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If the whole renewables fantasy was crumbling, it would look something like thisDespite 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 uncompetitive, investors are leaving to spend their money in the US and the middle east instead. Indeed, Chevron had a plan to double their Australian gas production but have abandoned that now. Australia used to be the world’s largest LNG exporter but Qatar and the US outpaced us. In a similar theme, Ampol just surprised the market by spending $1 billion dollars to double the number of petrol stations it owns, making it the largest retailer in the country. The CEO Matt Halliday said the unthinkable: “The transition [to EVs] will take decades, and combustion engines are going to still make up a large chunk of the national car fleet beyond 2050.” It was a very unfashionable and backward thing to say, but shares leapt 8% on the news yesterday. Australia’s biggest energy retailer hits go slow button on wind and solar, mulling options on EraringGiles Parkinson, Reneweconomy Origin Energy, Australia’s biggest energy retailer, appears to have hit the go-slow button on the rollout of new renewable energy projects, and is still mulling options on the already extended Eraring coal generator, the country’s biggest, which is officially due to close in 2027. Curiously, in its annual report, the company says: “With the Eraring Power Station’s closure planned for August 2027, failure to deliver our major renewable generation projects may affect Origin’s future supply capacity, financial prospects and reputation.” Yet it has made no commitment to build those projects in that timeframe. Think of the irony of putting the nations biggest battery next to the nations biggest coal plant, as if it needed back up: But this is made up entirely of big batteries, including the giant 700 MW, 2,800 MWh Eraring battery being next to the coal generator… It [the annual report] includes no wind or solar projects. The technologies did not even rate a mention in the results presentation, apart from the giant 1.45 gigawatt (GW) Yanco Delta wind project in the south-west of NSW, which has gained grid access rights but is still to complete environmental approvals. Chevron’s CEO says “Oil is not evil”: Chevron boss Mike Wirth leads the fossil fuel fightbackBy Perry Williams, The Australian Mike Wirth has a message for the fossil fuel haters: oil is not evil. The boss of Chevron, one of the world’s largest producers, has a front-row seat to the energy revival that’s gathered pace under the Trump administration. After a 43-year career in the oil and gas industry, he sees part of his role as helping deliver some home truths on the reality of the energy transition. “Some criticise fuels as somehow being evil or immoral or any number of different characterisations that you can find out there … to attack our industry,” Mr Wirth tells The Australian. “When, in fact, people in the world have the highest standard of living in human history today because they are not toiling all day long to feed themselves and feed their families and create heat when it’s cold or try to stay cool when it’s warm. I strongly disagree with characterisations that our products are only bad.” Finally, the international oil giant delivers the hard truths, without pandering. Clearly the power in the room has shifted, and with Trump in the US, doors are opening, and Australia is not so relevant: Chevron delivers gas warning to Labor with Australian investment souring
Chevron’s Texas-based chief executive, Mike Wirth, delivered the blunt message to Mr Marles on Friday afternoon in Geelong at a private meeting between the pair, saying he was concerned Australia was now uncompetitive with gas rivals such as the US and Middle East. Mr Wirth revealed Chevron had at one point considered doubling its LNG footprint in WA to 10 processing trains from the current five units that exported gas from its Gorgon and Wheatstone plants. However, that expansion had now been shelved. Australia’s $100bn LNG industry made it the world’s largest exporter for the past decade… Meanwhile Ampol bets big on Australians driving petrol cars for years to come. Ampol makes $1bn bet on the future of combustion engines over EVsBut, [Ampol’s CEO, Matt Halliday] is also a realist. The transition will take decades, and combustion engines are going to still make up a large chunk of the national car fleet beyond 2050. Despite also using its own debt to fund the deal, Ampol investors have firmly backed the expansion, sending shares nearly 8 per cent higher on Friday.
“I find the President to be curious. He asks questions. He asks good questions. He likes to talk to people in business. Under the prior administration, the door was not open. I only met President Biden once, and it was for a photo op,” Mr Wirth says. “…he’s a big believer in American energy, and he believes that American energy strength can underpin economic strength and national security.” With the American energy juggernaut taking off, Australia will be dragged by its green chains… Photo: LNG Carrier http://photozou.jp/photo/show/254715/24141912.| Photo Ampol: Marcnutt1996 | Photo: Trump;: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America
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 RoadOne of the ten cities they studied was Melbourne and there is a special mention for Boundary Road in Laverton North where daytime temperatures rose from 22.49 °C in 2001 to 30.82 ° in 2021. So that’s 8 degrees of warming in 20 years, surely the fastest rate of warming in a million years. Bring out your dead? This 8 degree local warming trend compares to a general city-wide background warming effect over the twenty years of about 0.5°C. Contrast that apocalypse with the western Quandong region, which is primarily agricultural. There man-made climate change caused a cooling trend of −0.12 °C/year during the day.
Melbourne, Australia: The top graphs are the day time land surface temperatures in 2001 compared to 2021. The bottom two graphs are the night time temperatures. Figure 12. LST means Land Surface Temperature. Does anyone really care about the workers in the urban deserts?The next time a smug Blob Academic panics about how 1.5 degrees of global warming will imperil pregnant women, babies, and cats and dogs, lets ask them if they know of the deadly microclimate threat. If a small rise in temperature is that serious, all the mascots, I mean victims, face a far bigger threat from high density development and unrestrained urban population growth than from coal and gas power plants a hundred miles away. When the experts tell us climate change causes school students marks to fall, or ruins the sleep of senior citizens, we can ask them why they think windmills and solar will cool folks better (or cheaper) than tree canopies? I mean, do they care or don’t they? And instead of installing 4 million solar panels on rooftops in the hope of shifting ocean currents to cool the suburbs, we could have planted trees instead. And given that we chop down trees that shade the panels, the big question is whether the local heating effect of solar panels can ever be compensated for by altering Antarctic jet streams via carbon reduction. These people are witchdoctors. The next time the electricity grid managers plot and scheme to switch off our air conditioners at peak times, we can ask them whether tree planting has a better cost-benefit ratio than demand management. Is it cheaper to grow trees or to turn off smelters and factories at 6pm? I’m sure there’s room for a thousand PhD theses comparing microclimate management as a way to solve “climate change” and I’m also sure most of them will never be done. If anyone really believes an extra degree is dangerous, the fastest, cheapest fix is air-conditioning with cheap electricity. But in the long run, the lifestyle answer is trees, parks, and ponds. Not “green steel,” not jet-stream manipulation, not billion-dollar grid schemes. Just shade, water, and leaves — the original solar harvesting technology.
The ten cities they compared were spread across the world: Cairo (Africa), Chongqing (Asia), Delhi (Asia), Istanbul (Europe/Asia), Melbourne (Oceania), Mexico City (North America), Moscow (Europe), Nuuk (North America), São Paulo (South America), and Tokyo (Asia). Details from the paper below:Keep reading → August 15th, 2025 | Tags: Micro-siting (thermometers), UHI, Victoria | Category: Australia, Global Warming, Meteorology, Sites |  Print This Post | |
Nobody wants to say ChinaA 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 the hellfire price spikes at 6pm, the government is subsidizing industrial batteries in homes, wired to the grid, often working in shared “virtual power plants”. Meaning that homes will have large boxes of chemical energy, controlled remotely, and nearly every gadget is made in China. No one likes to say it, but China is the cybersecurity elephant in the renewable energy roomBy Rachel Williamson, Reneweconomy A combination of state- and regulator-mandated access points with woefully insecure small devices are building an open door for cyber attackers, says Darren Gladman, regulator manager for major equipment supplier SMA Australia. “My god, small scale. We’ve just introduced an emergency backstop mechanism to turn everything off. If you wanted to make a hacker’s life easy, how could you have made it any easier?” he said during the panel session at ACES. “The battery rebate, it’s great. However, it’s led to a lot of battery suppliers, a flood of batteries coming in. Some of these companies, when you look at their structure, they might be two or three people in Australia. They’re not thinking about cybersecurity. They’re trying to survive in a really competitive, cutthroat industry. “And then you’ve got on top of the backstop mechanism. You’ve got virtual power plants. You’ve got this space that lends itself to manipulation so easily, an industry that’s so competitive and so under-resourced that this is seen as a complete luxury, until you’re told that it’s not, and no one’s been told that it’s not.” The federal battery rebate requires that all home batteries bought with the subsidy be VPP-enabled, and in Western Australia they must be connected to one. Apparently the rush of insecure gadgets into Australian homes is so bad, that it was referred to as “Digital Asbestos” by David Owen, a Deloitte partner. He wonders who will pay for the replacement of all the inverters if we realize, too late, that they pose an unacceptable risk?
In the end, the nation that lied about a pandemic, then launched hostile trade wars when we asked for answers, now potentially has access to many of our homes. It may also have control over explosive batteries and potentially could bring down our grid… Maybe we should have thought of that ten years ago?
Related: What if a foreign hacker could turn home batteries into “pager-bombs” but 7,500 times bigger? Imagery ©2025 Google Map data August 14th, 2025 | Tags: China, Cybersecurity, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |
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. Obviously, if the modeling was bad AND convincing, they would have released it all months ago. From the Australian Financial Review: we have “anonymous” sources Sources familiar with the modelling, who asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive government information, described some of the scenarios outlined in the report – known as the National Climate Risk Assessment – as “dire”, “diabolical” and “extremely confronting”. The report’s modelling has been largely complete since late 2024 and stakeholder groups have been repeatedly notified about its imminent publication.
What Stakeholders have been notified? It seems everyone who expects to score money from this has been told about it, and everyone who has to pay for it doesn’t count. In this case “stakeholders” means people in on the grift. Not people who have a “stake” in the outcome. Why “hide” the dire report?Wait for it… the excuse for holding back a science report about a coming catastrophe is that there is a big budgetary shock coming which will be “severe”. Presumably they are afraid people will have heart attacks and they haven’t got enough epipens and defibrillators or something: A major reason for the hesitation to release the assessment is related to the budgetary implications of the associated adaptation measures required by the government, which are expected to be severe, the sources said.
Is anyone buying this? “We’re hiding news of the tidal wave to protect you from the budgetary shock”? In a nation of adults, the Investor Group on Climate Change has been forewarned, but not the farmers, landowners, firefighters and taxpayers. So the industry reps for 100 Superannuation Funds (the pension funds) have been forewarned, but not the fourteen million employees who are forced to put their money into these funds, and whom, supposedly the funds, and the government are supposed to serve. Clearly the government are winding us up to expect very tough carbon emissions targets. Will the opposition get its act together before Anthony Albanese sells out the nation in a vainglorious race to “win” the right to host a pointless UN conference of private jet flying lecturing celebrities?
August 13th, 2025 | Tags: Hyperbole, Media bias, PR War | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  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 2025By 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. “In the first half of 2025, Australia saw $556 million of investment in utility-scale solar, falling sharply from $1.6 billion in the same period in 2024,” the report says. No wind projects at all reached financial close over the period. This is a far cry from the roughly $US59 billion ($A92 billion) BloombergNEF has said that Australia needs to invest some (sic) every year between now and 2030 to meet its economy wide net zero target – currently set for 2050. At Bloomberg, they know this is serious: “the slowdown in wind farm development has come despite government support for wind being at an all-time high” they say wistfully. A month ago they surveyed investors who managed as much as $38b in renewable “assets” so the Bloomberg team already knew from investors that the transmission lines are delayed, the communities hate the projects, and the costs have reached escape velocity. Australia’s transition is “sluggish” and “slow” and new projects are “stranded”: Renewables Investors Say Australia’s Grid Delays Hamper OutlaysBy Keira Wright, Bloomberg Australia’s rapid energy transition to replace aging coal-fired plants is seen as a global test case, but its sluggish build out of transmission infrastructure has left new solar and wind projects stranded, and helped make its power market one of the most volatile in the world. Transmission delays and slow planning processes are the biggest barriers to deploying capital, closely followed by costly and slow grid connections, according to the survey of members of the Clean Energy Investor Group To be fair, part of the slowdown this year was also the uncertainty over the recent Australian election, not that the opposition opposed NetZero, or even mentioned it much. But it’s a dire statement anyway — if an industry depends on the outcome of an election in a life-and-death kind of way, it only proves they are not and never were competitive, needed, or popular products. To that end, the Labor government has tried to make up for that by dropping money from helicopters with a boost to the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS)” which will “support” another 3GW of unreliable generation. But even Ross Garnaut, perpetual fan of green energy, says this is not enough, and he is long past mincing his words: “The renewable energy transition is sick,” he said. “We are, for the time being, on a path to comprehensive failure.” If the quote above from Sophie Vorrath is accurate, then according to Bloomberg, Australia needs to spend $92 billion every year for the next five years to meet it’s Net Zero Target. (Just $460 billion!) Where was that price tag in the Australian election when we needed it?
August 12th, 2025 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova The biggest and best studied reef in the world is looking goodDespite 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 more volatile”, and has suffered the tragedy of declining from record highs all the way back to “near long term average trends”, which sounds awful, I mean, “normal”. Like regression to the mean. Though it doesn’t look very “average” in the long term graph that AIMS don’t want you to see. The Blob Media promptly took the one-sided, politically-convenient AIMS press release, investigated no claims, asked no hard questions and churned out the worst possible interpretation of a good result. Which is apparently exactly what AIMS expected, because they didn’t complain. The ABC, with a billion dollar budget, could have done the graph Peter Ridd did. They could have asked AIMS for it. Heck, they could have just phoned Peter, he would have given it to them, and with a smile. Instead they pressed the “Climate Alarm: Give us Your Money” button.
The ABC | The BBC | The Guardian It’s clear that The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) is not even trying to give Australians the most meaningful information they can on the reef. When the media exaggerates the crisis, the experts are happy. AIMS don’t ring up the journalists and correct them. They don’t explain the bigger perspective. AIMS researchers surely know, but won’t mention things like the extraordinary genetic adaptability of reefs: corals already have the genes to survive another 250 years of climate change. They can use epigenetic tricks to adapt to warmer and “more acidic” water and that the Great Barrier Reef has 112 protected tough spots that survive and replenish after the bleaching. Corals got bleached way back in 1862, before the first coal plant, and long before the Ford Model T. Most likely corals have been bleached on and off for millions of years, it’s just that there were not many scuba divers around to take a photo or collect an ARC grant in 2 million BC. After millions of years of asteroids, volcanoes, wild temperature changes and dramatic shifts in atmospheric gases, (plus sea level swings of 125m) it would be a shock if corals did not have a full toolkit to cope with a bit of climate change. REFERENCES The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) annual reef survey Peter Ridd, Reef Rebels August 8th, 2025 | Tags: Great Barrier Reef, Ridd (Peter) | Category: Australia, Global Warming, Marine Life, Oceans | Print This Post | |  Image: Rolls Royce By Jo Nova The Space Race is backAustralia 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 MoonSébastian SEIBT , France 24 NASA’s interim chief Sean Duffy has made deploying a nuclear reactor on the Moon his top priority, framing the effort as a “second space race”. Solar power isn’t much use on the moon where each night lasts two weeks. The back-up battery payload would be enormous (and who wants to be in a moon colony when a big battery catches fire?) Nuclear power is the only thing that makes sense. “We need a lot of energy for future missions to the Moon,” said Simon Middleburgh of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales. “To establish permanent Moon bases, we would need to be generating our own water and oxygen.” Nuclear power, by contrast, offers an advantage in energy density. “It’s very dense, which means that a reactor the size of a small car could theoretically power a lunar base for around six years without refuelling,” Middleburgh said. Transporting a scaled-down reactor is not the same as launching a nuclear power plant into orbit, but it is still likely to be an expensive operation. For one, it’s unclear how many microreactors will be needed. While a single unit might suffice, backup reactors would be essential in case of failure. Experts told FRANCE 24 said it was impossible to imagine a lunar base without an alternative power source if the lights were to go out. All in all, launching and installing the reactors could cost several billion dollars, factoring in both manufacturing and delivery. Meanwhile in Australia our “most advanced” science bureau, the CSIRO, says nuclear power will take years to build and cost too much to use in Australia even though we have the largest uranium reserves in the world. Apparently, NASA can put a reactor on the moon, but CSIRO says small modular reactors are “too immature” for us. While the CSIRO waits for the rest of the world to master nuclear power and sell it back to us, it keeps us firmly locked in an era of windmills. Australia has more space for launchpads close to the equator than any first-world nation. That makes us ideal as a launch pad for satellites. It’s an industry we could have had. Thankfully, given the spectacular government failure, one small company in Australia is trying to catch us up. The first rocket launch in fifty years in Australia was a week ago. It only lasted 14 seconds, but Gilmour Space are ambitious and serious. For some reason the ABC didn’t mention this on the nightly news, preferring to repeat the same stories on foreign wars and e-scooter accidents it ran the day before instead. Presumably they didn’t want to show a small private company being innovative and scientific because it makes the billion dollar Blob agencies look bad. And there’s always the horrible risk that if they turn a bunch of engineers into stars, they might say things like Elon Musk. David Maddison comments about how Australia has been missing opportunities for 50 years: Of course, all Australian efforts to get into space are reminiscent of when Australia first launched its own satellite in 1967 on a surplus US Army Redstone first stage which the US donated after they had done testing in Australia. The Americans were prepared to donate more of the rockets as they didn’t want to return them to America but the Minister for Education and Science and also later PM Gorton at the time, could see no future in Australia being involved in space and rejected a proposal for a low cost space program along the lines of WRESAT. The cluelessness was staggering. Australia’s fledgling space program more or less languished after that. Australia was the third country to design and launch a satellite from its own soil and one of only six other countries to have launched a satellite at the time along with USSR (1957), United States (1958), United Kingdom (1962). Canada (1962), Italy (1964) and France (1965). I wrote an article about WRESAT. Yet another lost opportunity by Australia due to second or lower rate politicians and the senior public serpents who tell them what to think. Instead of being the worlds launchpad in the space race, or leaders in nuclear energy, the Labor Government plans to spend $22 billion dollars on a Future Made in Australia that no one wants to buy anymore. PS: Some interesting details in this video about what the Gilmour launch did well, and theories of what might have gone wrong: h/t James Murphy on Gilmour Space
August 7th, 2025 | Tags: China, Moon, Nuclear Energy, Space | Category: Astronomy, Global Warming, Nuclear Power, USA | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova Big Battery prices on fire in Australia last quarterThe 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. These spikes were so bad they moved the quarterly average costsThe average daily price for June 26th was 24 long hours at $1,408/MWh. It was the fourth highest price day in NEM history. Quarter two used to be the sleepy shoulder season for grid managers, now it’s a white-knuckle ride. Below are the winning bids on the national market graphed by their fuel type. In Quarter 2 last year when batteries won bids the whole market earned, on average $245/MWh. But in Quarter 2 this year, batteries won a higher percentage of the time (because we ran out of cheaper options), and the average winning bid was $478/MWh.
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Ampol’s stunning $1.1bn move to almost double the footprint of its petrol stations is not only about expansion. It’s a calculated bet on the future of internal combustion engines versus electric vehicles. The retailer and refiner has snapped up a portfolio of around 500 EG-branded petrol stations, consolidating its position as the country’s biggest fuel retailer.