Here's fun! Power Companies Could Remotely Switch Off EV Chargers to Reduce Grid Stress
Energy providers could have the option to switch off home EV charging stations remotely to reduce pressure on Queensland’s electricity grid.
The proposal is part of the Australian state’s Queensland Electricity Connection Manual (QECM), which provides a framework for the grid’s operation.
Section 8 of the QECM proposes that EV charging equipment may be limited or switched off by operators Ergon Energy and Energex (distributed network service providers or DNSPs) if it has an output of more than 20 amps—a standard domestic single-phase EV charger uses 32 amps.
The use of such “demand management” schemes is largely unique to Queensland and is also used on residential pool cleaning machines, hot water systems, and air conditioning units under the Peaksmart program.
Peaksmart gives households a cash rebate; in return, the operator can turn off air conditioners remotely during peak operating times (summer) to reduce pressure on the energy grid.
The large-scale roll-out of such programs has been earmarked as a potential catalyst to close down coal-fired power stations faster—amid the net zero push—and to, instead, adopt more intermittent renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and battery.
Federal Nationals MP Keith Pitt, himself an electrical engineer, says a proposal to use demand management on EV charging reveals that operators have little confidence the grid can handle the uptake of electric cars expected in the push towards net zero.
“EV take-up could increase peak demand by as much as 60 percent right across the National Electricity Market,” Mr. Pitt told The Epoch Times.
“That would mean you need a 60 percent increase in generating electricity capacity, transmission, and distribution. So that’s every substation, every cable, every supply point, every house—it will cost an absolute fortune.”
The federal Labor government has set a lofty goal of having 3.8 million EVs on the road by 2030—there are currently 83,000 in use.
Further, the government is also pushing to expand the charging network, aiming for 100,000 for businesses, 3.8 million chargers in households, and 1,800 publicly available fast chargers.
The initiative comes as part of a wider push towards net zero by 2050 and to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030. Further, the Labor government hopes to have 82 percent of the National Electricity Market powered by renewables.
Advocacy groups have argued against a demand management system saying it will dampen enthusiasm for EVs. “We know from surveys that average consumers aren’t particularly keen on mandated orchestration of their appliances,” says the Electric Vehicle Council in its submission on the QECM (pdf).
“The Peaksmart program enlists between 10,000 and 15,000 air conditioning units for orchestration each year … out of a total of about 300,000 that get installed. About 95 percent of consumers prefer retaining control of their air conditioning, overtaking the financial incentives on offer.”
Meanwhile, Melissa McAuliffe, acting director of energy services at Energy Consumers Australia, says it would erode consumer trust that the “energy system is working for them.”
“Our 2023 Energy Consumer Sentiment Survey finds that only 35 percent of households are confident that the energy industry and regulators are working in their long-term interests now,” she wrote in a submission (pdf).
“Further, such measures are unlikely to be completely effective for consumers or the system, as consumers may look to workarounds that circumvent giving DNSPs control. For example, through disincentivising the use of EV chargers, consumers may just use regular power points.”
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Hot Weather Does Not Mean Climate Change
As Ambassador Rahm Emanuel once said as chief of staff to President Barack Obama, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Hillary Clinton is taking this to heart, using summer temperatures to justify Democrats’ profligate spending on green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act.
No matter that hot summer days in cities do not equate to climate change; that climate change models are poor predictors of warming; and that the incidence of hurricanes and tornadoes has not increased over time. A better use of funds would be to buy air conditioners to keep people cool during hot months.
The Sixth U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stated that the “attribution of certain classes of extreme weather (e.g., tornadoes) is beyond current modelling and theoretical capabilities.”
It is well known that measures of warming are biased upward because temperature readings are taken in urban rather than rural areas and the world has seen increased urbanization over the past centuries. Solar activity also plays a role in warming.
Despite measurement problems, the “climate crisis” is the stated rationale for interfering with Americans’ choices of cars, appliances, and power generation sources. The “climate crisis” is why California aims to allow only battery-powered vehicles to be sold in the state starting in 2035 and why the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules that would require two-thirds of new passenger vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by 2032.
But what if we were not in a climate crisis after all, and trillions of dollars in planned tax credits and green energy expenditures are a misuse of taxpayer resources?
New York University professor Steven Koonin has presented data in his bestselling book, “Unsettled,” to show that the science is not as settled as many politicians would have us believe.
Koonin is a respected academic physicist. He was former undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy under President Barack Obama when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. His portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology. He has a bachelor of science in physics from Caltech and a doctorate in theoretical physics from MIT. Koonin taught for 30 years at Caltech and has published 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Koonin finds that daily record high temperatures have not increased over the past 100 years and daily record lows have become less common. This is directly at variance with media headlines.
Although wildfires made headlines this summer, global areas burned by wildfires have shown a downward, rather than an upward, trend. Tornado activity in the United States has declined since 1970.
The media covers climate change as though doomsday is approaching. Bad news sells, and well-funded organizations support the crisis message.
Take Covering Climate Now, founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in 2019 with over 460 news and media partners, including Reuters, Bloomberg, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC. Covering Climate Now helps “to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom.” It advises news outlets under its “best practices” to show photos of people frazzled in the heat rather than enjoying themselves in a pool. It states, “In the year 2023, there is simply no good-faith argument against climate science.”
“Consensus” on the “climate crisis” as presented by news outlets is not a scientific consensus at all. We need to follow scientific knowledge as it develops and carefully consider the costs and benefits of different alternatives.
This is particularly important for the transportation and energy sectors, which bear the brunt of costs for the “climate crisis.” People need these sectors to be highly reliable and cost effective. Making large changes to transportation and energy in a short period of time decreases reliability and increases prices dramatically.
Even if rising “greenhouse gas” emissions were affecting the climate, actions by the United States will not be helpful in the absence of changes by China and India, the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. If the United States were to get rid of all fossil fuel emissions, this would only reduce global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.
China, India, Africa, and Latin America are all increasing emissions, and President Xi Jinping announced last week that China has no plans to reduce emissions after 2030, contrary to the Paris Agreement that his nation signed on to.
In fact, American carbon emissions have declined by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years while Chinese emissions have risen by 5,000 million metric tons. Further reductions in U.S. emissions, with their associated costs, will just be a drop in the global bucket. Polls show that many believe protecting the environment is less important to Americans than economic growth.
Additionally, the message that government can create more total jobs by requiring more costly technology is seductive but empty. Yes, some Americans might be employed building the technology, but others lose jobs due to more expensive energy causing businesses to cut back on production and transportation or causing them to cut jobs directly to pay for increasing energy costs.
The EPA’s proposed tailpipe and power plant regulations will reduce economic growth by raising energy prices. As well as reducing jobs in the auto industry—GM, Ford, and Stellantis are closing down traditional auto plants—EPA regulations will also discourage energy-intensive manufacturing.
Raising the cost of energy at any time is poor economic policy, but especially when economic growth is slow. U.S. annualized gross domestic product growth was 2% in the first quarter of 2023, with data for the second quarter expected on Thursday. It’s summer, but now is not the time for Democrats to use the excuse of climate change to slow the economy further with more regulations.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/25/hot-weather-does-mean-climate-change/
***********************************************Gulf Stream current could collapse in 2025, plunging Earth into climate chaos
This is an old chestnut. Prophecies of doom about the Gulf Stream have been going on for decades now. The evident truth is that it cannot accurately be modelled
A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere's climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.
But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.
The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.
But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.
"The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected," co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.
"It was not a result where we said: 'Oh, yeah, here we have it'. We were actually bewildered."
AMOC as a global conveyor belt
Atlantic Ocean currents work like an endless global conveyor belt moving oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat around the globe. Warmer southerly waters, which are saltier and denser, flow north to cool and sink below waters at higher latitudes, releasing heat into the atmosphere.
Then, once it has sunk beneath the ocean, the water slowly drifts southward, heats up again, and the cycle repeats. But climate change is slowing this flow. Fresh water from melting ice sheets has made the water less dense and salty, and recent studies have shown that the current is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years.
The region near Greenland where the southerly waters sink (known as the North Atlantic subpolar gyre) borders a patch that is hitting record low temperatures, while the surrounding seas climb to all-time highs, forming an ever-expanding 'blob' of cold water.
The last time the AMOC switched modes during the most recent ice age, the climate near Greenland increased by 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15 degrees Celsius) within a decade. If it were to turn off, temperatures in Europe and North America could drop by as much as 9 F (5 C) in the same amount of time.
Direct data on the AMOC's strength has only been recorded since 2004, so to analyze changes to the current over longer timescales, the researchers turned to surface temperature readings of the subpolar gyre between the years of 1870 and 2020, a system which they argue provides a 'fingerprint' for the strength of AMOC’s circulation.
By feeding this information into a statistical model, the researchers gauged the diminishing strength and resilience of the ocean current by its growing year-on-year fluctuations.
The model's results alarmed the researchers — yet they say that checking them only reinforced their findings: The window for the system's collapse could begin as early as 2025, and it grows more likely as the 21st century continues.
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Race to salvage sinking cargo ship carrying 3,000 vehicles including 350 Mercedes as it burns out of control in North Sea after fire 'caused by electric car'
The race is on to prevent the sinking of a cargo ship off the Dutch coast which is carrying almost 3,000 vehicles, including 350 Mercedes-Benz, as it burns out of control with an electric car believed to be behind the deadly fire.
At least one crew member died and others were injured after fire ripped through the Fremantle Highway, a 18,500-ton car-carrying vessel. Rescue helicopters and boats evacuated 23 crew members from the Panamanian-registered ship.
Officials have said there are 'many' wounded. Some suffered broken bones, burns and breathing problems and were taken to hospitals in the northern Netherlands, emergency officials said.
Seven crew members jumped overboard and were rescued from the water, while the rest were airlifted by helicopter. Dutch broadcaster NOS reported that all the crew were Indian.
This afternoon, the ship was said to be burning out of control in the North Sea and rescue vessels were working to save it from sinking close to one of the world's most important migratory bird habitats.
'Currently there are a lot of vessels on scene to monitor the situation and to see how to get the fire under control,' coast guard spokeswoman Lea Versteeg told the Associated Press in a telephone interview.
'But it's all depending on weather and the damage to the vessel, so we're currently working out how we can make sure that... the least bad situation is going to happen.'
Asked if it is possible the ship could sink, Ms Versteeg said: 'It's a scenario we're taking into account and we're preparing for all scenarios.'
Early this afternoon, two ships were alongside the freighter hosing down its sides in an attempt to cool them, the coast guard said, but firefighters were still unable to attempt to extinguish flames on the ship and smoke was billowing out of its hold.
The ship's Japanese owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha, said it was working in cooperation with the local authorities of the Netherlands, a salvage company and a ship management company.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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