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By Jo Nova
The State of Climate Action for 2025 is out, looking like a kindergarten report with red and orange stickers for all the areas the world is failing in, which is everything. Show this report to any MPs who tell you Australia is in danger of being left behind.
Ten years after the Paris Agreement even The Guardian notices that despite the bonanza in new wind and solar power, coal use hit a record high last year.
It’s a bizarre report, surely a product of an industry oozing too much spare cash. It has finger-wagging lectures, chumpy predictions, and cutsie stamps. But who is supposed to be impressed by this (apart from The Guardian) — political staffers in the third world? No one is going to look at forty graphs of failure and think “we have to double our efforts”.
Progress is marked with school teacher lingo like “Well off Track” or “U Turn needed”. As if the world is waiting to hear, and can just, ‘bing’, make planes fly on pumpkin seeds.
The graph of zero-carbon sources in electricity generation rather sums it all up — the outstanding hell-for-leather uptake of renewables is almost a flat line, […]
By Jo Nova
Another day — another setback for the Mega Green Hydrogen Dream
The The Australian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) started at 6GW, grew to 11GW and then to 26GW as the mania spread. Such was the vision — it would produce five times the power of the whole Western Australian grid system. It would be the star of “exported renewable energy”.
Once pitched as the largest renewable project in the world — the fantasy is that 1,753 wind turbines, and nearly 11,000 megawatts of solar power will fill 6,500 square kilometers of the Pilbara in Northwest Western Australia.
The cable plan of 2018 to Jakarta and Singapore
Originally, the plan was to build a giant DC undersea cable to Jakarta or Singapore, but when that didn’t work they decided it would churn out 1.6 million tonnes of green hydrogen and 9 million tonnes of ammonia every year for export to Asia. The project was so ambitious they were going to have to build a whole new small town on the coast, with it’s own desalination plant — because rainfall is so low. “We need to have lakes” he said. Sure.
Funny how the same thing […]
By Jo Nova
Nishant Gupta set up a green energy hedge fund last year managing about $100m in assets, but he probably wishes he hadn’t.
His words are about as blunt as any hedge fund owner could possibly get.
Hedge Fund Built on Energy Bets Says ‘Clean Is Dead for Now’
Bloomberg
“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.
Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.
Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.
So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.
S&P Global […]
By Jo Nova
The irony! The only generator that can make affordable hydrogen is brown coal
The Great Green Hydrogen dream was killed by the dual impossibility paradox, it has no customers prepared to pay the Gucci level rates, and it can’t be made cheaper without using brown coal to which would mean it isn’t “green”.
The irony is practically radioactive — analysts admit Green Hydrogen is only economic if a company can get electricity at $30 to $40 per megawatt hour, which Australia had for decades, but blew away by adding “renewables”. Like every other nation on Earth, the more unreliable wind and solar we added, the more expensive our electricity got. These days the only generator that still make electricity at that price now is old brown coal.
For years Australian average wholesale electricity prices were $30/MWh
Sure, for five minute bids, and with generous subsidies stolen from taxpayers, wind and solar can pretend to be cheaper, but it turns out that the hydrogen factories, like every other factory, aren’t efficient if they stop and start every time a cloud rolls over, or […]
Image by Manuel Angel Egea
By Jo Nova
Only 18 months ago the Australian government gave $14 million dollars to Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest to figure out if his team could build a 500MW electrolyser to make hydrogen gas on an island near Brisbane. It was going to be a glorious Australian green-techno future, the largest hydrogen plant in the world, but it’s missed three deadlines in the last three months to greenlight the project. Instead the Australian company is going overseas.
As Nick Cater points out this part of the made-in-Australia renewable superpower is going to be made-in-Arizona because they still have cheap electricity — a miraculous 7.5c a kilowatt hour!
Australia’s manufacturing decline is a story of broken promises and failed industry welfare programs
Nick Cater, The Australian
Bowen described the project’s success as “critical” to Australia’s ambition to be a green energy superpower.
It turns out abundant sun was not such a competitive advantage in the manufacture of green hydrogen. Low taxes, fiscally responsible government and cheap and reliable carbon-free energy are far more appealing drawcards for investors.
The future is already being built in Buckeye, […]
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 […]
A week ago the Australian Government released their Technology Investment Roadmap Discussion Paper. Presumably they want a map because they’re lost. They’d like submissions by June 21.
David Archibald lets rip on why hydrogen fuel is not going to save us, but coal, gas, and nukes will. He has wondered for years why Australia is so concerned with talking about a thirty year energy plan when we don’t even have a 90 day supply.
Australia’s Energy Plan
Guest Post by David Archibald
Image: Gus Pasquerella
Global warming is the new state religion and Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is its high priest…
The fad of the moment is hydrogen. To recap, when global warming started out the villains among us realised that the easiest way to make money was to turn Australia from being a low-cost power producer to a high cost one and take a slice of the action on the way through. So the likes of AGL and Macquarie Bank concocted solar farm and wind farm schemes and sold them on to people wanting a high, government-enforced rate of return. They then used their own money to generate a yet higher return on equity by taking […]
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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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