By Jo Nova

There is no saving the Australian grid from a high pressure cell.

Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste

Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working.  Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.

Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.

The Australian government is dismissing comparisons with costs of running grids based on unreliable wind and solar power overseas because we supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously.

We have a natural disadvantage in wind power — we’re surrounded by vast oceans which make interconnectors prohibitively long, expensive and a strategic security risk for communist ships that might drag anchors accidentally-on-purpose

‘Where exactly can we build another thousand wind turbines that would work on a day like today? Macquarie Island? Antarctica?

And it’s not just one day. So far for May 2024 wind generation has been low half the time.

On May 25th at one point the entire generation was just 221MW or 2% of total capacity.

Australia has 11GW wind power “capacity” and 5% of that is working.

There’s no extension cord long enough to get to the land of the Faraway tree and dependable wind

Over in Western Australia, total wind production is 30MW. So even a new cable 2,000 kilometers long from Perth to South Australia won’t save the national grid. Wind power is only supplying 1.5% of the total electricity on the Western Wholesale Market for Perth and South West Australia. The total installed capacity of wind power in the West is about 1 GW, so it is supplying only 3 to 5% of that.

Macquarie Island is 2,500 kilometers from the closest Australian capital city, and Casey base Antarctica is 3,500 kilometers away.  It’s 2,000 kilometers direct to New Zealand, which is bad enough, but parts of the Tasman Sea are 5km deep. They don’t call it the “abyss” for nothing.

In any case, wind speeds over New Zealand right now are only 1 – 7 km/hr.