From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

BY RICHARD ELDRED

In an interview with the Telegraph, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband revealed his plan to lift the ban on building new onshore wind farms if Labour wins the General Election. Here’s an excerpt:

The Shadow Energy Secretary pledged a Labour Government will overturn planning rules that currently require local community support to approve proposed turbines. 

If he wins office he plans to use a ministerial “written statement” to remove an obligation in the national planning policy framework for community concerns to be “appropriately addressed”, a stipulation that has effectively blocked onshore wind projects for a decade.

The onshore wind ban was introduced by then-Prime Minister Lord Cameron in 2015, who was so worried by the backlash from Nimbys over a rash of planned wind farms that he gave local communities across England the right to block them.

“The onshore wind ban was a deeply unfair measure… and we want to lift it,” Mr. Miliband told the Telegraph. “At the moment, it’s easier to build an incinerator than it is to build an onshore wind development.”

Those plans are certain to generate a backlash, as they already have in Wales where the Labour Government has created zones called “pre‑assessed areas for wind energy”. 

Mr. Miliband said: “People have different views on the onshore wind ban but we’re going to lift it. 

“According to the Resolution Foundation, it [the ban] has cost poorer households six times more as a proportion of their income than middle-class households. And we’re going to get the fairness thing right.”

The zoning system in Wales means vast tracts of countryside have been deemed suitable for wind farms, whatever locals might think.

That has prompted a surge in planning applications for giant wind turbines up to 800ft tall, two to three times larger than any yet built in the principality.

Protest groups have sprung up everywhere from Anglesey in the north to Powys in the south. Similar battles are being fought across the Scottish highlands against both turbines and electricity pylons.

Worth reading in full.

Is it possible to ever celebrate regrowth, without first acknowledging injury?

For sure it can happen, coral reefs can bleach, and they can be destroyed by cyclones – and they can regenerate.  John Brewer reef as an ecosystem was approaching climax, in all its beauty, when it was smashed – just recently.

How is that a category three cyclone could sit for two hours over the top of one of the most spectacular of all the Great Barrier Reef’s mid-shelf reefs – for two long hours – unleashing such destruction and yet the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) monitoring program has no record of it?

This event is not recorded as a significant change in hard coral cover, or anything else in their newly released ‘reef-wide hard coral cover’.

Hard coral cover at John Brewer Reef was recorded as just 23 percent before TC Kirrily and that was a complete misrepresentation.  Hard coral cover is now officially 17 percent in this latest survey – and so much coral was destroyed in between.

At the reef crest for sure, coral cover went from more than 70 percent to perhaps less than 20 percent in one afternoon.

I watched satellite imagery of the cyclone in real time as it sat directly over John Brewer as a category three on Thursday 25^th January 2024.

Then at the first opportunity, I visited – that was three weeks later, on 15^th February 2024.

I observed how massive plate corals in shades of pink, green and chocolate brown, once beautifully arranged such that they over-lapped, and over-hung a wide and deep crevasse: these corals had been picked-up, flipped-over and smashed-up by the cyclone.  The extent of the destruction was gut wrenching.

And at the reef crest large sections were scoured clean of coral, where previously there had been such a diversity of hard corals including staghorn corals of a brilliant purple – and sea anemones with their bright orange clown fish.

I have received an email just this morning, ‘The AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program have recently completed the final survey trip of the 2023-24 reporting year … ‘. There is mention of John Brewer reef, I click across, there is comment:

In June 2024 reef-wide cover of hard corals was 17.3 %, having remained similar since the impact of crown-of-thorns starfish in 2019. In 2019 Crown-of-thorns starfish were at below outbreak levels.

I am growing to despise the premeditated ignorance that is everywhere in Western Civilization with opinion leaders and scientists often prostituting accurate reporting of the real state of the natural environment for a political narrative.

Then again, in the case of the AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program is it simply gross incompetence that dates back to the inception of the program nearly 40 years ago?

Could it be that they simply have no idea how to sample a structurally diverse ecosystem to meaningfully quantify change.

To be continued… 

By Jo Nova

It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia

For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.

If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?

The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the gas for electricity, but 80% of Victorian homes have gas for cooking or heating. And then there is manufacturing, not just in Victoria but most of Australia as gas prices rise all over the East Coast.

Who needs explosives and fertilizer, anyway?

Orica — one of the largest gas users in the country warned it may have to cut production and jobs in Newcastle due to the gas shortage. Since they supply explosives to the mining industry, and Australia is a big quarry, the repercussions would spread quickly.

By Perry Williams, and Rhiannon Down, The Australian

The nation is facing a deepening energy crisis on two fronts, with gas shortages so acute that Vic­toria’s main storage plant is set to run out by the end of winter and one of Australia’s biggest manufacturers warning it will slash jobs and close factories if supplies ­remain short.

German Morales, Orica’s president for Australia Pacific and sustainability, told The Australian that “there is not enough gas and there is not affordable gas”.

“Clearly if we fail to secure long-term gas at a reasonable market price, we may be put in a position of rethinking what is the manufacturing strategy for ammonia in Australia,” he said. “The Australian gas price is significantly more expensive than that you can buy in other jurisdictions, such as the US. That’s making it very difficult to justify manufacturing in Australia.”

And we thought wind generation was bad in April and May but June may be worse.

The awfulness of the fickle wind is upon us and reaching into our wallets. This was the total contribution of 11.5GW of wind generation to our national grid this month. Paul McArdle from WattClarity said the capacity factor for wind is as low as 21%.

 

Not-so-coincidentally on June 4th and June 13th when wind generation was exceptionally low, average prices in the whole system doubled (See below).

And this is a major problem with an electricity market that isn’t designed to find the cheapest solution for consumers. Cheerleaders like the CSIRO will still be saying “wind is cheap” when it’s obvious the lack of wind in a wind-dependent-system is very expensive. But these price spikes that were caused by wind turbines will be slapped on coal, gas or hydro, whatever rescued the grid, not on the wind industry. The more wind fails, the “higher” the prices are for its competitors. Neat eh? If only the “experts” at the CSIRO understood how unreliable wind drives up the cost of everything else on the grid.

Those prices are awful and often obscenely high across all five states… On June 13th wind generation fell to just 88MW at lunchtime, and was low all day. The spike this produced is obvious.

Some of the lows like June 20th caused mayhem because they were hitting at dinner time when solar power has gone to bed. Back before the subsidized renewables gold rush, prices would average $30/MWh across the whole grid — not just all day, but all month. This month so far, average prices respectively are SA $197, Tas, $287, Qld $132, Vic $182, NSW $165.

It takes some skill to run out of gas when we are also one of the Big Three LNG exporters in the world, but the Australian government has achieved this. Incompetence knows no bounds:

 

 

But hey, winter might be warm from now, who knows?

Not to belabor the point, but if we had decent climate models, we would know.

Gas price cap train wreck on the way

by Saul Kavonic, The Australian

The gas industry is scrambling to try to squeeze out any incremental supply, going as far as blending extra LPGs into the gas stream to eke out an extra per cent or two of production. Every lever to lift supply has now been pulled.

Australia’s energy market is one hiccup away from a major crisis, again. The gas market train wreck – long visible on the horizon – is now in front of us. Set in motion by Labor’s hostile gas policies since 2022, there are no easy levers left to pull to keep the lights on, while also keeping us warm in winter, and manufacturing jobs going. And it is only going to get worse in the years ahead.

If we run out of gas, we’ll just have to burn diesel, or sit in the dark, banging our heads on a cold wall.

Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay