By Jo Nova

Games with levelized guesses don’t take all the hidden costs into account

Prize of the day for national policy research goes to Nick Cater, who managed to ridicule our billion dollar national science agency, the CSIRO, with a newspaper column.

The CSIRO put out a report proclaiming that nuclear power would be impossible before 2040 and cost “twice as much” as renewables. But Nick Cater just compared electricity in New South Wales to Finland to prove their 129 pages of modeled costs were wrong:

On Saturday….  Electricity generation in NSW was releasing 750g of carbon into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of electricity. In Finland, it was 35g.

If the CSIRO’s GenCost report is to be believed, Finnish electricity prices should have gone through the roof a year ago when its newest reactor was turned on. They did not. The retail price of electricity in Finland, which is indexed to the spot market, came down almost immediately.

Were Energy Minister Chris Bowen to spend a few days in Finland, he might realise almost everything he says about nuclear is complete and utter nonsense. This might be why he spent his time in Europe last year trying to sell green hydrogen to the Germans.

All over Europe the countries with the most solar and wind power have the highest prices

Modeling electricity costs is ripe for the plucking, so the only costs that count are the real ones that customers pay. According to Eurostat data on electricity prices  in the EU last year, some countries were paying twice as much as others. And the cheapest electricity was in countries using coal power or lands with lots of hydroelectricity and plenty of water.

And if nuclear power was “eight times” more expensive than solar and wind, why is that Germany pays so much for electricity than France does?

Germany, Italy, Poland, and Greece are all pricey but none of them have nuclear plants (yet).

Serbia has cheap electricity and it is nearly 70% coal powered. Norway has cheap electricity and 100,000 natural Fjords for hydroelectricity.

Look who has solar power and expensive electricity:

Things aren’t working out well for Greece, Germany and Italy.

Look who has wind power too

Denmark has

CSIRO artificially pumped up the cost of building a nuclear plant in Australia because it would be a new industry here. Did they do that for technologies that are barely invented like hydrogen and batteries too? They claim it would take 15 years to build one plant, yet the French built 56 plants in 15 years, and that was 40 years ago. The average build time then, without faxes, flip phones and “the internet” was just 7 years, yet somehow they got it done. Do the CSIRO think they can get away with publishing this kind of incompetent partisan hackery and Australians won’t find out?

From CLIMATE DEPOT

By Marc Morano

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/05/11/cold-water-laundry-shower-dishes

Why you should embrace using cold water, almost all the time – Heating water gobbles energy, leading to higher utility bills and more planet-warming emissions.

By Allyson Chiu – Allyson Chiu is a reporter focusing on climate solutions for The Washington Post. 

Excerpts: You may not be giving a second thought to setting your washing machine on the hot cycle, cranking your showers to a steamy temperature or scrubbing your dirty dishes under a stream of scalding water. … While there are home improvements that can help you cut back on the energy it takes to heat water, including installing a heat pump water heater, one easy solution is to switch to cold water.

…

 Washing with cold water can reduce your energy footprint even more. By washing four out of five loads of laundry in cold water, you could cut 864 pounds of CO2 emissions in a year, an amount equivalent to planting 0.37 acres of U.S. forest, according to the American Cleaning Institute.

…

Bathing

Showering accounts for roughly 17 percent of the water Americans use in their homes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Your steamy showers also consume energy: Nearly half of a home’s hot water is used for bathing. A cold shower uses less energy than a hot one.

Jennifer Amann, senior fellow in the buildings program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group, said letting the tap run while you’re waiting for water to heat up results in water waste. She suggested that people think about how to minimize that.

“If you’re wasting cold water to get your hot water, then you’re really wasting both water and the energy resources,” she said. “Those energy resources still come largely from fossil fuels, and so they’re adding to emissions in the environment at a time when we really need to be doing everything we can to reduce carbon emissions.”

You should also rethink washing your hands with hot or warm water for the same reason, she added.

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Reed Timmer

Massive #tornado with multiple vortices rips down windmills and damages homes in Iowa including Greenfield, Iowa. Dominator FPV drone orbited the tornado racing northeast at 55 mph. Dominator 3 could have directly intercepted this tornado. Major tornado outbreak underway

On May 21, 2024, multiple powerful tornadoes tore through southwest Iowa, resulting in fatalities and significant damage. The town of Greenfield, home to about 2,000 people, was hit especially hard. The Adair County Memorial Hospital sustained tornado damage, forcing some storm victims to seek assistance elsewhere. The destruction in Greenfield left a large section of the town leveled, with multiple fatalities and more than a dozen injuries

H/T Dr. Roy Spencer