not robust to controlling for prior beliefs do not provide positive evidence for politically motivated reasoning because they can be consistent with either political or accuracy motivations. Indeed, distinguishing the effects of prior beliefs and partisanship is important and common in the literature, even among proponents of the MS2R account, best described by Kahan (39): “Under [motivated system 2 reasoning], the signature feature of this form of information processing is the opportunistic adjustment of the weight-assigned evidence conditional on its conformity to positions associated with membership in identity-defining affinity groups. In Bayesian terms, there is an endogenous relationship between the likelihood ratio and a person’s political predispositions. It is this entanglement that distinguishes politically motivated reasoning from a normative conception of Bayesian information processing, in which the weight (likelihood ratio assigned) evidence is determined on the basis of valid, truth-seeking criteria independent of an individual’s cultural identity. [Motivated system 2 reasoning] also distinguishes politically motivated reasoning from cognitively biased forms of information processing in which the likelihood ratio is endogenous to some non-truth-seeking influence other than identity protection, such as an individuals’ priors in the case of confirmation bias,” although the effects of prior beliefs and partisanship have not been sufficiently empirically investigated in the context of investigating the apparent role of deliberation (39, 40).

Second, past research on MS2R has relied upon correlating individual differences in cognitive sophistication (e.g. cognitive reflection, numeracy, and education) with the extent of partisan differences on politicized issues (9, 11, 41). Although it is generally thought that people scoring higher on cognitive sophistication scales are better at deliberation than people scoring lower on these scales, they also tend to differ in many other aspects. For example, they tend to generate different intuitions on many reasoning tasks (i.e. people who are more cognitively sophisticated also have different prior beliefs and knowledge than those who score lower (42, 43)). Thus, because this approach is correlational, it does not allow for the direct identification of causal effects of deliberation.

Current research

In the current research, we address both of these limitations. First, we provide a causal test of the role of intuition and deliberation on how people evaluate pro climate change and contra climate change arguments by forcing some participants to make judgments under cognitive load and time pressure. Second, we measure prior beliefs about climate change by asking how serious risk participants believe climate change to be and how much they agree that human activity causes climate change.

This paradigm allows us to shed new light on competing accounts of the role of deliberation in argument evaluation surrounding climate change: Does deliberation magnify partisan bias, consistent with the MS2R framework (11)? Or does it facilitate accurate assessments, consistent with a more classical perspective on reasoning (30, 31, 37)?

Furthermore, we specify a third alternative. Previous research (e.g. studying blatantly false political news posts (30)) has argued that the classical reasoning approach simply predicts that more deliberation will lead to increased objective accuracy, defined here as holding a position more consistent with the scientific consensus on climate change. However, most people do not actually have direct access to the information needed to know the objectively accurate answer, particularly in the context of complicated technical issues like climate change. Thus, the classical reasoning account would not necessarily predict that deliberation leads to more objectively accurate views. Instead, accuracy-motivated deliberation may lead to improved coherence between one’s existing directly relevant beliefs and the stimuli being presented. That is, deliberation may increase the extent to which one evaluates whether new information makes sense in light of the relevant beliefs/knowledge that one has developed based on previous information that one has encountered (a process that, as discussed above, can be consistent with unbiased, rational Bayesian updating (34–37)). In this case, deliberation should magnify differences based on prior beliefs. As a result, finding that deliberation increases coherence with prior beliefs could be consistent with either a motivated or rational account.

In our experiments, we asked participants to indicate how much they agreed with politically neutral arguments about climate change (meaning that there were no references in them to specific policies or to politics in any way). These arguments were taken from “procon.org,” a website that collects arguments that were made in real life about several different topics. Arguments were content counter-balanced, such that for each statement, we created a pro and contra version, one of which was randomly assigned to a given participant; participants never saw both the pro and contra versions of the same argument. Altogether, they were presented with six arguments (half contra and half pro). Table 1 shows the pro and contra versions of an example item from our experiment (for a complete set of statements, see Table S1).

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You can read the rest of the article explaining why and how your reasoning is deficient and that you are an emotionally manipulated troglodyte here.

Have fun discussing this tripe.

The website of American Trucking Associations had an interesting blog post last month concerning electric mandates for the Trucking industry. It is focused on the testimony of Andrew Boyle, ATA first vice chair and co-president of Massachusetts-based Boyle Transportation before a Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on the future of clean vehicles.

A cut from his opening remarks:

Boyle’s testimony demonstrated the disconnects between mandates and the real-world.

From the article.

After one trucking company tried to electrify just 30 trucks at a terminal in Joliet, Illinois, local officials shut those plans down, saying they would draw more electricity than is needed to power the entire city.

A California company tried to electrify 12 forklifts. Not trucks, but forklifts. Local power utilities told them that’s not possible.

Costs, sourcing and reliability are being ignored

Aside from the likely inflation these costs will impose will be issues caused by weight.

It’s not that we can’t overcome challenges, but we don’t overcome them by pretending they don’t exist

California standards will unleash supply chain disruptions nationally.

The order of implementation is important

Bottom line: The trucking industry starts with ‘yes.’ We are committed to protecting the environment and shrinking our footprint, and we have proven that. All we ask for is honesty and transparency about the road ahead. While we share the passion for EVs in cars and light-duty vehicles, projecting an automotive construct onto trucking industry dynamics is a massive mistake. 

Success will depend on national standards with achievable targets and realistic timelines that enable innovation to flourish.

For the complete original article click here.