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By Jo Nova
The EU Free Trade agreement would Weaponize the Paris Agreement
The Labor Party want to sign a deal with the EU which means that future Australian governments won’t be able to drop the Paris Agreement without being bludgeoned in trade by the EU. If we revise our Net Zero goals downwards or delay them the EU can cut access for our farmers to their markets. And the EU will be able to say they are not bullying us, or interfering with our sovereign rights, they are just enforcing a trade agreement we signed up for.
In the Labor Governments own words:
For the first time in a free trade agreement, Australia (and the EU) has made a binding commitment to implement obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
— Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Effectively Australian farmers or exporters to the EU will be held hostage by the EU to make sure we meet our Paris targets, even if we vote against Net Zero commitments. The deal has meaningless words like “Australia maintains the right to regulate in pursuit of its own public policy objectives” but if we […]
Image by Semevent from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The trend is spreading. Coal, the stranded asset of a bygone era, is hot property again everywhere. All it took was a few weeks of an energy crisis, and decades of brainwashing against coal is evaporating.
On Friday, I wrote about how countries like Japan, Korea, and India were redirecting themselves towards coal power. Now Bloomberg, Fortune, and others are reporting this trend. As I write, Italy is considering delaying the closure of all its coal plants til 2038, Germany is reopening old coal plants. Thailand is restarting two coal plants it only shut down last year. Bangladesh is going to run its coal plants at max capacity all summer.
And the Ecoworriers are starting to fear this crisis will trigger a more permanent shift back to coal — which it absolutely will — not because of ‘sunk costs’ or any of the other excuses the greenies tell themselves, but because the oil crisis will break the sacred exorcism spell cast upon coal. Governments have been shocked at how vulnerable they are without fossil fuel energy.
People might be ordering EVs, but governments want fossil fuels.
Activists should be panicking […]
© Jo Nova
By Jo Nova
“It’s just a matter of time” says Frontier Economics chief Danny Price
Even though it was a public holiday, there was a raging bonfire in prices in South Australia on the evening of Australia Day. The spike in prices hit a blistering $20,000 peak and stayed there for three long hours…
AEMO
Expert Danny Price warns of ‘catastrophic’ national grid failure after SA price surge
By Patrick Starick, The Advertiser
The average price for every hour of the 24 hour period in South Australia was $2,457 per megawatthour.
Frontier Economics chief Danny Price, a key architect of energy policy for state and federal governments, warns renewables cannot meet high electricity demand and predicts significant outages and high prices. Wholesale electricity spot prices spiked in SA to near the $20,000 per megawatt hour limit on a still Monday night, when household batteries drained and wind generation dipped, prompting the Australian Energy Market Operator to issue a low-reserve warning at 8.42pm. “It is only a matter of time. It will happen. There’s no doubt that it will happen. Year by year the system becomes more fragile […]
By Jo Nova
Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:
“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.” — 13 min
“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”
It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:
Some extracts of his interview:
The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:
“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.
This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have […]
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By Jo Nova
It’s all so unfair. They just wanted to save the world and be treated like heroes, but nothing is working out.
The CSIRO has suddenly stepped back from promises of a Green Utopia. Only last week the AEMO (which manage the grid) admitted we’d need to keep coal plants running ’til 2049. Now, in a double shock, the CSIRO says we won’t reach a 100% renewables grid, because eliminating the last 10% of emissions is too expensive.
Don’t miss what a huge backflip this is:
— Suddenly, the CSIRO experts are saying that fossil fuels are an essential part of the Australian grid, in order to reduce costs.
— Suddenly gas is not just a short bridging fuel to get us to the land of pure renewables.
— Just like that, Net Zero Electricity is dead. If the land of the baking sun and roaring forties can’t make it work, who can?
They don’t specify what the last 10% of non-renewable energy is, but without nuclear power, it has to be fossil fuels, doesn’t it? They just can’t bring themselves to say “10% fossil fuels”. Holy green electron!
If only they could have […]
By Jo Nova
The world really is waking up to the terrible truth about the forced “green transition”. The Wall Street Journal (finally) speaks the blasphemy out loud — countries with a lot of renewables are “hemorrhaging industry”, they face right-wing revolts in elections, they can’t keep up in the AI race, and the system wide costs of renewable electricity are crippling.
The pagan quest to do rain-dances with electrical generators has become an existential threat. If AI is the next revolution, then the lands of green fantasia have already lost the race. There’s a global contest to create the first world dominating AI before anyone else does. This is not an exponential curve we can afford to lose. The first nation to crack adversaries encryption codes, hack their defenses, design the killer bioweapon, or build a self replicating drone army — potentially takes it all.
The contest is, above all, an energy competition. Ponder that gram for gram, each day the human brain uses ten times the energy than muscle does, yet despite that stupendous cost, it conquered the world.
For twenty years some rich countries became mired in corruption and virtuous beauty contests. They toyed with […]
By Jo Nova
The State of Climate Action for 2025 is out, looking like a kindergarten report with red and orange stickers for all the areas the world is failing in, which is everything. Show this report to any MPs who tell you Australia is in danger of being left behind.
Ten years after the Paris Agreement even The Guardian notices that despite the bonanza in new wind and solar power, coal use hit a record high last year.
It’s a bizarre report, surely a product of an industry oozing too much spare cash. It has finger-wagging lectures, chumpy predictions, and cutsie stamps. But who is supposed to be impressed by this (apart from The Guardian) — political staffers in the third world? No one is going to look at forty graphs of failure and think “we have to double our efforts”.
Progress is marked with school teacher lingo like “Well off Track” or “U Turn needed”. As if the world is waiting to hear, and can just, ‘bing’, make planes fly on pumpkin seeds.
The graph of zero-carbon sources in electricity generation rather sums it all up — the outstanding hell-for-leather uptake of renewables is almost a flat line, […]
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By Jo Nova
At the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, the cheapest form of energy needs more subsidies. Just keep pouring the money…
The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has finally quietly admitted that they’ve given up on wind and solar power becoming cheaper than coal. Instead, renewables are so uncompetitive they will need another ten years of subsidies, or however long it takes until the last coal plant shuts off.
It’s so revealing. Once upon a time they might have thought (or at least pretended) that subsidies were there to get the unreliable generators ‘over the development hump’ so they could compete in a free market. But after 20 years of subsidies, there are no new economies of scale left to wait for. We got to the bottom of the cost efficiency curve and we’re going up the other side. Costs are now rising as the new projects have to go to far flung fields and wait for impossible transmission towers to appear. Windmills kept getting bigger until there was a nasty surprise in the maintenance bills that wiped 36% off Siemens shares in a single day.
AEMC opine about getting back to a free […]
By Jo Nova
The Rainforest Reserves community group has achieved something that the Dept of Environment, Energy and Perfect-Weather has not been able to do.
Not only has Minister Chris Bowen not managed to create a map to show off his achievements, but nor has any other government agency. Even with a billion dollar budget, the CSIRO has not made a map so user friendly, helpful and informative, nor has the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the Dept of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), or the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC). Neither was the map done by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and the Climate Change Authority (CCA). It can’t be an accident… but it does look like The Blob doesn’t want to make it easy for Australians to know how vast these projects are.
ARENA got $7 billion to throw at renewable projects over 16 years. They and others, spent 3 million dollars mapping Australia to help renewables investors, but didn’t think to do a map to help Australian taxpayers? (The mapping project closed in 2021, and has now been sort of packed away.)
[…]
Cromarty Firth, where old North Sea Oil platforms are dragged to rest until the price of oil rises again. | Photo by joiseyshowaa Cromarty Firth Oil Rigs
By Jo Nova
Finally, the UK conservative Party is offering fossil fuels with no apology
It’s all good, but the UK Opposition left it so late to actually oppose The Blob, that Nigel Farage and Reform UK may wipe them out permanently. The latest polls have Reform romping ahead on 29-35%, leading the Labor government who can only get support from 18-24% of voters. The conservatives (who, let’s remember, were The Government a bit over a year ago) have slumped to 15-20%.
Now that Nigel Farage has made it obvious what voters want, the Tories have finally been dragged into offering it too. But true leaders are the people that do it first. We hope Sussan Ley, Australia’s opposition leader, is paying attention.
In March The Tories dumped the impossible NetZero plan. Now they say that if they are (ever) elected again, they will “maximize extraction” of North Sea oil and gas, which sounds like the British way of saying “Drill Baby Drill”.
Tories pledge to get all oil and […]
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By Jo Nova
Don’t mention that capacity factor…
The media and wind industry always sells the biggest, best new generators at their full imaginary capacity. The newest largest wind farms are said to be “1 GW”, even though they will almost never supply that. The real percentage they supply of the advertised “capacity” is called the “capacity factor” and it rarely gets a mention. The average reader, not paying attention, won’t notice that the $2b cost doesn’t stack up at all. It’s like buying a brand new car without knowing it only gets 7 miles per gallon (and only when the wind blows).
We need to know ‘the mileage’
The latest GenCost report uses the term “capacity factor” literally 100 times (I counted), so obviously it’s central in calculating the value of a generator, yet it is that which shall-not-be-named in public discussions. And when they do say it, it’s often worse than they say, and that bad number is also shrinking.
In 2019 the CSIRO Blob Experts bravely assumed that the modeled average capacity factor of onshore wind would be 44.4%. Years later, in the latest GenCOST report they assume, like an addict, that it would […]
By Tedder – Own work, CC BY 3.0,
By Jo Nova
“No wind project, not a single one, was signed off financially in the first half of 2025.”
There is a bit of paralysis of green investment Downunder.
BloombergNEF sells itself as the analysts of the energy transition for investors. According to them, Australia’s rapid transition is “seen as a global test case” and if so, the green wish-fairy needs an ambulance full of money. This year investments in grid-scale solar shrank to just 30% of what they were a year ago, and no wind project at all was committed in the first half of 2025.
This is a fall that is accelerating. 2023 was the boom year and in 2024 investment “fell 48%” which sounds pretty drastic. But this year is even worse.
Renewables investment falls off cliff as no new wind projects reach financial close in first half of 2025
By Sophie Vorrath, RenewEconomy
Investment in new wind and solar projects dropped by 64 per cent in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, underscoring concerns that Australia’s energy transition is not attracting nearly enough capital.
Image: Rolls Royce
By Jo Nova
The Space Race is back
Australia couldn’t build a nuclear plant “til 2045”, but NASA is going to put one on the moon in five years time.
The new NASA chief, Sean Duffy, is set to announce urgent plans to get a very small nuclear reactor on the moon. What was going to be a 40MW microreactor in the “early 2030s” is now said to be a 100MW one launched in 2029. The reason for the rush is because three months ago China and Russia announced plans to cooperate and build their own nuclear plant on the moon in the early 2030s. They want the power to set up what they call an international lunar base. According to Politico, the fear is that the first nation to colonize the moon could declare a “keep out zone” — a quasi form of ownership that would stop another nation setting up in the same area.
Space race: US aims to beat out China and Russia with nuclear reactor on the Moon
By:Sébastian SEIBT , France 24
NASA’s interim chief Sean Duffy has made deploying a nuclear reactor on the […]
By Jo Nova
Big Battery prices on fire in Australia last quarter
The Renewable Crash Test Dummy suffers yet another nasty price surprise. We have more batteries than last year but the average price per megawatt hour has doubled.
In June there were a few hellfire price spikes where the prices on the National Energy Market launched up to an obscene $10,000 a megawatt-hour and then levitated there for hour after hour. These spikes had a width like we rarely see. Now, with the latest AEMO Quarterly Report we know that the spikes were due to the batteries.
On the left, the price spike of June 26th. On the right, the timing of the battery discharging…
And just so everyone can see how much energy the batteries provided — note the patch marked “Battery” below in the daily load curve of June 26th. The black line across the top is “total demand”. Most of the area under that curve was provided by the evil, but reliable, fossil fuels. Batteries contributed just 0.7% of total NEM generation.
Anero.id
These spikes were so bad they moved the quarterly average costs
The average daily price for June 26th was 24 […]
By Jo Nova
The invisible shrinking solar industry
Quietly, the world manufacturing base for solar panels has been shrinking for nearly two years and yet hardly anyone knows. Especially not the Prime Minister of Australia who set up the the $1 billion Solar Sunshot a year ago to artificially create an Australian solar panel manufacturing industry, twenty years too late, and with the worst possible timing.
China has already captured the solar market and killed it.
Gluts have consequences
The CCP is making twice as many solar panels as the world wants to buy. The latest trend is from bad to worse.
Let’s remember this story, the next time the propaganda media try to tell us solar panels are setting new records. Isn’t this the sort of thing our investigative sleuths at the ABC-BBC-CBC should have been digging out before elections were held? Doesn’t this change everything?
Australia is supposed to be going gangbusters “leading the world” and installing 22,000 panels a day to meet our Net Zero target, but no one else in the world is doing that.
China’s solar giants quietly shed a third of their workforces last year
Reuters
Over 40 solar firms have […]
By Jo Nova
Paul Homewood came across another die-hard believer still saying “What about all the subsidies!” He reminds us of the Guardian headline hand-wringing over $7 Trillion dollars of subsidies in support of fossil fuels. The main source of this meme is the IMF, so I went to their two year old report data to create the graphs that the IMF won’t.
The IMF fossil fuel fantasy update of 2023…
The trillion dollar claims of fossil fuel subsidies amount to nothing more than IMF wet dream. Literally, 80% of the “subsidies” are what they’d like to charge oil and gas companies for things like the imaginary damage that CO2 does on simulated Earths in broken climate models. The IMF calls this “implicit subsidies”. You can I might call it a brazen fake (or worse).
The IMF has a budget of over $1 billion dollars a year, and they have 20 impenetrable super-graphs on their blog and report, but they don’t have the simple graphs like this, that I did below, showing that most of the subsidies are the “implied” imaginary sort, and that one country on Earth does all “the subsidies”. (Click to Enlarge…) Nobody mention China.
The orange […]
By Jo Nova
It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?
Governments waved their magic wands to declare the renewable transition would “bling” into existence, but they didn’t bother doing the sums on whether we could mine the vast resources in time, and what would happen to the prices of everything, if every other stupid fashion-obsessed western nation tried to do the same thing at the same time.
At the academic safe-space known as “The Conversion” Thomas York explains to baffled renewables fans why wind farm developers are mysteriously pulling out at the last minute. He doesn’t spell out the baby-nature of the economic reality, but we can read between the lines. The ship called The Infrastructure-Bill has arrived and it’s killing them: the price of steel, copper and aluminium has doubled and tripled; we can’t make the right boats fast enough to build the towers out at sea; everyone wants high-voltage cabling at the same time, and they all need the rare metals for the magnets, which are well, rare. Then, the delays in arranging all this mean the developers fall over their contract agreements timelines, so they […]
By Jo Nova
Foiled — Coal plants are closing (in theory) in Australia, but all the cheap, free, wind and solar power needs hideously expensive high voltage towers, which aren’t going to be built in time, or maybe ever. Last week the AEMO officially announced there would be a two year delay, throwing a spanner in the transition timeline. Coal plants like Yallourn, are supposed to be closing in 2028, but the Victoria-NSW-Interconnector (VNI) won’t be ready until 2030 now.
It doesn’t matter how much wind or sun falls on outback plains if there is no cable to connect them. The renewables-unreliable industry is worthless without these large pieces of infrastructure, which the farmers detest, and the industry can’t possibly afford to pay for itself.
The organization of the farmers in Victoria is just inspirational — all the paddocks marked in red are the areas farmers have refused access to the VNI project. Give these people a medal.
The Australian
‘We’ll fight them at the gate’: Vic farmers vow to step up fight against VNI West transmission project.
By Christine Middap, The Australian
And now, as the Victorian government presses ahead with legislation […]
By Jo Nova
That was a hellfire price spike yesterday. It’s not so much the height, but the width of the spike is shocking. Prices lifted off in NSW at 4:45pm and didn’t come back down til 9pm. That’s a four hour nightmare at around $10,000 per MWh. I rarely, if ever, have seen so much area under the red line — so many dollars flowing under the bridge.
“We could have bought a whole new gas plant instead”
Hypothetically, there was around 11,000 megawatts of demand at $10,000 a megawatt hour for over 4 long hours which is a $450 million “price signal” (and that’s just NSW). In Victoria a similar spike consumed another $200 million*. The market — sick, injured and rigged, it seems, is beating us over the head. The average price for the whole 24 hour period in NSW, Victoria and South Australia was a red hot $2,000 per MWh. (A 24 hour average!)
This is not a free market, it’s a fixed market — designed to change the global climate and maybe also keep the lights on. A free market would fix itself, but the government banned the good options, so all we’re left […]
By Jo Nova The Transmission line cost bomb just went off and it changes everything
This is big. So big the AEMO just announced transmission line costs are up as much as 55%, and they are going to re-visit projects they previously said needed to proceed (which is the nice way of saying they will have to axe some or many of them). What no one is spelling out, is that if the transmission lines can’t be built, they also can’t build the vast solar and wind “farms” that the Labor government was depending on. Suddenly a lot of renewable projects are orphans.
Australia is supposed to build 10,000 kilometers of high voltage transmission lines by 2050. But last week, the AEMO admitted in their Draft 2025 Electricity Network Options Report that these interconnectors would cost between 25 to 55% more than expected, which makes them essentially unaffordable.
Plan B is where they pretend cars, home solar and batteries can save the “Transition”
The old plan of massive wind and solar factories spread across the continent is quietly mutating into a DIY version where the government hopes homeowners will rescue the Net Zero transition by buying the batteries the […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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