Herald Sun’s Terry McCrann: “The Climate Spectator’s a joke!”

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The Herald Sun’s leading numbers man, Terry McCrann is clearly on the STT team – he came out swinging a while back with a call to can the fans – in no uncertain terms (see our post here).

Well, Terry’s back and – from the way his latest piece reads – we think just might have been sneaking a peek at a few of our recent posts – it’s almost spooky.

This time Terry’s caught on to the unassailable FACT that hundreds of times each year the combined output from Australia’s wind farms registers little more than a big fat doughnut – which leaves coal, gas and hydro to take up the slack.

And we love the way Terry tips an enormous bucket on the “capo dei capi” of greentard bloggers, Tristan Edis of Climate Speculator fame.

Tristan has never had the strongest grip on energy market fundamentals – and is always a little too quick to cut his jib to suit his undying love affair with giant fans – he never lets the facts get in the way of lots of warm, fuzzy fan-tales.

After the massive national wind power fail a week back, Tristan tied himself in knots trying to put a positive gloss on the grand fan debacle.  But – as Terry points out – Tristan’s half-baked efforts to hose down the media disaster that followed scored a monumental FAIL.

As it is now, it will always be – no matter how many more fans get slung up – no matter how many more $billions worth of RECs get funnelled from power punters to wind weasels – the story will be the same in 10 years or 100 years – wind power is premised on a technology which was redundant before it even began.  It can only ever be delivered in crazy, random intervals and – even then – at EXORBITANT cost.

Over to Terry to tell the tale that STT followers know all too well.

When you need more power to keep the lights on the answer is most certainly NOT blowing in the wind
Herald Sun
Terry McCrann
23 January 2014

THANK God – or Gaia – for King Coal.

But for our coal-fired power stations, in last week’s heat, the lights and air conditioners and everything else would have gone off for Victorians and South Australians.

If we’d been relying on wind farms, we would have had multiple blackouts and hundreds, if not thousands of extra deaths.

No doubt to Green fanatics like Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, that would have been a price worth paying – just like the thousand or more who have drowned because of the disastrous Labor-Green asylum-seeker policies – to enable her consequence-lite moral (actually, totally IM-moral) preening.

As my colleague Andrew Bolt has pointed out, back in 2011, Senator Hanson-Young was asked after another 200 people had been lured to their deaths by the Labor policies they supported, whether the Greens took any responsibility.

Her reply: “Of course not. Tragedies happen, accidents happen.”

Presumably she’s say the same at the many, many, more deaths that would occur in a heatwave, if we were crazy enough to embrace her dark-Green agenda and close down our coal-fired power stations and replace them – correction, pretend to replace them – with wind and solar.

The evidence is clear, unambiguous and undeniable. Except of course to deniers like Hanson-Young and Tristan Edis of the – embarrassingly, also our – Climate Spectator website.

When you need more power to keep the lights on, to keep industry working, to, at its most basic, keep people alive, the answer is most certainly NOT blowing in the wind.

When we needed more power last week, wind went missing in action. This truth is captured in the graphs.

When power usage was exploding from 6000MW to over 10,000MW and peaking above 12,000MW, the – already marginal – contribution from wind was almost invariably going down.

The graphs show that on only one day of the four-days of plus-40 degree heat across southern Australia, did wind provide anything close to a sustained – but still essentially insignificant – contribution to Victorian and South Australian power supply.

On each of the other three days, wind power essentially went missing for a number of hours right at critical times. On Tuesday, wind output dropped almost to zero for a sustained period right at the peak of the heat in the afternoon.

The data comes from the excellent windfarmperformance website of Andrew Miskelly. He collects the raw data from the official AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – feed, and publishes wind farm output at five minute intervals for the full 24 hours of every day.

The data gives the lie to the core claim made for wind farms – that if you scatter them across enough territory, the wind will always “be blowing somewhere.”

Well, for three hours on Wednesday, we got barely 140 megawatts (MW) in total out the 28 wind farms “scattered” across NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.

That’s 140MW when demand was peaking at over 10,000MW. Thank you coal.

The wind farms are – jokingly – supposed to have a total capacity of 2660 MW. So we were getting power equal to just 5 per cent or so of that ‘capacity.’

There are two other equally significant – and utterly damming – messages in the graphs.

The first is that it is precisely when you need more power, that wind falls off. When it gets hot.

Through most of the heat of Tuesday, that 2660MW of joke-capacity was producing 600MW falling to 400MW. On Wednesday, apart from the three hours of essentially nothing, for the whole of the rest of the day, we got barely 300-400MW.

Thursday was the only day where we saw a sustained, semi-reasonable contribution. But then it was still mostly only around 900MW.

Friday saw some hours of around 1200MW. Except it spiked down to 400MW, or less than 4 per cent of power demand – smack in the middle of the afternoon, when we needed the power most.

This points to the second damming message. Precisely because the wind can stop blowing – and as we can see, it can stop blowing right across Southern Australia at the same time – you have to keep real power stations ticking over all the time, to be able to pick up the slack.

Even warmist propagandist Edis tacitly – and completely unknowingly – admits this, in his ludicrous attempt to claim reliability for wind.

On his website he wrote that AEMO had an “ace up its sleeve” – being able to accurately forecast the amount of wind power that would be generated 24-hours in advance.

He charted the forecasts against the actual output and showed a remarkable – indeed impressive – co-relation.

Leading him to triumphantly conclude that gave both AEMO and the generators advance notice as to when “wind generation was likely to be low such that they can be prepared to fill the gap.”

In doing so he beautifully – and so totally unknowingly – captured the point: that coal-fired power stations have to be kept ready to take over when …. the wind don’t blow.

It also didn’t help his case that his article carried a correction that the accurate forecasting wasn’t 24 hours ahead but just a single hour.

What a way to run a grid – checking whether the wind is blowing and then ‘forecasting’ it will continue for the next hour. And, oh by the way, having a nice coal-fired station to call up when it doesn’t.

Further and fundamentally, we can handle this when wind is barely 5 per cent or so – 10 per cent on a rare good day or hour – of the grid. That’s to say, while wind is still essentially a vanity highly expensive Green-warmist feel-good form of power generation.

It would be impossible – even with what Edis thinks is the luxury of a single hour’s notice – in a grid where wind was a much bigger component. That would be especially so, if the coal-fired stations were actually decommissioned.

In the classic dishonest warmist way, Edis tries to suggest that wind is actually more reliable because in the middle of last week, one of Loy Yang A’s generators went down, going from generating 450MW to zero in minutes.

“This outage was certainly not forecast in advance,” he snarkily added.

No it obviously wasn’t. But there’s one huge difference in a rare accident to a single generator in a coal-fired plant and the times – the many times – that the entire wind industry goes to zero or near enough to zero.

Perhaps Edis can tell us how many times have all the generators in all the coal-fired stations gone to zero at the same time?

That’s the absolutely damning point about the uselessness of wind. You can’t just take a ‘time-out’ when they go to zero. You either have blackouts or you substitute.

You have to keep extra coal-fired – or gas – stations ticking over, literally 24/7, to be able to supply power when …. what’s that phrase again? Oh yes …. when the wind don’t (so often) blow.
Herald Sun

Terry makes quite a point of referring to the data tossed up on Andrew Miskelly’s cracking windfarmperformance.info website.

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STT swears by it – wind weasels and their parasites (like Trisan Edis) just swear at it. Funny about that.

Well, just to rub a little more salt into the wounds here’s a recap of the recent energy market debacle – brought to Australia’s Eastern Grid courtesy of the great wind power fraud.

On the Eastern Grid Australia’s wind farms are spread from: Jamestown in the Mid-North, west to Cathedral Rocks on lower Eyre Peninsula and south to Millicent in South Australia; down to Cape Portland (Musselroe) and Woolnorth (Cape Grim) in Tasmania; all over Victoria; and right up to Cullerin on the New South Wales Tablelands.  Those hundreds of fans are spread out over a geographical expanse of 632,755 km².

That’s an area which is 2.75 times the combined area of England (130,395 km²) Scotland (78,387 km²) and Wales (20,761 km²) of 229,543 km².

So you’d think that if the yarn spun by greentards about the “wind always blowing somewhere” such that there’ll ALWAYS be oodles of wonderful “free” wind power had any legs it would run like the wind in Australia.

Well, let’s debunk that little furphy with some pictures – courtesy of windfarmperformance.info.  Oh, and if they appear out of focus, click on them, they’ll pop up in a new window and look clean and crisp.

Let’s start with Monday, 13 January.  From 10am from 5pm the entire fleet of fans connected to the Eastern Grid couldn’t top 300 MW (or 11% of their total capacity of 2,660 MW) and for most of that 7 hour stretch struggled to produce 150 MW (or 5.6% of total capacity) and all as demand picked up (as usual) around Noon and rose into the afternoon.

Surely things picked up the next day?

Tuesday, 14 January saw Australia’s wind power capital, South Australia (1,203 MW capacity) producing a risible 110 MW (or 9% of capacity) at the same time demand hit its peak and – as a result – the dispatch price rocketed from $70 per MW/h to $10,500 as peaking power operators cranked up OCGTs and diesel generators to keep the grid up and running (see our post here).

About the same time wind power output took a dive in SA, the output of all fans on the Eastern Grid amounted to less than 400 MW – or a derisory 15% of the total nameplate capacity of 2,660 MW.

At the same time (around 7pm) SA’s fans were producing 110 MW – ALL of the fans in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania collectively managed to add a laughable 290 MW to the 400 MW total – which represents a woeful 20% of their total nameplate capacity of 1,457 MW.

As they say, “what a difference a day makes” – so surely wind weasels were back in the game by Wednesday?

Wednesday, 15 January proving – yet again – that only the completely deluded would ever use “wind power” and “reliable” in a sentence.

From Noon to 3pm Australia’s entire collection of fans pumped out less than 160 MW (or less than 6% of capacity) and bottomed out (as demand peaks) at a laughable 90 MW (or 3.4% of capacity).

Every time this happens (and it happens over 100 times each year – see our post here) the dispatch price skyrockets from its usual average of around $40 per MW/h and often hits the $12,500 per MW/h regulated cap.

In the meantime, the grid is kept up and running with OCGTs and diesel generators that spew out 3-5 times the amount of CO2 that a modern coal-fired plant emits for the same given output.

And if you think what we’ve laid out above was an aberration, then keep a watch on windfarmperformance.info this week.  STT’s bet is that wind power output will register an enormous FAIL – yet again. South-Eastern Australia is set for a run of typically warm summers days, with a large high pressure system sitting over Victoria, which means no wind and, accordingly, no wind power.

As a foretaste, on Australia Day (26 January) the total output from Australia’s fans struggled to top 200 MW (or 7.5% of capacity) for around 8 hours from Noon (right when the juice was needed most).

All this would be hilarious if someone else was paying for it – but the “joke” is all at taxpayer and power punter expense.