Month: May 2024

Daily News 4 May 2024

Annual GWPF lecture: Climate Uncertainty and Risk

by Judith Curry

My talk on Climate Uncertainty and Risk, presented at the Annual GWPF Lecture

Video of the presentation [here]. My ppt slides can be downloaded here [ GWPF uncert & risk (2)].

Josh has prepared a cartoon montage:

GWPF_2024_Judith_Curry

Below is a transcript of my remarks:

I am delighted to be here this evening, to talk about my favorite topic – climate uncertainty and risk. To provide some context for climate uncertainty and risk, lets first consider the so-called climate certainties:

The Earth’s climate is warming
A warming climate is dangerous
We’re causing the warming by emitting CO₂ from burning fossil fuels
We need to prevent dangerous climate change by eliminating CO₂

These alleged certainties are associated with apocalyptic rhetoric from UN and our national leaders. Here are some of my favorites:

“The clock is ticking towards climate catastrophe” – Ban-Ki Moon, UN Secretary General
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator” – Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world” – Joe Biden, US President.

The UN Paris agreement targets NETZERO emissions by 2050 to keep warming to within 1.5 degrees. Policy makers and others are grappling with a number of issues in addressing the NETZERO challenge. These include the technical, economic & political feasibility, the priority of climate change relative to other problems, and unintended consequences of a rapid transition of our energy systems.

So how did we come to be between a rock and a hard place on the climate issue, where we are allegedly facing an existential threat. And the proposed solutions are both unpopular and infeasible? Well in a few words, we’ve put the policy cart before the scientific horse.

In the 1980’s, the UN Environmental Program was looking for a cause to push forward its agenda of eliminating fossil fuels and anti-Capitalism. With the help of a small number of well-positioned activist climate scientists, a 1988 UN conference in Toronto recommended that the world “reduce CO₂ emissions by approximately 20% by the year 2005 as an initial global goal.” The implicit assumption was that the small amount of warming observed over the previous decade was caused by emissions, and that warming was dangerous.

1988 was the year that the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC. The first assessment from the IPCC in 1990 concluded that the recent warming was within the magnitude of natural variability. Well, that didn’t hinder the UN. They went ahead with the 1992 Treaty from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that was signed by 196 countries, to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change caused by emissions.

The second IPCC assessment report in 1995 found pretty much the same thing as the first assessment report. However in the meeting with policy makers to write the summary, there was substantial pressure for a stronger finding. They came up with the word ‘discernible’, and then went back and changed the body of the report to be consistent. At that point, the IPCC lost any pretense of being independent or uninfluenced by politics. Apparently ‘discernible’ was sufficient to justify the 1977 Kyoto Protocol.

A number of leading scientists were deeply concerned about the policy-driven science of the IPCC. Pierre Morel, Director of the World Climate Research Programme, had this to say:

“The consideration of climate change has now reached the level where it is the concern of professional foreign-affairs negotiators, and has therefore escaped the bounds of scientific knowledge (and uncertainty).”

William Nordhaus, Nobel Laureate in economics, stated:

“The strategy behind the Kyoto Protocol has no grounding in economics or environmental policy.”

Mixing politics and science is inevitable on issues of high societal relevance, such as climate change. However, there are some really bad ways to do this, and we’re seeing all of these with the climate change issue. Policy makers misuse science by demanding scientific arguments for desired policies, funding a narrow range of projects that support preferred policies, and using science as a vehicle to avoid ‘hot potato’ policy issues. Scientists misuse policy-relevant science by playing power politics with their expertise, conflating expert judgment with evidence, entangling disputed facts with values, and intimidating scientists whose research interferes with their political agendas.

Apart from politicization, arguably the biggest issue is that we have oversimplified both the climate change problem and its solution. The UN has framed climate change as a tame and simple problem, with an obvious solution that is demanded by the science. The precautionary principle has been invoked, in context of speaking consensus to power. However, climate change is better characterized as a wicked problem, with great complexity and uncertainties, and clashing societal values. When viewed as a tame problem, the climate change problem is framed as being caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which can be solved by eliminating fossil fuel emissions. Both the problem and solution are included in a single frame, whereby the science demands this particular solution. This framing dominates the UN negotiations on climate change.

There’s another way to view the climate change problem and its solutions. This framing views climate change as a complex, wicked problem. This framing of the problem also includes natural causes for climate change such as the sun, volcanoes and slow circulations in the ocean. This framing is provisional, acknowledging that our understanding is incomplete and that there may be unknown processes influencing climate change. While the UN’s framing is about controlling the climate, this other framing acknowledges the futility of control, focusing on managing the basic human necessities of energy, water and food. Economic development supports these necessities while reducing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes.

Wait a minute. Don’t 97% of climate scientists agree on all this? Doesn’t climate science demand that we urgently eliminate fossil fuel emissions? Here is what all scientists actually agree on:

Surface temperatures have increased since 1880
Humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet.

However, there’s disagreement and uncertainty about the most consequential issues:

How much of the recent warming has been caused by humans
How much the planet will warm in the 21st century
Whether warming is ‘dangerous’
And whether urgently eliminating the use of fossil fuels will improve human well being

Nevertheless, we are endlessly fed the trope that 97% of climate scientists agree that warming is dangerous and that science demands urgent reductions in CO2 emissions.

So how did we come to the point where the world’s leaders and much of the global population think that we urgently need to reduce fossil fuel emissions in order to prevent bad weather? Not only have we misjudged the climate risk, but politicians and the media have played on our psychological fears of certain types of risks to amp up the alarm.

Psychologist Paul Slovic describes a suite of psychological characteristics that make risks feel more or less frightening, relative to the actual facts. In each of the risk pairs below, the second risk factor in bold is perceived to be worse than it actually is.

natural versus manmade risks
controllable versus uncontrollable risks
voluntary versus imposed risks
risks with benefits versus uncompensated risks
future versus immediate risks
equitable versus asymmetric distribution of risks.

For example, risks that are common, self-controlled and voluntary, such as driving a car, generate the least public apprehension. On the other hand, risks that are rare and imposed and lack potential upside, like terrorism, invoke the most dread.

Activist communicators emphasize the manmade aspects of climate change, the unfair burden of risks on poor people, and the more immediate risks of severe weather events. The recent occurrence of an infrequent event such as a hurricane or flood elevates perceptions of the risk of low probability events. This then translates into perceptions of overall climate change risk. And so, our perceptions of climate risk are being cleverly manipulated by propagandists.

In spite of the recent apocalyptic rhetoric, the climate “crisis” isn’t what it used to be. Circa 2013 with publication of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, the extreme emissions scenario RCP8.5 was regarded as the business-as-usual emissions scenario, with expected warming of 4 to 5 ^oC by 2100. Now there is growing acceptance that RCP8.5 is implausible, and the medium emissions scenario is arguably the current business-as-usual scenario according to recent reports issued by the Conference of the Parties since 2021. Only a few years ago, an emissions trajectory that followed the medium emissions with 2 to 3 ^oC warming was regarded as climate policy success. As limiting warming to 2 degrees seems to be in reach, the goal posts have been moved to reduce the warming target to 1.5 degrees

The most recent Conference of the Parties is working from an expected of warming of 2.4 degrees by 2100, and half of this warming has already occurred. Instead of acknowledging this good news, UN officials continue to amp up the apocalyptic rhetoric. The rationale for continuing to increase the alarm is that the impacts are worse than we thought, specifically with regards to extreme weather. However, for nearly all of these extreme weather events, it’s difficult to identify any role for human-caused climate change in increasing either their intensity or frequency. Even the latest IPCC assessment report acknowledges this. Nevertheless, attributing extreme weather and climate events to global warming is now the primary motivation for the rapid transition away from fossil fuels.

This rationale commits the logical fallacy of conflation. There are two separate risk categories for climate change. The first is the slow creep of global warming, with impacts on sea level rise and glacier melting. The second is extreme weather events and interannual climate variability such as El Nino, which have little if anything to do with global warming.

The urgency of addressing emergency risk is being used to motivate the urgency of reducing the incremental risk from emissions. Reducing emissions will have little to no impact on extreme weather events. Ironically, attempts to reduce emissions are exacerbating energy poverty and unreliability, which increases emergency risk. One would logically think that if warming is less than we thought but impacts are worse, that priorities would shift away from CO₂ mitigation and towards adaptation. However, that hasn’t been the case.

Underlying all this is an important moral dilemma that is implicit in climate policy debates. There’s a conflict between possibly preventing future harm from climate change, versus helping currently living humans. The UN policies are targeted at possibly preventing future harm. However, the UN climate policies are hampering the UN Sustainable Development Goals that focus on currently living humans.

In 2015, the world’s nations agreed on a set of 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals to support future global development. These goals include, in ranked order:

No poverty
No hunger
Affordable and clean energy
And development of Industry, innovation & infrastructure
Climate action

Why should one element of Goal 13, related to net-zero emissions, trump these higher priority goals? International funds for development are being redirected away from reducing poverty, and towards reducing carbon emissions. This redirection of funds is exacerbating the harms of weather hazards and climate change for the world’s poor. Efforts to restrict the production of oil and gas is hampering the #1 goal of poverty reduction in Africa, and is restricting Africa’s efforts to develop and utilize its own oil and gas resources. The #2 goal of no hunger is being worsened by climate mitigation efforts, including restrictions on livestock and fertilizer. Industry and infrastructure require steel and cement, which are currently produced by fossil fuels.

Neglecting these sustainability objectives in favor of rapidly reducing CO₂ emissions is slowing down or even countering progress on the most important Sustainable Development Goals. This statement from a recent UN Progress Report particularly struck me: “Shockingly, the world is back at hunger levels not seen since 2005, and food prices remain higher in more countries than in the period 2015–2019.”

Leading risk scientists and philosophers, who don’t have a particular dog in the climate fight, have expressed their concerns about how all this has evolved and where its headed. Norwegian risk scientist Terje Aven has this to say:

“The current thinking and approaches have been shown to lack scientific rigor, the consequence being that climate change risk and uncertainties are poorly presented. The climate change field needs to strengthen its risk science basis, to improve the current situation.”

Political philosopher Thomas Wells states:

“The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons. And so long as they continue to do so, they put all our futures in jeopardy.”

The diagram below summarizes the UN view of climate risk. I call this the “climate is everything” view, based on a recent cover story in Time magazine. Under this perspective, climate change is a big umbrella that subsumes extreme weather and energy policy, and causes many of the world’s problems. The most recent problem that I spotted is that climate change is harming Indonesian trans sex workers. Go figure. The “climate is everything” perspective is reinforced by a broader view, espoused by the UN and others, that the environment is fragile, there are too many people, capitalism is bad, and therefore we need global control of all these issues.

Screen Shot 2024-05-04 at 2.35.58 AM The following figure provides a different view, that is more consistent with a human centric perspective and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Further, this view is consistent with human flourishing and thriving, to meet the challenges of the 21^st century. Most importantly, this view regards climate change, extreme weather, and energy policy as three different issues, albeit with a small overlap. Energy Policy is regarded as primary, since abundant energy is needed to manage whatever challenges from climate change and extreme weather that we may face in the future. And to spur human development – energy is the motive power that pushes the frontier of human knowledge and advancement.

Screen Shot 2024-05-04 at 2.36.11 AM

Once we separate the incremental risk of warming from the emergency risks associated with extreme weather, the problems and their solutions become more tractable. My book Climate Uncertainty and Risk argues for a reset of climate and energy policy, that is consistent with the human centric perspective. First, we need to face some inconvenient truths about climate risk.

Risks from climate change and extreme weather are fundamentally local. The risks are entwined with natural climate variability, land use, & societal vulnerabilities. Blaming weather catastrophes on fossil fuel emissions deflects from the real causes of our vulnerabilities, which includes poor risk management & bad governance. And finally, many people fear a future without cheap, abundant fuel and continued economic expansion, far more than they fear climate change.

There are also inconvenient truths about the UN climate & energy policies. The urgency of meeting NETZERO targets is causing us to make bad choices about future energy systems.

Wind & solar power is impairing grid reliability and increasing the cost of electricity. If we somehow reach net zero by 2050, we will notice little if any change in the climate before 2100, relative to natural climate variability. We can’t control the climate or extreme weather events by eliminating emissions.

Given that the UN has mischaracterized climate risk, it will come as no surprise that we are mismanaging climate risk. The left-hand side of the diagram summarizes elements of the UN approach to climate risk management. The right-hand side of the diagram is a perspective that I describe in my book, informed by modern risk science. This includes elements of what has been called Climate Pragmatism and Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty

Screen Shot 2024-05-04 at 2.36.39 AM

On the left, we have a tame problem, while on the right we have a wicked problem
On the left, we have global problem and a global solution, while on the right, problems and solutions are regional
The left hand side seeks to control the problem, while the right hand side seeks to understand the problem and manage its impacts
On the left, the focus is agreeing on the problem, while right focuses on agreeing on no-regrets solutions
On the left, there is a focus on consensus and speaking consensus to power, while the right hand side acknowledges uncertainties and disagreements
On the left we have the precautionary principle, while on the right we have robust decision making
The UN strategy imposes targets and deadlines, whereas the strategy on the right uses adaptive management that is flexible, and incorporates new understandings as they become available.

In terms of politics, the UN strategy is deeply polarizing, whereas the strategy on the right seeks to secure the common interest of communities.

Once you separate energy policy from climate policy, the way forward for energy policy is fairly straightforward. A more pragmatic approach to dealing with climate change drops the timelines and emissions targets, in favor of accelerating energy innovation. The goal is abundant, secure, reliable, cheap & clean energy.

The energy transition can be facilitated by: accepting that the world will continue to need & desire much more energy; developing a range of options for energy technologies; removing the restrictions of near-term targets for CO₂ emissions; and using the next 2-3 decades as a learning period with intelligent trial & error. All technologies should be evaluated holistically for abundance, reliability, lifecycle costs and environmental impacts, land and resource use. Without focusing on CO₂ emissions, odds are that this strategy will lead to cleaner energy by the end of the 21^st century than by urgently attempting to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power.

The wickedness of the climate problem is related to the duality of science and politics in the face of an exceedingly complex problem. There are two common but inappropriate ways of mixing science and politics. The first is scientizing policy, which deals with intractable political conflict by transforming the political issues into scientific ones. The problem with this is that science is not designed to answer questions about how the world ought to be, which is the domain of politics. The second is politicization of science, whereby scientific research is influenced or manipulated in support of a political agenda. We have seen both of these inappropriate ways of mixing science and politics in dealing with climate change.

There’s a third way, which is known as “wicked science.” Wicked science is tailored to the dual scientific and political natures of wicked societal problems. Wicked science uses approaches from complexity science and systems thinking in a context that engages with decision makers and other stakeholders. Wicked science requires a transdisciplinary approach that treats uncertainty as of paramount importance. Effective use of wicked science requires that policy makers acknowledge that control is limited and the future is unknown. Effective politics provides room for dissent and disagreement about policy options, and includes a broad range of stakeholders.

My book Climate Uncertainty and Risk provides a framework for rethinking the climate change problem, the risks we are facing, and how we can respond. This book encompasses my own philosophy for navigating the wicked problem of climate change. As such, this book provides a single slice through the wicked terrain. By acknowledging uncertainties in the context of better risk management and decision-making frameworks, and with abundant energy, there’s a broad path forward for humanity to thrive in the 21st century.

Thank you

JC remarks

This was a very enjoyable evening, and I very much appreciate the invitation from GWPF

via Climate Etc.

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May 4, 2024 at 04:49AM

Daily News 4 May 2024

Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens as Green Revolution Causes Economy to Bleed to Death

From the NoTricksZone

The “greener” Germany gets, the bloodier its economy becomes. How much can an economy bleed before it dies?

Since Germany has become hostile to industry and its Green Revolution has made energy prices among the world’s highest, it’s no wonder that the country’s economy is hemorrhaging economically. Companies are shutting down and moving out.

Foreign direct investment from Germany into the United States from 2000 to 2022 (in billion U.S. dollars, on a historical-cost basis). Source: statista

For example, German online Blackout News here reports on how automotive supplier IHI has announced the closure of its plant at Erfurter Kreuz, Thuringia, and that around 300 employees will be affected in a region that is already struggling.

The company is an manufacturer of turbochargers for cars and intends to close the plant in 12 to 15 months, reports Blackout News.

The announcement is just the latest in a long, seemingly unending series of closures.

“In recent months, several automotive suppliers have had to close their doors or file for insolvency. This development shows the volatile challenges facing the industry,” comments Blackout News.

Analysts expect the demand for turbochargers, outfitted on internal combustion engines, will be less in the long term due to e-mobility.

Alarming economic pessimism trend

In more economic bad news for Germany, pessimism among small to medium size enterprises (SMEs), once the backbone of the German economy, has risen as the business climate index has fallen steeply to minus 1.4.

“The business climate index, an important barometer for the mood in small and medium-sized enterprises, fell to an alarming low of minus 1.4 points in February,” Blackout News reports here. “This is the lowest level since the financial crisis 15 years ago. A survey of around 1250 companies conducted by Creditreform Wirtschaftsforschung shows that the majority of respondents forecast a gloomy future for the SME sector.”

The latest figures show that there are no signs of hope for a recovery, “after the third year of crisis.”

Analysts blame a number of factors, such as the current weak construction and industrial production, geopolitical conflicts and “unclear economic policies”. The current Socialist-Green coalition government blames everyone else except for themselves.

The German government has shut down its remaining nuclear power plants after lying to the country in claiming that they weren’t needed – just after experts had concluded the opposite was in fact true. The government plans to phase out coal power plants as well, which will only further exacerbate Germany’s energy woes and its hostile business environment.

via Watts Up With That?

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May 4, 2024 at 04:01AM

Daily News 4 May 2024

The looming electricity shortage

Many states in the US are headed for a serious and prolonged shortage of electrical power not seen in decades, driven by rising demand from the artificial intelligence revolution and mandates to adopt green energy.

via CFACT

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May 4, 2024 at 03:30AM

Daily News 4 May 2024

Uncontrollable Surge: Daytime Solar Output Swamps Grid & Wrecks Power Market

The chaos that’s wrecking our power supplies is what happens when engineers are replaced by ideologues. Long on cultish mantras about the ‘inevitable transition’ and the wonders of ‘free wind and solar energy’, but short on maths, physics and economics, the clowns in charge of our power supplies would have been charged with treason, not so very long ago.

While the cult attempts to gloss over what’s happened to power prices and the underlying (and once orderly) power market, now and again one of their number break ranks.

To be fair, Alinta’s Jeff Dimery is more rent seeking crony capitalist than delusional cultist. But his recent revelations about the chaotic effect daily surges of solar power from household rooftops have on the power market, have rattled the ranks of rent seekers and cultist, alike.

In the piece below, the team from Jo Nova detail the significance of Dimery’s recent and very public confession that the so-called wind and solar ‘transition’ is spiralling out of control and on a path to inevitable disaster.

Alinta chief admits the transition has “soaring costs”, and has stalled because of the rooftop solar glut
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
April 2024

The system is reaching a crisis point and April is turning out to be the month of confessions

His speech was the sound of an industry being tortured. The transition is going backwards. Big projects are stalled. Costs are rising and reliable old assets are being closed too quickly. It’s like we are disassembling the plane as we fly it…

A couple of weeks ago in Australia the chief of Alinta Energy admitted in a big speech that the industry needs to be honest with the public about the costs of the transition. This marks a big shift from the “cheaper and cleaner” misinformation which the renewables industry was practically built on. Jeff Dimery had a stark warning — his company bought a large old coal plant in Victoria for a billion dollars in 2018, and it powers one fifth of Victoria. But to replace that today with renewables would cost $10 billion.

But he also laid bare the crushing effect subsidized rooftop solar PV panels are having on the transition. No news outlets seemed to appreciate the implications of this. Fully one in three Australian homes now has solar panels, but they are all dumping power on the grid at the same time pushing wholesale prices into negative territory that burns the other generators. The midday solar glut, as he calls it, means no one wanted to invest in large scale renewables. But as night follows day, surely that which ruins the market for large scale renewables would also ruin it for large scale fossil fuel plants too? The subsidized solar panels are vandalizing the whole market.

Skeptics who have been predicting this all along, note that the same people who cheered every time a coal plant was struck down are now wading through an impenetrable swamp of their own creation. The same subsidies that hurt coal and gas power, now wipe out the large (subsized) wind and solar plants too. It’s takes some chutzpah to complain about solar subsidies ruining the market for other generators which are also subsidized.

Someone let a plague of solar-locusts on our grid. They eat the profits out of all the reliable providers, which close down. We are actively sabotaging the entire grid — killing off the parts that made it work.

Australians to pay more for their energy as transition accelerates, Alinta Energy says
Colin Packham, The Australian

Australians face higher bills as the country struggles to build adequate replacements for coal with soaring costs for new sources of green power and transmission, Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery has warned.

The stark comments, described by the energy boss as “truths and straight talking” comes amid growing concern about the toll of Australia’s energy transition.

Mr Dimery said Australian energy stakeholders must be honest with the public about the toll of the transition.

Mr Dimery complains he can’t build anything profitable at $58 a megawatt hour.

“When I sat down to write this speech, the future Victorian energy price for the 2026 calendar year was $58 a megawatt hour,” said Mr Dimery.

“At $58, I can’t build anything to meaningfully prepare for coal to come out of the system. I can’t build more solar, because we already have a glut of solar in the middle of the day, which is sending spot prices deeply negative. If I was just looking at the forward price, I would also be very wary about building new wind, because the margins would be slim to non-existent, and any curtailment – which is a growing problem – could be disastrous.”

If only the energy commentators of Australia could read the same AEMO reports that unpaid bloggers do? Then they’d know that this time last year old brown coal plants were still selling electricity for $15 a megawatt-hour. But Mr Dimery probably knows this, since he owns one of those coal plants, and he didn’t mention it either. (Perhaps he believes in the transition, or perhaps the Hong Kong owners of Alinta might not appreciate that?). He’s being more honest than the other energy chiefs, but Australians need the whole truth. Just what are we giving up by blowing up the old coal plants?

The renewables transition was like a gold rush, but quickly projects started to fail… as Big Government plans do:

11 minutes: I also want to explain what’s caused the drop in investment for large scale renewables. … In the last 5 years the top three gentailers [combined generator-retailers] in this country have collectively written off in excess of $10 billion of shareholder funds. There’s a race to Net Zero but it’s supposed to be for emissions not for profit.

In the early era of renewables Australia had the perfect investment climate for wind solar and pumped Hydro. It could have been seen as the gold rush for renewable generation and certainly we saw no shortage of companies trying to get a piece of the action, but very quickly projects started to fail, loss factors increased and investment cases started to crumble. With a lack of planning and proper infrastructure we quickly found the grid overwhelmed…

Costs are rising rapidly:

15 minutes: Let me tell you why higher cost and uncertainty about recovering those costs that’s why in 2017 Alinta energy developed and built the first big battery in Australia for around $1.5 million per megawatt. Right now we’re building another one that will cost roughly $1.7 million per megawatt . In 2020 it cost around $850,000 to insure a gas fired power plant. Today it’s around $1.75 million — that’s up 40%. I shocked people when I spoke at a conference two years ago and said that it would cost $8 billion to hypothetically replace our Brown Coal fired power station which was acquired for $1.1 billion. Replacing it with pumped hydro and offshore wind today would now cost in excess of $10 billion. That’s up two billion in a mere two years. Developers rightly are afraid to lock in high costs in case they can’t be recovered.

The Alinta chief admits his biggest problem is the glut of solar panels at midday
Everything he says about the problems with massive solar input at lunchtime is true for all the original baseload generators on the grid too. In full honesty he would admit coal plants were not retired because solar and wind were cheap, they were driven out of the market by the subsidy on an essentially irrelevant unreliable form of extra generation that always turned up when we didn’t need it:

18 mins: Without the deployment of new private capital, state and Commonwealth balance sheets simply cannot carry the financial burden we have a glut of daytime rooftop solar energy at the same time that 95%of all large scale renewables are getting curtailed — basically switched Off in some hours of high rooftop solar. The percentage of all energy produced by large scale renewables that was curtailed increased from 10% in the last quarter of 2022 to 13% in the last quarter of 2023. Now you might think 3%, who cares? Well boards care, investors care, and developers care. No one wants to lose 13% of their output and no one dares think just how much more could be lost that could be the difference between profitable and unprofitable. In short, ladies and gentlemen, continued subsidies at one end of the market are driving higher uptake into a glut and undermining the economics of new and existing large scale renewables.

But let’s be real eh? We were happy to destroy the profitability of the old coal plants and the gas plants that taxpayers built, which is what all the subsidized intermittent players did. We’re only complaining now, Mr Dimery, because we care about “renewable” profits.

The solution to the solar panel glut is battery storage
(What did I say? One reason for the EV mandate is so they can make you buy the backup battery to store the useless intermittent watts in?) Dimery doesn’t want to offend 3 million solar panel owners, but he is quietly saying “they must pay”:

I know how much households love their solar and how important solar is to the transition, but as with any of the intermittent technologies on its own it has pluses and minuses. … the daytime production from rooftop solar needs to be stored and shifted to when it’s required. We’ll need household batteries but they’ll fill up quickly. We’ll need big batteries, and they’ll also fill up quickly too. EV’s will take time to build up to critical mass and for vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid models to alleviate some of the imbalances of homeowners dominating solar and battery installations. We’re exploring other options too like inviting retail customers to be co-investors in wind farms and giving them a portion of the output offset against their bill as well as providing better insights about their appliances via itemized bills that show what’s being spent on heating and cooling and refrigeration.

It’s a solar death spiral
He points out that solar PV owners themselves don’t care about the negative wholesale prices at lunchtime (but in a real market they would).

Rooftop solar is contributing to low energy prices at various times in daylight hours but it isn’t affected by price signals in the same way large scale generators are. It’s a problem we need to solve.

So we subsidize lunchtime solar we don’t need, which makes electricity more expensive for those without solar. Eventually everyone feels they have to buy solar panels, but at the same time the solar glut is driving out the generators we need the other 75% of the day. This is a spiral that only goes down. The end is coming. The subsidy game can’t go on forever.

We need to put real prices on solar panels now, and if that stops all new solar being installed (except in remote locations) so be it. Then we then need to rejig the billing system so those who installed the panels aren’t being subsidized by those who couldn’t afford them. It will take years to unravel this mess.

The land of truth is arriving at the magic renewable tree.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jeff Dimery was always a renewables guy, Oh the irony, that he is now the one saying we need to keep coal running a bit longer:

Jeff was a founding member of Australia’s Clean Energy Council, and previously served on the boards of The Renewable Energy Generators of Australia, Australian Energy Council (including as both Chair and Deputy Chair), and the Australian Wind Energy Association.

Alinta Energy from Wikipedia

Alinta owns 3GW of power, gas, wind, coal, and “co-generation” in NZ, and has about 1.1 million retail customers.

Alinta Energy is an Australian electricity generating and gas retailing private company owned by Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE). The sale for $4 billion was approved by Treasurer Scott Morrison in 2017.[2] Alinta Energy has an owned and contracted generation portfolio of up to 1,957 MW, approximately 1.1 million combined electricity and gas retail customers and around 800 employees across Australia and New Zealand.[1]

Alinta Energy’s approximately 3,000MW electricity generation portfolio includes:^[8]