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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 […]
Bernard DUPONT: El Castillo Pyramid, western side – Tulum Maya site QR Feb 2020.jpg
Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
13 year megadrought during Medieval Warm Period may have finished off the Maya
A slightly spooky new paper shows annual rainfall patterns from a thousand years ago on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. It’s so detailed, they list every drought by year, including 13 unbroken years of drought from 929 to 942AD. It’s a bit like someone unearthed the Maya Bureau of Meteorology records from a thousand years ago (except it’s better, because it’s a rock with no politics).
This is one of the highest-resolution tropical stalagmite records ever published. Each year the stalagmite grew by as much as a millimeter, allowing for a year by year analysis — or indeed 12 datapoints within each year.
During this era of perfect CO2, for some reason that no climate model can explain, the poor sods in Maya suffered through extreme swings from wet to dry, stacked back to back. The climate was chaotic. Droughts were followed by floods. It’s uncannily like “climate extremes” we are told man-made emissions are going to bring.
It is sobering […]
By Jo Nova
What’s left of Australian manufacturing
The CEO of Bluescope Steel is a fan of renewables, but for Mark Vassella to make steel, what he wants is cheap gas, not wind and solar power — and he’s getting desperate. These are strong words from a CEO of one our Big-50. “Manufacturing is at a ‘tipping point‘” he says. “Energy costs are now 3 to 4 times higher than the US”. Furthermore, “Without immediate intervention there will be no Future Made in Australia.” — He twists the knife, talking about the PM’s pet project (the one where we somehow make solar and wind power here cheaper than the slaves do in China. )
He’s especially scathing of the idea that one of the biggest exporters of LNG in the world, now has to import it back.
“ In what world does exporting LNG in massive quantities only to re-import it to supply a shorter domestic market make any sense? It’s like importing sand into the Sahara.”
Vassella knows US and Australian energy prices all too well. Bluescope also own the North Star steel mill in Ohio and is looking to expand further in the US.
BlueScope […]
By Jo Nova
If the whole renewables fantasy was crumbling, it would look something like this
Despite the Labor Government throwing money at unreliable energy, renewables hopes are quietly unraveling. The largest energy retailer in the country just announced a nice 26% profit jump, based on fossil fueled gas, and they also announced they’d be keeping Australia’s largest coal plant open longer. The two year extension for Eraring, is now a four year extension. Despite reaping in gas profits and keeping the planet-destroying-plant operating, the share price promptly leapt 6% to a ten year high.
Significantly, Giles Parkinson at Reneweconomy also noticed that Origin’s annual report includes talk of batteries, but no wind or solar projects, which seems like an important oversight in a nation belting headlong towards the Green Utopia.
Meanwhile, for the first time I can recall, a fossil fuel CEO is daring to defend the industry. The shift in confidence in palpable. Mike Wirth, the Chevron CEO, is not only saying “oil is not evil” but he clearly isn’t afraid of the Australian government. He’s so unafraid he also delivered a “stinging rebuke” — saying that high costs, red tape and environmental rules have made Australia so […]
By Jo Nova
Who knew, we can solve global warming by moving suburbs, planting trees, limiting immigration?
A new study used satellite data to look at ten cities around the world to see which parts of cities are the warmest, and how that has changed in the last twenty years as they grew.
It looks like man-made global warming mainly applies to airports and industrial areas. We put most of our thermometers at airports which awkwardly turn out to be 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than surrounding areas, and presumably warmer than they were 120 years ago when there wasn’t 3 square kilometers of concrete runway there sitting in the sun. Industrial zones were even worse, being 2.8°C hotter. Conversely leafy green areas with a lot of vegetation were nearly 4 degrees cooler than the average. So airports are at least 6 degrees warmer than forests. Places near bodies of water were, not surprisingly, even more than 4 degrees cooler. It’s part of why people pay $5 million for a beachside mansion isn’t it?
The worst climate change in Melbourne is on Boundary Road
One of the ten cities they studied was Melbourne and there is a special mention for […]
Nobody wants to say China
A couple of weeks ago at the Australian Clean Energy summit, there was a dawning realization that in our rush to diversify the energy grid we are accidentally “diversifying” our cyber security risks too.
Where, once upon a time, we could double and triple check the barriers around big old coal plants, now we have opened electronic doors to our grid on homes all over Australia. Energy geniuses told us solar panels would be decentralized, but instead, now that Australia has 25,000 megawatts of household solar, we have to add wireless gadgets to control them remotely. And some of these gadgets are coming in from fly-by-night small time operators. If, hypothetically, a foreign power wanted to be mean, or just hold an extra negotiating or blackmail card up its sleeve, we’re making it very easy. If Mr Chin wants something approved, he could say “Nice grid you have there…”
Small scale solar is so big, As Williamson points out, that it supplied 13% of the electricity to the NEM so far this year. And in Western Australia, it has generated 20%. (Boy is the West in trouble?)
On top of this, to deal with […]
By Jo Nova
Could it get more vacuous? We used to think climate simulations were bad. Now we don’t even have the modeling, we have unverified, imaginary, rumors of modeling…
In a new PR tactic, the Labor government has leaked that it has “held back” an intense and scary report. This means the Blob-Media can put out frightening headlines about how dire the report is (and none of those horrid critics can ridicule the assumptions).
This new extended version of vague “non-releases” allows the Ministry of Climate Panic to get in a few extra weeks of baseless media speculation, hyperbole and uninformed discussion. Furthermore the Greens can pretend to be relevant by demanding its release, as if they want transparency, and as if the government is “covering up” the climate disaster while they actually promote it. It’s a win-win for the Blob. The reason for the tabloid theatre is that next month the Australian government is announcing new sacred emissions targets for UN Climate Piety and Net Zero goals by 2035. Hence if there actually was a climate crisis, and if Australia could make any meaningful contribution to solving it, the report should have been released late last […]
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.
By Jo Nova
The biggest and best studied reef in the world is looking good
Despite record high emissions of carbon dioxide, and hottest ever temperatures, the Great Barrier Reef was again enjoying one of its best years yet. In the 40 years that AIMS has been studying it, the last four years are great results.
Judging by the data, corals are coping fine with today’s heat and CO2. But the more money we spend finding a climate crisis, the worse our science institutions get. One-sided money and monopoly science can turn any institute into a tax-grabbing-machine, that serves the Blob, not the people. Thus is it so.
The AIMS annual reef survey for 2025, tells us that the Great Barrier Reef had suffered “a sharp decline after a record breaking heatwave “. Worse, mass coral bleaching is becoming more frequent as the world warms, and the time between events is shrinking, giving corals less time to recover.
So Peter Ridd took the same data and did the graph that AIMS, with $90 million in taxpayer dollars, couldn’t do, so we can all appreciate the full disaster. And here it is:
AIMS also tells us that the “reef is […]
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 […]
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
In a nasty shock, the VNI West interconnector price has doubled and doubled again
The whole renewables fantasy is unraveling before our eyes.
In 2023 the Victorian NSW interconnector was supposed to cost $1.8 billion. By May this year the price-tag had doubled to $3.6 billion, and now a mere two months later, the estimate has been revised again up to $7.6 billion and that’s plus or minus 30 to 50%. So it could cost as much as $11 billion. (And who knows where this trend ends?)
Without this transmission line, many future wind and solar farms evaporate, not just ones that wanted to connect to it, but other ones further away. Even offshore wind farms are less profitable without the VNI and other mainland connectors. Intermittent generators make more profits when there are bigger mainland lines to spread their erratic surges of electricity through.
“The Jacobs review also notes that without VNI-West, other significant renewable energy generation and network projects like offshore wind off the coast of Victoria will be less effective.”
— Summary of the Independent Assessment of Plan B
This […]
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By Jo Nova
In the end, we have to win the Science battle
Donald Trump is not just slowing down the Blobocrats-of-Climate-Control, he’s on a quest to destroy it at the source. He asked the EPA Chief, Lee Zeldin, to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding, and the EPA chief has delivered. Without the Finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health, the central mechanism for US climate regulation disintegrates.
Skeptics Francis Menton and Anthony Watts are celebrating this historic win after years of work. But the quest is not over. Menton estimates that the official unwinding and legal battles could continue for the rest of the Trump Presidency. He hopes it will clear the Supreme Court before the next election.
Essentially the sacred EPA finding of 2009 was that atmospheric concentrations of six key greenhouse gases threatens both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations. At that moment, CO2, the building block of life, became also “a pollutant”. By issuing this “finding”, the EPA was therefore legally required under the Clean Air Act to regulate cars, houses, power plants, factories, hamburgers and your light bulbs.
Thus the Endangerment Ring binds all others, employs […]
By Jo Nova
The Blob cometh to shake some more money out of us
Australia is due to set a global weather target for 2035 in September, so the UN sent a former Minister of Climate Resilience from Grenada to poke pins in his Voodoo dolls on national TV. He invoked the No-Fruit Incantation and prophesied that Australians will only get one bit of fruit a year, which is 99.7% reduction from current production levels of 150 kilograms per capita. No one batted an eyelid. The ABC repeated it all, unquestioningly.
What no one said, was that thanks to the horrors of extra CO2 the world now grows twice as much fruit for every, man women and child, as we did in 1960. It’s that bad.
In toto, following The “UN Science” — fossil fuels have thus caused total global production of fruit to increase five fold. Even though we were besieged by all those droughts and floods, fungus, rat plagues and jellyfish, somehow we all grew five times as much fruit.
As we can see, this is the total collapse of global living standards, graphed by the OWID:
Perhaps being ludicrous is the point?
There […]
7.8 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
The poor today are even paying to help the very rich people of 2100 get slightly richer
Matt Ridley
In a droll, but scathing assessment, Matt Ridley calculates that even in a best case scenario, with the most generous estimate of how useful a wind turbine might be, the people in the UK are spending £25 billion a year to reduce global emissions of CO2 by 0.00002 or two hundredths of one percent.
At that rate getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output.
The numbers burn like the Hindenburg, yet serious people keep a straight face, like we are living in an episode of Monty Python. The Parliamentarians pretend to save the world, the scientists research a pretend world, and the media pretend to be journalists.
Excerpts from Matt Ridley on X:
The climate boondoggle is one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history: never in the field of human commerce, or at least not since the sheriff of Nottingham, has so much tax been paid by people so poor to people so rich. Perhaps Ed Miliband is […]
By Jo Nova
Another day — another setback for the Mega Green Hydrogen Dream
The The Australian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) started at 6GW, grew to 11GW and then to 26GW as the mania spread. Such was the vision — it would produce five times the power of the whole Western Australian grid system. It would be the star of “exported renewable energy”.
Once pitched as the largest renewable project in the world — the fantasy is that 1,753 wind turbines, and nearly 11,000 megawatts of solar power will fill 6,500 square kilometers of the Pilbara in Northwest Western Australia.
The cable plan of 2018 to Jakarta and Singapore
Originally, the plan was to build a giant DC undersea cable to Jakarta or Singapore, but when that didn’t work they decided it would churn out 1.6 million tonnes of green hydrogen and 9 million tonnes of ammonia every year for export to Asia. The project was so ambitious they were going to have to build a whole new small town on the coast, with it’s own desalination plant — because rainfall is so low. “We need to have lakes” he said. Sure.
Funny how the same thing […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a great day for lawyers
A court at the top of the UN Faraway Tree has proclaimed that rich countries have an obligation to “protect the climate system”.
In full Blob-propaganda mode, the BBC rushed to tell us how this was a win for the people, in “the worlds highest court”. The BBC-Blob doesn’t mention that the poor people of Britain (and the free world) will pay, and most of the poor islanders cheering in the South Pacific will get nothing. As the BBC says, dripping with Marxist-medicine: ““This is a victory not just for us but for every frontline community fighting to be heard.” When they say “us” they mean “the Blob”. When they say “frontline community” they mean the Blob rent-a-crowd protestors. They don’t mean frontline farmers, or small business owners or Christians.
The ruling is “non-binding” which means any sensible government will ignore it, just like the USA, France, Israel and India have in the past, and even Australia did in 2002. China pretty much ignores it every year. But this ruling is very useful for patsy governments who want to do something anyway (like give back the Chagos Islands for […]
Image by Steve from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The poor suffering Blob experts are losing the information war
They can’t seem to get a break, even with all the Governments, bankers, media, universities and the United Nations to help them.
If only they had truth on their side, they could just explain it, but since they don’t — the next best thing is publishing concocted studies demonizing the truth-tellers as conspiracy theorists, and blaming profiteering Big-tech. Free speech is so dangerous, they warn, that “Elon Musk-owned X lacked fact-checks or Community Notes on 99% of the posts”. Ninety nine percent! Clearly, The Blob wants warnings and labels on every single damn tweet. No moment in the public town square can be left unguarded.
We can’t have adults thinking for themselves! And that’s the thing isn’t it, there is something profoundly condescending and undemocratic about those who believe adults can’t be trusted to have conversations that no one corrects, live, one tweet at a time. The incredible unbridled smuggery of the Blobocrats is there for all to see, (as is the desperation) yet so rarely mocked, tarred and feathered […]
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