By Jo Nova
Imagine the outcry if a coal plant was obliterated by hail?
A few days ago, a 3,300 acre solar power plant in Texas suffered major hail damage. This was a plant so new it was still under construction. The Fighting Jays solar project started generating in 2022, but was not expected to be fully complete until the end of 2024. In theory it was supposed to last for 35 years.
It is so large they boasted that it covers 2,499 football fields (like that is a good thing). Despite the vast footprint, it was rated at only 350 MW. At noon at peak production it could generate about half of what one forty year old coal fired turbine makes all day every day, and every night too.
Collecting low density energy is more expensive than the wish-fairies might think.
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?
Or you the taxpayer? pic.twitter.com/GpNSaopObZ
— Corey Thompson (@Roughneck2real) March 25, 2024
At an average construction price of $1 million per megawatt the project likely cost about $350 million dollars. In order to rebuild it, they will need to remove and dispose of the broken panels, so it may cost even more.
The Fighting Jays solar farm was insured against hail damage. Presumably insurance premiums will be rising.
Locals are worried about the possibility of contamination with heavy metals, plastics and other chemicals in the local water supply. Hopefully they won’t leave it all there to rot.
On the plus side, the hailstorm reduced some pollution of the Texas energy market.
h/t Colin
The ice god looked down and said: you’re mine, you’re all mine!
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Yes, what WILL they do with the broken panels? Presumably there is a pollution hazard with some of the metals used and also a practical point as to what you do with such a large pile of glass and other junk. Perhaps the panels could be buried in the same place that old wind turbine blades go to die?
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Since wind and solar plantations get to overide environmental laws, why not just dump them in the ocean, LoL?
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they were allowed to do that.
Or how about for future windmills and solar panels that part of the purchase contract is to send the expired product back to the manufacturer, usually in China, for disposal?
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The Mariana Trench looks promising!
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Part of the purchase contract should also cover the cost of battery backup so electricty can be provided when it is actually needed (and not just when the Sun is shining and the wind is blowing).
Currently unreliable energy is crowding out reliable energy and forcing coal fired plants designed for base-load operation to cycle-up and down to provide back-up for unreliable weather-dependent wind and solar power. This makes the operation of coal fired plants uneconomic.
Who is going to come up with the A$6-10 Trillion required for back-up batteries to replace coal and gas which now provide backup for unreliable wind and solar?
Most coal fired plants in Vic, NSW and Qld are scheduled to be “retired” (aka blown up) in around 5 years time.
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They might even get an acceleration in sea level rise that they want so badly.
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You cannot bury hubris.
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They’ll need to clear more land to bury the junk. It sure didn’t make the 15-20 years life.
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Hubris fools – Nature rules.
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Might as well bury them on site, as the land now isn’t useful for anything else.
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Just get the greenies to pick all the pieces up, take them home and recycle them into dreamcatchers, peace medallions, etc. and then they can send them to the citizens of Ukraine and Gaza. I’m sure they’ll appreciate that virtue signal.
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They would have a surplus of medals and regalia. How about GreenCoin an NFT
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They can smash them up and feed them into a cement kiln as they do with tyres and other waste. There is no pollution and has been tested in kilns in many countries such as Switzerland. The only thing is the rate of feed to allow quality control of the composition of the clinker. At low levels some metals ls such as zinc even help strength.
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We wouldn’t want to produce airborne heavy metals though. Organic stuff incinerates just fine, but perhaps cadmium, not so much? They would need some excellent filtration…
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Google Sun cable
NT project
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EPA: “Oh look! Over there! Is that a hint of mercury coming out of the filthy coal fired power station? Look over there! There’s nothing to see here.”
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The well established, efficient and effective solar panel recyclers will be salivating at the business opportunity a mountain of procees feedstock provides.
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AS it is relevant I have reposted this from the Wednesday general thread-
England is a small country with a unique combination of historic villages and lush landscapes that can vary mile by mile.
It certainly hasn’t the room for a 2000 acre solar farm proposed for a lovely corner of Wiltshire. The claim is that it will power 150,000 homes.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/wiltshire-farmland-set-to-be-covered-in-2-000-acres-of-solar-panels/ar-BB1kvVV9
It will mean not only the destruction of lovely countryside but also have a notable impact on our ability to feed ourselves. Still, if we import food instead of growing it ourselves, we don’t need to worry about the CO2 as that will be from someone else’s carbon budget.
These vast expanses of panels are a terrible use of valuable land and the threat of destruction by hail must be very real.
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Hopefully, Mother Nature will come to the rescue again and smash those panels in Wiltshire.
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“Mother” Nature?
You said that without a “trigger warning” for the Leftists in this group.
You are going to now trigger a Leftie who will have to spend the day in a “safe space”.
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Actually, I thought that men couldn’t argue with Mother Nature because Mother Nature rules.
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LOL. It was early in the morning when I posted my comment and I may not have been fully awake.
Note to self – I must consider more the needs of those people with special needs (like Lefties).
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Does England, and the rest of the UK, have enough sunshine hours? I lived there (Sussex) for a year and hardly saw the Sun.
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No, of course we don’t. Our annual average in one of the sunniest corners of the South Coast is 1700 hours. However when most needed-the winter-sunshine amounts and light levels are very low
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But UK still carpets those beautiful rolling hills of Cornwall with wind turbines and solar panels. Looks horrible.
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How do the subsidy-harvesting schemes work in Texas and the US generally for solar plantations?
I know that for wind plantations, Warren Buffett said:
I assume it’s different to Australia where the subsidy is added directly to the consumer electricity bill (plus other incentives like minimal to no requirement to obey environmental laws etc.).
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That Texas solar plantation looked like it consumed a lot of productive farmland that could otherwise be used to raise that substance that the Left hate non-Elites having access to, meat.
If it came to a choice between meat and useless solar panels I know what I’d choose! I would want meat plus a coal, gas, nuclear or real hydro (not SH2) power station.
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To be fair, there is a lot of land in Texas that isn’t useful for much of anything. Land that can’t even grow grass. It’s just scrub brush and weeds. It might be suited for raising deer or goats, but not cattle.
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Yes, but this looks like good land with grass on it.
And the Fighting Jays Solar Project is in Fort Bend County.
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Or Corn which can be burned directly for power as biomass or turned into ethanol. Over a period of one year I wonder how natural solar collection fares against direct electricity generation by very low efficiency solar panels less their cost of manufacture, erection, transmission lines and disposal? Someone must have done the calculation.
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The issue has been discussed.
Goolag “solar panels vs ethanol” without quote marks.
I haven’t had a chance to look closely but most of the answers appear to be Leftist and woke rather than scholarly, just what Goolag wants you to read.
So you might have to dig deeper for the truth, maybe look at DuckDuckGo or other search engines
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Or I will do the calculations myself. Tons per acre. Calorific value per ton. KWhr per acre.
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Some quick calculations
Roughly say annuals like Canary grass. 5,600kwhr per acre for a crop.
Solar farm 300kwhr per acre per day day.
So a simple annual grass produces 10 days of a solar farm output.
However if perennials could be used, the gap narrows.
From this the infrastructure cost of manufacturing the solar panels, assembling, installing, connecting and the transmission lines, step up transformer. You have to wonder if the same land could not be used for biomass generation. Plus you could harvest the seeds of grasses as food for humans.
Currently we use animals to harvest and convert the inedible cellulose stalks.
I am also puzzled that they are using prime grass farming land for electricity generation, not dry desert? But that may be for very local consumption of the electricity of a nearby town, which avoids all the distribution and step up costs. And dramatically reduces the cost.
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It’s all part of the plan to reduce food production.
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And there was a very good article, pointing how it’s totally wrong to harvest a crop for fuel.
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It’s totally wrong to build these vast fragile replaceable non commandable solar panel arrays when fossil fuel is so cheap but carbon dixoide is responsible for ‘toxic emissions’. Like breathing.
And sneaky, deceitful trees and grasses breathe too at night. Evil plants. Carrots. Don’t get me started on termites and cockroaches and methane. Or fungi. Away with the lot of them. Destroying our planet. Tax the lot of them. And buy more solar panels.
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I’ve used DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for a few years. They don’t collect and on sell your data as much as Goolag, but I don’t think you will find much difference in the search results on the respective platforms. If you want search results that are less corralled or censored, try Yandex. I only stumbled on Jo’s blog because l tried it out 18 months ago
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DuckDuckGo will give you similar results to Goolag, they just won’t on sell your personal data as much. The search engine Yandex does less censoring and corralling with your searches if you need to research a “controversial” topic
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Then there is the cost of mining and shipping of various mineral ores to the country of manufacture, and transport of the completed panels to the country where they will be installed.
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You WILL eat meat.
You WILL drive your gas guzzler.
You WILL heat your home.
You WILL use cash.
You WILL travel at your leisure.
You WILL disobey the globalists.
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At best, wind and solar plantations are highly unreliable just because of the significant unpredictability of wind and cloud cover.
Another factor causing their unreliability is the fragile nature of low density energy collection equipment plus el cheapo infrastructure like interconnecting power lines.
Wind and solar are dependent not only on the weather to function, but can also malfunction due to adverse weather such as excess wind or hail.
And solar panel output can also degrade as they accumulate dirt and dust and have to be regularly cleaned at great expense.
Windmills also suffer blade leading edge erosion due to water droplets from rain or seaspray or the considerable amount of aerial wildlife they kill.
It is exceptionally rare for a coal, gas, nuclear or real hydro (not SH2) plant to go offline because of the weather.
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According to the UN the world is boiling and severe storms are becoming more powerful and more frequent. It therefore follows that large areas of glass should be deployed in areas that are subject to these more powerful and more frequent storms in the hope that they will ameliorate those same storms at sometime in the future. If you are a leftist it makes sense.
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It was interesting to read what happened to a small solar array erected at a WA minesite. Totally covered in dust in 2-3 days, reducing output by 40%. They tried to clean it regularly with water and brooms, but instead shelled out for an expensive auto cleaner that cleans the panels a number of times daily.
Seems a total waste of effort.
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The problem in Texas is that many Californiastani refugees are going there and there are concerns that they may bring their destructive woke ideas with them. They can’t live under the woke laws they supported but want to destroy somewhere else. Among those woke ideas are random energy generation.
The Left are destroyers. As Donald Trump said “everything woke turns to sh-t”.
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The popular number plate surround slogan in Colorado years ago was
“Don’t Californicate Colorado”
It didn’t have enough magic
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But the trend now is move even further out (a good idea) with the Appalacians now becoming popular.
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Probably more so for the east coast refugees than Clifornians
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After “scrutenising potential areas with a very intense scrut” Chiefio has “moved out” from California to Florida semi-rural and seems more than happy with the move.
More in past threads at his site
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Building solar farms is one of the dumbest things humans do. Is there a scale we can use that can measure the stupidity?? It would probably need to be a logarithmic scale to cover the outright idiocy of the idea. One axis surely would start at “stupid” and continue through to descriptors such as “abysmally bad”, “stupendously stupid” and “outrageously perplexing”….not necessarily in that order……
Are there the words that can truly describe the sheer waste of land, money, time and resources that go into making these happen? I doubt it.
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Indeed there is.
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Even Einstein said ‘human stupidity and the Universe are infinite’.
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Socrates sad “I only know that I do not know.”
Sometimes human tinkering creates evolutionary breakthroughs like the plough, or
discovery of germs, that advance human life, whereas, most times, human stupidity
and sheep-li-ness rules. alack.
The same is most apparent in govuhmint, the public service and other honey pots of power.
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How about ‘desalination plants’?
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How about building pyramids?
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Well, I’ll wager that solar farm insurers are really busy scrutinizing their exclusion clauses.
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Check what EPA (or even Wiki) writes about the toxicity of cadmium compounds (panels have Cd-telluride and other toxic compounds). Check also the measures and sanctions by NIOSH and OSHA, if any plant throws cadmium wastes right on the ground. Who pays the cleanup is a good and expensive question.
Greenpeace – Forget CO2. Here’s a real “hard core” environmental problem.
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There were further articles about this problem, with the locals very concerned about the leakage of cadmium telluride into the soil. It seems the site owners weren’t prepared to quantify the amount, instead employing a university professor to claim that it would be “minimal”.
Apparently home solar panels often don’t use cadmium telluride, but cheaper panels as used in large-scale sites do to save costs.
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Solar panels are inexpensive and they were insured. Only 16% of Texas power is generated by coal, by comparison wind is 25%. Texas has favourable conditions for solar generation, notwithstanding the risk of storm damage. As of Q1 2023, the value of total solar investments in Texas is nearly $22 billion, bringing more than 10,000 industry-related jobs to the state. https://www.seia.org/state-solar-policy/texas-solar
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Yet, 60% is fossil fuelled generated. Another 10% is nuclear. With 25% from wind, it doesn’t leave much solar in the mix.
From here
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/energy/2023/texas.php#:~:text=In%202022%2C%2042.6%20percent%20and,power%20plants%20generated%209.7%20percent.
Sorry, the link function does not work properly on my iPad.
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From your link
“Enough Solar Installed to Power: 2,677,486 homes
Percentage of State’s Electricity from Solar: 5.82%”
So its a trivial power source and installed capacity is a completely different thing to actual generation. At peak the installations would power 450,000 homes on average-but not of course at night.
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Just to complete your stats there Simon.
From the Texas Comptroller (government) recent Statewide Overview. https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/energy/2023/texas.php#edn12.
“In 2022, 42.6 percent and 16.6 percent of Texas’ energy was generated by natural gas-fired and coal-fired power plants, respectively. Wind power generated about 25 percent, and the state’s two nuclear power plants generated 9.7 percent.Solar, hydroelectric and biomass sources provided most of the remainder.”
That leaves a little over 5% for solar …..hydro and biomass provided about 0.2%. The solar cost $22 billion (US $).
For random energy.
That’s energy you can’t count on.
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Reliable electric power systems MUST be substantially built, robust and durable. Thin glass windows are none of that insured or not.
Then why should we subsidize the insurance industry that will surly spread these costs out to all their customers?
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Just because something creates jobs doesn’t mean it’s an efficient utilisation of human or other resources (assuming your claim is true, it’s probably exaggerated, just like claims for the number of homes powered).
Your hero Emperor Mao Zedong got a whole lot of people involved in killing sparrows. Hundreds of millions of people were instructed to get involved to kill all of China’s sparrows because they supposedly ate the crops.
And yet the purpose was pointless and the outcome was destructive, much like wind and solar plantations.
Mao said “man must conquer nature” which is exactly what the Left today are trying to do in controlling the climate by destroying power stations.
And how did Mao’s campaign end up?
In famine because Mao didn’t know (or perhaps he did!) that the sparrows ate the crop pests.
Similarly the Left today are at war against the farmers.
History repeating itself huh?
It’s a good thing you Lefties stopped the teaching of real history in “schools”….
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In OZ, you just have to look at the effort going into making farm vehicles, ie Toyota Landcruiser and Hilux, unaffordable and the Murray Darling scheme to buy or take water from farmers and run it unused out to sea.
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I assume you are unaware of the Murray mouth. Otherwise you could not make the comment about water running “unused out to sea.” The vast amounts of water taken for cotton, rice and other irrigation upstream on the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee endanger the lower lakes and the Coorong. Virtually zero water reaches the ocean. Of course the lakes and the Coorong are in SA, hence of no interest to our eastern observers.
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Here you go sweetie, have some more GST. $$$$$$$$$$
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Remove the barrages and the Murray mouth will stay open. Huge amounts of good water are wasted in the lower lakes which are just big evaporation ponds. Not to mention the damage done to the Murray river banks around Barmah in the winter due to sustained high river levels for environmental flows. Yes I have seen the destruction over the years myself. Not to mention the many millions of $ spent on weirs and pumping stations just to water the forrest every year rather than just when it floods which is doing a lot of damage to the forrest.
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Lots of it disappears in that great evaporation pan called Lake Alexandrina.
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A top Carp breeding environment. Smash the barrages and let nature work.
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“I assume you are unaware of the Murray mouth. Otherwise you could not make the comment about water running “unused out to sea.”
I assume you mean during the drought when dredges had to be employed to keep the mouth open.
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The more that the number of jobs in the fossil fuel industries can be reduced for the same amount of output, the more jobs in total that are created.
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Renewables and ‘green’ policies don’t create any jobs. They only create (let’s say) one ‘new’ job for every ten that were made redundant – a net loss despite all the crowing about ‘new jobs’.
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Actually, a Spanish study quite a few years ago put the rate at 2 to 3 real jobs destroyed per ‘renewables’ job. But maybe the industry has got a lot better at destroying jobs over the intervening years.
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Inexpensive and insured – so can we deduce from your comments that you have little to no concern about the waste of resources…?
I’d like to think you were being facetious, but the comment meshes all too well with your ideology.
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All of this mess was known by engineers before construction began.
This scenario has been created in a very deliberate manner to complete the demolition of Western society.
Mission accomplished.
In the meantime, Australian farms, forests and oceans are being smashed to accommodate the flush of “renewables” which may give a small dribble of DC from time to time.
This is all so obvious at ground level that there’s a strong, undeniable case to say that treason is involved.
Continuation of the analysis then requires that those responsible be identified, prosecuted, stripped of all assets , incarcerated for the remaining term of their natural life and fed on pancakes made from cockroach and cricket meal flour.
Water must from the solar panel runoff: it is totally pure.
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Meanwhile, in Australia we are being forced to use paper grocery bags in supermarkets to replace the vastly superior free plastic bags that were provided (and despite the lies of the Left had multiple uses, they were not “single use” as claimed).
Nothing like chopping down more trees for single-use paper bags to make way for solar and wind plantations huh?
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In fairness to Woolies their PBs are made from recycled material, allegedly?
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In NSW and Vicdanistan there are no longer plastic bags for purchase, they only offer paper bags, at least for Coles.
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I suspect hail insurance would be hard to get in Southern Texas.
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“bringing more than 10,000 industry-related jobs to the state.”
I didn’t realise that solar farms had massive carparks for all the workers, you learn something every day.
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Mr S is irrepressible.
Solar panels are inexpensive since they are made in China (many using slave labour) and they produce peak output at noon when peak usage is late afternnon and early evening.
All solar project energy production should be paid on a “dispatchable” energy basis so that they compete on an even footing with reliable gas and coal power.
The cost of sufficient pack-up batteries to provide output that matches demand would render all solar farm projects uneconomic and so no more would ever be built.
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$22 Billion dollars worth of “inexpensive”, threatening to bankrupt insurance companies, the mug taxpayers and das gubermint, for increasingly common extreme destructive weather events…
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There are no favourable conditions for wind or solar because they’re weather dependent: wind doesn’t produce below wind speeds of 20klms or above wind speeds of 80klms. Solar doesn’t produce on cloudy wet days or when the sun sets. The materials for both wind and solar involve extensive and very polluting mining. They use rare earths which cannot supply anywhere near the number and amount of wind and soar farms to maintain power in the West. And these rare earths cannot be used for anything else if they are wasted in solar and wind: you know, things like medical and computer and electronic equipment. And then there is the land covered by wind and solar farms; because wind and solar have a low energy density a wind or solar farm in installed capacity to replace say a coal plant like Eraring of 3000MW would cover about 400 square kilometers. That’s 4oo square kilometers based on installed capacity. And since we know wind and solar have a capacity factor of only about 30% of their installed capacity you can multiply that 400 by 3. 1200 square kilometers to replace one 24/7 coal plant.
There are 3 types of people who advocate renewables:
1 Grifters; those dirtbags making money from the government grants and subsidies
2 Communists who want to destroy the West by ruining our power grid
3 Useful and virtue signalling idiots who think they are saving the planet and that life in their little suburban bubble will continue as before.
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Well said cohenite.
And it’s even worse than what you suggest because to truly replace a power station with 1200km^2 of windmills you still need an implausibly large battery, either electrochemical or hydro.
In fact you probably need more than 1200km^2 of windmills because some will be supplying power directly and others will be charging the battery and putting aside even more power for windless days.
The calculations for hydro storage have been done for the US and it’s just not physically possible.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
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A solar “farm” occupies around 50 times the land required by a coal power station to achieve the same power output.
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25,000 football fields of solar panels will be cheap to replace? I don’t believe you.
And whether they are insured or not, does not alter the collective financial damage.
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Enjoy your cadmium telluride latte simple Simon. I bet you’d be jumping up and down if it was coal spillage into your water supply, but cadmium telluride is ok, oh, and big spent lithium batteries rotting on the ground in the 1000s when there’s and accident trying to recycle…bwahaha
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Sounds likw you have never worked at scale Simon. Cheap x a lot = expensive. Hope your insurance assertion works out. Even then there will be consequences.
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How stupid is the Western world. This is your future Australia. Enjoy not only sitting in the dark but drinking solar panel flavoured water as well, or you might be lucky and hail storms won’t happen for the next 35 years, you know, because of global boiling…bwahaha. The Western world citizens, DUMB AND DUMBER!
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We are the global village idiot
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Maybe they should consider covering the panels with something that can resist hail, like sheets of steel. A “roof” if you will.
They could also optimise panel efficiency and longevity by controlling the air temperature around the panels. It’s only a few walls.
I wonder why indoor solar panels are not more widespread…?
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Or just go to the superior vertical arrays that I’ve covered before to minimise damage…
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Actually in dear old England, having PV panels mounted vertically would be a lot closer to optimal than on a flat (or even 20 deg) roof.
London at 51 deg N plus 23 deg winter solstice yields 74 deg from horizontal.
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Australia could easily prove to the world and itself how useless wind and solar is by reference to the solar and wind plantations on Flinders Island and King Island in Bass Strait. Given they are in the Roaring Forties and have good sun, if there’s anywhere in the world such schemes could work it would be there. But they still rely on diesel fuel.
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And the money they spend on that King Island set up is insane. Highly subsidized.
But it’s public money which is free! The Australian dream! How Australia has never fallen to full blown socialism is a miracle. Australians are by default socialists, so I have come to conclude. Thankfully there is also a strong protestant work ethic amongst us as well.
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From some comments I have seen elsewhere it would almost seem that the installations on the Bass Strait islands were installed to fail.
And not updated with technology advances. The miners in WA plan their installations to reduce (not eliminate) their costs for diesel generation. But that also means their FF generation is designed to cover full power requirements. And I assume their accountants can add and subtract.
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Woke insurance companies will probably continue to insure fragile, high risk, solar and wind plantations which will mean insurance premiums will rise for regular non-Elite people.
Back in the day, insurance companies would refuse to insure obviously foolish and risky schemes.
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W & S are TOXIC disasters and they completely destroy the ONSHORE and OFFSHORE environments and their CAPACITY FACTORS are 30% and 15% in very favourable weather and the DILUTE nature makes them very VULNERABLE and DANGEROUS for Humans.
Why do govts and their stupid voters want to wreck our environments forever with these TOXIC disasters and a complete WASTE of the last 34 years and WASTE of TRILLIONS of $ and no difference to the WEATHER or CLIMATE at all?
Why can’t our so called Scientists, pollies, MSM etc look up the DATA from OWI Data and add up the very simple sums for themselves? This just takes a few minutes and costs us NOTHING, so what’s their problem? Are they really that stupid?
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Gosh, what could be sweeter than collecting insurance AND subsidies?
If we are to expect more severe and frequent weather events, seems kind of stupid (in the face of this type of storm being a regular occurrence in Texas) to build more undependable PV generation without a little payout.
Every day is Fraud day in wind and solar!
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Here’s an idea.
Weather-related damage to wind and solar plantations could be avoided if instead of building those expensive, unreliable, environment-harming monstrosities we built instead inexpensive, reliable, robust, ultra-long life coal, gas and nuclear power plants and if suitable sites can be found, real hydro (not SH2).
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The real trick would be to properly size the generation installation to minimize the overall generation cost per kwH.
A lot of David’s choices would be seriously over or under sized for many locations. And even for FF generators, the cost (and reliability) of delivering fuel to remote locations may cost more than the fuel.
WA’s experiment with micro installations (and eliminating grid distribution wires) needs to ensure public scrutiny of the results.
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Andrew Bolt called out the most stupid pollie on the planet last night as he and Sen Matt Canavan tried to make any sense of BO Bowen’s BS and nonsense in response to Barnaby Joyce in parliament.
And they’re correct that our Aussie Toyota boss was very uncertain about the Bowen idiots claims about the future cost of their cars using the Bowen donkeys fantasies and delusions.
And Bowen still didn’t UNDERSTAND and yet he was STANDING on the same STAGE as the Toyota boss. Why do Aussies have to put up with such a loony and why isn’t he SACKED?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt-Y0Q2wS14
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The simpleton Chrissy Bowen is staggeringly stupid.
Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for the Albanese regime.
A majority of Australians got what they wanted and deserved.
Tragically, the thinking and working community us suffering very badly under this Government.
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It seems most people didn’t know this govt is the former Rudd govt buffed up and rolled out as a new one.
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What? That would improve Labor’s chances of winning a second term
As Bowen the Genius said before the election that ScoMo surprisingly won in 2018:
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AGAIN I’ll just link to the co2 emissions data since 1990 for the OECD and NON OECD countries and that equals over 37 billion Ts per annum in 2022.
The OECD co2 emissions are slightly lower per year since 1990 while the NON OECD have increased by over 14 billion Ts per year by 2022.
And the NON OECD or China, India, the rest of Asia and Africa etc will be building many hundreds of new BASE-LOAD COAL power stations for decades into the future.
You can find this data in 5 minutes, so why doesn’t everyone understand these very simple sums?
Or do we want WASTE another 34 years for NOTHING and WASTE endless TRILLIONS of $ AGAIN for a GUARANTEED ZERO RETURN?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=OWID_WRL~OECD+%28GCP%29~Non-OECD+%28GCP%29
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Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) the world’s largest dedicated fund manager within greenfield renewable energy investments and a global leader in offshore wind has had a meteoric rise since being founded in 2012. They are owners of this project in a joint venture with AP Solar Holdings LLC.
CIP manage 12 funds and have to date raised approx. EUR 28 billion for investments in energy. They even have their tentacles into Queensland (has purchased the zero emission generation assets of the Bowen Renewable Energy Hub which is the $5billion hub earmarked by Queensland as central in its plan to transition away from fossil fuels – AFR article paywalled) and moved into the proposed WA 5,000-MW Murchison green hydrogen project:
“The project is located near Kalbarri, in the mid-west part of the state. The site covers 126,000 hectares (311,352 acres) of pastoral land at Murchison House Station. The plant will produce hydrogen using solar and onshore wind power and will export it to Asian countries, Japan and South Korea in particular.”
Unlike the questionable quality of the Texas land which fell into the shadow of the solar panel project the WA land is apparently “pastoral land”.
Looks like the ghost of the Dutch East Indian Company is alive and well and financially colonising the green world. Thing is you can’t just stick your finger in the dyke hole when the leaks start with Texas perhaps being the first of many to come. Even a marriage can look rosy for the first 12 years lol.
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Murchason house station may be considered “pastural” in Australian terms, but you probably would not like to live there !..( nice place to visit though,..but very remote !)
5000 MW of solar and Wind will be interesting there as it is frequently hammered by Cyclones and extreme storms !
The nearby town of Kilbarri is still waithin go be rebuilt from the last event
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Thanks for that, looks like a second hole is waiting to be discovered even before the dyke is built. The general area itself looks like there may have been Dutch presence since 1711 and the wreck of the trading ship Zuytdorp. The wiki info is great reading including the Dutch/Aboriginal inter marriage theory. Maybe there is another land rights claim to be lodged when CIP start up. Cheers.
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A lot of the Kalbarri homes that were damaged were old and poorly built, and I’m guessing that a lot of their residents didn’t have home insurance.
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A lot were under insured and so were paid out. Not enough to cover the repairs 🙁
10
1 American Football Field = 0.52 Hectares or 1.32 acres.
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Can I have that in swimming pools please, maybe Sydney harbors?
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Or cricket pitches or tennis courts.
10
Oh no blame it on climate change.
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Why rebuilt it? It will likely happen again. It would be so much smarter to put in leading edge hydrocarbon and/or nuclear facilities instead. Now that would be building back better.
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Or return it to farmland to grow some more meat.
Power stations can be built just about anywhere and should not be built on useful farmland.
Hopefully the soil hasn’t become contaminated with cadmium from the panels.
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I wouldn’t want to graze cattle where there is a load of shattered glass.
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Actually the shattered glass is probably cheaper than the age old method of spreading Whisky over newly sown grass seed – either one will ensure the grass comes up half cut.
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With a high risk of toxic contamination, absolutely! That land is surely lost to future agriculture.
20
The BOM has a hail database that can be searched by location and time period
Might be useful to check current and future solar farm projects in Australia
http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/stormarchive/storm.php?stormType=hail
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Hail the hail!
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It will be interesting to see what they are going to do with thousands of acres of broken toxic solar panels. Who’ll want those chickens that are coming home to roost?
Anyway, Hail to the hail.
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Another issue not mentioned is that the land will be littered with shards of broken glass, a safety hazard for workers, or animals if the land is returned to a useful purpose like farming.
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And did the Texas power grid even notice that this solar panel plantation went AWOL?
Of course not.
Solar does not make a meaningful or useful contribution to the energy supply.
It’s only purpose is Leftist virtue signaling and subsidy harvesting.
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Hail storms are not the only weather dependent event that are a problem for solar farms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqknT1jDnOs&ab_channel=TheVirginian-Pilot
30
https://www.theweatherjunkies.com/single-post/2017/09/28/puerto-rican-solar-farms-heavily-damaged-by-hurricane-maria
You can bet the woke Labor Goverment in QLD will be approving solar wind farms in northern QLD which is subject to regular cyclones!
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Yep. A QLD solar farm went underwater at one stage. Seems they built it in the wrong place…
30
Have you noticed how most solar and wind plantations use up valuable farmland?
All part of the Left’s war against agriculture.
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Note that one on the way into Warwick.
20
How about using the CBD car park roofs?
Or the roofs of any building mainly occupied during daylight hours.
00
Going forward all solar panels will be protected by stainless steel mesh. We need to build more solar plants to overcome the effects of anthological global warming that results in unprecedented hail storms. /sarc
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I didn’t realise that they need a Faraday shield as well?
00
Hail the hail and may the next tornado/twister tear up a few windmills. Dorothy and toto will meet them on the yellow prick road
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Here’s a thought – Texas has tornados – if that facility was hit by a tornado there would be panel fragments over a huge area and it would be unusable for the foreseeable future due to heavy metal contamination . The cleanup bill would be astronomical….
50
HOTP
“Bowen ditches doomed EV sales target
Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has walked away from Labor’s target to have 89 per cent of new car sales electric by 2030, casting doubt on the government’s green agenda.
26 MINUTES AGO By JESS MALCOLM”
All we need now is a nuclear conversion!
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How are these Chinese made EVs supposed to be recharged with a collapsed power grid?
Charging you EV at night from solar panels on your roof for free
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1422775818182338
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Okay, sort of on the same topic as Joanne mentions this solar plant, and then Bayswater coal fired plant as well.
Have a look to this link to Bayswater power plant power generation for the most recent 7 days.
There’s actually a few things worth pointing out here, and seriously, I would like to sincerely thank those greenies who release information like this because it makes my work sooo much easier. (Umm, that’s my being sarcastic there, sorry for that!!)
On that black chart in the middle. (I didn’t realise there were so many shades of that feelthy black colour) well, look at the top right, and notice the small red lettering ….. registered capacity, and that’s the dotted line across the top of the page. Note that each day around Peak Power time, the plants winds up to ‘full whack’, well, a little bit more on some days, now that the Upgrade is almost complete. (Hey, if it’s a stranded and dying asset, umm, why are they upgrading it?)
Note also that all four Units are operational, for the whole week. (and not just during daylight hours, with a high around Midday)
Note at the bottom right under the ‘load curve’, you can see that for the whole week, the plant operated at a Capacity Factor of just under 77%.
Note how, well, you know that old crock ….. oh, these coal fired plants are virtually useless, because they can’t ramp up and down as needed in this modern day and age of electrical energy consumption. Umm, note how this ancient 40 year old dinosaur does indeed ramp up and down, and up and down, twice a day, for the two Peaks, all day, every day, by at least half its Nameplate. (Capacity)
Note also that very handy, and oh so damning Emission Intensity, that has been added to show how really bad these plants are, and here it’s across the board 913KG/MWH CO2 emissions. Thanks for adding that you guys, it saves me so much maths work.
Just imagine a little checking would show that the latest technology for coal fired power generation is Advanced UltraSuperCritical Coal fired generation, and that’s FOUR levels of tech higher than Bayswater, well, that has an emissions intensity of 700Kg/MWH. (umm, also curiously around that stranded assets theme, why are they still spending billions of dollars working on advancements to coal fired power technology)
So, with respect to that emissions intensity, the newer tech has a savings of 24%, and that’s an awful lot of CO2.
And on top of that, you get VAST amounts of generated power 24/7.
Tony.
170
Bayswater
I was part of the design team for Baywater – scheduled to be “retired” in 2030-2033
Could easily operate for another 20 years – and may have to do so to keep the lights on in NSW.
100
How many wind turbines (or solar panels) with back-up batteries would A$600 million buy?
70
As a rough guide, Wind or solar currently costs approx A$1.0m per. MW , installed (NamePlate capacity)
Batteries , approx A$0.72m per MWh
Even withouut battery backup, A$600m would only get you approx 200MW (average) of variable wind if a CF of 30% is assumed
If a more reliable supply was needed, with battery backup, its likely you would need to split that $600m for 500MWh of battery ($360m) , and 240 MW of wind ($240m) for a reliable supply of maybe 50-80 MW !
But even then it will fail eventually with only 10 hrs of backup !
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Here’s a very interesting global change in co2 emissions per sector from 1990 to 2020.
1990 Electricity and heating 8.61 billion Ts In 2020 15.11 billion Ts
1990 Transport 4.61 billion Ts In 2020 7.1 billion Ts
1990 Manufacturing 3.96 billion Ts In 2020 6.18 billion Ts.
Most of the other categories are much lower emissions and some had less co2 emissions. Like land use and forestry and other fuels.
Global population in 1990 was 5.3 billion and increased by another 2.5 billion to 7.8 billion by 2020.
Here’s the OWI Data link.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-by-sector
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Here’s the co2 emission changes per sector for Australia from 1990 to 2020.
In 1990 Land use and forestry was 50.68 million Ts and by 2020 this had reduced to just 2.53 million Ts of co2 emissions. Just unbelievable but TRUE. I wonder what that cost the Aussie farmers and the Aussie economy?
Of course Aussie co2 emissions are only 1% of global co2 emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-by-sector?country=~AUS
10
OK, so whats the problem you’re trying to highlight?
00
Next step for climate alarmists sun mirrors, bullet proof glass, that will bring the costs down, the Western world, dumb and dumber.
30
Don’t worry about it, they are renewables.
20
Not covered by general media but yesterday the Albanese Government announced that a down payment of billions of dollars has been made to Rolls Royce UK to buy Small Modular Reactors for the next generation nuclear submarines scheduled to be built in shipyards in SA.
Defence Minister Marles answered a question in Parliament about guaranteeing the safety of our RAN personnel, no doubt making mischief question, that SMRs are “sealed” and safe.
How about that, nuclear reactors as sealed.
sarc
ps: Where does this leave the leftists who have constantly asked where are SMR?
30
I am very sceptical about the whole project.
Australia and the UK are rapidly failing states.
20
They’re planning to have a quick run at sea for a month then tie up to a dock and pump the SMR power into the National Grid for the rest of the time.. 12 subs?? That’s 4 each for Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne. Adelaide can go full renewables and Perth is in another country.
20
In this video( 5 minutes) former deputy PM John Anderson and Konstantin Kisin tell us we have stupid pollies lying to the people and fairly soon we’ll all have to WAKE UP.
This only takes a few minutes, but you’ll learn something from Kisin and wonderful to hear someone mention the big increase in life expectancy because of the use of FOSSIL FUELS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WQCGvNp2K4
20
Is this disease X
Bird flu jumps to cows, luckly they have been doing gain of function on the virus, so we should be OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA1r6R_twSs
10
Huh, They’ve already OVERDONE the reduction of CO2, ( or whatever) and now it is cooling. or is , nay, WAS it ‘ Too Much too quick ‘ ?
Yep. we’ve swung now from one extreme to the other. Good Job we’ve stuill got a few coal burners arouund before we forget how to build more. “Tony from Oz” – you still available ? not much coming up on the Search !
Best regards frrom aye, brrrrrr, Scotland 4C at 11am was 6C at 8am after sunrise ….. Och well it’ll be another snowy Easter ( nothing new here)
30
The size of the array is astonishing! Seems it could perhaps serve a dual purpose as a sort of vast tent city for all the migrants that are flooding in over the southern border.
20
“Traffic Lights and Roundabouts”
“Why the Climate Models will never work”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/03/26/traffic-lights-and-roundabouts/
20
‘Don’t go to Toronto’: Canadian city considers implementing a ‘rain tax’
20
FWIW – looks like more jab “Oh Gawds”
Sxtart reading down from here in the newsletter –
“Kevin McKernan is the gene researcher who last year broke the story of contamination in the mRNA injections. Yesterday he published a new, highly-technical Substack titled, “Vaccine targeted qPCR of Cancer Cell Lines treated with BNT162b2.” ”
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/falling-down-wednesday-march-27-2024?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Concludes
“I think this is the most promising line of research going in terms of helping establish covid liability. If genetic integration is proven, it will bring the entire odious pharma crack house right down on their heads.”
10
Can we handle a world where Big Pharma goes broke, everyone has to give up all their pills and watch their diet instead? What would we do with a healthy population?
Chemists would only sell vitamins and bandages, hospitals only fix broken bones, millions of sales reps would be unemployed..
20
Whilst there are alternatives, i suspect that just the loss of “The Pill” to women would result in a rapid spike in world population….with all the consequences that might follow !
..And ..no pain medication ??
So NO, .. just sort out the corruption,…much less dramatic.
10
Green Energy Beaten Black And Blue: Video Shows Massive Hail Damage To Texas Solar Farm
10
Maybe the righteous Greenie “we must save the planet” to protect “Mother Earth” – aka GAIA – might …. just might appreciate what Nature itself really is.
BUT THEY WON’T!
As always, if something is too good to be true – it is normally not true, so having believed their Gaia is benevolent and so to “save the planet” they built things that nature can destroy. That’s smart!
It gets worse: Now the entire top layer of soil/sand to a depth probably 200mm (8″) will need be scooped up with graders and whatever plant (heavy machinery), over 3300 acres (enough for 15,000 three bedroom, single story homes) and dumped somewhere as the glass will make the entire area what is known as “Foul Ground”.
There’s no doubt about ut! – Solar is just so GREEN and is clearly “saving the planet”.
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Texans Concerned Over Potential Chemical Leakage from Solar Farm Damaged in Hailstorm
10
Joke tissue paper infrastructure.
00