As a director of The Australian Environment Foundation I am delighted we were able to bring Benny Peiser out from the UK.
Bookings need to be done in the next few days!
Australian Environment Foundation
Dr Benny Peiser who heads up the London based The Global Warming Policy Foundation, is visiting Australia and speaking at three major events in Sydney 26 April, Brisbane 27 April and Melbourne 28 April.
Benny Peiser
Dr Peiser has written extensively on domestic and international climate policy and has appeared on numerous media outlets to contest global warming alarmism and demonstrate the cost of policies being proposed to address it.
His visit is especially timely given the European – indeed global – energy crisis and the key issues of energy and the environment that are prominent in the Australian federal election campaign.
What can the UK tell us about renewable electricity? Benny Peiser points the way ahead on renewables based on the UK and world experience. He is a climate change expert and a complete Renaissance Man who brings a contemporary and historical social perspective to the issue, as well as deep knowledge of the science and policy solutions.
As an example of his breadth of interests his name is literally written in the sky with a minor planet bearing his name, in honour of his work on “near earth objects and impact hazzards”. He is a former member of the German Greens, holds a PhD in Cultural Studies for a thesis examining the history, archaeology and natural history of Greek problems at the time of the ancient Olympic Games.
Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer founded the GWPF in 2009, and under Peiser’s direction it has become a major source of climate realist policy in the UK.
The event includes lunch and drinks so prices vary from $135 ($100 for students) or more. See the link for options. Book a table of ten and get a discount!
The AEF has invited Benny Peiser to visit Australia to deliver the Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture for 2022. Dr Peiser will speak on “The Global Energy Crisis, Net Zero Emission Targets and the War in Ukraine” at the Hawthorn Arts Centre, starting at 6:30 pm.
Sadly, not for Western Australians, Tasmanians, the NT, South Australia or New Zealand this time. Perhaps it’s time to arrange some other events for skeptics?
Welcome to Your Green Dystopia. The wind turbines at ESI Energy killed 150 eagles in the last ten years and last week the company was fined $8 million dollars “or $53,300 per carcass”. Which sounds someone cares about these birds. But don’t think the The Fisheries and Wildlife Service (FWS) are outraged at the deaths of eagles. The real problem was not the slaughter, but that ESI didn’t fill out the paperwork first. If they had only got their permits to kill, it would have been fine.
As Gregory Whitestone says: The government is funding this knowing the birds are dying in the name of Clean Energy
The DOJ press release further stated: “ESI and its affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits for generating electricity from wind power at facilities that it operated, knowing that multiple eagles would be killed and wounded without legal authorization.”
The legalized slaughter of eagles and other large birds of prey was legitimized under the Obama administration and continues today. At the time, it was estimated that nearly 600,000 birds of all types were killed by the much smaller wind footprint at that time, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles.
Unknown to most citizens is the fact that the FWS has established a “take limit” for wind energy companies to kill bald eagles. This would be similar to a bag limit for a hunter. However, hunters dare not as they are not of the protected class and would be subject to a maximum fine of $250,000 or two years of imprisonment for a felony conviction. FWS regularly imposes fines on oil companies and electric transmission firms for inadvertent deaths of bald eagles, all the while giving its seal of approval to green-induced eagle carnage of a grand scale from turbines.
The FWS bald eagle take limits were revised February 2022 to allow a more than four-fold increase in the legalized slaughter.
File this story away next time you meet someone who thinks wind farms are good for the environment. Also handy for children in schools where they need to explain the pros and cons of renewables.
What’s remarkable is that a conversation had by so many on the internet has finally made it, for a moment, onto television. No surprise it happened on a footy show. It certainly wasn’t going to happen on The 7:30 Report, Four Corners, or 60 minutes.
A star Australian football player had a “scary” incident with nausea, dizziness, and heart irregularities and missed a lot of the game this weekend. The hosts of the show casually asked if it was the booster shot — saying “that’s obviously the word going around.” Possibly they were relaxed about discussing it because one of the shows hosts even has Bells Palsy, and they had discussed it off camera with him. So they let down their guard:
“Exactly, heart issues and Bell’s palsy has gone through the roof since the boosters and Covid issues,” Lloyd said.”
“We had (sports journalist) Michelangelo Rucci on (3AW) on Friday night and he said that there’s a ward in Adelaide filled with people with similar symptoms to Ollie Wines – nausea, heart issues – so there has to be something more to it.”
This is the biggest news story on the planet. Mainstream Media football show hosts openly talking about adverse reactions sweeping the world after #OllieWines was hospitalised with an irregular heartbeat. pic.twitter.com/9azM3eFTz1
Wines spoke for the first time on Monday. “I’m 100 per cent back to normal, thanks to the Calvary staff the doctors and nurses there,” he said. “They really looked after me, and now I’m 100 per cent fine. There were a few little issues but they have been rectified now.” He said his heart issue is not related his Covid vaccination or vaccine complications, including myocarditis.
Having sold their souls not-covering Biden-family corruption, election scandals, Pharmaceutical malfeasance, and rackets running through politics and science, it’s no surprise that barely 1 in 6 Republicans trust most media outlets. Mass lies will do that.
Look at the vast partisan gulf in the poll below which asked “how trustworthy do you rate the news media…“. Can anyone look at this graph and argue that the media is not dominated by left-leaning views? Fully 18 of 22 media outlets appeal to, and are trusted by around three times as many left leaning voters.
It’s no surprise that the most polarized and divisive news source in America is CNN followed by The New York Times and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.
The Republicans (red) are more skeptical than Democrats (blue) of nearly every media outlet.
The least polarising of the mainstream news outlets is the Wall Street Journal.
The only media outlet arguably that serves both political views is The Weather Channel, but even there half of Republicans and 40% of Democrats don’t “trust” it. There is no common Town Square media left where both sides of the political spectrum can hear each others views.
How things have changed since the year 2000
Republicans were always less likely to trust the media than Democrats were, but in the last twenty years that trust has evaporated.
The Daily Examiner in New Zealand seems perplexed that government funding might be a bad thing. Almost like they and the academics at the AUT research centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy, who did the study, have never once thought about the Government as a vested interest.
While in 2020, 62% of New Zealanders trusted the news they consumed, in 2022 the figure was 52%. Additionally, general trust in the news continues to decline.
Paradoxically, one of the main reasons for distrust in news media appears to be the Government’s funding of it. A large number of respondents now perceive media as an extension of the Government, hence it is seen untrustworthy, says Myllylahti.
This year, journalists have been increasingly under attack when reporting on the Covid crisis, vaccinations, vaccine mandates, protests and so on. In its role as disseminator of vital information in a crisis, the media has perhaps been seen as the Government mouthpiece. In one sense, it has quite rightly been, says Dr Greg Treadwell, co-author of the report.
Funny how telling the public to obey the government, without any questions or alterative views, makes the media look like a wing of the bureaucrats because that’s exactly what it was.
It’s a shock. More than half the states in the US are considering legislation to allow doctors and sometimes even nurses and pharmacists too, to prescribe early treatment drugs “off label”.
Let’s not forget that doctors were able to do that for decades and it’s largely the medical boards who have become the defacto Praetorian Guards of Big-Pharma — taking away the rights of doctors via threats to destroy their career if they step out of line.
Many of the proposed bills simply aim to stop medical boards from evicting doctors who use drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. North Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee appear to have largely succeeded. The rest are working on it. In Tennessee, people may even be able to buy a drug that’s been given to a billion other humans, right over-the-counter. Golly, that’s almost as free as El Salvador?!
Meanwhile people in America are providing the drug “off-label” and “off-prescription” anyway, sneaking it into hospitals and handing it out at churches. It would be better for everyone if they could ask their doctors. But this response from state legislators in the US seems remarkable to this Australian — almost like Democracy still has a chance.
North Dakota was the first state to pass legislation last November:
The new laws “Prohibit the Boards of Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy from disciplining a licensee solely on their dispensing of ivermectin for off-label treatments such as Covid-19.” The main aim apparently was to stop some doctors and pharmacists from using the excuse that the medical boards will punish them if they prescribe or supply ivermectin. But presumably some professionals were genuinely afraid of being punished.
In Kansas the legislation was approved on March 23:
Senator Mark Steffen championed the bill and also happens to be an anesthesiologist who has prescribed ivermectin.
“Thousands of Kansans and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because of this propaganda that shut down early treatment,” said Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson. “I fully believe that this passage of this bill through the Senate will gain national attention and help be a very important part of getting the care to the people who need it.”
The bill would allow doctors to prescribe ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and any other FDA-approved drug that isn’t a controlled substance for an off-label use to prevent or treat COVID-19.
“Studies overwhelmingly show that ivermectin has up to an 85% chance of reducing hospitalizations and death when given early for COVID,” he said in caucus. “This is about decreasing suffering and death of the individual patient.”
“To a large degree, [ivermectin’s] been driven underground,” he said. “In my Reno County area, I have an 80-year-old Mennonite pastor and his wife, who is a retired nurse, they’re doling it out behind the scenes to all their church members. I have other people who have gone to the veterinary for ivermectin and dole that out to their friends. They know what they’re doing and they do a great job with it.”
Senator Steffen went on to write to 250 hospitals in Kansas to point out that they may face legal action if they don’t pay attention to early treatment:
In consultation with the legal community, indications are that “failure to treat” will now be considered “wanton disregard”.
Oklahoma found a different way — the Attorney General simply said there’s no legal reason to punish doctors:
Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor says his office does not plan to discipline doctors for prescribing certain medications, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to treat covid.
O’Connor said in a news release that his office finds no legal basis for a state medical licensure board to discipline a licensed physician for prescribing a drug for the off-label purpose of treating a patient with COVID-19.
The Oklahoma attorney general said he stands behind doctors who believe ivermectin is in their patients’ best interest.
“I stand behind doctors who believe it is in their patients’ best interests to receive ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine,” O’Connor said in a statement. “Our health care professionals should have every tool available to combat COVID-19. Public safety demands this. Physicians who prescribe medications and follow the law should not fear disciplinary action for prescribing such drugs.”
The bill HB2746/SB2188 has just passed the Senate and is headed for the Governors desk. The original bill aimed to make ivermectin available over the counter, like aspirin. But the amended bill requires a bit of paperwork of some sort: “a non-patient-specific prescriptive order, developed and executed by one or more authorized prescribers.” But some still argue that it is effectively now an Over-the-Counter (OTC) medicine in Tennessee now.
The source of the problem was that the Tennessee Medical Board put up a warning on their website last year that doctors risked their medical licenses if they spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. Many doctors naturally assumed that even mentioning that there was an early treatment alternative would be classed as misinformation.
Incredibly, that sparked a debate about free speech (hallelujah.) It all looks so sensible.
“I had several doctors contact me last summer and into the fall about what they were seeing and hearing from the Board of Medical Examiners, that would potentially punish them for prescribing treatment for COVID that they felt was in the best interest of their patients,” Tennessee Republican state Rep. Chris Todd told Stateline. “That hit me, because they have a perfectly valid license and have practiced for years, and there’s no reason to issue a statement carte blanche.”
The medical boards were intimidating doctors. A bit like saying “Nice Practice you have there…”
Tennessee lawmakers say doctors complained to them about receiving emailed warnings. At its meeting in September, the board discussed sending a warning to all physicians in the state. But Bill Christian, spokesperson for the Tennessee Health Department, which oversees the medical board, said in an email that if doctors received any emails, they came from professional organizations, not the board.
In any case, the board in December deleted the warning from its website, although Christian said that the policy behind it remains in effect.
Rep Chris Todd blamed a “CDC that’s gone beserk”. Nicely said.
Politicoreported Feb. 1 that medical boards have penalized eight physicians in one year for furthering COVID-19, vaccine and therapeutic misinformation.
Fact checkers at AAP examined that claim and found that since July 2019, 61 medical practitioners had been disqualified by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) for any reason — not just related to COVID-19 vaccination.
Naturally, other doctors have struck themselves off, seeing what was coming. And so have young candidates for medical school. How demoralizing for the whole profession to find they are nothing but robots performing for an unaudited committee.
Eight doctors struck off in the US is still eight doctors too many. But Australia has about 8% of the population of the US, so it’s “far ahead” in Communist Medicine. Damn.
There’s an electromagnetic ball of fire that is 1.3 million times the size of Earth and just 8 minutes away by photon, and we really don’t know what’s going on there.
Historians will mock us for trying to predict Earth’s climate when we are in the baby days of Space Weather knowledge. Solar Cycle 24 (the last one) was a shorter cycle, just under 10 years. Right now the big question is whether Solar Cycle 25 will be bigger and more active which seems to happen after a short cycle. But it’s too early to tell. This top graph overstates the effect.
The Solar Cycle Prediction Panel predicted that the 25th cycle since record-keeping began would be similarly quiet, with a peak of 115 sunspots. By contrast, the number of sunspots for the last 18 months has been consistently higher than predictions. At time of writing, the Sun has 61 sunspots, and we’re still over three years from solar maximum.
Solar Cycle 25, bigger than expected.
Cycle 25 has been consistently higher than Cycle 24, but it is all within the margins of noise.
It certainly doesn’t look like it will be “the highest on record”. h/t Eben.
So there are battles over predictions but they are all guessing, including the author of this press release, and the top graph, Scott McIntosh, who admits as much:
A solar cycle following a longer cycle, they noticed, was likely to be on the weaker side. But a cycle following a shorter cycle was likely to be stronger. Solar Cycle 23 was long, which is consistent with the weakness of Solar Cycle 24. But Solar Cycle 24 was also short, coming in at just under 10 years.
This, McIntosh and his colleagues predicted in 2020, meant that Solar Cycle 25 was likely to be stronger – perhaps among the strongest on record. And the climbing sunspot numbers would suggest they may have been onto something.
“Scientists have struggled to predict both the length and the strength of sunspot cycles because we lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanism that drives the cycle,” McIntosh said at the time.
If he’s right and extreme UV marks the magnetic fields moving in waves, it’s just one more factor that’s missing in the models. Climate modelers think the Sun is just a ball of light, and fill all the gaps in their understanding with the hypothetical effect of “CO2”.
In 2014, he and his colleagues published a paper describing their observations of the Sun on a 22-year cycle.
This has long been considered the full solar cycle, when the poles return to their starting positions, but McIntosh noticed something interesting. Over the course of about 20 years or so, flickers of extreme ultraviolet light called coronal bright points seem to move from the poles towards the equator, meeting in the middle.
The movement of these bright points across the mid-latitudes seems to coincide with sunspot activity.
It’s really more of a 22 year cycle on the sun before the North pole gets back to where it started.
These bright points, McIntosh believes, are linked with bands of magnetic fields that wrap around the Sun, propagating from the poles to the equator every 11 years or so.
Because they have opposite polarity, when they meet in the middle, they cancel each other out – what the researchers call a “terminator”. These terminator events mark the end of a solar magnetic cycle, and the start of the next.
But they don’t always take exactly the same amount of time. Sometimes these bands slow down as they reach mid-latitudes, which means that the length of time between terminator events varies. And the team noticed that there’s a correlation between the length of time between terminators and the intensity of the following solar maximum.
“When we look back over the 270-year long observational record of terminator events, we see that the longer the time between terminators, the weaker the next cycle,” said astronomer Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
“And, conversely, the shorter the time between terminators, the stronger the next solar cycle is.”
A new Israeli study sliced through the medical records of 1.2 million people. They compared people who had three doses with people who went on to have four. By three or four weeks after the 4th shot, people had half as many symptomatic infections. It’s “nice” but it’s only 50% efficacy, and that’s as good as it gets. So much for the glory days of “95% efficacy” — things are so unimpressive, no one talks in percentages anymore. By eight weeks after the fourth dose there was pretty much no extra protection against infection left.
On the plus side, the fourth dose did seem to prevent people getting a nasty disease, with 3.5 times as many 3-dose people getting a severe infection compared to the 4th-dosers. On the down side, those patients were only followed for six weeks. The honeymoon-from-hospitalization may fade quickly too. It lasts a few months with the 3rd dose.
So the fourth dose isn’t going to last through the winter — the meaningful honeymoon period is just a few weeks — from Week 2 to Week 6 to be precise, and that’s only 30-50% “protection”. If damage from Wuhan spikes is cumulative, the short honeymoon may be a bum deal, to say the least.
So when it comes to people getting on planes, if it’s not safe for the unvaccinated to fly because they might spread more disease, then it’s not safe for the multi-vaccinated most of the time either.
Higher dots on this graph mean more protection
8 weeks after the fourth dose there was no difference between people who had three or four doses. They probably still have some protection against Severe infection, but for how long?
Here’s a surprise for all you Australians trapped in Australia because you chose not to take part in a medical experiment. The reason you can’t leave is not for your own health. It’s not for the health of fellow Australians. It’s because we are “protecting the rest of the world”. This is a world where where fully vaccinated travellers have already spread Covid to every country on Earth and at least 72 countries are happy for you to turn up on their door with your tourist dollars and without a vaccine.
As Senator Rennick says: “I cannot for the life of me see the health risks in an unvaccinated person leaving the country.”
Paul Kelly, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer explained that it was due to Australia’s International Health Obligations. That’s an international treaty we signed because we’re a member of the WHO. As far as a quick search turns up, Australia, Canada and the UAE may be the only nations still banning their own citizens from leaving. In Canada, things are so inexplicable, the vaccinated don’t even need to do a test anymore. So people infected with Covid are free to fly in or out of Canada shedding virus everywhere. But healthy unvaccinated people “will need to be tested at the airport and again eight days after arrival, and isolate for 14 days.” Righto.
The Australian PM Scott Morrison keeps telling us he opposes mandates, yet he hasn’t said “boo” about this international treaty. Indeed, if the Australian government was set up as a subsidiary wing of Pfizer and Moderna, they could hardly have done more to lift profits
Below Senator Rennick asks Paul Kelly, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, at the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee why unvaccinated Australians can’t leave the country. It may take two repeat-viewings to get the message, there is no sunset clause on locking in the refuseniks.
The Good news is that finally the two year Pandemic Emergency Biosecurity powers are about to end.
The Bad news is the government plans to make other rules that will still stop unvaxxed Australians from leaving.
Australian citizens who wish to travel without getting injections will still need to swim, paddle, ride crocodiles, or renounce their citizenship. Perhaps Prof Kelly is hoping to use this as a “booster” bonus carrot? Will they ban the two-jabbed?
Welcome to Prison Australia where unvaccinated citizens are not able to leave. (And Canadians thought they were the only ones). If your best friend is getting married in Madagascar, the Africans will let you fly in, but you can’t go because Australia won’t let you out.
Australians who are unvaccinated or not-jabbed-enough can apply for permission to leave. But unless you need foreign medical care, live or work overseas, or are flying in the “national interest” (meaning you’re a politician) you may not qualify. Trips need to be “longer than three months” for no good reason I can think of, except that it stops most holidayers. Which is obviously the point.
People may get an exemption if they need to work overseas. Which is fine if your boss wants to send you to conventions in the Greek Islands but you can’t take the wife and kids unless she owns the company, and the kids are your employees. Otherwise, there’s no pleasure cruises for the unjabbed peasants from Oz.
Unvaccinated Australians who want to leave pretty much have to escape
We can always drive to Broome. We might find an Indonesian fishing boat and get a lift back the other way, in a kind of reverse boat-people maneuver. With luck, Australian-boat-people might be able to apply for political asylum in Bali. But will Indonesia accept them? Otherwise it’s only 150 kilometers from the top end of Queensland to Papua New Guinea. It’s possible to swim or paddle across the Torres Strait, it’s just that the crocodiles may appreciate your trip more than you do.
The ban doesn’t apply to unvaccinated foreigners in Australia, (luckily for Novak, eh, or he might still be here?). Non-Australians are free to leave, so dual nationals could always renounce their citizenship but the rest of us just have to go stateless.
Right now, there are about 70 countries which allow unvaccinated travelers in. Places like France, Spain, Greece and the UK, as well as Norway, Israel, Denmark, and those bastions of freedom: Cuba, Russia and parts of Africa and central America.
When nations with medical systems as good as Haiti aren’t afraid to welcome the Unvaxxed, it seems a tad odd that Australia is afraid to send them.
As it is, the Australian made vaccine is not on the approved list in Australia, so unvaccinated Australians aren’t able to fly out of Australia to go to Iran where they could get an Australian vaccine. It’s almost like we’re owned by Pfizer.
Set Australia Free Scott Morrison…
If it all sounds a bit hard to believe, ponder that it’s been the law since the Human Biosecurity Emergency was announced two years ago:
“From 25 March 2020, all Australian citizens and permanent residents must not travel outside Australia unless exempt… “
Long after Covid became tame enough to let in, and evolved into omicron, the Pandemic Emergency was extended again and again, even in February this year until 17 April 2022. Will they extend it again? I’ll have more to say tomorrow…
From the Australian Government Health website — here it is in black and white:
Restrictions on outbound international travel for unvaccinated Australians
If you do not meet Australia’s definition of fully vaccinated for international travel purposes, you need to apply for a travel exemption to leave Australia. For more information and how to apply see Travel exemption process to leave Australia.
are travelling as part of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak, including the provision of aid
need urgent medical treatment that is not available in Australia
are travelling for a compelling reason and for three months or longer
your travel is in the national interest
you are ordinarily resident in a country other than Australia.
are travelling for your business or employer
providing critical skills or working in a critical sector.
Would you like hoops to jump through?
When to apply
You need to apply for a travel exemption at least two weeks, but not more than two months, before your planned travel.
If you are travelling due to the death or critical illness of a close family member, you can apply inside this timeframe. We will prioritise your application.
At the moment, two jabs is enough, and people can do them barely two weeks apart and then fly seven days later, which doesn’t sound like anyone in the Health department is too concerned about the travellers actually being protected. If we want to know the efficacy we have to wait two or three weeks after the last injection before we even count them. But if we are only worried about them getting on planes full of viruses, who cares?
It’s not about health is it?
In February more than 400 Australians applied but were told they couldn’t fly out of the country. Some 390 people applied to leave on compassionate grounds, but 168 of those were knocked back. About half the people who said they lived overseas were not allowed to leave either. All told during the last two years the Australian Government has declared that 147,000 Australians didn’t have permission to leave the country. Who knows how many thousands more never bothered to apply in the first place.
As the grapevines bud for the season in France, a mild spring followed by a savage frost is bad news for farmers.
There have been three bad frosts in recent years. The young fashionable expert tells us that frost means it’s climate change. But people didn’t realize...” it’s a form of denial” she says with a straight face.
The change in weather pattern is also pushing up his insurance coverage for loss of harvest, he added. In Yonne, two-thirds of the harvest was destroyed as a result of the frost last year, according to the farm ministry.
Winemakers were starting to join forces to invest in new tools, such as heating cables, to help mitigate the effects of such frosts, she said. However, many in the industry are still reluctant to face up to the fact that the impact of climate change could be long-lasting, Civet said.
Météo-France, the country’s meteorological service, said the night of April 3 was the coldest night on a national scale since the creation of the national thermal indicator in 1947, with an average temperature of 29.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees below zero Celsius). This indicator averages the temperature of weather observation sites across France.
The late winter snap also hit Germany with a new record low temperature of minus 12.7 (9.1F) set at Bad Berleburg-Hemschlar.
— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动官方推号 (@TGTM_Official) April 3, 2022
How do we know when it’s propaganda — when all the news readers speak with one voice.
What’s the difference between the Western doctors and the CCP-docs? About a year. AHPRA are the communist party of medicine in Australia. Instead of banning doctors who talked about a new form of pneumonia, AHPRA bans doctors who talk about cheap treatments or problems with vaccines. What’s the difference?
This supports Jo’s post on wind droughts. The point is that we have to strive for “wind drought literacy” in the general population. Apart from people who mess around in sailboats and people who play sports where the wind has an impact on missiles in flight, most of us take little notice of the wind unless it is blowing our hat off or turning our umbrella inside out.
It is really important for everyone to know that the wind is quite often low across the whole of SE Australia due to high pressure systems and sometimes these systems linger for a day or two. Wind droughts are more frequent in individual states.
The easiest way to get a fix on the wind situation is to glance at the NEMwatch widget. It is live and it changes every five minutes. You can read it on your phone and this is the kind of picture you will see.
The bars indicate the amount of power that is being generated and consumed in each state at the moment. WA is not connected to the Eastern electricity grid so supply matches demand while in the SE there are flows between the states
The generation bar is colour coded with wind in GREEN and the takeaway message is to see how much more green is required to replace coal (black and brown) and gas (red). Windless nights are the real killers because both the sun and the wind are off duty.
AEMO RECORDS
The AEMO has a continuous record of the power delivered from all the wind farms attached to the integrated electric power grid covering South Eastern Australia (the NEM). Paul Miskelly used that data for the calendar year 2010 to report that the total wind output across the entire grid fell rapidly to zero or near zero on many occasions in the year.
During the first 6 months of the year, there are 58 intervals where the output falls below 2% of the installed capacity.
For the entire year, there are 109 such intervals of varying length, adding up to 155.6 hours, or nearly 6.5 days.
At the time where were only 23 wind farms with a less than 2GW of installed capacity and it was anticipated that the supply would become more reliable as the number of sites increased.
Some years later John Morgan reported that the situation was much the same in the 12-month period from Sep 2014 to Sept 2015 when the capacity of the wind fleet was approaching 4GW.
He found 29 days in the year with the fleet delivering less than 10% of capacity. The lowest was 2.7% https://bravenewclimate.com/2015/11/08/the-capacity-factor-of-wind/
Mike O’Ceirin, an independent analyst, has unpublished information collated from the AEMO records up to the end of 2020 showing an average of 15 episodes per year when the delivery was 6% or less of the installed capacity.
Some of those episodes last for a long time.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF WIND DROUGHTS
The system has to be designed to cater for the worst case scenarios of wind and solar input. Obviously the weakest parts are windless nights because WHEN THERE IS NEXT TO NO GENERATION, NO AMOUNT OF ADDITIONAL WIND AND SOLAR CAPACITY HELP. 5, 10 or 50 times next to nothing is still next to nothing compared with the demand in the grid.
RE enthusiasts regularly report new records for the penetration of RE into the grid and the South Australia is the star performer because on sunny and windy afternoons RE can exceed the demand in the grid for short periods. They are looking at the system through the wrong end of the telescope because generating an excess of RE power for some short periods, or even substantial periods, will not prevent system collapse on windless nights unless there is 100% of conventional power available or there is massive grid-scale storage that is not feasible with current technology.
So read the reports from the Energy Realists of Australia, become a wind-watcher and tell your friends and relations about the NEMwatch widget!
If Climate Change was a real threat, the Bureau of Meteorology might even look at their own historic records.
When Jennifer Marohasy and Chris Gillham did just that, they found that as bad as the current situation is, it’s happened before:
The wettest day in Lismore was in February 1954.
The wettest year for Lismore was 1893.
There was no increase in the intensity or frequency of extreme wet days at Lismore, or the towns around it.
Now if the BOM looks at this with a supercomputer, they might find an effect from CO2. But if the BOM just used a calendar, like I did, they might find the latest floods started the week after Hunga Tonga volcanic dust rolled across Australia. Maybe that matters?
No one needed a supercomputer to read a rain gauge in 1885, and we have excellent long data. Imagine how handy that might be if the BoM wanted to understand, say, Australian flood cycles? There are 137 years of rainfall records in Lismore from 1885 to now, but the BOM said we set a new record for Lismore based on Lismore airport where records started as long ago as… 2002.
The Bureau of Meteorology is guilty of exploiting taxpayers, vandalizing Australian history, and spitting on decades of work by the earliest meteorologists in Australia. And they want us to think they care?
Australia now has nearly 10GW of wind power installed on the National Electricity Grid, but look at the monthly minimums — the guaranteed power we can rely on. The good news is that it’s increased by 10% over this time last year. The bad news is that it was only 216MW.
From the 10,000MW of windpower we paid to install, at one point in the last month only 2% was working, and that’s not unusual.
The true dismal story of wind power is that we need a near total second network of generators just sitting around waiting as back up. Since the back up is reliable, we could use them instead. As a bonus, backup power won’t kill birds, bats and hypnotize crabs and it won’t destroy sleep for farmers and spotted quolls, and it doesn’t create a national security risk either. Handy, eh?
Original graph: WattClarity | Click to enlarge.
The monthly average generation is about 30% of capacity. But the world doesn’t run on average electricity.
Nuclear’s suddenly the answer to “Net Zero” — Japan wants to triple its nuclear power by 2030
It’s the third largest economy in the world, and a large but quiet vacuum of global fossil fuels. Right now it’s the second largest importer of gas in the world after China, and the third largest importer of coal (not that Extinction Rebellion seems to care).
Prior to the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power generation accounted for almost 30% of Japan’s energy mix.
Though some plants have resumed operation since then, nuclear energy currently accounts for only around 6.2% of Japan’s energy mix. To make up for the nuclear shortfall, Japan stepped up imports of natural gas; liquified natural gas (LNG) imports jumped 12,621 thousand tonnes between 2010 and 2011.
PM Kishida’s administration …aims to leverage Japan’s nuclear infrastructure to help achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, hoping to have nuclear energy take up between 20-22% of the energy mix by 2030.
The Economist in 2020 lamented that the energy transition was not transitioning
Half of those renewables in the graph are from hydropower:
The Japanese government tried to help renewables, but nuclear power was replaced with coal and gas:
IN THE WAKE of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, enthusiasm for renewable energy in Japan swelled. Kan Naoto, the prime minister at the time, declared that the country would draw up a new energy strategy “from scratch” and “elevate” renewables. One of his government’s last acts before losing power was to pass a law to stimulate renewable energy. Dozens of small firms sprang up. Fukushima prefecture itself pledged to get all its power from renewable sources by 2040.
The hoped-for transformation, however, has been slow. Renewable generation has grown from 10% of the power supply in 2010 to 17% in 2018, almost half of which comes from old hydropower schemes. Most nuclear plants, which provided more than a quarter of the country’s power before the disaster, have been shut down, at least for the time being. But for the most part they have been replaced not by wind turbines and solar panels but by power stations that burn coal and natural gas.
They’re all returning to nuclear power – Germany, France and the UK. When will Australia consider it?
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AEF Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture – 28 April 
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