Is this the world's most pointless car?
Citroen has been building small cars for many decades, but the shortest of all went on sale only recently.
The all-electric Ami - named after, but not related to, another Citroen introduced in 1961 - is designed primarily for urban use, and measures only 2489mm (94.9in), which would have been considered modest even in the early 1900s. The Ami has space for two, a single-charge range of 46 miles, has a top speed of 28mph, and can be purchased from £8095 in the UK.
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Financially disastrous windfarms
When a hard-pressed local authority in southern England was looking to boost its finances, it turned to a novel idea: leveraged bets worth hundreds of millions of pounds on solar energy.
For Thurrock Council in the county of Essex, it sounded like a surefire winner. Instead, the gamble backfired spectacularly.
Last month, the council disclosed a £470 million ($572 million) loss for the current fiscal year after its various investments went wrong — about £2,670 for every one of the area’s 176,000 residents, who now face higher taxes while the local authority seeks a bailout from the national government.
The debacle highlights concerns about how some local authorities across the UK have invested taxpayers’ money in high-risk initiatives. It has also put a spotlight on the entrepreneur who owned the solar farms, Liam Kavanagh.
Following reports by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about his business relationship with Thurrock, Kavanagh said in June 2020 that he was “never going to raise a pound from a local authority again,” according to recent court filings from a case in which the financier is suing his former chauffeur.
Kavanagh’s companies, which operated solar farms across the UK, had received hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of investment from Thurrock Council, which oversees a region along the River Thames east of London.
Two years on, Thurrock is stuck with a huge annual deficit and has been stripped of its financial powers. The former leader of the council has resigned.
Mark Coxshall, current leader of Thurrock Council, described its losses as “shocking” but added: “The first stage to creating a good plan for recovery is to understand the full extent of the problem.”
When the Sun Shines
The story dates back to at least June 2016, when Thurrock Council helped to finance the purchase of a solar farm in Swindon, England, through bonds marketed by Rockfire Capital, a company owned by Kavanagh. Over the following years, Thurrock helped to finance 53 solar farms across the UK, all of which went on to be ultimately owned by Kavanagh.
The arrangement was not without precedent. UK councils have been known to borrow money to invest in new projects, in an attempt to top up income squeezed in the years following the financial crisis. Now they face another squeeze, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cuts spending in an attempt to correct the calamitous seven-week reign of his predecessor Liz Truss.
Other investments have gone wrong. Last year, Slough Council, in Berkshire, was taken over by ministers after blowing a £100 million hole in its budget following a string of commercial acquisitions. In Spelthorne, in Surrey, the council used hundreds of millions from the Public Work Loans Board to buy commercial property — at one point borrowing £1.1 billion.
These councils were spurred on by the 2010-15 coalition government, which wanted local authorities to behave in a more businesslike way. In 2016, when Thurrock made its first solar farm investment, the local authority said it was a “pro revenue generating council,” and would “continue to look for similar opportunities.”
“People in Thurrock can rest assured that not only are we looking after their money, but we are also doing our bit to help protect the environment by reducing the amount of carbon produced by burning fossil fuels,” Shane Webb, a Tory councilor, said in 2016.
To go big on renewable energy, Thurrock borrowed £1 billion at low interest rates from more than 100 other local entities including the Greater London Authority, Cornwall and Leicester councils.
At one point its debts reached £1.4 billion, equivalent to almost 10 times its spending on local services.
The investments prompted John Kent, leader of the opposition Labour Party at the council, to write to the national government demanding an investigation.
“I, and other councilors, have been raising concerns about the council’s borrowing and investments strategy for over two years,” Kent wrote in July this year. “Throughout, we have been ignored, falsely reassured, fobbed off and misled.”
Toucan Energy
Some details emerged in a High Court judgment, published in April last year, concerning a dispute between one of Kavanagh’s companies, Toucan Energy Holdings Ltd., and another firm, Wirsol Energy Ltd., surrounding the construction and sale of 19 solar parks.
Toucan claimed approximately £30 million in damages as a result of alleged defects in the parks. Ultimately, the judge dismissed most of the claims.
While Thurrock was not a party to the case, its dealings with Rockfire Capital and Kavanagh were mentioned in the proceedings. The court heard that Rockfire Capital had approached Thurrock in 2018 with an opportunity to invest £145 million in bonds linked to the parks — on top of hundreds of millions it had already invested in the solar farms.
Kavanagh was a witness in the case, and not a party. During the case it emerged that a £5 million commission charged by Rockfire Capital to Thurrock was not included in a prospectus sent to the council. Kavanagh told the court that he saw no reason to include details of the fee in the document because all his business partners knew that Rockfire Capital “always charges a commission.”
The judgment also quoted Daniel Kirk, who worked at Toucan Energy, saying in a message to a colleague that he was “not working for someone who just treats us like a cashpoint for his own equity when [the] taxpayers and signed contracts [sit] above his equity.”
During the case he told the court that these comments were “more of a personal failing on my side at this point to properly manage and communicate with Mr. Kavanagh.” Kirk declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News for this article.
In another message quoted in the case, Kirk said that Kavanagh “was taking” two payments — claimed to be £350,000 and £650,000 — and complained: “those are designed to cover our costs not his cars.” The judge in the case, Justice Andrew Henshaw, concluded: “Mr. Kirk’s contemporaneous view that Mr. Kavanagh was extracting money from the business for his own benefit is plain.”
The Chauffeur
Kavanagh himself has taken to the courts to protect his reputation, bringing a case against his former chauffeur, Tony Tremlin, who is alleged to have given a copy of dash-cam footage to a journalist at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The court filings refer to footage in which Kavanagh allegedly complains about BIJ articles about him. Kavanagh says the dash cam was for vehicle safety, “not for obtaining and retaining surreptitious recordings” of his conversations.
The financier was captured on tape discussing how he planned to wind up one of his businesses: “You take risks, you get in and get out.” Bloomberg has seen a partial transcript of this recording in publicly available court filings.
The quotations attributed to Kavanagh in the filings include him saying that he needed to “protect everybody’s interests and the money” and “get rid” of Rockfire Capital in the wake of a BIJ story.
“I’m not bothered now,” he is alleged to have said. “I’m never going to raise a pound from a local authority again.”
Tremlin said in his defense filings that disclosing the footage was in the public interest. He accused Kavanagh of putting businesses — owing £655 million of public money — into liquidation, without Thurrock’s consent.
Kavanagh claims the information given to journalists was confidential, and that he “does not court publicity.” The case is ongoing, with Tremlin filing his defense in recent weeks.
Responding to Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd. going into administration last month, Kavanagh said in an emailed statement: “I cannot comment on the decision to put the company into administration having had no role in that decision or indeed the management of the Toucan business. I installed a new management team in June 2022 and, as far as I am aware, the underlying business has traded strongly.”
In the statement, Kavanagh added “I am confident that this is a business with a positive future, particularly given the recent and current growth in the green energy market.”
Tremlin did not respond to a request for comment.
Emergency Bailout
Thurrock’s financial health has continued to crumble. In September, ministers stripped it of some powers and put Essex county council in charge of its finances. Thurrock was told to refinance its low-interest loans to pay back neighboring councils, and has borrowed money from the UK’s Public Loans Works Board at an interest rate of between 4% and 5%.
Rob Gledhill, former leader of the council, resigned. At the time, Gledhill said he welcomed support from the government but that the “political buck stops with him.” He declined to comment for this article. Sean Clark, a former corporate director of finance at Thurrock who was involved in investment decisions, was suspended from his role in September, the BBC reported. Clark did not respond to a request for comment.
On Nov. 10, Toucan Energy Holdings 1, the holding company owned by Kavanagh, went into administration. Interpath Advisory, a restructuring firm, was appointed to hunt for a buyer for the farms. Coxshall, Thurrock Council’s current leader, said in a statement that the move would “maximize recovery” for taxpayers.
Last month, the full scale of the potential losses to the taxpayer were laid bare. Thurrock revealed a £470 million deficit for the current financial year, and wrote off four investments at a cost of £275 million. It said it has made a further provision of £129 million made to cover other losses.
Thurrock has appealed to the national government for an emergency financial bailout, and has warned of further cuts and a likely sale of buildings, land and other assets — along with tax increases for local residents.
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Biden Environmental Policies Are Endangering Maine Lobstermen and Right Whales
The Maine lobster industry is a constant target of radical preservationist environmentalists. If their attacks persist, the industry is sadly at risk of going extinct.
That’s terrible for American conservation.
Earlier this fall, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch “Red List” issued a warning to avoid eating American lobster on account of the alleged harm the industry causes endangered North Atlantic right whales.
By red listing American lobster, Seafood Watch tarnished the sterling reputation of workharding people responsible for harvesting 82% of the nation’s lobster catch. Prompted by this flawed decision, the Marine Stewardship Council also suspended the Gulf of Maine’s MSC certificate effective December 15th, 2022.
These attacks aren’t isolated. The Biden administration seeks to regulate the lobster industry on these grounds too. And in doing so, their actions will result in the endangerment of both lobstermen and rare North Atlantic right whales.
Ahead of last week’s State Dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron, Rep. Golden tweeted, “If the Biden White House can prioritize purchasing 200 Maine lobsters for a fancy dinner, @POTUS should also take the time to meet with the Maine lobstermen his administration is currently regulating out of business.”
Golden alludes to two Commerce Department, specifically the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), rule changes.
The first change, pertaining to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Fisheries’ Biological Opinion (BiOp) Conservation Framework, urges 10 fisheries –including U.S. lobster – to adhere to a 98 percent risk reduction from the fishery by 2030.
Per the Maine delegation, this modification would be “a death knell for our nation’s lobster industry” since it already poses a low risk to right whales.
In conjunction with the Conservation Framework, NOAA Fisheries is set to implement an Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan “to reduce the incidental mortality and serious injury to North Atlantic right whales.” It went into effect in September 2022 and demands “at least a 90 percent risk reduction target” from the lobster industry.
Another right whale rule to be finalized by the Commerce Department next year would displace anglers and boaters from waters yet come with no benefit to the whale.
I elaborated on this in an earlier Townhall column, writing, “Radical preservationists similarly blame fishing vessels for contributing to the whale’s demise. In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) ceded to special interests by proposing changes to the North Atlantic Right Whale Vessel Strike Reduction Rule. They argue, “Reducing vessel speed is one of the most effective, feasible options available to reduce the likelihood of lethal outcomes from vessel collisions with right whales.””
Much to the chagrin of radical preservationists and their allies in the Biden administration, lobstermen aren’t foes of the North Atlantic right whale. On the contrary. They’ve made accommodations for the species–which is protected by both the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act–and haven’t been responsible for gear entanglements in over 20 years.
Conservation stakeholders like Maine lobstermen can coexist with these whales.
But since destructive preservationist thinking dominates this White House’s environmental decision, Biden and company believe placing the whale ahead of lobstermen is practical. Instead, it’s counterproductive and antithetical to true conservation practices.
Maine lobstermen also note the Biden administration actively dismisses data showing right whales aren’t migrating to areas where they fish.
If this administration truly cared about the plight of North Atlantic right whales, why are they pursuing 10 large-scale offshore wind projects in the Atlantic Ocean region where these fragile creatures frequent?
As lobstermen and other conservationists don’t pose threats to these whales, what actually endangers the remaining 350 whales? As many of us suspected, it’s actually offshore wind turbines.
According to a bombshell Bloomberg report, a NOAA Fisheries scientist admitted these projects pose a credible threat to the species:
Both initial construction of wind projects and decades of expected operation threaten to imperil right whales in southern New England waters, Sean Hayes, chief of the protected species branch at NOAA’s National Northeast Fisheries Science Center, said in a May 13 letter to Interior Department officials.
Mr. Hayes warned Interior Department officials about greenlighting these, writing, “Additional noise, vessel traffic and habitat modifications due to offshore wind development will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline.”
The report added, “Wind turbines may disrupt the dense concentration of zooplankton that the whales depend on for sustenance, potentially forcing them to spend more energy and take more risks searching elsewhere for food, Hayes said.”
This very admission by a NOAA Fisheries scientist should put a dent in the Biden plan to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
True conservation preaches wise use of natural resources and coexistence between people and nature. Maine lobstermen steward their lot well–even against the backdrop of onerous, strict environmental regulations.
By imposing unreasonable risk reduction demands, the 4,500 people directly and indirectly employed by this $1.4 billion industry face displacement from the workforce— without any added benefit to the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
If lobstermen are regulated out of existence, kiss both this 150-year industry and the right whale goodbye.
Nevertheless, it shouldn’t come down to sacrificing one for the other. Let’s save the whales and equally protect Maine lobstermen too.
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John Kerry gets an easy ride from Britain's climate establishment
For climate campaigners, Donald Trump was the anti-Christ, pooh-poohing climate change and withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement. But what of the Biden administration – is it really going to make the climate lobby any happier?
Things may be a little clearer following the visit to Britain of John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, who gave the annual Fulbright lecture at King’s College London on Friday evening. He was certainly keen to assert that America is now wearing a different pair of boots than it was under Trump, telling his audience ‘you need guideposts, and unfortunately in my country many of those guideposts were torn down.’
Britain’s climate establishment appears to treat US Democratic politicians very differently to Britain’s Conservative government
Kerry is very good at evangelising, preaching that the world is in peril and that it is down to all of us to do something about it. I wonder how many of his audience even questioned his claim that 10 million people are dying annually from the heat – a statistic that he used to illustrate the urgency of action in what he referred to as the world’s hottest year ever (a premature claim given that there are another three weeks to go yet). Kerry didn’t tell us where his 10 million figure came from, but it is likely a garbled reference to an Australian study published in Lancet Planetary Health in July 2021, which was widely reported – and misreported – at the time. Actually, the study claims that 5 million deaths a year can be attributed to extreme temperatures – either high or low. In fact, in the study cold-related deaths were found to outnumber heat-related deaths nearly ten to one. The bias towards cold-related deaths showed up even in Africa – indeed, paradoxically, it was especially strong there, with 1.18 million deaths a year attributed to the cold and 25,500 attributed to the heat.
While the study found a slight increasing trend in heat-related deaths – up by 0.21 percentage points between 2000 and 2019, this was outweighed by a fall in cold-related deaths, which fell by 0.51 percentage points over the same period. One of the authors of the study, Professor Yuming Guo of Monash University in Melbourne, noted that while heat-related deaths would like continue to rise with global warming, the net result in the short to medium term is likely to be fewer overall temperature-related deaths as fewer people are exposed to cold extremes.
It is quite shocking to catch out the US climate envoy appear to give such a misleading impression of what the evidence tells us on heat-related deaths. But let’s leave that aside for the moment. If you are a representative of the US government preaching about the urgency of tackling climate change you might be expected to be able to announce some pretty drastic action on the part of your country in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. So what was Kerry able to announce? He talked of technologies to cut methane emissions and carbon capture and storage (CCUS) – which angers many climate activists because they see it as a means for fossil fuel companies to justify their continued existence. He praised Egypt for closing down gas power stations (the gas, he suggested, was going to go the Europe instead, making up a much-needed shortfall). He reiterated plans he had announced at COP27 in Egypt for an Energy Transition Accelerator, whereby developing countries would be paid to close down coal plants and invest in renewable energy instead. He spoke of America bearing this and other financial burdens, such as helping developing countries cope with extreme weather.
But there was a gaping hole in what he said, which became more glaring the more he went on. Here he was, addressing an audience in a country which has legally-committed itself to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 but representing a country which has made no such commitment, and, to judge by Kerry, doesn’t look like doing so, either. The most the US has done is set itself a target – not a commitment written in law – to reduce emissions by 50 to 52 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030. When you had, in 1990, among the highest per-capita emissions in the world, that it not the most exacting of targets. Even Donald Trump made significant progress towards this target thanks to shale gas continuing to displace coal during his time in office.
After Kerry had sat down, former Labour MP Baroness Hayman took to the stage to berate the UK government for approving Britain’s first coal mine (producing coking coal for the steel industry) in 30 years. But why didn’t she turn round and berate John Kerry for the US’s continuing expansion of its fossil fuel industry? The US government expects gas production to increase from 98.1 billion cubic feet a day in 2022 to 100.4 billion cubic feet a day in 2023. The US will also produce 592 million tonnes of coal in 2022.
Britain’s climate establishment appears to treat US Democratic politicians very differently to Britain’s Conservative government. Not, of course, that we should be ungrateful for America’s expanding shale gas industry: last week Joe Biden did a deal with Rishi Sunak to export more liquified natural gas (LNG) to Britain – a resource without which we would be pretty stuffed at the moment.
Kerry isn’t stupid. He knows that he would never sell Britain’s climate and energy policy to his own voters. The Biden administration’s climate policy seems pretty clear: it will continue to promote shale gas over coal, and to tackle fugitive methane emissions from the gas industry. It will also pay for developing countries to forego the opportunity to grow their own economies with cheap fossil fuels. It will offer subsidies to investors in green energy and to buyers of electric cars, on the condition that they are made in America – a provision in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA as Kerry unfortunately referred to it, forgetting what those initials tend to stand for in Britain.
But no, America is not going to eliminate its fossil fuel industry; it is going to grow it. And neither is it going to try to force itself down the rabbit hole of net zero. But if Britain’s self-denial in refusing to exploit its own fossil fuel reserves creates export opportunities for US producers, then so much the better. Before the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the first President Bush made clear that the American lifestyle was not up for negotiation. That is still the position of Kerry and Biden. Were they British Conservative ministers they would be harangued at every opportunity by the same people who praise them now.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/john-kerry-gets-an-easy-ride-from-the-climate-establishment
*************************************************On potential energy solutions, too many Australians deny the facts on nuclear
Facts and truth are loose concepts in the climate alarmists’ arsenal. As we pass one “tipping point” declared a decade or two ago, we are warned of new tipping points a decade hence.
It is an endless campaign of urgency, more marketing than science. We muddled our way through the “critical decade” only to be galvanised for the “decisive decade” ahead.
The more you examine science, the more complex the unfolding patterns and policy responses become. The more you interrogate the facts, the more the catastrophist scenarios and simplistic solutions are exposed.
Just because climate scientists predict change does not give licence to journalists and activists to fit up normal weather events as proof of their mooted climate dystopia. Meanwhile the wildest claims of the climate alarmists pass unexamined.
Last Saturday Anthony Albanese visited Renmark, in South Australia’s Riverland, which is experiencing a major Murray River flood that could turn out to be the third worst of the past 100 years, matching 1974 but falling below the 1931 flood, and way short of the 1956 monster. Yet the Prime Minister used the current high river to push his alarmist message.
“Climate change is real,” he said, axiomatically. Then came the hyperventilation: “And I’ve witnessed since I’ve been leader of the Labor Party, I’ve visited areas of tropical rainforests that have never burnt before that have burnt during the bushfires, during the summer of 2019 and 2020, that came after, of course, a period of drought.”
This is a familiar routine of blaming recent natural events on climate change, suggesting this is all worse than it used to be, and boldly ascribing the same causal factor for droughts, floods and bushfires. Most media regurgitates this stuff; like pandemic paranoia, climate alarmism fits into that vortex where media and politicians find mutually beneficial hyperbole.
I asked the Prime Minister’s office which rainforest Albanese claimed had burned for the first time, and it did not answer. Back in that terrible summer there were two prominent references to “unprecedented” burning of rainforests, both of which were quickly debunked when I checked the record.
Guardian Australia ran Australian National University climate academic Joelle Gergis in September 2019. “I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” wrote Gergis, a member of the Climate Council. “As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning.”
Soon enough media was alive with the horror of rainforest burning for the first time. Yet in October 1951 The Cairns Post had reported, “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms … The fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.”
So, nearly 70 years earlier, before global warming, rainforest burned in Lamington. Why would media run with fantasy over reality?
Around the same time climate activist and former NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins told ABC regional radio: “There are fires breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn. The west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, subtropical rainforests, it’s all burning. And this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”
A few minutes of online research put the lie to that. The South Australian Chronicle reported in February 1915 about lives lost in the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated”. And The Canberra Times in 1982 reported a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000ha of dense rainforest on the northwest coast.
This fudging in favour of catastrophism is the rule rather than the exception. The lack of curiosity or scepticism from media is astounding, but then even the weather bureau plays along.
In early 2019 when the Bureau of Meteorology proclaimed a new national record for the highest overnight minimum of 35.9C it was dramatic news around the nation. But neither the BOM nor anyone else in the media bothered to reveal that the weather station, at the western NSW location of Noona, had been in place for little more than a year – so all we really knew was that it was the hottest night in Noona for about 18 months.
That same year on January 24 the BOM proclaimed the hottest maximum ever recorded in a capital city – 46.6C in Adelaide. Again, it was big news around the country, but the weather bureau failed to mention the same site had measured a maximum a full degree higher in 1939. The only reason the 2019 record beat the 1939 reading was because the BOM’s temperature “homogenisation” had revised the early record downwards by more than a degree. You do not have to question the BOM’s methodology to wonder why it is not forthcoming with these relevant facts when it announces its new records.
Examples abound. We are constantly told Pacific Islands are about to be swallowed by the ocean when studies show the landmass of islands is growing, both through natural processes and human intervention.
The bracing predictions of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are conveniently left unexamined – remember sea levels were to rise 6m, hurricanes were going to be more common and snow would retreat from Kilimanjaro – these and other predictions remain stubbornly unfulfilled.
Never mind, because politicians and media leap on every storm, drought, flood and fire as evidence we are experiencing these dire predictions already. This aversion to reality or disdain for truth extends to the energy policies proposed to deal with climate by reducing emissions.
There is a pretence being perpetrated on the public that this nation can power itself, affordably and reliably, on renewable energy plus storage. Worse, it is often insinuated that Australia’s efforts to reduce our 1 per cent share of global emissions can somehow change the weather, even though global emissions continue to rise.
Addressing the energy cost and supply crisis this week, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said: “This crisis is caused by coal and gas prices, anybody who says it’s caused by renewables is lying, and that needs to be called out, renewables are the solution to this crisis, not the cause.”
He had better tell Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe, who had this to say last month: “It is difficult to make predictions here, but it’s probable that the global capital stock that is used to produce energy will come under recurring pressure in the years ahead. If so, we could expect higher and more volatile energy prices during the transition to a more renewables-based energy supply.”
Sounds a hell of a lot like the transition to renewables is putting upward pressure on prices. This is obvious when you consider the massive investment required in intermittent generation, regulated transmission and storage, all of which need to be funded by taxpayers and consumers.
This was made plain by Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery last month when he predicted price rises of at least 35 per cent for consumers. “The cost of the transition is going to be for a raft of reasons more expensive than it otherwise would have been a few years ago, and we need to make the public aware of the cost of transition,” he told Ross Greenwood on Sky News.
Are Lowe and Dimery telling lies? I think not. Bowen wants to pretend that a trillion-dollar transition away from fossil fuels to a renewables-plus-storage model will be cheap and painless.
In fact, the evidence suggests it is impossible. The International Energy Agency says almost half the reductions to get to net zero by 2050 globally will have to come through “technologies that are currently at the demonstration or prototype phase” – you only have to look at the energy crises facing every economy going down the renewables path to see this reality playing out.
Yet even on potential energy solutions, too many deny the facts. Bowen, Albanese and even modern Labor’s nuclear energy realist, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, argue a domestic nuclear energy industry would be uneconomic – “the most expensive form of energy” – for Australia. This too, flies in the face of verifiable facts. The IEA’s 2020 analysis of electricity generation costs found that “electricity from the long-term operation of nuclear power plants constitutes the least cost option for low-carbon generation”. The politicians cite “most expensive” when the apolitical global experts talk about “least cost” – yet our national debate fails to interrogate these issues.
On current technology the great advantage of nuclear, despite considerable capital costs, is reliability, durability (a new plant will last at least 60 years) and the leveraging of existing transmission infrastructure. By comparison, renewables require massive overbuilds (so capacity triples demand to cover intermittency across different locations), battery storage (which is inadequate and prohibitively expensive), firming generation (probably gas) and at least 28,000km of transmission lines to link generation projects across vast distances. Additionally, solar panels and wind turbines will need to be replaced every 15 to 20 years.
So the initial capital cost of wind generation needs to be multiplied four or five times before it can be compared to nuclear. And nuclear is getting cheaper and easier with the development of small modular reactors.
If we have regard for the facts, and we want to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, no politician ought be able to reject nuclear on cost grounds. But there is far too little focus on reality right across this debate.
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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
