Like any ideological cult, wind and solar acolytes bury troublesome facts and replace them with oodles of helpful fiction. Start with the supposed cost of the electricity occasionally generated by wind turbines and solar panels.

The usual trick is to invent some model said to capture the unique benefits of running on sunshine and breezes. The model ignores critical variables (such as sunshine and wind and wear and tear on turbines and deterioration of panels) thereby overstating output and understating the actual cost of generation.

Once upon a time Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) was renowned for advancing science and technology using objective and critical analysis, and all for the benefit of the Country. These days. Not so much.

CSIRO is just another government institution overrun by ideological crones obsessed with the conceit that they alone can change the weather 50 years from now and that if we don’t ‘act’ now the world will incinerate some time later next week.

Well and truly captured by wind and solar rent seekers, part of their brief is to put up fictional accounts of the (always understated) costs and (always overstated) benefits of wind and solar: its GenCost report sits somewhere between Science Fiction and rubbery accounting, as Nick Cater explains below.

We now know Labor’s renewables dream is based on economic modelling that isn’t as ‘unimpeachable’ as Chris Bowen claims it to be
Sky News
Nick Cater
4 May 2024

A scan of Chris Bowen’s media archives on his ministerial website shows that he has claimed that the cheapest electricity comes from renewable energy at least once a week for the last two years.

“Facts are facts,” he told ABC’s Sabra Lane last December.

He cited economic modelling by the CSIRO describing it as “unimpeachable and very, very clear”.

If the Energy Minister is beginning to sound screechy, it is probably because he’s losing the argument.

An Essential poll for the Guardian last month found that 40 per cent of Australians think renewable energy is the most expensive form of energy, up from 38 per cent last October.

Only 36 per cent said nuclear was the most expensive, and 24 per cent picked fossil fuels.

For the first time in an Essential poll, a clear majority supported nuclear energy, 52 per cent in favour compared to 31 per cent against.

The findings should trouble not just the government but the CSIRO.

It has suffered self-inflicted repetitional damage by venturing outside its area of scientific expertise into the complex microeconomic world of energy pricing.

Despite Bowen’s insistence, most Australians know that computer modelling of future prices are not facts but predictions that must be truth tested against observations made on the ground. Observations of the upward trend in household electricity bills, for example.

This week, the Centre for Independent Studies published a devastating critique of the CSIRO’s modelling which shows it to be unworthy of the paper it’s printed upon.

The CIS’ conclusions confirm that our peak scientific body has been wading out of its depth, cherry-picking data and making rookie calculation errors.

Significant costs attached to renewable energy are conveniently ignored in the CSIRO GenCost analysis.

The cost of storage and associated transmission lines incurred before 2030 are treated as sunk costs, even though investors will expect a return over the asset’s life.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan – Bowen’s roadmap of the transition to renewables – requires considerable rooftop solar and home battery investment.

Householders and businesses bear this cost, but it is not included in the GenCost analysis.

The cost of decommissioning turbines, solar panels and batteries at the end of their life is also excluded.

In estimating the carbon emissions savings that are said to come by adopting renewals, AEMO’S roadmap excludes emissions from the manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and the other paraphernalia required by intermittent renewable energy, making them seem cleaner than they are.

CSIRO’s method of evaluating individual projects doesn’t consider the energy system as a whole but as separate parts.

This approach allows financially unviable projects to get approval, leading to costs being transferred to consumers.

Most egregiously of all, the CSIRO cherry pick the data to make other forms of electricity generation appear more expensive.

It bases its cost estimate for Small Modular Reactors for example on the cost of a failed project in Utah, which faced peculiar cost overruns, technical challenges and regulatory hurdles.

It includes the finance costs for SMRs but not for wind and solar, where the assumption is that money is borrowed for free.

The GenCost report would likely have found nuclear was considerably cheaper if it had examined a mass-produced reactor like GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, which is about to start production in Canada for installation at Darlington Point in Ontario.

Previous nuclear reactors have been one-off projects.

SMRs like the BWRX-300 will be made on production lines similar to those used to manufacture aircraft.

GenCost uses unrealistic assumptions about the construction costs of new coal plants, making them appear more expensive than renewables.

The ISP selectively chooses specific future years in its cost-benefit analysis to justify transmission projects and ignores years where reliability breaches are likely to occur.

In its determination to stack the cards against fossil fuel generation, the CSIRO assumes that the current price spikes for coal and gas caused by the Ukrainian war will remain constant throughout the lifespan of new plants.

In reality, world gas prices have already returned to levels close to those before Russia’s invasion.

The complete list of errors and biases in the CSIRO GenCost is extensive.

The CIS report is available online.

The CSIRO’s errors are forgivable in part.

The organisation’s expertise is in scientific research and innovation, not microeconomics.

It is hard to fault its work on insect control, fine wool processing, radio astronomy, WiFi protocols or polymer banknotes.

Yet its work on energy pricing is not just economically naive but a departure from the established scientific method.

It commits the most egregious error in the scientist’s rulebook: a priori reasoning, the formation of conclusions based on deductive logic or pre-existing knowledge in which the search for empirical evidence becomes superfluous.

The CSIRO researchers knew what the answer should be and proceeded to torture the evidence until it made a false confession.

A priori reasoning can be helpful in mathematics and logic, but it should never be applied to empirical questions or phenomena in the natural or social sciences.

It leads to confirmation bias, where investigators selectively interpret evidence to support their preconceived notions.

It encourages logical falsehoods and oversimplification, where conclusions are drawn from established principles and ignores the complex, dynamic systems that operate in the natural world or human behaviour.

It cannot cope with complexity or uncertainty, is inherently speculative and runs a high risk of error.

It leads to the delusion that computers are intelligent and that the ability to compile a spreadsheet is the path to omnipotence.

These are increasingly common symptoms in the laptop class.

It’s a condition that might be called Excel syndrome, the delusion that the ability to put a spreadsheet together is a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.
Sky News

And check out Nick’s interview with Alexandra Nicol on the extortionate costs of wind and solar subsidies:

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Pints With Aquinas

Jordan Peterson and Matt Fradd discuss global warming and climate change and dig into how more CO2 in the environment is actually making the planet greener, not more arid.

Watch Full Episode on LOCALS: https://mattfradd.locals.com/post/561…

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Jordan Peterson and Matt Fradd discuss global warming and climate change and dig into how more CO2 in the environment is actually making the planet greener, not more arid.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing in this video is meant as medical advice

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Transcript

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I was going to say, this brings up a broader point because in the internet age, we are constantly being funneled information, but it feels like a mix of information and lies, and it’s hard to discern what’s true. So, I’m drinking this drink today, and it’s talking about how recent science shows that we’ve misunderstood sodium, you know. And maybe that’s true, but the point is, from little things to big things to religious things, when I’m online, I hear from different people who both look credentialed, both seem as passionate as the other, and they’re telling me something that’s conflicting.

Yeah, and I was listening to a fellow recently called John Eldridge, who’s an author, and he said that we’ve become disciples of the internet. In that, you know, we’re being tutored by the internet and not necessarily the content, but the means by which we use it, and it has led us to be weary, skeptical pragmatists. Do you get that? Because I meet people all the time who are so confident about political things, and I think, gosh, I wish I had your courage. I’d love to be that confident about things, but often, I don’t know how to be confident.

One of the things that happens when you start being exposed to a wide range of conflicting facts is you actually start to understand how unsettled, for example, even the basic science is in most situations. Like, most of what passes for the settled science is nothing of the sort. Okay, everywhere you look, if you’re a scientist, everywhere you look into any given question deeply, you run into conundrums and profound sources of disagreement, even about what’s hypothetically fundamental. I mean, the climate science is a good example of that; it’s an appalling scam.

Well, here’s the simplest way to look at it: we’re essentially in a carbon dioxide drought by historical standards. So if you look at the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last number of hundreds of millions of years, like a pretty whopping timeframe, we’re at a very low level. We dropped to about 350 parts per million by say, 1850 something like that. Plants start to die at 250, right? Because they need carbon dioxide. So, we were almost at the point where the plants were going to start to die. That’s how low the carbon dioxide levels are. Now, they have been increasing, why? Well, some of that’s probably man-made, you know, it’s not exactly settled, but we could give the devil his due and say some of that’s man-made. Okay, so now we’re up to something in the low 400s, and that’s been increasing, and perhaps because of industrial output.

So, what’s been the major consequence? The major consequence is that the planet is 20% greener than it was in the year 2000. 20%, this is NASA data. No one disputes this, by the way, the satellite imagery is absolutely clear. Okay, 20% greener, an area the size of the continental US has greened since the year 2000. So, the whole planet is 20% greener. That’s a big effect. Crop yield has gone up 13%, right? Okay, where’s the planet getting greener? Because you heard climate, global warming, the deserts are going to grow. Well, then it wasn’t global warming because that turned out to be a scam, then it was climate change. The deserts are going to grow, it’s like no, the deserts are shrinking. The deserts are shrinking because the planet is greening, because there’s more carbon dioxide. Okay, so why are the deserts shrinking? Well, because plants breathe, and they breathe through these pores called stomata, and when there isn’t much carbon dioxide, the stomata have to be open, and then the water evaporates. So if you increase the carbon dioxide, the stomata close, and that means plants don’t need as much water, so they can invade the semiarid areas around deserts, and that’s what’s happening.

So, I truly believe, I believe this to be the case. If you took a dispassionate look at the data, and you look at the effects of carbon dioxide, the biggest effect, clearly, clearly by likely an order of magnitude, is the greening effect. It’s like, well, is that good? Well, it’s the opposite of what was predicted, and the opposite was regarded as a catastrophe. Okay, so the opposite of a catastrophe is good. There’s more plants, and crops grow better. Okay, so what’s the problem exactly? Well, you could make the case that it’s still a very rapid rate of change, and any rapid rate of change has a destabilizing effect on let’s say a given ecosystem, and so that’s a fair objection.

But if you’re kind of fond of plants, 20% is a lot. Like, I’ve never heard anyone make a credible case against that particular perspective. So, I’ve talked to a lot of people now, a lot of very good scientists about climate change, and the last person I talked to was Patrick Moore, and he has been, he started Greenpeace and then he left it when it got corrupt. He’s outlined the data pertaining to the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over very long periods of time. What the climate apocalypse mongers do is they take a very small section of time, like an arbitrarily small section, and that’s a big problem because when you’re doing something like climate analysis, the timeframe matters. You can’t just pick the timeframe that’s suitable for your bloody hypothesis, that’s not reasonable. And so you can say, well, carbon dioxide has been increasing over the last 100 years. It’s like, okay, well, how about the last 500, how about the last thousand, 10,000, 100,000, 150,000, 2 million, 10 million? What’s your timeframe and why? Well, I picked the timeframe that’s convenient for my hypothesis. It’s like, no, you don’t get to do that. Like, you seriously don’t get to do that. And then if you combine that with the fact that we’re in a carbon dioxide drought, Patrick Moore actually believes that if we wouldn’t have started to burn fossil fuels, the plants would have started dying in about 500 years. So, he thinks that the fossil fuel revolution saved the planet.