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Renewables Investment “falls off a cliff” in Australia — down 64% this year

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.

Offshore wind fantasy is crumbling against hard reality of metal, boat, cable, and money shortage

By Jo Nova

It’s so unfair, the wind is free, but who could have known we’d need metals, boats, cables, and magnets?

Governments waved their magic wands to declare the renewable transition would “bling” into existence, but they didn’t bother doing the sums on whether we could mine the vast resources in time, and what would happen to the prices of everything, if every other stupid fashion-obsessed western nation tried to do the same thing at the same time.

At the academic safe-space known as “The Conversion” Thomas York explains to baffled renewables fans why wind farm developers are mysteriously pulling out at the last minute. He doesn’t spell out the baby-nature of the economic reality, but we can read between the lines. The ship called The Infrastructure-Bill has arrived and it’s killing them: the price of steel, copper and aluminium has doubled and tripled; we can’t make the right boats fast enough to build the towers out at sea; everyone wants high-voltage cabling at the same time, and they all need the rare metals for the magnets, which are well, rare. Then, the delays in arranging all this mean the developers fall over their contract agreements timelines, so they […]

A cold windless evening shakes $600m out of the Australian electricity grid

By Jo Nova

That was a hellfire price spike yesterday. It’s not so much the height, but the width of the spike is shocking. Prices lifted off in NSW at 4:45pm and didn’t come back down til 9pm. That’s a four hour nightmare at around $10,000 per MWh. I rarely, if ever, have seen so much area under the red line — so many dollars flowing under the bridge.

“We could have bought a whole new gas plant instead”

Hypothetically, there was around 11,000 megawatts of demand at $10,000 a megawatt hour for over 4 long hours which is a $450 million “price signal” (and that’s just NSW). In Victoria a similar spike consumed another $200 million*. The market — sick, injured and rigged, it seems, is beating us over the head. The average price for the whole 24 hour period in NSW, Victoria and South Australia was a red hot $2,000 per MWh. (A 24 hour average!)

This is not a free market, it’s a fixed market — designed to change the global climate and maybe also keep the lights on. A free market would fix itself, but the government banned the good options, so all we’re left […]

Liars and wordsmiths don’t demolish and rebuild wind farms they “repower” them

By Jo Nova

Repowering with intent to deceive…

When the subsidies run out, and an old industrial wind plant is due to be demolished and rebuilt, there are perfectly good English words the industry could use like demolish, rebuild or replace, but instead they call it “repowering” — as if we could just plug a bigger extension cord in and let those turbines grow.

In the headline above, Reneweconomy could have just as easily have said the cost of “rebuilding” the old wind farm was too high, and most of the country would know exactly what that means. Instead “repowering” sounds like a minor low cost maintenance job. Nothing to see here!

Think of the difference between someone saying they want to repower your house compared with saying they’re going to demolish and rebuild it…

You might agree to a little repowering without thinking about it. And that’s the point isn’t it? To sneak in a giant civil works operation and a set of 200 meter towers with blades bigger than the wingspan of a Jumbo Jet. Those new foundations will need 3,000 tons of concrete each. Just call it repowering!

Old industrial wind turbines are only 1MW or […]

Australian coal plants falling apart due to neglect, Wind power useless — “We nearly saw widespread outages”

By Jo Nova

The Victorian state electricity grid is running close to the wire

They’ve run their largest coal plants into the ground — to the point of neglect where an air duct “detached from the boiler end and fell to the floor”. So one 380MW unit will be out of action at Yallourn for two weeks. And it’s just the latest in an ongoing series of failures.

We are the Renewable Crash Test Dummy — this is what the unfree, fixed, forced market produces when the best assets in a system are treated like planet-wrecking trolls.

A Hi-Tech transition, my foot…

An Air duct collapses at Yallourn Power plant. ABC News https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-09/yallourn-power-station-outage-air-duct-collapse/105394406

The Net Zero forced transition is just vandalism of a perfectly good electricity grid.

The whole 1,450 MW plant at Yallourn makes 20% of the state’s electricity, but has been described as “limping” along into retirement –– (a lot like Victorian manufacturing.)

One report on the power station found that at least one of its four generators was out of action for a third of the time last year. Yallourn was supposed to close in 2032, but under siege from heavily subsidized unreliable generators, […]

Green Hedge Fund executive says the whole Clean Energy Sector Is Dead

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 […]

The UK pays wind turbines for failure — so the market wants to install more failures

Subsidy farms are designed to suck payments from plumbers, bakers and mums and dads.

By Jo Nova

When failure becomes a commodity…

Ponder for a moment how intrinsically unsuitable, maladapted, and worthless wind turbines are to a grid. Their failure is so comprehensive, multifaceted and inevitable, an entirely new and bizarre market was invented to reward their failures. Even when they generate electricity, if the time is wrong, the demand is low, or the network can’t handle it, they will still be paid. The grid can’t use the power, but the customer still gets slugged for something they didn’t use, or they couldn’t get. In the UK the costs for this useless power grew to nearly £400 million last year.

The largest provider of useless power was SeaGreen wind plant which made nearly twice as much from being “constrained” than from being of service. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) reports that SeaGreen earned £100 million for making electricity, and £200 million for being “constrained”. Effectively, the useful electricity it made costs a shocking £2.70 a kilowatt hour, after the other payments are included.

Obviously, when the government rewards failure, the market responds by planning to fail. It follows […]

Denmark offers largest offshore wind area for auction, but no one bids anything

Photo by Kim Hansen. Postprocessing by Richard Bartz and Kim Hansen. | Wikimedia

By Jo Nova

““The green transition in Denmark has stalled right now”

Denmark was the posterchild for the wind industry. It has the largest share of wind power in its national grid, and is home to the industry giants, Vestas and Orstead — two of the world’s largest wind-manufacturers . Denmark is planning a large expansion in wind energy (or it was). But when the government offered up three areas of the North Sea that were described as “among the best in the world”, the deadline came and went last Thursday and not a single bid was received.

Wind energy is free and no one wants it…

This is a huge shift from the situation in 2021 when there were so many bids for one wind plant, it ended up being settled by a lottery.

Denmark Gets No Bids in Largest-Ever Offshore Wind Tender

By Sanne Wass and Will Mathis Bloomberg

High costs and power price risks made auction undesirable

The Danish Energy Agency didn’t receive a single offer by Thursday’s deadline in the tender to develop three offshore […]

Australia’s only wind tower manufacturer goes out of business

Image: Keppel Prince

By Jo Nova

More proof that wind power can’t be used to make wind turbines

The one and only Australian manufacturer of wind turbine towers is going out of business, despite Australian electricity reaching 35% glorious renewable, and the Prime Ministers big plan to have the $22 billion dollar Future Made in Australia, as well as our galloping Net Zero fantasy to reach 82% renewable by 2030. We are, in theory, supposed to install 40 new wind towers a month somewhere in Australia, but none of the towers, it turns out, will be Australian made.

Imagine what we could do if Australia were the largest exporter of iron ore and coal in the world? The government could still screw it up.

Right now, we ship the iron and coal 7,000 kilometers away with heavy fuel oil, to be made into windmills to save the world, only to ship them right back, rather than make them here.

Renewables are the cheapest source of electricity on Earth, they say, and Australia has twice as much as China (proportionately). But China makes 65% of all wind turbines globally, and soon Australia will make 0%.

OWID

[…]

$650m in renewable energy didn’t save Broken Hill from days of blackouts after a storm islanded it

Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham

By Jo Nova

The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.

The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.

Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’

By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian

Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without […]

The mystery of a thousand dead whales and dolphins

By Jo Nova

For some reason more than a thousand whales, dolphins and porpoises died around the UK’s coastline every year for the last eight years. This is roughly twice as many as in the 25 years before that. What could it be?

Whatever it is, it isn’t windfarms. Greenpeace says so:

“There is no evidence whatsoever linking offshore wind to whale deaths. The manufactured hysteria is the result of fake news promoted by politicians, big oil, and their cronies to save the oil and gas industry”

Greenpeace Australia says wind-plants save whales.:

…”building offshore wind is way, way better for ocean wildlife than fossil fuels”.

And yet there are a thousand dead cetaceans.

Andrew Montford of NetZeroWatch graphed beached dolphins, whales and porpoises against the rise of a new industrial marine machine:

Cetacean Strandings in the UK graphed against offshore wind capacity. @Dissentient

There’s no evidence, say Greenpeace, sounding just like Philip Morris.

We don’t know for sure what is causing so many whales and dolphins to die, but Greenpeace doesn’t even want to find out. The only thing we do know is that Greenpeace is craven, counterfeit, eco-imposter front for the Globalist […]

Renewable Fiasco: If Germany just kept nuclear power, it could have saved $600b and cut emissions by 73%

Phillippsburg Nuclear Power Plant by Lothar Neumann, Gernsbach

By Jo Nova

If the Germans just did nothing at all, it would have been Greener

Germany already had nuclear power in 2002, if they just kept it and didn’t build all the wind and solar plants, they wouldn’t have had to spend 697 Billion Euro on subsidies, and would have cut their emissions by 73% more.

If ever there is a statistic that says there is something rotten in the State of Climate Panic, this is surely it. I mean, does CO2 matter or doesn’t it? Do the Greens care at all, or even a bit? If there was a climate emergency and The Greens were worried about CO2, they might have protested that the EnergieWende was a reckless experiment. But if the Greens were tools for communists, foreign states or banker-investors, then they might keep choosing options that benefit other countries, help Bankers or just make Big Government bigger.

Either the German Greens have utterly failed at the very task they set out to do, or they were really aiming at something else.

Ross Pomery writes at RealClearScience and WattsUpWithThat

Study Quantifies Germany’s Disastrous Switch Away From […]

Industrial wind plants afflicts 3,000 times as much of the surface of Earth as a nuclear plant does

The clean green future doesn’t have much room for wilderness

By Jo Nova

John Constable puts some numbers on The terrifying scale of the green revolution in The Spectator this week.

Ponder just the scale of the Sophia Offshore industrial wind plant being built off the UK. The wind is free, but to collect enough of it to power 2% of the country, the UK will have to build 100 wind turbines, some 200 kilometers out in the North Sea. Each blade is 108m long and weighs 65 tons, or about as much as a semi-trailer. When the wind blows hard enough, about 200 tons of matter will rotate above the ocean. The box holding all the spinning parts together weighs another 500 tons and needs to be suspended 140 meters up in the air over the waves and during storms.

Each of the 100 turbines will reach 250 meters high, which is “only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building”. So much effort and so little to show for it.

To make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall in the drink with the first stiff breeze, the turbines need to be weighed down with more than a thousand […]

Cold, windless Victoria may run out of gas before the end of winter

By Jo Nova

It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia

For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.

If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?

The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]

JoNova

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Renewables Investment “falls off a cliff” in Australia — down 64% this year

Offshore wind fantasy is crumbling against hard reality of metal, boat, cable, and money shortage

A cold windless evening shakes $600m out of the Australian electricity grid

Liars and wordsmiths don’t demolish and rebuild wind farms they “repower” them

Australian coal plants falling apart due to neglect, Wind power useless — “We nearly saw widespread outages”

Green Hedge Fund executive says the whole Clean Energy Sector Is Dead

The UK pays wind turbines for failure — so the market wants to install more failures

Denmark offers largest offshore wind area for auction, but no one bids anything

Australia’s only wind tower manufacturer goes out of business

$650m in renewable energy didn’t save Broken Hill from days of blackouts after a storm islanded it

The mystery of a thousand dead whales and dolphins

Renewable Fiasco: If Germany just kept nuclear power, it could have saved $600b and cut emissions by 73%

Industrial wind plants afflicts 3,000 times as much of the surface of Earth as a nuclear plant does

Cold, windless Victoria may run out of gas before the end of winter

JoNova

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