The case for wind power was built upon a myth
We keep being told that it will continue to get cheaper. Now the truth has been revealed
Wind is already the cheapest form of power and will save us a fortune in future. We know this because the green energy lobby keeps telling us so. But it is hard to square with the words of Tom Glover, chair of energy company RWE’s UK arm, last week.
No more offshore wind farms will be built, he said, unless the Government hikes the guaranteed long-term prices offered to their operators by as much as 70 per cent.
The energy “market” is not really much of a market at all, not when it comes to green energy. The Government underwrites wind and solar through “contracts for difference” – guaranteeing operators a minimum “strike price”, rising with inflation, for every megawatt-hour of electricity they generate over 15 years.
The trouble is that wind farm developers will no longer accept the strike prices offered. Last time the Government held an auction for the right to build offshore wind farms, in September, it received not a single bid.
The maximum strike price the Government offered was £44 per MWh. According to RWE it won’t receive any bids until this is raised to between £65 and £75.
How come, when the cost of wind energy is supposed to be falling year on year? True, the cost did fall sharply up until 2019. But this then went into reverse thanks to higher commodity prices and interest rates. With renewable energy, most of the costs come upfront – which makes it particularly reliant on cheap debt.
But this is only half the story. If we are going to have a grid based on intermittent renewables, it is no use looking just at the cost of generation. We have to add on the cost of energy storage, or some other kind of back-up – or else build so many wind and solar farms that we have just enough power at the worst of times, and a super-abundance of it at other times.
All are likely to be horrendously expensive. Storing energy in lithium batteries, for example, can cost around six times as much as generating it in the first place. Using gas as back-up – as we do now – means we have gas power stations sitting idle for some periods, pushing up the unit cost of generation when they are needed.
As for super-abundance, we would end up with masses of idle wind turbines and solar panels instead. They would only get built if their owners were bribed with huge compensation for being unable to supply all their power to the grid.
Wind farms already do receive such “constraint payments”, which inevitably end up on our bills. In 2022, energy consumers – unknowingly in most cases – had to pay £215 million to wind farm owners to turn off their turbines. This is a bill that is surely only going to rise as more and more wind farms – and far too few energy storage facilities – are connected to the grid.
Remember how, last summer, the renewables lobby was trying to tell us that wind energy was “nine times cheaper” than gas? It was a blatantly false comparison between long-term strike prices for wind and “day ahead” prices for gas – ie the inflated prices we have to pay the owners of gas power stations to turn them on for a few hours at short notice when wind and solar are in short supply. We are paying more than we need to for gas power because we are using it to balance renewables.
So, no, don’t be fooled by the PR. RWE has let the cat out of the bag. Renewables never were particularly cheap – and they are likely to get a lot more expensive.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/29/the-case-for-wind-power-was-built-upon-a-falsehood/
******************************************************Uber Driver's Tesla Model 3 Battery Dies After 120,000 Miles In 15 Months
There's probably no better way to convince people that electric vehicles are as good as internal combustion cars for every use case scenario than having EVs undergo tough trials, and ride-hailing vehicles have it tougher than most. So can a Tesla Model 3 handle that kind of punishment long-term?
Yes and no, according to Dobson, a Model 3 owner who has used his car for Uber duty for almost a year and a half now. YouTube creator Kim Java first featured him in one of her videos in July 2022, when he traded in his Toyota Camry for a slightly used 2019 Tesla Model 3 to use as an Uber car. He spent $53,000 on the Tesla – more than he had ever spent on a car – but he immediately started making savings in fuel and maintenance. The savings added up to $10,000 since he bought it, which is impressive. However, he was unlucky to make the purchase before the EV maker started cutting prices like crazy. Had he waited a few more months, he would have gotten a much better deal on his Model 3 Standard Range Plus.
Alas, that is not his main problem with the Tesla. Dobson covered 120,000 miles since July 2022, which is a lot for a regular user but quite normal for an Uber driver who drives six days a week, more than 300 miles a day, and supercharges twice a day.
The big problem is that the high-voltage battery pack of his Model 3 died recently, and he claims it's because Tesla didn't prepare the Model 3 for the daily grind a ride-sharing vehicle typically has to deal with. The battery died suddenly, Dobson says, and not through progressive degradation.
In a previous video shot when the car had covered 90,000 miles, the battery showed degradation of 11 percent, but after crossing the 110,000-mile mark, he began to see a quick drop in degradation and driving range – down to 170-180 miles at 100 percent SOC.
There may have been something wrong with the battery because a Tesla should lose only about 12 percent of battery capacity after 200,000 miles, according to the EV maker's 2022 Impact Report.
Dobson claims Tesla told him the degradation was attributed to regular wear and tear, but he didn't agree with that, arguing that the degradation was too rapid. It's not clear if the fact that he typically did two Supercharging stops a day, often charging to 90 or 95 percent state of charge, was a factor in the demise of the Model 3's battery.
A typical ride-sharing EV covers more miles in a week and goes through more charging cycles than most EVs for private use cover in months. Some claim that frequent Supercharging, especially when done over a recommended limit, can put significant stress on the battery, though a recent Recurrent study showed little to no difference in battery degradation between frequent fast charging and rare fast charging on Tesla EVs.
Whether or not Supercharging was to blame, one day the Uber driver charged the car overnight at home and had 170 miles of available range, but when he used a Supercharger later in the day, the range didn't go past 35 miles. At that point, he received a notification from Tesla to bring in the car for a check.
He took the car to Tesla Service for an evaluation and was later told that it would cost $9,000 to replace the battery. He accepted that, and he now limits charging to 80 percent at Tesla's recommendation, typically getting 160-170 miles of range from that.
Tesla gave him only a one-year warranty on the new battery, leading Dobson to suspect the battery was not new but refurbished. He also believes that because his car's fully charged battery theoretically offers 207 miles of range at 100 percent SOC, which is 14 percent less than what an identical Tesla Model 3 with a brand-new battery would get.
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Assault on farmers, fishers and foresters will only harm the environment
Governments across Australia are forging ahead with their attacks on farmers, fishers and foresters, with the latest blow aimed against the Murray-Darling irrigators after the federal government recently passed legislation through the lower house cutting their water allocations.
The inevitable result of such legislation will be a fall in food and fibre production. In addition, the east coast Barramundi gillnet fishery is to be phased out by 2027, and two major agricultural dams in Queensland (Hells Gate and Urannah) have been shelved as a bribe to delay UNESCO declaring the Great Barrier Reef endangered.
The Queensland mackerel fishery was cut by 70 per cent in July, the Victorian hardwood forestry industry is facing closure in the next few years, and the West Australian hardwood forestry industry will go next year. As for the future, there is also the push for low-emission agriculture as part of Australia’s net-zero pledge. This is targeting methane emissions from livestock and the supposed problem of nitrogen in fertiliser.
But damaging these industries perversely increases environmental harm. For example, the continuously tightening regulations on Australia’s fish catch resulted in Australia becoming a net importer of seafood in 2007, and we now import well over 60 per cent of our seafood. By importing fish from countries such as Thailand that have far less strict environmental guidelines, damage from overfishing is far more likely.
Similarly, restricting or banning hardwood forestry simply means we must import from countries where sustainable forestry, which has been practised in this country for decades, is merely a dream. There is also a major environmental and biosecurity risk with importing fish and timber from overseas. The 2016 outbreak of white-spot disease in prawns is a good example of this.
Sadly, the rationale for most of these assaults on agriculture is based on poor quality-assured science. For example, cuts in Murray-Darling irrigation water are intended in part to allow more freshwater to reach Lake Alexandrina at the mouth of the river in South Australia. It is claimed the lake needs more water or it will go saline – like an estuary. But the lake was salty until the 1930s when the dams were built at the mouth of the Murray to stop the salt coming in from the sea. So, farmers are forced to cut water consumption partly to maintain a fiction that the lake is naturally, and should always be, freshwater.
Similarly, it was claimed that the Hells Gate and Urannah dams needed to be cancelled to help the Great Barrier Reef. But, if anything, the dams will stop sediment and nutrients reaching the sea – and UNESCO and most of the science institutions have been telling us the sediment is bad for the reef. For some reason, the government and UNESCO now prefer to wash the sediment into the sea.
Equally ridiculous is the promise by federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to restrict fishing in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, supposedly to protect the Great Barrier Reef, which is 800km away on the other side of Cape York. That is farther than the distance between Sydney and Melbourne.
Plibersek claims this is to protect fish that move between the Gulf and the Great Barrier Reef through the Torres Strait. I suppose that all creatures on Earth are interlinked in some way, but there is no evidence of any problems with the Gulf fishery or of there being a significant ecological link between the Gulf and reef.
After all, for most of the one-million-year history of the Great Barrier Reef, the Torres Strait was a land bridge, so to go from the Gulf to the reef one had to take the long way around Australia. And the reef did just fine.
At least for the Murray-Darling farmers there is one thing going in their favour – rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. It is beyond dispute that most food crops and trees grow much faster in an atmosphere with double the amount of the carbon dioxide – for wheat about 30 per cent faster and they need less water. And no Australian government can cut carbon dioxide concentrations because Australia’s emissions are negligible compared with those of China and India.
Other than that, politically harmful decisions have been based on poor advice from science organisations that have become ideological and hostile to the productive heart of the Australian economy. Not only does this harm the Australian economy but closing down agriculture, fisheries and forestry will simply export jobs and increase environmental costs in other countries. This is NIMBYism on a national scale.
We are witnessing a widening disconnect between the productive rural regions and the city nobility. We need a fresh start, beginning with a review of the science behind agricultural policy.
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Australians unlikely to give up meat, become vegetarian to help environment, study shows
Probably even more so in the USA
A La Trobe University study asked more than 700 Facebook account users who lived in Australia about their beliefs on climate change, the impact of meat consumption on the environment, and their meat intake.
The report found respondents, who were aged between 18 and 84, believed reducing and eliminating meat intake were ineffective ways to address climate change.
They reported low willingness to engage in either action, despite participants showing increased awareness of meat-eating impacts on the environment.
"Although past research has shown that animal agriculture contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, our participants believed reducing and eliminating meat intake to be some of the least effective actions against climate change," co-author and provisional psychologist from La Trobe University Ashley Rattenbury said.
Australians are among the biggest meat-eaters in the world, a trend the study highlighted.
In 2020, the World Economic Forum reported that Australia had the world's second-highest annual meat consumption per capita in 2018, behind the United States.
Two thirds of the La Trobe University study participants said having limited options when eating out was a barrier to adopting a vegetarian diet.
"[The sentiment] 'I like eating meat' was the most common barrier," co-author Matthew Ruby, from La Trobe's School of Psychology, said.
"That maps on to many other past studies that [have found] most people eat meat because they like it.
The La Trobe research was compared to a similar study conducted in 2003 by Emma Lea and Anthony Worsley, from Deakin University, which asked hundreds of Australians for their beliefs about barriers and benefits to vegetarianism.
Only one third of Lea and Worsley's participants agreed that limited options when eating out were a barrier, despite there being far fewer vegetarian options available 20 years ago.
Other 'green' actions favoured over vegetarianism
The La Trobe University study also asked participants about their perceptions of the effectiveness of stopping or reducing meat consumption, compared to how willing they would be to engage in other actions that benefited the environment.
"Participants thought that cutting back on meat and stopping eating meat were the least effective things they could do and as such were the least willing to do those, particularly to stop eating meat," Dr Ruby said.
"They are very happy to get more energy from renewable resources, to recycle things more, to buy fewer new things — which all do have an impact.
"But considering the amount of meat that the average Aussie eats, cutting back on meat would have more of an impact than some of those in terms of emissions."
Researchers hoped the findings would help organisations and campaigners better understand attitudes around environmental dietary behaviours.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-06/la-trobe-univerity-meat-consumption-study/103065134
***************************************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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