Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Climate Realists of Five Dock, JoNova; “… you were being realistic and they didn’t want to hear it. …” – Aussie climate and energy minister Chris Bowen has been accused of ignoring criticism of his green energy fantasies.

From the transcript;

… We can’t make this transition to we absolutely convinced we what we’ve got. The alternative is going to work. There’s going to be at a price point that it won’t kill the economy. At the moment, we’ve got neither of those.

Mark Colvin: you say the idea of getting to 80% renewables by 2030 is complete BS. You say closer to 80 years?

Yeah, well, you’ve got to build these things. You know, transmissionlines.

They say their own reports say you’ll need 82.0 or their equivalents12.1, 2.8, eight, ten years. So get eight. I can do my math. It’s got tobe 80, 70. So you’ll be another generation before anything like.

Anything like.

What they’re talking about occurs.

We know it’s never too late to learn a lesson. What would you say to Chris Bowen if he’s listening this morning?

Oh, take a big good and take.

A big, deep breath. You know, you’re a minister now. You’ve got responsibilities. You’ve got to you’ve got to put it all on the line and you’ve got to be you’ve got you’ve got to be honest to everybody about it. …

Listen to the interview or read the transcript: https://omny.fm/shows/ben-fordham-full-show/it-s-bullshit-former-snowy-2-0-boss-sprays-chris-b#description

WUWT recently reported on the timetable and budget blowouts, but what this reveals is far worse.

Paul Broad, the man who ran the Snowy 2 project from 2013 to 2022, has accused the Australian Government of basing their entire green energy transition plan on fantasies.

Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen appears to be the chief fantasist. Bowen has repeatedly revealed his terrifying ignorance of energy matters, like when he told Australians we can store electricity like water.

If Paul Broad is right, and someone who managed a major energy project for 10 years probably knows a few things about electricity and engineering, the future of the Australian electricity grid is in the hands of headstrong and ignorant fools. I believe the Aussie energy grid, or at least the East Coast side of the grid, is now headed for an inevitable crash.

The real world, the laws of physics, the vagaries of renewables, they don’t care about the fantasies of politicians. The trail of economic wreckage, from forced power cutbacks and factory power cuts due to grid shortfalls, has only just begun. Sooner or later, one fossil fuel plant closure too many will bring down the grid.

Essay by Eric Worrall

Mark Steyn discussing the gaping gaps in today’s climate science with Australia’s Joanne Nova.

Click here to view the Steyn Online article on the video.

From JoNova’s site;

My appearance with the wonderful Mark Steyn Tuesday is playing at SteynOnline, or on the Australian ADH TV.

Mark was tickled with the idea from my article last week: The science is settled but we just found 19,000 new volcanoes.  He also wanted to talk about The crime of talking to Tucker Carlson and the Red-pilling of Naomi Wolf.  We discussed other major science surprises like the mass phytoplankton blooms that seed clouds. That was another rule breaking surprise just two months ago — that moment when researchers realized that all the toluene and benzene pollution over the Southern Ocean was actually not caused by humans at all, but by phytoplankton.

We discussed the odd coincidence of how all the places that are warming in Antarctica seem to lie over the top of a 91 volcanoes we only discovered a few years ago.  As I said, we know the surface of the moon better than we know the depths of the ocean. Only three men have visited the Mariana Trench and it’s only 11 kilometers from the surface of Earth, but 12 men have walked on the moon.

—  It was a lot of fun. Bear in mind that it was 3pm for Mark and 3am for me. We really are on opposite sides of the world.

Read more: https://joannenova.com.au/2023/05/jo-nova-talks-to-mark-steyn-about-volcanoes-and-free-speech/

Jo is a personal friend and is also a high profile critic the climate insanity currently afflicting Australian politics.

Jo Nova’s interview with Mark Steyn, a giant of free speech and climate skepticism, and a fearless critic of alarmists like Michael Mann, is well worth watching.

I found the interview interesting because it hilights a little discussed but potentially very important gap in climate science – our desperately incomplete knowledge of undersea and under-ice volcanic activity, and the potential impact of that activity on Antarctic ice sheet dynamics, ocean chemistry, atmospheric greenhouse gasses and fluctuations in ocean temperature.

Snowy Hydro Dam. Supplied by Snowy Hydro

By Jo Nova

Australia’s star “Renewables BackUp” the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme has been delayed another two years. The pumped storage mammoth looks more like a ghost elephant every day. When last we heard, Florence the hapless tunnel boring machine started on a 15 kilometer tunnel and carved through 150 meters of rock only to get stuck in some sand, where it is still stuck months later. Now the completion date has blown out to late 2029.

When it started in 2017 it was supposed to cost $2 billion, and be finished in four years. Now, if we include transmission lines, the cost is about $20 billion, and the four years has become twelve. Even the Greens leader Adam Bandt thinks it should be ditched. It’s that bad.

Paul Broad was the CEO of Snowy Hydro for ten years until August last year. So he managed one of Australia’s largest single generators for a decade. Now that he’s free to speak, he’s scathing about the renewables transition. On Thursday he spoke to Ben Fordham of 2GB radio making it clear what a fantasy project NetZero is:

“The notion that we can have 80 per cent renewables by 2030 is bullshit,”

“Eraring [Coal power station] CANNOT close…If the lights don’t go out I’ll be awfully surprised,” he said.

‘The truth is… this transition (to renewables), if it ever occurs, it will take 80 years… not eight.’

The standard marketing for Snowy 2.0 includes this line, which was supposed to impress us:

” It will store enough energy to power 3 million homes for a week.”

Except that for $20 billion dollars we could build new coal plants to power 3 million homes for the whole dang year.

And Snowy 2.0 will be a very inefficient battery, consuming about 1.5 kilowatt-hours for pumping for each 1.0 kilowatt-hour it delivers, due to losses in the pumping/ generation cycle and in transmission (two ways). Further, its claimed cyclic storage capacity will be constrained by the unequal volumes of the upper and lower reservoirs and the need to integrate operation with the existing Tumut 3 pumped hydro station.

Environmentally, vast construction sites and roads/tracks across 35km of Kosciuszko National Park have destroyed thousands of hectares of native alpine habitat. Twenty million tonnes of excavated spoil will be dumped in the Park and reservoirs, enough to cover a football field to a height of three kilometres.

Pest fish and pathogens will be transported from Talbingo Reservoir to Tantangara Reservoir and then across the alps into the Murray, Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Tumut headwaters, overwhelming native species and devastating trout fishing. Four 330kV transmission lines on two sets of 70-metre towers will traverse eight kilometres of the Park over a cleared easement swathe up to 140 metres wide. This will be the first time transmission lines are erected in a NSW national park for 50 years.

From The Daily Mail: we find out it’s really our Energy Minister that’s the problem

Broad resigned because “Mr Bowen became the Energy Minister” and Bowen wanted to run a gas plant on hydrogen that didn’t exist:

He [Broad] said said he resigned as Snowy Hydro CEO last August after nine years in charge because after Mr Bowen became the Energy Minister ‘I was dead in the water, so it was only a matter of time before I formally resigned.’

‘Particularly the gas plant at Kurri Kurri (in NSW). (former Coalition energy minister) Angus Taylor and I were very strong that you needed gas to keep the lights on. ‘And we had more gas in NSW than we know what to do with. We need gas (for) when the sun’s not shining, when the wind’s not blowing … (but) Chris Bowen was against Kurri Kurri.

‘Then he said, we’re going to run Kurri Kurri 30 per cent on hydrogen.

There is no hydrogen … and there won’t be for another 10, 20 years at the earliest,’ he said.

Imagine if they’d put out this announcement the week before the Liddell coal fired plant closed?

h/t Crakar24, David B, Eric Worrall, Strop,