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By Jo Nova
Australia is supposed to be going hell for leather to install renewables in order to pretend it has a chance of making Labor’s 82% reduction in emissions target by 2030. Instead investors are running away:
Investors desert Australia’s renewable rollout at ‘critical juncture’
Mike Foley and Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
Investment in renewable projects collapsed by 50 per cent over the past year, wiping out $4 billion in spending on the rollout, compromising the Albanese government’s clean energy targets and spurring industry warnings that the delays could raise electricity bills.
It’s always a critical juncture for renewables isn’t it? It’s like that for things that serve no useful purpose and levitate on subsidies. Investors must bet on which way the political wind will blow, and last year, after the Trump win, renewable energy took a hit.
Financial commitments for new renewable generation projects fell to a 10-year low in 2025 of $4.4 billion, half the value of projects that reached financial close in 2024, according to the Clean Energy Council’s annual report, published on Tuesday.
Investors are fleeing because of all the usual reasons not to invest — there’s […]
By Jo Nova
The ABC and the Guardian think they are onto some hot scandalous leak, but they don’t seem to realize the awful truth they are accidentally revealing.
This is not the story of an evil miner failing to make commitments, it’s the story of their technology fantasy busting. If wind and solar power were cheap, the profit hungry miners would be doing it wouldn’t they?
Instead all their ambitious plans are coming undone.
BHP is the largest mining company in the world, it has shareholder approval to spend millions on wind and solar projects and on the conversion to electric trucks. They also had an enthusiastic management and Net Zero targets, yet somehow the company has decided to drop or delay the wind and solar projects, and the low emissions processing plant too. It’s all been put in the deep freeze, delayed until 2031 before it even starts.
The truth is that the big electric haul trucks are not even close to being ready, and without the batteries to soak up the unreliable power, there was no point in spending a billion dollars on the wind and solar projects either yet.
Everything hinged on the electric […]
By Jo Nova
The Renewable Age of Waste has arrived
How do you make a solar plant perform best at breakfast and dinner time — when humans need it most? Just build three times as much generation as you *need* and throw away most of what it produces in the middle of the day….
Solar panels peak at midday but demand for electricity is highest when everyone goes home and turns on the oven, the dryer and plugs in a Cybertruck. But that’s no problem when you have billions of taxpayer dollars to waste — just burn the money building generators that spend most of the day working at minimal efficiency. Then call that waste “Economic Curtailment” — supposedly because it not economically worth operating the equipment. This happens when wholesale prices have gone negative and solar plants are *choosing* to blow away the megawatts most of the day.
Profligate waste is not just a rare event but our national energy policy.
Looking at the graph below, “Availability” is what they could have produced on the left. But what they actually contributed to the country is shown on the right.
“Keeping up with the curtailment”
By Dan […]
By Jo Nova
The world is backing away from renewables
Wow. What a turnaround. President Macron, a man of The Blob, has come right out and blamed the Spanish Blackouts on renewables. No system, he says, can be so dependent on renewables. Everyone knew this, but few in power would say the words.
Back in 2017 this was the man who had a plan to shut down 14 nuclear reactors in France. Today he plans to push through a law to reverse that. At the same time, the current French renewable energy targets have just been dropped by 20%. Instead of building 150GW of unreliable power, the new target will be about 120GW.
Back in April, Spain finally celebrated 100% renewable energy, and within days suffered a national blackout that caused at least five deaths and left thousands without lighting and the internet, and panic-buying petrol and food. The blackout spread as far as Portugal and Southern France.
Macron blames renewable energy for Spain’s national blackout
— By Kieran Kelly, The Telegraph
French president says European neighbour’s deadly power cuts were caused by shift towards net zero
In response […]
By Jo Nova
Engineers really don’t like phrases like “right skewed degradation with a long fat tail”
But new data suggests that’s exactly what’s is happening in the global solar fleet, and it’s bad news for insurers, installers, and grid planners.
One of the largest and longest studies ever done has looked at 11,000 solar panels around the world and found the same mysterious bump in unexpected failures. Surprisingly it didn’t matter whether the panels were installed in hot, cold or humid environments, the unexpected failures were still there. This suggests the higher failure rate is a systemic problem, not just something that afflicts those installed, say, in humid areas, or in the desert.
UNSW study finds up to 20% of solar panels degrade far faster than expected
By Casey McGuire Electrical Connection
Lead author Yang Tang says this has serious implications for system longevity: “Most solar systems are designed to last around 25 years, based on their warranty period.”
“But at least one in five systems degrade much faster than the typical rate and roughly one in 12 degrade twice as fast. This means some systems could lose about 45% of their […]
By Jo Nova
Green activists who sabotaged the Berlin grid last week may not have convinced anyone that carbon dioxide was a threat, but they have raised awareness that Germany needs more diesel generators, and thermal power plants.
On January 3rd, left wing extremists caused the longest blackout in Berlin since World War II leaving 100,000 people without heating or electricity for up to five days in midwinter. Suddenly local utilities have realized how vulnerable Germany is and are calling for a “national crisis reserve of mobile generators and heating systems.” And they want several hundred megawatts of it.
The association of local utilities (VKU) put out a press release calling for this new emergency reserve to be set up and spread around the country so it can restore power within 24 hours. They also for someone to clear away the bureaucratic red tape that slowed down the helpers, specifically mentioning the odd thing that must have delayed the response this time — like “responsibility, permits, liability, costs, labor rules and insurance.”
They paid homage to the “decentralized energy supply base on renewables” which could have (but didn’t) mitigate the damage. They probably had to write that. […]
By Jo Nova
Chris Wright, the United States Secretary of Energy, marvels that people can spend so much to achieve so little:
“Germany invested half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity of its electricity grid — and today produces 20% less electricity than before that investment, selling it at three times the price.” — 13 min
“The lucky one billion — including everyone in this room — consumes about 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other seven billion want to live like we do, but they consume about three barrels per person per year.”
It’s so nice to hear grownups talking:
Some extracts of his interview:
The tale of a remarkable transition from energy importer to energy exporter:
“Look at what’s happened in the United States. We’ve tripled liquids production in less than two decades. We are by far the world’s largest producer. We’ve more than doubled natural gas production, and it’s still growing fast.
This is phenomenal. Lower costs, lower prices — it has transformed the world. It’s hard to overstate the impact of the U.S. shale revolution and what all of you have […]
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By Jo Nova
It’s all so unfair. They just wanted to save the world and be treated like heroes, but nothing is working out.
The CSIRO has suddenly stepped back from promises of a Green Utopia. Only last week the AEMO (which manage the grid) admitted we’d need to keep coal plants running ’til 2049. Now, in a double shock, the CSIRO says we won’t reach a 100% renewables grid, because eliminating the last 10% of emissions is too expensive.
Don’t miss what a huge backflip this is:
— Suddenly, the CSIRO experts are saying that fossil fuels are an essential part of the Australian grid, in order to reduce costs.
— Suddenly gas is not just a short bridging fuel to get us to the land of pure renewables.
— Just like that, Net Zero Electricity is dead. If the land of the baking sun and roaring forties can’t make it work, who can?
They don’t specify what the last 10% of non-renewable energy is, but without nuclear power, it has to be fossil fuels, doesn’t it? They just can’t bring themselves to say “10% fossil fuels”. Holy green electron!
If only they could have […]
By Jo Nova
Panic-stations in Renewable Utopia
Even the AEMO, our green grid operators, have realized Australia is not ready to shut down the last coal plants by 2037 which was the plan up until five minutes ago.
Things must be desperate. After 20 years of telling us how wind power was absolutely, definitely cheaper — for the first time, an official admitted the blasphemy — “wind is becoming too expensive”.
Now they tell us.
Reality for ALP as coal will be needed until 2049, says AEMO
By Colin Packham and Richard Ferguson, The Australian
Coal will be needed to stabilise the energy grid until 2049 under an extraordinary 12-year extension of the fossil fuel that threatens Labor’s net-zero target, as the green-energy revolution leads to a 100 per cent explosion in power transmission costs.
In a 115-page document that mentions “net zero” just once, the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that wind is increasingly becoming too expensive and there is a risk the nation is overbuilding transmission lines through rural and regional Australia.
So, “Net Zero” has vanished from the pages, and what appears in its place is a 100% explosion in transmission […]
By Jo Nova
The The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has made up some fantasy figures suggesting a teensy weensy price rise is on the way in five years time unless we buy more unreliable generators, add more batteries and install giant high voltage lines. Somehow, miraculously, electricity prices will fall slightly in the next five years while we spend the hundreds of billions of dollars adding all that infrastructure. Sure.
The AEMC report feels like it was created to fill a very specific political advertising campaign. Don’t scare the horses with big price rises, but just scare them enough to justify us spending a kiloton of money on our crony renewable friends and Chinese pals, OK?
Households face sharp electricity price rise without urgent action, key agency warns
By Colin Packham, The Australian
Households could face a 13 per cent jump in electricity prices early next decade unless the rollouts of renewable energy, battery storage and transmission are accelerated, the country’s energy market rule maker has warned.
And if the “decline” in prices doesn’t happen, will the AEMC staff pay Victorians the difference from their own salaries, or is there no cost at all for […]
By Jo Nova
The world really is waking up to the terrible truth about the forced “green transition”. The Wall Street Journal (finally) speaks the blasphemy out loud — countries with a lot of renewables are “hemorrhaging industry”, they face right-wing revolts in elections, they can’t keep up in the AI race, and the system wide costs of renewable electricity are crippling.
The pagan quest to do rain-dances with electrical generators has become an existential threat. If AI is the next revolution, then the lands of green fantasia have already lost the race. There’s a global contest to create the first world dominating AI before anyone else does. This is not an exponential curve we can afford to lose. The first nation to crack adversaries encryption codes, hack their defenses, design the killer bioweapon, or build a self replicating drone army — potentially takes it all.
The contest is, above all, an energy competition. Ponder that gram for gram, each day the human brain uses ten times the energy than muscle does, yet despite that stupendous cost, it conquered the world.
For twenty years some rich countries became mired in corruption and virtuous beauty contests. They toyed with […]
By Jo Nova
It’s hard to keep up with the bad news
Is Australia finally waking up to the ugly truth about unreliable electricity?
Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics dropped the bomb that electricity costs were up 37%, foiling hopes of an interest rate cut. They tempered it by saying it was due to the government stopping the rebates, as if that made it understandable instead of being a national disaster. The government promptly promised to make electricity cheaper by giving up plans to change the the polar vortex with our power plants. No, wait, — of course, they promised to think about paying rebates again…
The coal is dead, long live the coal
And so we reach the point of where headlines fill our main newspapers this week with warnings that blackouts are coming if one particular coal plant closes and prices are destroying businesses just like we said they would years ago. The old coal plant that was supposed to close in August now looks unlikely to close in 2027, because of blackout fears. Eraring supplies about 20% of the energy to our largest state grid. Suddenly newspapers are explaining what system inertia means and talking […]
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, […]
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By Jo Nova
At the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, the cheapest form of energy needs more subsidies. Just keep pouring the money…
The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has finally quietly admitted that they’ve given up on wind and solar power becoming cheaper than coal. Instead, renewables are so uncompetitive they will need another ten years of subsidies, or however long it takes until the last coal plant shuts off.
It’s so revealing. Once upon a time they might have thought (or at least pretended) that subsidies were there to get the unreliable generators ‘over the development hump’ so they could compete in a free market. But after 20 years of subsidies, there are no new economies of scale left to wait for. We got to the bottom of the cost efficiency curve and we’re going up the other side. Costs are now rising as the new projects have to go to far flung fields and wait for impossible transmission towers to appear. Windmills kept getting bigger until there was a nasty surprise in the maintenance bills that wiped 36% off Siemens shares in a single day.
AEMC opine about getting back to a free […]
By Jo Nova
The Rainforest Reserves community group has achieved something that the Dept of Environment, Energy and Perfect-Weather has not been able to do.
Not only has Minister Chris Bowen not managed to create a map to show off his achievements, but nor has any other government agency. Even with a billion dollar budget, the CSIRO has not made a map so user friendly, helpful and informative, nor has the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the Dept of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR), or the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC). Neither was the map done by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and the Climate Change Authority (CCA). It can’t be an accident… but it does look like The Blob doesn’t want to make it easy for Australians to know how vast these projects are.
ARENA got $7 billion to throw at renewable projects over 16 years. They and others, spent 3 million dollars mapping Australia to help renewables investors, but didn’t think to do a map to help Australian taxpayers? (The mapping project closed in 2021, and has now been sort of packed away.)
[…]
BHP Home page
By Jo Nova
That didn’t last long
It was only two years ago that BHP announced “Operational Decarbonisation”. They would build 550MW of wind solar and battery storage in the Pilbara region of WA. It was part of a $4 billion global budget for electrifying trucks and reducing carbon emissions. It was all so ambitious — they set a goal of a 30 per cent reduction by 2030, from 2020 levels, and net zero by 2050. The “Responsible Energy” message is still starring all over their home page.
Their diesel haul trucks use 1.5 billion litres of fuel each year, and they were keen to replace them with electric vehicles, which, they said would “save money”. But it’s all fallen in a hole already. The $4 billion USD global plan has shrunk to half a billion — a savage 88% cut. The new Pilbara solar and wind turbines were quietly shelved late last year (perhaps after Donald Trump won) but the news is only being shared now.
Meanwhile the electric trucks haven’t been invented fast enough so they’ve been delayed indefinitely.
BHP scraps renewable energy projects, casting doubt on emissions targets
By Tedder – Own work, CC BY 3.0,
By Jo Nova
“No wind project, not a single one, was signed off financially in the first half of 2025.”
There is a bit of paralysis of green investment Downunder.
BloombergNEF sells itself as the analysts of the energy transition for investors. According to them, Australia’s rapid transition is “seen as a global test case” and if so, the green wish-fairy needs an ambulance full of money. This year investments in grid-scale solar shrank to just 30% of what they were a year ago, and no wind project at all was committed in the first half of 2025.
This is a fall that is accelerating. 2023 was the boom year and in 2024 investment “fell 48%” which sounds pretty drastic. But this year is even worse.
Renewables investment falls off cliff as no new wind projects reach financial close in first half of 2025
By Sophie Vorrath, RenewEconomy
Investment in new wind and solar projects dropped by 64 per cent in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, underscoring concerns that Australia’s energy transition is not attracting nearly enough capital.
By Jo Nova
The invisible shrinking solar industry
Quietly, the world manufacturing base for solar panels has been shrinking for nearly two years and yet hardly anyone knows. Especially not the Prime Minister of Australia who set up the the $1 billion Solar Sunshot a year ago to artificially create an Australian solar panel manufacturing industry, twenty years too late, and with the worst possible timing.
China has already captured the solar market and killed it.
Gluts have consequences
The CCP is making twice as many solar panels as the world wants to buy. The latest trend is from bad to worse.
Let’s remember this story, the next time the propaganda media try to tell us solar panels are setting new records. Isn’t this the sort of thing our investigative sleuths at the ABC-BBC-CBC should have been digging out before elections were held? Doesn’t this change everything?
Australia is supposed to be going gangbusters “leading the world” and installing 22,000 panels a day to meet our Net Zero target, but no one else in the world is doing that.
China’s solar giants quietly shed a third of their workforces last year
Reuters
Over 40 solar firms have […]
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
In a nasty shock, the VNI West interconnector price has doubled and doubled again
The whole renewables fantasy is unraveling before our eyes.
In 2023 the Victorian NSW interconnector was supposed to cost $1.8 billion. By May this year the price-tag had doubled to $3.6 billion, and now a mere two months later, the estimate has been revised again up to $7.6 billion and that’s plus or minus 30 to 50%. So it could cost as much as $11 billion. (And who knows where this trend ends?)
Without this transmission line, many future wind and solar farms evaporate, not just ones that wanted to connect to it, but other ones further away. Even offshore wind farms are less profitable without the VNI and other mainland connectors. Intermittent generators make more profits when there are bigger mainland lines to spread their erratic surges of electricity through.
“The Jacobs review also notes that without VNI-West, other significant renewable energy generation and network projects like offshore wind off the coast of Victoria will be less effective.”
— Summary of the Independent Assessment of Plan B
This […]
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 […]
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