Talk a big game and you’d better be prepared to back it up. The wind and sun cult have been telling us that we’re well on our way to wind and solar powered future, for years now. But the prevalence of calm nights says otherwise.
Over the last 6 months, the sun has been setting with alarming predictability, and our betting is that it will continue to do so; and over that time frame the wind has failed to cooperate with the cult’s wild claims about a grand wind and solar transition.
Step behind the curtain, and you’ll soon discover the reality: every single MW of wind or solar capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with a MW of capacity from a meaningful power generation source, which means either coal, gas, hydro and nuclear.
As the team from Jo Nova explain below that reality comes with a staggering price tag for which you, the power consumer and taxpayer, will ultimately be liable.
$100m wasted? Gas plant revved up after five years on standby — another hidden cost of renewable energy
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
3 July 2024
The real cost of back up
Imagine building and maintaining a perfectly good gas plant and then having it sit around for five whole years “just in case”?
There’s been a wind drought in the last three months in Australia, which meant hydro power had been used more than expected to fill the gap. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s been dry spell for most of the last year in Tasmania too and the dams were getting low. So on June 6th, the Combined Cycle Gas plant at Tamar Valley was set up to run for the first time since 2019.
Back in 2016 the maintenance costs of the keeping the CCGT at Tamar Valley on “30 day” standby was $12 to $24 million a year, depending on who you asked. So the five year cost of gas backup is in the order of $100 million, but those costs will be slapped on the gas plant bill, when really they’re a weather dependent renewables cost. What we need is reliable energy, not random electricity.
If energy companies were only paid for reliable dispatchable power, the wind and solar plants would have to build their own “back up gas plants” that sit around idle for years, and juggle their own generators. So they’d all go out of business by breakfast. Why build a perfectly good gas plant with vast wind and hydro complex, when you could just build the gas plant and get what you need? Fossil fuels are essential, renewables are superfluous weather-changing talismen.
From WattClarity: This confirms that it’s the first time in just over 5 years that the combined cycle unit has seen a run!
Naturally Hydro Tasmania blame the drought, not the failing wind farms. But when the wind doesn’t blow, hydro likes to make profits from the price spikes, and there have been plenty of those lately.
In 2009 the whole gas plant was built for $230 million dollars. But the 2016 power debacle where the Basslink cable broke during a drought, cost the state $560 million dollars.
The only thing worse than the cost of back up power, is the cost of blackouts.
The Tamar Valley Power Station has four units, three are peaking gas units (adding up to 178MW), and one more efficient baseload turbine (CCGT) of 210MW.
Jo Nova Blog
STOP THESE THINGS 
Paul Miskelly signalled in 2012 with his major paper on wind droughts that there should be a MW of gas capacity installed to back up every MW of wind capacity.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1260/0958-305x.23.8.1233
The documentation of wind droughts (not a term used until two or three years ago) by Anton Lang and the Miskelly team should have killed the dream of a transition to wind power but nobody with any influence noticed and the meterologists never mentioned low wind periods either.
This is an overview of the wind drought story and what it means for the net zero project,
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2024/06/things-that-go-slump-in-the-night/
Wind droughts will kill the green-power fantasy, and they have the potential to deal a massive blow to our lifestyle, depending as we do on abundant, reliable and affordable power.
The flight from coal has gone as far as it can go for the time being due to the break in wind and solar input on nights with little or no wind. It’s as simple as ABC.
So the transition to wind and solar power can’t proceed with current storage technology.
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/11/approaching-the-tipping-point/
All over the western world where net zero policies are in place, grids are approaching the tipping point and in the case of Britain, Germany and South Australia they have passed that point and rely on imports to keep the lights with industrialization as a form of demand management.
Serious questions have to be asked about the silence of meteorologists on wind droughts. At the same time the responsible authorities should be called to account for their failure to check the wind supply before connecting intermittent energy to the grid.
We need to start planning what to do with these sky scraping wind sticks as the deluded suddenly start waking up to this scam having thought they were “saving the planet” for the last 20+ years now realizing they are wrecking it and only saving some portfolios and pension funds which is really what all this fake clean energy is all about. Maybe the next scam will be to use the towers to filter viruses which is a struggling branch of the dying tree of pseudoscience so as to pull these imaginary particles from the air whereas Mother Nature put trees there for that purpose of filtration as these camouflage energy sticks chop all those trees down. I would expect that the pitch to start putting huge filters up there on top of these towers after taking down the blades and generators of this disabled power racket will then be a new filtering scam that will pacify those who routinely get sucked into all the fear porn generated by the propaganda systems that suck massive quantities of energy.
Here’s a great overview of how much land is being destroyed there in Queensland.
https://www.rainforestreserves.org.au/