Recent Posts
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Friday
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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Wednesday
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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Saturday
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Friday
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Thursday
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Wednesday
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
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Saturday
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China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
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Friday
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The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
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Thursday
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To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
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Wednesday
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On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
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Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
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Friday
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Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
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Thursday
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Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
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Wednesday
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The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Conservatives are tearing themselves apart over “The Paris Agreement”
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Saturday
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Facebook “Crap Home Battery Installs Australia”. It seems the inverter fell off the wall, but luckily missed the gas bottles.
By Jo Nova
It’s like the “Pink Batts” debacle but this time with potentially explosive electrochemical gear
The costs have blown out in the subsidized home battery scheme– and now so have the safety standards.
Costs of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program were supposed to be $2.3 billion but when homeowners realized they got huge subsidies for installing bigger batteries than they needed, they … installed bigger batteries than they needed. Thus and verily the Cheaper Home Batteries Program blew out to $7.2 billion. And since most of the lucky homeowners won’t be sharing their battery with the voracious energy cartels, their batteries will sit at home barely used.
The government only woke up to their own inept scheme after 160,000 home units had been installed. Then they suddenly had to slap an end point on the scheme in order to stem the bleeding. So just as night follows day — that created a rush to install as many batteries as possible before the deadline, eventually reaching 250,000. Ponder that a 25kWh battery (the average size in Australia) […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a High-Voltage Wealth Transfer Disguised as Climate Policy
The big new “cheaper battery scheme” was so badly designed it accidentally burned through $2.3 billion in just 6 months. We could have built two new gas plants… instead we blessed a few wealthy homes with batteries bigger than they can use, which will probably sit around doing nothing most of the time. The scheme is so bad, the government has already promised to add another $5b to the pyre.
And since most homeowners are not opting to share their battery in a virtual power plant with the voracious retailers, this extra battery power will probably just sit there unused in homes around the country, hopefully not catching fire too often. It’s just another Soviet-style failure of communist midwits.
The government keeps bragging about the rampant success of the program but it is a globalist lemon from end to end. The Cheaper Battery Scheme was supposed to save homeowners $4,000 on a new 10kWh home battery, but the rebate was offered “per kilowatt hour” not per battery. (Does Chris Bowen does even know what a kilowatt hour is?).
The design meant solar installers had every incentive to […]
Energyco
By Jo Nova
It’s the worst kind of surprise for the Renewable fantasy
The billion-dollar “shock absorber” for NSW’s renewables grid has effectively short-circuited before it even ramped up to full power.*
One of the world’s most powerful battery storage projects has suffered a crippling failure just a couple of months before it was supposed to be ready for full operation. The problem with one, and possibly two of its three transformers is so bad, it’s the kind of glitch that affects the whole national transition. This battery was supposed to provide stability for the grid as coal power stations were forced out by the renewable subsidies. But suddenly generators all over NSW are recalculating maintenance schedules and closure dates.
The company is saying it will be six months to a year-long delay, but, given the waiting times for transformers in the US have blown out to an astounding 120 weeks, and up to 210 weeks or 2 to 4 years, it seems wildly optimistic to hope this can be back in action next year. Currently the AEMO officially describes this fault as continuing until May 3rd, 2026.
This highlights the fragility of the whole transition which […]
Image by AngMoKio
By Jo Nova
The Daily Telegraph has discovered a major Net Zero project has signed up several Chinese companies. The huge battery and solar scheme in Bundey South Australia has been given the red carpet treatment by the Albanese government. It will be fast tracked as a priority by the government and cash will rain down from the “Capital Investment Scheme (CIS)” .
The group running the project is Ganaspi Energy. Supposedly it is based in Sydney, except that when the Daily Telegraph visited the office there, it was empty. No one was responding to emails or text messages, and the phone number didn’t connect. If this company was a ghost corporation, or a front for Chinese interests, they don’t seem to be trying hard to disguise it?
Ganaspi Energy has brought in several Chinese firms, and held a party with some them in Suzhou to celebrate. Supposedly, the Bundey BESS and Solar project will be the largest battery storage power station in the Southern Hemisphere.
Taxpayers are underwriting the project for the first 15 years.
Revealed: Net Zero project’s major links to Chinese business
By James Willis, The Daily Telegraph
National security […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
There goes that Big Back-Up Battery plan It looks like consumers won’t save the Australian grid by spending thousands to buy the batteries the government can’t afford.
Unfortunately, the government has screwed it up again. They’re (we’re) subsiding solar panels and home batteries, and hoping customers will pay thousands to put a battery in their garage so that the grid managers can use it at dinner time to stop wild price spikes and blackouts.
Dean Spaccavento is the co-founder and CEO of Reposit Power –– which sells a controller that connects batteries to solar panels. He says almost no homeowners are signing up for the Virtual Power Plans (VPP) where they share their battery to help balance the grid. People don’t trust the agencies, and even if they did, most of the batteries on the market couldn’t be used in a VPP anyway. They’re not fit for purpose. The government, he said, assumed you could just plug in a battery, but it isn’t like that. “The government’s definition of what qualifies as “VPP ready” is meaningless.” he says, so all the manufacturers can say their battery is “VPP ready” when they’re not.
[…]
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 […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
Who wants to buy a battery to help save the Energy Minister?
Spread the word, the new desperate plan to rescue the Transition Fantasy is to trick Australians into buying home batteries (and EVs) because the wind and solar factories can’t afford to pay for their own backup. But read about the experience of poor Mr Anderson. He accepted a $1,000 discount off the price of his battery, and in return agreed to allow AGL to draw off emergency power from his battery to “stabilize the grid in times of drama”. But he didn’t realize that the Australian electricity market did drama all the time. It’s like The Hunger Games at 6pm and he’d just volunteered as tribute.
It seemed like a good idea to sign up to be part of a virtual power plant (VPP). It was fine for the first year, he says, but then AGL started draining his battery at dinnertime, leaving him buying electricity when it was the highest price. Worse, they also changed his payment plan — and he got suckered with the “Demand Tariff” surprise — the diabolical plan which takes someone’s single greatest half hour consumption […]
Image by Maria Godfrida from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Nice grid you have there, shame if someone suddenly… switched it off
Two insiders at the US Dept of Energy say they have found covert devices inside solar panel inverters and batteries that would allow them to communicate with China. Even though firewalls have been put in place, these backdoor devices could operate around them.
Last August a Dutch white hat hacker got into 4 million panels in 150 countries in an effort to warn the West that major infrastructure was vulnerable. A month later an Australian cyber expert warned that a foreign hacker could turn our home batteries into “pager-bombs” too. If a hostile power turned off the overcharge protection on a sunny day, millions of solar panels would be pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front. How exactly would our firemen cope if 1 in 100 homes caught fire at the same time, and then we had a blackout? Anyone?
Individual solar panel inverters are generally too small to trigger national security […]
By Jo Nova
In a brave election promise, the Australian Labor Party want poor people to help pay for batteries for rich Australians.
The discount battery deals will only be suitable for people wealthy enough to own a home with solar panels, and who happen to have ten thousand dollars sitting around that they don’t want to use or expect any return on for nearly a decade. There can’t be too many of those.
The true cost of home batteries is about $13,000, so the $4,000 discount still leaves a big bill. And the savings for electricity bills are estimated to be around $1,100 per household each year. So no one comes out ahead for nine or ten years, and that’s assuming their battery is still useful at age ten or eleven, and their house hasn’t caught fire.
This policy isn’t a winner for the rich or the poor. Because batteries are essentially uneconomic, the policy screws the whole country. The only beneficiaries are the solar and battery installers and Chinese industrialists. Them, and the politicians who got us into this mess. To avoid admitting they were wrong, they’d probably like to trick Australians into buying the batteries that […]
By Jo Nova
Thanks to Paul Homewood at NotAlotofPeopleKnowThat for finding this gem of a video.
Commiserations to friends in the UK, where Ed Miliband, or worse, his new National Electricity System Operator (NESO) think that flywheels will save money because the UK won’t need to maintain back up power stations and import so much electricity.
Ed Miliband is the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is a bit like being the Minister for War and Peace at the same time, or perhaps more like Health and Ebola. His big new plan is to set up a big new bureaucracy (NESO) and their big idea is to stop blackouts by installing giant flywheels around the country.
Flywheels are good at smoothing out the frequency glitches, but the second largest flywheel operation in the world would only power the UK for a fraction of a second. It’s going to take a lot of flywheels, or as David Evans dryly remarked, if they can speed up the flywheels it might work, but to put enough energy in, they may need to get close to the speed of light.
Ed Miliband reveals plan to prevent net zero blackouts
by […]
Battery bombs in the suburbs?
By Jo Nova
You think exploding pagers was a wicked trick….
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
At that point, millions of solar panels are pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front.
Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he […]
By Jo Nova
For some reason wind and solar power will not be powering a new EV battery factory in Kansas. Instead the sudden extra demand for electricity will be met by keeping an old coal-fired plant running.
Environmentalists are not happy. Wait ’til they realize no one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide at all.
EV Battery Factory Will Require So Much Energy It Needs A Coal Plant To Power It
Kevon Killough, Cowboy State Daily
A $4 billion Panasonic electric vehicle battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, will help satisfy the Biden administration’s efforts to get everyone into an EV. It also will help extend the life of a coal-fired power plant.
The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.
Naturally, to make something utterly pointless takes a lot of taxpayer money and Panasonic will receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which will, quite possibly, increase emissions and create inflation too.
As Mark Mills said it takes 250 tons of material to make […]
By Jo Nova
Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.
The P-Volt made by Tecnam
Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights
Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph
A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.
Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.
The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.
“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.
What do we […]
By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
By Jo Nova The amount of storage America needs for a grid run on erratic wind and solar power is so galactically vast the numbers don’t matter. Because every which way they are calculated, every estimate, the highest one, the lowest one, it doesn’t make any difference. They are all unaffordable.
And they’re not just unaffordable in the sense that it hurts. They’re unaffordable in the sense that there is no economy left.
Basically America would need 12,500 times as many batteries as it has now. At current prices this would cost about $175 trillion dollars, which is eight times the entire GDP of the United States.
Some researchers predict costs will fall, but even at fantasy low ball estimates that are one tenth of current prices, the cost of those batteries is still nearly $20 trillion.
Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
David Wojick, CFACT
We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it […]
By Jo Nova
The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero
The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.
The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)
Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.
How fast those balance sheets change…
Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.
‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]
More deadly than man-made climate change
Six people have died in New York this year so far due to house fires started by e-bikes. I had no idea.
Fires from exploding e-bike batteries multiply in NYC — sometimes fatally
Matthew Schuerman, NPR
NEW YORK — Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City.
These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,” said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. “We’ve seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they’re actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments.”
As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year.
In early August, a 27-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, identified as Rafael Elias Lopez-Centeno, died after his lithium ion battery caught fire […]
by Jo Nova
Just another day saving the Earth from pollution
Highways were shut for 12 hours and people had to seal themselves in their homes for hours.
Green Inferno: Tesla Battery Catches Fire in California Causing Shelter-In-Place
A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California. A shelter-in-place advisory was in place for 12 hours due to fears of toxic smoke from the fire caused by Elon Musk’s battery system, with county officials announcing that even though the fire was “fully controlled” by 7:00 p.m. PT, “smoke may still occur in the area for several days.”
Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, North County Fire Protection District, and Pacific Gas & Electric had all issued a shelter-in-place advisory for nearby areas, including an interactive map showing which areas are affected and closing roads for over 12 hours.
Local residents were told to shut all windows and turn off ventilation systems due to the hazardous waste material that may have entered the atmosphere due to the Tesla Megapack fire.
Also this week, but so much worse:
Electric scooter battery fire kills 8-year-old in US
New York: Amid […]
Australia has added more unreliable wind and solar than anywhere on Earth but when an energy crisis strikes, and those prices are still on fire, the solution is more of the same.
Senator Matt Canavan, The Australian
As rest of the world wakes up on coal, we’re closing it down
Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.”
The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.
[The energy regulator’s] recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.
How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.
This winter’s energy shortfalls came just after the Liddell coal-fired […]
Someone needs to tell the Australian Energy Minister the bad news about batteries
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says we just need more renewables and more storage:
Bowen says we can store water, we should be able to store power
“You can say the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Well, the rain doesn’t always fall either but we managed to store the water,” Bowen said.
Chris Bowen isn’t having any of Uhlmann’s ‘wind doesn’t always blow’ rhetoric.
“the rain doesn’t always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment”#auspol pic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy
— Squizz (@SquizzSTK) June 16, 2022
Is this Chris Bowen’s Zuma-numbers moment with electricity?
He doesn’t seem to realize that electrons won’t politely sit in a shoe box waiting for the day they run your toaster. When South Australia got the worlds biggest battery in 2017 everyone got excited but few realized it would only power the state for two whole minutes before it ran out. South Australia is just 6% of the total National Energy Market, but if we were trying […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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