Guest essay by Eric Worrall
South Australia’s catastrophic renewables policies have been endorsed by former Vice-President Al Gore; Gore considers South Australia to be a climate world leader.
Donald Trump ‘isolated’ on climate change: Al Gore says rest of world moving on without US President
7.30 By Callum Denness
The United States will meet or exceed its Paris Agreement emissions targets despite an increasingly isolated President Donald Trump withdrawing from the accord, former vice-president Al Gore says.
In Australia to promote his latest film, An Inconvenient Sequel, the climate campaigner and one-time presidential candidate said Mr Trump was out of step domestically and internationally.
“The country as a whole is going to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement, regardless of what Donald Trump says or does,” Mr Gore told 7.30.
…
Disputing the argument renewable energy is less reliable and more expensive than conventional power sources, Mr Gore praised South Australia’s recently struck deal to build a battery storage facility with Tesla.
“The electricity from both solar and wind continues to come down every single year. And the new historic development is battery storage is coming down significantly in cost,” Mr Gore said.
“And this historic announcement that South Australia is leading the entire world with the installation of the largest battery in the world, it will be the first of many to come.”
…
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-10/donald-trump-isolated-on-climate-change-says-al-gore/8693806
The escapades of South Australia, the world’s renewable crash test dummy, regularly appears in WUWT. But for people suffering blackouts, surging electricity costs, economic hardship, and inane political excuses for their ongoing misery, South Australia’s botched energy policies are no laughing matter.
Will the new battery pack help? The South Australian grid typically draws around 800Mw-2Gw of electricity.
100MWh is not a lot in the context of 800Mw-2Gw of power demand.
The cost of the battery is not clear – estimates range between AUD $33 million to $240 million.
Yes the battery might give a few minutes of breathing space to fire up a backup gas generator, if clouds cover the sun or the wind dies. No the battery will not help if the vagaries of seasonal weather deliver several months of unusually low wind, as just recently occurred in South Australia.
South Australia could solve their problems almost overnight by restoring baseload capacity. They don’t even have to go for a fossil fuel based solution. South Australia has one of the largest deposits of Uranium in the world. One large nuclear reactor could easily produce all their energy needs without emitting CO2. Nuclear power is frequently proposed in South Australia. Nuclear power works – you can build a stable, competitive economy on the back of zero emissions nuclear power.
Instead the South Australian government persist with hideously expensive, unstable, and untested solutions, with using their people as guinea pigs to see what breaks first – the South Australian electric grid, or the South Australian people’s patience with their blundering politicians.
South Australia’s policy in my opinion represents a patchwork bandaid approach to power grids. Too much instability? Add a battery. Unseasonably slow winds? Add more solar or wind. Even slower winds? Add even more solar or wind. Better add another battery to cope with all that extra solar and wind.
It seems very unlikely that such a patchwork effort to create a power grid could ever approach the stability of a grid which offers true weather independent baseload capacity. No matter how much extra renewable capacity is added, plausible intermittency scenarios exist which lead to grid failure. And we haven’t even considered the load of all the electric cars South Australia expects to be able to attach to their grid the near future.
Why should anyone care about what happens in South Australia – other than South Australians of course? The reason is that what happens in South Australia will have repercussions elsewhere.
If South Australia declares victory over renewable instability, regardless of how unjustified or premature their declaration, it is likely the South Australian template for grid chaos will be attempted elsewhere, maybe in your home state. I think from Al Gore’s words of endorsement we can reasonably conclude that South Australia’s nightmare electrical grid problems are Gore’s template for the entire world.
Mr Gore has made a new climate scare movie has he? Well I welcome that because I am sure it will list all the failed prophecies he made in his “Inconvenient Truth” original
Some companies departing S Australia due to rising electricity prices and unreliable power supply:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/almost-200-jobs-lost-as-coca-cola-closes-south-australia-plant/news-story/dd631661be27941ed3058bb5508db11f
Ironically – a recycling firm:
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/jobs/recycling-firm-to-shut-35-jobs-lost-as-sa-government-ignores-plea-for-help-over-soaring-power-bills/news-story/d24d29ce9ba072d5adbc4d47ab06f4b9
BHP Billiton shed 500 jobs – and get the background on Tim Flato – you couldn’t make this stuff up!
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/stopthesethings.com/2016/03/06/wind-power-costs-crushing-south-australian-businesses-firms-hit-with-90-price-hike/amp/
And of course the departure of Holden motors:
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/jobs/federal-budget-2017-help-on-electricity-prices-housing-and-100-million-for-after-holden-closes-in-sa/news-story/b8eb848fddae092eaedda70952771d33
And no doubt many more…
Would the last one to leave South Australia please turn off the lights … O wait …
Would the last person to leave SA please blow out the candle.
South Australia has a good natural gas supply, some of it from its own section of the Cooper Basin. The best way they can ensure the lights stay on and industry keeps running is to back up their excellent renewable energy assets by encouraging distributed base-load CCHP (Combined Cooling Heating & Power) utilising that gas. CCHP meets everyday baseload with up to 90% efficiency, and is right there when you need it and the sun fails or the wind don’t blow.
The gas is all sold. The tight gas in sandstone needs vast amounts of water to frack and squeeze it out. Lots of deep holes. No planning, no reservation for local use.
Lastly, the oil is running out, that is 28% of SA’s government revenue.
Very hard times are coming in SA.
The gas is sold as Geoff states, it’s one reason why gas prices are through the roof in Australia, even more so in SA. And fracking is simply banned in SA. Then we have traitors like Turnbull re-activating a carbon tax July 1st 2016. He now wants a carbon tax on certain imported vehicles. And we have the idiot Finkle talking about energy independence, energy security, renewable energy, reduced emissions and reduced costs to the consumer. Yes, we have been truly “Finkled”.
There was an interesting article that The Wall Street journal had on line a couple of days ago. It mentioned that eastern Australia has closed a number of coal power plants at the same time as they were increasing solar and wind. They figured that gas power plants could kick in when needed. That was all after the government of Australia signed 20 year agreements to sell most of their natural gas to other countries. Now south and east Australia often doesn’t have enough natural gas to run the power plant at full load when needed. Recently that lead to 90,000 home a businesses having their electricity shut off.
Western Australia has plenty of natural gas but there are not any pipelines connecting western and eastern halves of the country.
This is truly a disaster created by short sighted narrow minded politicians. Just the kind of people The Great Goracle likes to praise as saving the future.
The Gore Effect strikes again. Gore visits Melbourne, Melbourne wakes to freezing temps.
Now if investigative journalism was not an anti diluvial concept, I would interview the Champagne champions asking if they would pick up the tab for saving the planet in keeping with their honour-bound philosophical imperative.
Somebody please do this. If I could I would say to them I am worried about the planet and having admired their taking the lead on this existential matter, would they be prepared to put up their fortunes as most ordinary folk were being asked to do with their hard-won few extra dollars to save their grandchildren and mine (mine are actually not so badly off, I’m serving up antidotes for their de-education. One of their subject texts has an ‘x’ on Iqaluit saying “Future site of the summer Olympics?” We laughed and joked about the frigid water sports, beach volleyball, and track in parkas. )
So long as South Australians keep on voting in idiots, they’re going to get idiotic governance. They’ve no grounds for complaint when they end up sitting shivering in the dark. They voted, they got.
Only the minority of SAians who voted for losing parties of pragmatic policy are worth a sympathetic thought.
South Australia — the energy equivalent of Merkel’s Germany. Consistently voting to achieve suicide.
Bit like ths. Mindless prats.
Has anyone scripted a scenario, post..Gore election as President?
And get it published, and made into a movie, with Inconvenient Truths graphically presented?
The mind boggles, esp,lly if the tenor of the original piece of Gore Crap is replicated!!
Posted it before but believe it merits repeating. I live in Algores political and actual homeland. He sold out last Governor on a Green supply chain primed with tax dollars. The whole thing collapsed in on itself people. Google Hemlock semiconductor. That is the reality of Al Gore-o-nomics. Thank you for sending Kieth Urban. We apologize for Gore
Well, I’m glad Al Gore praised the South Australians. After all, the effort to get his praise has cost them a tremendous amount of money and aggravation.
Does someone here have an estimated of the actual costs per person the people of South Australia have paid in order to get his praise?
All of Australia needs political reform. You may vote because of the policies of the party leader and then have Jim deposed by someone you would never have voted for (Abbot /Turnbull case). This sort of thing should trigger another election. Also, the choices should be real (the problem with the EU – left same as right and even they have to defer to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels). You folk in Oz need a disruptive constitutional conference. or start planting a lot of bananas.
Reminds me of this post below.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/australias_green_delusions_a_diesel_in_the_shed.html
Australia’s green delusions: A diesel in the shed
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/australias_green_delusions_a_diesel_in_the_shed.html#ixzz4mZsf8FIg
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Al Gore helped to make this bed and now he has to lie in it. He could no more call S. Australia’s miserable renewable energy policy a failure than he can be the 43rd US President. The cult dogma must be aped, the cultists reward pathways need constant reinforcement. Al Gore is one of the high priests of the cult of climate scientology.
I may have missed it somewhere, but how exactly is this battery going to be charged?
My understanding is that the battery is necessary because SA has a capacity deficit. That being the case, where are the excess electrons, needed by the battery, going to come from?
Of course, being the old fogey that I am, I took engineering 101 about 50 years ago. That was the patriarchal old white man science, not the exciting new multicultural stuff.
It’s going to come from their plentiful supply of renewable energy. They won’t rely on interstate interconnectors to fossil fuel generation, oh wait…
People are being told this battery is to “smooth” the dips when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine. They are conveniently not told that there is no capacity in renewable generation, not nameplate capacity, actual generation to keep the lights on and industry going at the same time as charging this rediculous battery system.
I am looking forward to seeing it fail in spectacular fashion. But them Musk will already have his money and fame.
The first western economy that collapses and leaves its people huddling in soup lines for handouts will be praised by Gore as bravely leading the way to s sustainable future.
He will speak from a safe distance, should there be such a distance.
I just want to note that the Gore Effect has been validated again. His visit down here has been accompanied by snow falls, frost, even black ice here in Tasmania, which has resulted in a couple of road accident deaths.
It is amazing how a State settled by free enterprise Brits and hard working Germans (my ancestors on my father’s side – my mother’s people were… hard working Germans) can go so wrong.
I lived in South Australia for 15 years from 1978 on.
At Gawler, north of Adelaide there was a horseshoe bridge over the railway line through town. The track was re- ballasted but someone forgot to change the height gauges upstream. So a train came and damaged the bridge which took a few months to repair. No sooner finished when it happened again! Only more damage. About that time the State government fisheries research vessel was being re-furbished and re-fitted with all the best state of the art gear. When re-launched into the millpond calm Port River it sat there for a few minutes and promptly turned turtle and sank. So a month of wrangling ensued over who had the job of re-floating it.
Government incompetence is nothing new in SA. I thought at the time the slogan on the numberplates should read “SA State of Incompetence”.
Have never regretted leaving. It has a few nice places to visit but I don’t recommend living there.
Al Gore only was told one side of the story was he told about all the blackouts and all the workers losing there jobs .http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-09/political-leadership-needed-to-secure-future-of-energy-supply/8339116
The prestige of being ‘the Leader’ is kind of thin when the followers are lemmings.
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The use of the battery for other purposes, such as contributing to extreme peak demand, or help to meet “TV pickup” when it’s half time in the Australian Rules final, or even to allow a gas fired genset to start up, is limited by the 100MW export capacity.