The infantile mentality of the renewables cult is on vivid display when they crow about wind or solar adding something meaningful to the grid. Always brief and fleeting, the 60 minutes when solar or wind did something special, is always trumpeted as if no one else cares about their power needs for the other 23 hours in a day. It’s a little like cheering on the plucky disabled kid, knowing he’ll never win the race but he should get full credit for trying.
A week or so back, it was solar’s time to shine (for a brief 30 minutes, anyway).
As Eric Worrall reports, the hubris was short-lived, as Australia coal-fired power plants picked up the yoke and kept the power coming after the Sun set, as they’ve done faithfully for the best part of a century.
Aussie Triumph? Solar Briefly Overtook Coal, then Failed at Sunset
Watts Up With That?
Eric Worrall
21 August 2022
If only those lazy engineers would figure out how to keep the solar panels working at night, when people actually need the electricity…
Solar briefly overtakes coal in Australia as number one source of power nationally
ABC News
Tom Lowrey
20 August 2022
Key points:
-
- Solar energy beat out coal as the leading source of power across the energy market for about half an hour on Friday
- Most of the power came from rooftop solar panels, rather than from large-scale solar farms
- Energy experts say it is a sign of things to come as Australia transitions to renewable energy
For about half an hour on Friday, the national energy market caught a glimpse of what a renewables-powered future might look like.
Solar energy eclipsed coal as the lead source of power across the energy market, which includes all states and territories except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
It was not the first time it had happened, but experts said it was the first time it had happened under relatively “normal” conditions.
It was not caused by a shortage of coal-fired power, and it happened just outside the sunniest time of the year.
Joshua Stabler, from energy consulting firm Energy Edge, said that made it particularly significant.
“This is the first time in business-as-usual that we’ve ever seen coal be dethroned as [the] number-one fuel source in the market,” he said.
“Coal has been at times up to 80 or 90 per cent of the amount of energy coming into the market.
“Which means that this is a big event.”
…
Coal still dominates the grid during the evening peak, when solar sources are no longer available.
But Richie Merzian, from progressive think tank the Australia Institute, said that was solvable through a transformation across the energy grid.
“We can make more energy on our rooftops in our communities, we can plug in more large-scale renewables, but we need a grid that can accommodate that,” he said. …
ABC News
What I love about this article is not one mention of batteries or storage. Until some genius figures out an affordable energy storage system, none of these green triumphs help ordinary consumers. Renewable capacity will continue to inflate household energy bills.
Whatever coal providers lose to renewables during the day, they more than make up for at night, or during unfavourable weather conditions, when the power they provide dominates the electricity grid.
We can forget about the gigantic Snowy 2 pumped storage system, which was the great green hope until someone bothered to actually run the numbers. Even the deep greens at Sydney Morning Herald nowadays call Snowy 2 a “White Elephant”.
The leverage coal providers hold over the Aussie government is they can simply pack up and leave, and crash the Australian electricity grid, if anyone attempts to interfere with them taking the same profits as they did before renewables entered the market.
We have already seen this leverage play out, during the recent crisis when the Aussie government tried to impose fixed prices on coal plants during a wind drought. We can only guess what coal operators said to government representatives behind closed doors, but the government response was an immediate offer of large capacity subsidies for coal plants, in return for a promise to keep their plants running.
Coal providers demanding the same profit they made before renewables entered the market, and being in a position to force the Australian government to comply, leaves ordinary Australians lumbered with the combined cost of running both the old coal powered electricity system and the new renewable electricity system. These costs will either appear directly in people’s energy bills, or indirectly via federal taxes, which are passed on to coal plant operators in the form of capacity subsidies.
One thing is clear. There will be no end to skyrocketing household electricity bills, so long as the Australian Federal Government keeps trying to inflict useless renewables on the market.
Watts Up With That?
STOP THESE THINGS 
The current Australian government seems hell bent on bringing our society to its knees. They are allowing our grid to be decentralised by literally blowing up baseload power generators. This is sabotage. It is also a well known strategy in WAR. Take out the grid!
This is creating a massive renewable energy footprint which is turning our regional areas into large scale heavy industrial zones. Has anyone been to Ararat in Victoria lately? You can drive up to the city’s lookout to witness this first hand. Look to the west and you will see the stunning Grampians in all their magnificent glory. Look back to the east to see what utter devastation mankind is capable of. Mount Ararat is surrounded by an ever growing sea of industrial scale wind turbines at its base. The irony of this spectacle does not escape me.
Look down upon the RES (UK) Ararat wind farm. Thank you very much Sir Robert McAlpine! See what international hedge fund managers and self interested parties have done to the Australian landscape. And all in an effort to supposedly save it? This is an entirely unsustainably business model. Thousands of tonnes of concrete have been poured into the ground, and there it will remain. The blades will need to be buried in landfill, only to have the whole process repeated when the site is ‘repowered’ with yet bigger and bigger turbines.
We are doing the complete opposite of what we should be doing as a growing society. We MUST replace old coal fired power generation with new HELE coal technology, because we know IT WORKS!!! If nuclear or fusion technology can be shown to replace or work in tandem with HELE coal plants, then build them too.
Victoria is now becoming the land of the long white knives!
I wonder what the Aboriginal translation for that is?
Reblogged this on Calculus of Decay .
When President Kennedy asked the US Atomic Energy Commission to simplify and streamline procedures and regulations to open nuclear plants, the Rockefeller Foundation leapt into action to sponsor fraudulent research to prove that the “Linear No Threshold” model of risk from radiation exposure was real, and that radiation-induced effects are heritable. Coal, oil, and gas interests still pay Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council…. to propagandize nuclear power fear.
Is it the same in Australia?
The California headline in April 2021 was that renewables had provided 95% of California’s electricity. April has the nicest weather, and therefore the lowest electricity demand.
How long did the party last? Four seconds.
If you want to know the price of renewables, look at your energy bill.