Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Sydney Morning Herald, MIT and University of Sydney Graduate Saul Griffith thinks we can completely replace the Australian vehicle fleet with EVs by 2030, though more research is required into decarbonising heavy industry.
Carbon dreaming: how to fix the climate crisis
By Nick O’Malley and Peter Hannam
August 14, 2021 — 12.01am…
One person worth asking is engineer and physicist Saul Griffith, who lives in a rambling suburban home backing onto the rainforest of the Illawarra escarpment at Austinmer south of Sydney.
Before he fled a locked down Los Angeles to return to Australia, Griffith, a graduate of the University of Sydney and MIT, completed the most detailed inventory of how American households use power.
He and a team at one of the non-profit organisations he co-founded, Rewiring America, worked out how much power and gas American homes and small businesses used for transport, heating, cooling and lighting and household appliances.
…
NSW Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean says Griffith, who he uses as a “sounding board” on similar issues, is “basically a genius”.
So can Australia decarbonise at the speed the IPCC says is necessary?
“Oh yeah,” says Griffith. “We could shit it in.”
Griffith’s mantra for Australia is the same as it is for America – electrify everything. Indeed he is establishing a Rewiring Australia organisation to advocate for such policies.
By his calculations Australia can reduce emissions by more than 50 per cent by the end of the decade by replacing gas and coal-fired power with renewables and helping households, small business and light-manufacturing deploy solar and battery technology to replace internal combustion vehicles as well as gas-burning water and space heating appliances.
…
A further benefit of a large electric vehicle fleet would be that the batteries in parked cars would serve as a vast and interconnected back-up to the grid.
…
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbon-dreaming-how-to-fix-the-climate-crisis-20210812-p58ici.html
Skipping past the bit where Saul Griffith proves Santa Claus is real, by ensuring everyone in Australia receives a brand new EV, without massive tax hikes, vastly increased household or government debt, or other major economic dislocations, and overlooking Australia’s huge distances, imagine for a moment that your brand new EV was part of the grid battery backup system.
It is a freezing cold, cloudy windless winter morning, the solar panels have not yet come on stream, but everyone switched on their home heating to drive back the morning chill, as soon as they got out of bed. Some people left the heating on all night. Many people had a hot shower or bath to shake off the chill – they had to use electricity, because the solar hot water system is not yet receiving enough sunlight. Having enjoyed a breakfast of eggs on toast (its cold) and a hot coffee or two, now you need to get work. So you hop into your shiny new EV, which has been draining back into the grid all night to cover the winter surge in demand, and push the start button.
I don’t think you need to be a certified genius to figure out what happens next.
A true genius if his calculations tell us how to do it. And we all agree that those calcs are good.
A little word like ‘scale’ seems to crop up in my head when people say thing like ‘the whole country’.
It’s like they have no concept of size and scale…..
And the thought of using electric vehicle batteries as the grid storage is so malevolent, only a true environmentalist could ever consider it.
Quite – also massively shortening their useable life. Oh well, think of all the new jobs generated trying to recycle these horribly dangerous items!
All that research to develop batteries with a useable capacity, if barely. With the stroke of a pen the capacity of a parked EV reduced at random. (Well not really random, but varying with the weather.)
Plus you charge your car to go to work, then find out someone needed a bath and the grid left you with 50% charge.
It’s not like cars have massive over capacity or the best way to run grid storage is for everyone to take it to the city and back every single day.
Obviously not much of that toxic, white, patriarchal science behind these ideas.
Any you get to pay for the privilege of providing electric power to your neighbors, after paying to charge your EV battery!
Not to mention the fact that you’ll be paying even more to replace the battery when its service life is reduced.
Well when the government will eventually be able toggle your EV on or off (disable it) along with all the tracking and useage data sent to government computers for mileage billing, it will be simple.
There will be a screen message on EV’s main display that informs the driver the car is “temporarily” disabled whilst the grid is using the EV battery to keep the lights and to leave it plugged in. If the operator unplugs the EV from the charge/discharge outlet, the vehicle will go into a longer disabled period until the owner pays a fine for denying the vehicle battery’s stored power to grid.
Consider what happens when they take remote control and the battery temperature is less than 32F.
By that time (probably in about 6 months or so at the rate it’s going), your “social credit” score will have as much bearing on whether you’ll be able to start your car or not, and if so, how far from your designated habitation zone you will be privileged to travel. Maybe it will be 5km, maybe it will be 10km.
Perhaps that is why these proponents of the fast approaching global authoritarian dictatorship are so positive about EVs, range won’t matter because you simply will not be authorised to travel far. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy! OR ELSE!
You will definitely need a COVID19, variant Omega, passport before the Gooberment will allow you to drive anywhere.
You mean the Googlement.
The inverter power loss converting EV voltage to grid would be staggering. Why would anybody pay for electricity to charge their vehicle and then donate that back to the grid? Who would let their vehicle battery be drained be drained at random times, so that you never knew if your vehicle was avalable for use?
So your socal credit score doesn’t go negative, comrade.
You wouldn’t want that now, would you?
No, I thought not.
You’re right. You pay a premium to power up your vehicle, then they simply take that power back without any compensation at all.
What a money making circle that is for the power company.
Now, I have not investigated this at all, but it seems to me that current EV’s are not equipped to communicate and back feed to the grid. SO complete replacement of the EV fleet also then.
It is fortuitous that clever man happened to feel homesick about now, and happened to meet the minister. Does anyone else smell a coordinating capitalist plot. Like some heads of state happen to think of inviting Greta to come and harangue their governments.
It would work, if only we could get the sun to shine at night.
I would hope if my car was part of the national grid, it would be given to me free.
If this sort of scheme is put in place,”free” would be an irrelevant term, as the society would be all out commie.
Exactly, and any LITTLE thing that went wrong, and every BIG thing that went wrong (and there would be lots of both big and little things going wrong, such that it would make Venezuela look positively attractive and wonderful), would be multiplied by the entire population.
Frackin’ Socialists and Progressives just never learn from previous Communists examples of how central planners always manage to plant their heads far up their own asses, no matter how smart they think they are. I’d think them a lot smarter if they could actually learn from events like the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, the Killing Fields, the Gulag, the Final Solution, and lesser evils such as North Korea and Cuban royal monarchies, and in Venezuela, the Chavez family looting to go along with an inexplicable toilet paper shortage, and pet and zoo animal national menus and the ruination of the formerly profitable Venezuelan oil industry.
You’d eventually pay for it, somehow.
This point has been frequently mentioned here at WUWT, but always bears reminding.
Grid electricity attributes:
Pick two. All three is not an option.
If you pick emissions-free than neither of the other two will be available.
You can surely buy some inexpensive solar panels to provide 120/240V power for your home but only when the sun is shining.
It would be affordable.
It would be emissions-free.
But it would be completely dependent on direct sunlight so completely unreliable.
There are no solar panels being made from recent sunshine. All have required pre-historic sunshine in their manufacture.
The smelting anodes are close to all carbon made from petroleum coke and pitch binder:
Oh I understand the massive carbon footprint in the manufacturing tail of solar panels. But these solar PV production emissions are all in China where they apparently don’t count according to the IPCC…. even though its one atmosphere we all share.
The capacity factor of my roof top solar is 15.5%.
That is actual power (kwhr) produced over a year divided by Nameplate x hours in one year.
Note that daily winter production is only 30% of Summer daily production. This is another fact that the renewable proponents ignore.
Remember that PV “nameplate” ratings (voltage, current, power) are only useful for system designing, which have to be done using maximum values for safety reasons, per the National Electric Code. Any relation to the energy that might be produced in a given location is minimal.
The only cheap solar panels to be had are either heavily subsidized or used. The used one may produce some power, for a while, but much less than advertised.
Totally agree. That is a good list.
Nuclear is affordable, reliable and as emissions-free as it gets.
As evidence, I present to you… France!
But France like German Sweden Japan US etc are shutting down their Nuclear Fleet
Because they are ‘ pwned’ by China, who are building many nukes, of many flavours: conventional, EPR, homegrown APR, even a Thorium MSR. They are building wind and solar too, yes, but they are also building much more coal fired power plants.
Defining reliable:
I would set it at 2 hours or less power outage per year. That equates to:
(8,760 – 2 hrs) / 8,760hrs/yr x 100% = 99.98% annual reliability.
99.98% reliability is roughly what most Americans have come to expect. Californians are currently being groomed for expectations of drastically less reliability.
Reliable would mean you can depend on it and plan. No power plant has 99.98% availability, but one is able to plan preventive maintenance, and if something is starting to fail, usually there’s some kind of warning, and it would be rare anyway. But if the utility is crossing it’s fingers every day hoping that the wind blows in the correct range and that there’s no clouds, isn’t just a life of stress and aggravation? I take it that there are no penalties if a ‘renewable’ provider can’t produce when – and yet, I know that various producers have been paid to put the brakes on the turbines when too much power is being produced. Ca – Ching! for the green investors, not so much for the utility customers.
Nuclear would be almost emissions free, but environmentalists wouldn’t have a bar of it.
Never going to happen any party going into an election with that mandate and how voters feel about it would get backlash. Lefties can dream up any calculations they like but no-one is going to be stupid enough to try it as a policy.
Not sure about Australia, but in Alberta, we’d have to expand the existing electric transmission and distribution systems by a factor of about 7 to 10 for electrification of the economy to work. Using electricity instead of natural gas in residential heating and water heating alone would increase annual consumption at home from about 600 kWh per month to about 3000 kWh per month, and that does not include the ability to charge electric vehicles. Of course, some wish to eliminate private vehicles anyway. It helps with lockdowns.
Depending on a lot of variables, for the average household, the vehicle energy use is around about the same as the household energy use. So this plan doubles power use to start with.
Hello, Mr. Stubbings. I live in Edmonton. Whenever I hear somebody talking about using wind or solar to electrify the world, I ask them to calculate what it would cost to electrify Rimbey What would you have to pay for the land for the wind turbines? What would the turbines cost, and their installation, and connection to the existing grid? What would you have to pay to maintain the natural gas power plants you’d need to smooth out the unpredictable irregularities of wind- generated electrical power? The price tag might be 100 million dollars.
Rimbey has a population of 2500.
The green nuts trying to ban or phase out gas heating and cooking has really surprised me – shows the alarmists actually believe the crap they have been spewing and that they are as stupid as a bag of …insert favourite item here…. The green lobbiests are making a mint currently but pushing for the phase out of natural gas will back fire, as there is no way enough wind and solar can be produced, deployed and backed up in any meaningful time frame. These idiots really believe that there’s a climate red alert and that the temperature is out of control, hurtling along at the insane speed of 1.5°C per century.
/sarc (in case any idiot greens think I’m agreeing with them)
Jordan Peterson said it in one of his talks, “There is little connection between intelligence and wisdom”. This is why we see very intelligent people pursuing agendas that do not appear to be based in reality.
I would guess that Saul wears slip on shoes or shoes with Velcro fasteners.
Hey, I wear shoes with velcro fasteners, but then I am NOT a ‘genius’! I wear them because at my age, 82, shoelaces just drive me right up the wall!
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
I think that the issue here is that this guy gets to make good coin for throwing in brussels sprouts and going “Mmmmm. That looks so scrumptious”.
Ah, so that’s why no-one eats my fruit salad 🙂
Brussels sprouts are scrumptious, preferably straight off the plant stalk, if you must cook them … steam for 5mins max; do not boil, serve with butter & black pepper.
Here are some nice recipes –
https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/collections/brussels-sprouts-recipes/
They’re unbelievably tasty fried in olive oil with plenty of salt & pepper
Shit would taste good prepared in that manner.
Got to admit I have a taste for sprouts.
And yes, steamed and then served with butter.. 😀
Brussel Sprouts are little cabbages from hell.
My father said of a friend of mine: very bright but no common sense. Applies here.
That truism is nowhere more evident than Noam Chomsky’s politics. He is arguably one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century and still believes that socialism is a viable alternative to a free market.
I think technically he is an anarcho-syndicalist, which is a dishonest linguist’s way of saying he knows socialism is a catastrophe but he’s not giving up on the dream, so he gave it a different name.
Now there’s a mouthful and a half. I believe I heard someone use that term years back but I was stone cold sober at the time and couldn’t get my head around the explanation. I missed my chance. Do they come in pairs, groups or clutches, like eggs? Only a linguist could invent one of those. Only a fool could believe such baffle-gab.
Thanks for the memories.
His knowledge of the crimes of the American empire is impressive but when it comes to economics his discourse degenerates to normative hand waving.
Why are so many intelligent people convinced that economics is just “common sense” and good intentions?
I’m a Canadian and was proud of it until my countrymen elected Trudeau. I grew up with a chip on my shoulder about how much better we were than Americans. My interest in Donald Trump (very negative) awakened interest in the US. I read the Constitution and from there gradually expanded my grasp of the country, its history, culture and system of government.
As I watched the thing unfold my respect for Trump started to grow, but more to the point, my respect for the US grew exponentially. It really is the last bastion against the stupidity of so many of the rest, toying with socialism. If I’ve learned 1 thing it is: you can’t polish a turd, and there is no clean end to pick it up with.
America has no crimes to answer for that have not been recompensed in spades. Every country has a history … none have made such an effort to repair the damage and make it so such things don’t happen again.
Cheers
so how do you reckon the very early just announced elections gunna go?
trying to get re elected before covid and vaxxing falls over?
I have to believe our little actor already knows something we don’t. He’s got some cagy people around him and look what he has for opposition. There is no conservative party. If I was a betting man I’d back Justine … he’s pretty and the girlies love him.
He actually believes that he could run things better, not some anonymous socialist group. That’s the problem with intelligent but idiot socialists and also with trust-fund socialists – they seem to think that they’ll get to run things but foolishly are ignorant of the fact that they will be first put up against the wall when the revolution comes.
No totalitarian regime will tolerate a loud-mouth know-it-all founder. One must keep up on changing dogma.
These people have no intention of running anything. They just like to kibitz those who do … and give instructions. They aren’t doers. They’re deep thinkers who live in a faerie tale world of make believe.
You’re right though, as always happens, the socialist leaders don’t trust intellectuals and political theorists any more than we do. They’re among the 1st “useful idiots” to get disappeared,while being lauded as heroes of the people. Chomsky may be brilliant but he’s politically naive.
Intelligence and Wisdom are different. Even 1st edition DnD knew that!
(don’t mock. You all secretly still own some D20s! 😛 )
I’d like to see him harvest a field of wheat with an EV header, or cart the grain to the silo, or even feed some sheep (put 1-2ton of hay and grain in tray/trailer and drive it around rough and/or hilly terrain).
This “genius” lives in a bubble of delusion, and if he or his ilk gets their way we all will have to pay the price.
what worse is Aus let the mongrel back IN!!
MIT used to be a decent engineering school. But it caught the climate disease from badly infected neighbor Harvard when Lindzen retired in 2012. This doofus is a direct result.
The Sloan School infected the Engineering Schools first.
Knowing all about something is in no way related to understanding it. And being able to string words together is not intelligence.
Definitely not better call Saul. I’d advise this student to first finish his studies before lecturing the rest of us.
“To study” is an obsolete verb. In its way to be cancelled because of its white supremacist connotations.
No. Go out and work first in the nuts and bolts of whatever you are trying understand before trying to get people to believe in your pontifications.
This one always cracks me up.
Yep may as well that the wheels off them since they won’t be going anywhere in the morning.
Please someone tell the young man that long ago tramways were invented… as they are permanently “interconnected” to the grid, they do not need batteries.
Can you imagine what sophisticated Chinese hackers could do to the grid and transportation systems?
I really doubt that they will have to be all that sophisticated or Chinese.
One that is currently not possible with EV batteries. You need to convert the power back to AC and synchronize it with the grid before you can use car batteries in that way.
Either existing charges will all have to be retrofitted with new circuitry, or you are going to have to add the circuitry to the car itself.
Well, yeah, if you want to go all facty on us.
exactly, but facts are only an interesting aside, not part of any policy making.
Oh that little problem will be solved by hand waving.
That is Simonesque logic
That would be true of our bank accounts being similarly tied in to the government exchequer. Just imagine a govrnment that never had to budget because the entire population would collectively cover all over spending.
hmm
in Aus they hit us with “levies” on top of taxes to pay for their F ups
Double taxation is supposed to banned by the US constitution, but the pols have been very creative in weaseling around the ban.
My wording was poor. I meant what if your bank account was tied directly to the government’s bank account? They wouldn’t need to have either taxes or levies. They’d just siphon off what was needed when it was needed.
There is something called the project triangle I had never heard of until I googled:
Hot rodders used to laugh about that choice. It turns out the choice isn’t limited to hot rods.
So, yes, you could indeed replace the entire Australian vehicle fleet with EVs by 2030. That would certainly be fast. Some people (we know who they are) would call it good.
That reminds me of another hot rod maxim:
From bitter experience I say that anyone who thinks they can get around the project triangle is nuts.
In engineering, we used to say to ignorant pushy clients – Choose any two from …Good – Fast – Cheap: & dont complain to us about the decision YOU make, go tell your boss !
They would always back down.
That reminds me of the period in the 90’s when NASA adopted a program they called “better, faster, cheaper”. After two Mars landers nose-dived into the Martian surface they reviewed the program and determined that it doesn’t matter if something is better, faster, or cheaper, if it can’t achieve it’s goal.
In my business we have the magic triangle, Cost, Time, Quality. Choose the two attributes you want carefully. In Australia, defence contractors don’t comply, everything is more costly, longer delivery, and lacking quality.
One good thing about governments’ use of ‘experts’ and ‘geniuses’ like Griffiths is that the climate emergency BS will come crashing down to reality much faster and be revealed to be the biggest government idiocy of all time. However, it means that society will come crashing down too, because there is no way that it can function without energy. Hopefully the old reliable power plants will not have been torn down by mobs of ‘geniuses’ emboldened by political victory.
The geniuses will blame their failure on corporations, big oil, the 1%, Trump, racism, inequity, and conservatives. The Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists will endorse these lies. Fame and fortune await the “geniuses.”
aka the Snake Media.
Thanks Eric for pointing out something that should have been obvious, that the ‘interconnected car batteries’ will not be available at the most power intensive parts of the day, during rush hours!
I had thought the car batteries could have been used, but now I realize how silly that was.
Is that OUR griff ???
He’s got the same dumb ideas .
OMG, I had not noticed. What if??????
Sorry. Great minds think alike. And not like griff.
There is 100% correlation between Griffith and Griff.
Our griff claims to be British, though most of his other claims have proven to be less than truthful.
He is unlikely to be able to provide any evidence to back up that claim.
Being British might be the least of his worries 😉
There’s no correlation between intelligence and common sense. He’s a good example :<)
Oh I don’t know, no common sense and, clearly, rather little intelligence.
Most people with common sense are not low IQ.
Intelligence IS common sense = critical / analytical thought = “joining the dots”.
“Qualifications” = degrees / diplomas / credentials etc = remembering dots while often not connecting them= Saul
He is a stock-standard example of the type Sinclair Lewis described a hundred years ago in his novel Arrowsmith; “The attractions of financial security, recognition, even wealth and power distract Arrowsmith from his original plan to follow in the footsteps of his first mentor, Max Gottlieb, a brilliant but abrasive bacteriologist…Professional jealousy, institutional pressures, greed, stupidity, and negligence are all satirically depicted, and Arrowsmith himself is exasperatingly self-involved.”
A genius thinks rationally. This Griffith guy is a ditz.
Intelligence is not common sense. Common sense comes from hard work, trial and error, and having the intelligence to learn from it. Mr. Intelligent (myself included) can see a dual purpose to the EV batteries, but missed the obvious that they can’t be relied upon as backup for the grid during the most demanding time, during rush hour. Also using the EVs as backup is basically a lie, because as someone else on this page pointed out, none of the chargers are set up to feed power back to the grid, or even just to the house. I have an engineering degree, love complicated things, and yet missed the obvious. Common sense is a totally separate thing, and there’s no short cuts.
“I hate when people confuse education with intelligence, you can have a bachelor’s degree and still be an idiot”
– Elon Musk. Dec 9, 2020
In Mr Griffith case, a Masters Degree, but still the same kind of idiot.
‘we could shit it in’ – not only a genius, but one with Tourettes syndrome!
Yes, Rick,
There is no place IMO for people who cannot express the!selves better than this in matters at the national policy level.
They might think they are too smart to be bothered by the niceties of polite social discourse, but if they do think in this superiority way, they show that their education is incomplete. Geoff S
Language is a window into the mind. This man’s mind is a pig sty.
The fact that he hasn’t included construction, maintenance or practicality tells us everything about his “ideas”. The man is in fact clueless.
According to MENSA, so am I, and I call BS on this
Well, I don’t know much about Mensa (because I don’t hang out with 98th percentilers), but I’m sure Mr Griffith has an IQ up in the triple digits.
The triple digits is still just high normal, not even 2 SD above the mean. Impressive is 3 SD above the mean (IQ 145+).
100?
It’s basically just a club for people who are good at passing certain tests designed by people who are good at passing certain tests for people who are good at passing certain tests.
I’d bet my bottom dollar there are lots of people who visit WUWT who are 98th percentiles but don’t it.
TBH, I think people who are in Mensa are generally nothing special – there are different types of intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is important and just because someone is a good carpenter or joiner doesn’t mean they are stupid – quite the opposite more often than not
High IQ is overplayed IMHO
Yeah, what a genius. He did the Climate Math, failing to realize that it is fundamentally, and fatally flawed. It is based on nothing but fantasy.
Oh yes, that Griffith fellow is a bona fide Einstein.
Einstein called BS on CO2 greenhouse effect in 1917.
I don’t think so, Tim.
I think he did it was called TOBLERONE.
Making toblerone take lots of cows, which generate lots of you know what!
Don’t knock Einstein on either violin playing or chocolate!
OK genius, where will all this electricity come from?
From the fairies in the bottom of our gardens.
John Galt he isn’t…
No, he’s the Brawny Paper Towel man.
yep, Griffith’s the Big Brother government’s snake oil seller.
Thank God Saul went back to Australia. Please lock him down or up or whatever state of locking you’re in right now.
luckily he would be
hes in NSW;-)
sadly his internet will still be working!
Is that moron griff of these pages? Explains a lot.
“<em>A further benefit of a large electric vehicle fleet would be that the batteries in parked cars would serve as a vast and interconnected back-up to the grid. </em>
Could a person unplug the car? If the government (tax payers) buy and give you the car, then I suppose they can force you to let them use the battery.
If all the batteries are drained and start recharging at the same time, that can’t be good.
In the USA the term “Rube Goldberg” {UK = Heath Robinson} implies a silly and complicated contraption to solve a trivial problem. Can we now add Saul Griffith to this list?
Australia. 19.8 million vehicles, 100 months until 2030. 200,000 replacements per month. $60k USD per vehicle. Only $12 billion per month. $1.2 trillion.
RD, and that doesn’t even begin to address where the electricity will be coming from. Throw in another few trillion.
Nor does it address tripling the capacity of the entire electrical grid to handle the new load. Another trillion or two.
J.K.S…. whilst we all know this EV conversion is never going to happen, ….the electrical power required to recharge the ficticious 100% EV fleet is not what you imagine.
If you consider the average daily distance traveled, and the average EV power consumption needed to do it,… you may be surprised to find that little , if any, additional generation capacity is required above what is currently installed !
IE..we have sufficient generation, but we do not use it very efficiently.
Explain how that works in California, Ahhjay. They can’t cover current demand.
Are you saying that California could cover current demand if they used their current capacity more efficiently and have enough left over to power an all electric fleet??
I’m not seeing it, but I’m willing to change my mind if you have convincing numbers as evidence of how much current waste California has, and that it would also cover, oh say, 90% of future demand for an all electric fleet.
Now, that’s just California, but I’m not sure what you claim is also true for all of the U.S., either.
How many years to build the facilities to manufacture 200,000 electric vehicles per month?
The REAL solution was revealed by one expert: electric bicycles to replace the general’s populations automobiles. Much less resource intensive.
Obviously we will just tell the auto makers to switch over from ICE to EV. They should be able to have it done by the end of the week? Right?
e-bikes are dangerous, basically pedal-assisted motorcycles with clueless operators.
It’s this simple back of the cigarette packet calculation which can be done in less than 60 seconds the geniuses always fail to do.
OMG, yes, Rusty. It’s the same in all those “Evil genius has elaborate plan to take over the world” movies and the whole scheme falls apart because the Evil Genius forgot one little thing. Oops!
Life imitates art.
Australia is the ‘Land of the Gouge’ where paying a lot and getting very little is more the norm than the exception. Can you imagine the supply / cost failing !? Follow the money, the dweeb co-founded “Rewire America” to cash in there, what’s the bet “Rewire Australia” is registered / being registered here for a nice little earner of other peoples money whilst he hides out in the rainforest of the Illawarra escarpment. Too much ganja, son !
and most are in lockdown and Vic now has 9pm to 5am curfew too
so we couldnt even go outside to warm ourself on auto combusting teslas etc to keep warm
Amazing, innit?
FauXi’s Flu is deadly at 9pm until 5am. At 8:59pm, you’re OK. At 5:01am. you’re OK.
We have the magic molecule, CO2, which causes everything bad. And now we have the smartest virus the world has ever seen. It can tell time!
It doesn’t dare show up on canned goods in grocery stores, where hundreds go each day. But it does know to hide out in small shops, where maybe 50 or even much fewer stop in during the course of a day. I have no idea how that little bug figured all of that out. Amazing!
Seen driving a few days ago in Littleton, Colorado, a Nissan Leaf with vinyl stick-on letters on the rear window that read:
DECARBONIZE OR DIE
I nearly had an acute irony attack.
Highlands Ranch was better when cattle were raised there.
Once I was unable to decarbonize for almost 3 days and whoo boy was I feeling bloated! Thankful for laxatives!
Utopian schemes like this always look great on the faculty lounge or small commune scale. Same thing with Communism. But for both, the bills eventually come due.
“Griffith thinks we can completely replace the Australian vehicle fleet with EVs by 2030”
There are 20 million registered motor vehicles in Australia.
There are 3,058 days until 2030.
Australians need to be replacing their ICE vehicles for EV’s at a rate of 6,540 per day.
The best year for number of EV’s sold in Australia was 2019, they sold 6,718 in a year.
….genius…
And for each day this doesn’t happen, add 2 more cars to the tally.
Today: 6,450 per day, tomorrow: 6,452, Next week: 6,464, Next year: 7,180 PER DAY!
Quick, you’re getting behind!
Better start whipping those poor kids at the cobalt mines in the DRC harder!
It doesn’t mine itself!
My former KGB neighbor was looking over my shoulder as I read this. He laughed and said, “Is easy! In Russia have method to solve. Start shooting owners. Pretty soon, no need replace wehicles!”
I think he was joking. Maybe.
The trouble with trying to look heroic as in the picture at the top of the article is that you come off looking like a character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
He’s a lumberjack and he’s okay.
… and I won’t link to the “Lumberjack Song,” thus avoiding any microagressions.
“I wear my sisters nickers, her panties and her bra’r.
I wish I was a girly just like my dear papa’r”
… has new meaning these days. Ya gotta be careful.
Back when I was young we just told idiots to “Go Fly a Kite,” these might consider a ground like a key!
H.D.,
You were very polite.
Just told my wife about this genius and his idea of backing up the grid with ev batteries, she came up with a very different word to describe him.
How many syllables?
Two. Begins and ends with a D.
You can’t fix stupid, and you can’t fix someone with no common sense. Over half of American’s live paycheck to paycheck, and electric cars and home batteries are far out of the economic reach of most Americans.
AOC said the government could just print the money. Right now we are simply borrowing it to fund the mini-GNDs.
See my thread on the question here …
w.
Let them learn the hard way.
Every country has one.
US has its engineer liar named Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford who claims the US could go emission-less 100% renewable grid electricity. Of course he conjures up mythical hydro power dams build-outs and winds that never stop blowing to make that appear to work to the Ignorati unable to do critical evaluations of such nonsense.
and Australia has Saul Griffith, the Down-under renewable energy engineer liar.
I had to sit in on one of his seminars a few years ago and I wanted to scream.
There are more and more real world failures. The life of a unicorn salesman should be getting harder and harder.
Let’s see…we move the overly expensive green energy via an electrical grid to my car’s batteries losing some 20% in heat due to transmission, conversion, and charging, then take that back from my cars batteries losing say another 10% in transmission and conversion to use for something else? Did I get that about right?
So of the power that costs twice as much to produce I eventually use it at 70% efficiency leaving all EV cars discharged in some possible emergency situation.
Sounds like a great plan.
(I am keeping my gas-powered truck, thank you very much)
It’s rather like giving the government direct access to everyone’s savings account … promising they’ll pay it all back when they have excess.
How long before everyone becomes broke?
And what effect will all this have on global temperature in 2100?
This guy is simply A Troll – just coming out with impossible-to-do stuff and thus wind folks up.
Ohhhhhhhh alright, lets have some fun and feed him.
Feed him unreliable energy
If nothing else, a few random power cuts, brownouts and blackouts (##) will slow down his bloviationing and give him time to actually think the <expletive> thing thro.
## ’bout time somebody coined ‘Green Outs‘ to describe the upcoming, haphazard & random failures of ‘Green’ elecktrikery.
wots rekkon
I hadn’t considered that. I assumed he was just an idiot.
” ’bout time somebody coined ‘Green Outs‘ to describe the upcoming, haphazard & random failures of ‘Green’ elecktrikery.”
I like the sound of ‘Green Outs‘
No, He and Greta are P.R. devices to add momentum to a long con in the peak payoff phase.AGW is now turning over $70,000 a second around the world, and will continue until falling temperatures and exorbitant energy prices cause riots. Australia will be one of the hardest hit countries as our per capita spending on Windy Things is 4 times the OEDC average. When interest rates revert to normal our power prices will sky rocket, our industry will grind to a halt and our standard of living will fall sharply. That’s what you get for having a merchant banker who trades carbon offsets as a prime minister. Do you remember Malcolm Turnbull, Clive Palmer and Al Gore cooperating on the ” Fall Back Position ” when Malcolm’s carbon tax bill could not pass?
Stop Snowy 2 now. At an efficiency of around 55% it will be an enormous drain on the power grid.
Modern Science: plausible, but likely improbable, and often impossible in a comprehensive frame of reference.
And I thought Wylie Coyote, Super Genius was just a cartoon character.🤪
Chuckling at the thought of Wylie Coyote opening the “ACME” crate containing solar panels or a wind turbine…
Does Wylie put the solar panels on the blades?
It’s going to be fun drIving those EV’s from Brisbane to Perth to do a little winter surfing. Be sure to stop at the Olympic Dam on your way and see the copper mine that had to increase it’s production 5 times to supply the windings for your electric motors.
Driving from Brisbane to Perth is quite possibly one of the most boring trips one can drive. There are probably more boring in Siberia, but I’ll bet it’s a close call.
Perth to Brisbane: 4,313 km.
Yeah, but you need to have the side trip to Roxby Doonman mentioned.
So turn right at Port Augusta and head north for another… 230km, visit the mine, then south again back to Port Augusta to rejoin your roadtrip.
Perhaps that’s a typo? Or perhaps I’m not enough gf a genius to understand what that genius is saying?
The words “shit” and “f*ck” turn out to be very versatile in Aussie English… 🙂
I think in this context, shit means to wave a magic wand like Harry Potter or a pistol like Stalin.
From the above article:
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” — Bible, Romans 1:22, King James Version (KJV)
If this keeps up, in the not too distant future it will be considered slanderous to say someone is a genius. Or an activist.
Matt Kean is an idiot. He, as the whole of his party are supposed to be conservatives, but in truth they are just a another shade of socialists.
Not accurate, unfortunately the party split some years ago and now the real Libs are fighting back and succeeding slowly against the Liberals In Name Only globalist lefties who successfully infiltrated and took over executive positions of influence to manipulate from.
Kean is a LINO and said to be influential as a LINO leader.
“everyone switched on their home heating”
What makes you think home heating will be permitted under this scheme?
I taught senior capstone design at two of the top 300 American universities for a total of seven years, and I advised an additional four groups during two years before that. In a university the guys referred to as “genius” likely had a 4.0 or near 4.0, but on book material. When it came to senior design teams of those geniuses often couldn’t do a thing. Generally the 2.0 and 3.0 students got projects organized, built, tested and working. The best student I ever had was a 3.0 that the other faculty thought was mediocre.
When someone is described by academics as “genius”, like say John Holdren, it is time to vet their ideas carefully.
That says a whole pile about the other faculty.
In my experience the best capstones were done by the students with the best marks. That also says something about the other faculty.
One of the standards in engineering education says students have to be able to apply knowledge in a context other than that in which it was learned. If the students with the best marks do lousy capstones, that implies the school is not achieving that standard.
We should find a way to talk about this some time. Our curriculum is highly theoretical rather than applied — I was an exception being a Ph.D. in a scientific program, but also a P.E. with a lot of applied experience. I can understand why our top GPA students do poorly in the capstone course — because of our curriculum; I’d like to know what there is in your curriculum that made for a better match of GPA to performance on applied projects.
He is certianly not an electical engineer, as he has no basic understanding of how electrical grids work. I looked at his site, he is a metalurgist. That’s cool, but does not give him any more credibility on grid scale power generation than any other lay person.
And it shows!
Every time a lithium battery is recharged – it shortens its life- yes, lithium batteries do not live forever.
And not just lithium batteries.
You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to understand how a grid works; there’s plenty of technical literature for every level of education and understanding if one is curious and open to learning outside their specialisation.
Learning from a book is not “understanding”.or being competant.
Could you learn to drive by reading a book
Grid operation is much more complex than most think, and this is being demonstrated each time we have a grey/black/brown/green..”out” or demand management is deployed ( basic admission of failure to supply).
I wasn’t proposing that anyone could operate a grid, and yes, you need to learn the traffic rules before jumping in a car, unless you live in the sticks somewhere.
I know a metallurgist who is so challenged by engineering.
Dumb idea. Not to mention that EV batteries are very expensive and do have a limited cycle life. I’d have very little interest in loaning out my EV storage to the grid unless I was to be adequately renumerated for its use when it came time to spend the thousands of dollars it takes to replace one years earlier than otherwise expected.
You sound as though you imagine that you’d have a choice
Well I happen to have a PhD in chemistry from UniSyd and I’m embarrassed by the innumeracy of this person.
Anyone with a calculator can look at the price of gasoline, and the price of electricity and easily work out that EVs are more expensive to run than ICE cars on a like vs like comparison. I’m including gasoline excise in that calc, which is currently 43.3 c/L Aussie. The excise is for road upkeep, which is why for an apples to apples comparison it needs to be applied equally.
Last year at the depths of the Covid recession EVs were more expensive to run even ignoring gasoline excise, since the gasoline price was down around AU$1/L vs the retail electricity price I pay, which is 34c/kWh.
And with the rise in electricity price as electricity demand massively increases with EV take up this equation is only going to get worse for EVs. Especially as guys like this force closure of baseload power stations like Liddell – which is due to shut in a year or so.
It’s crazy. Even if you believe in the climate fairies it’s crazy. But no global warming has occurred this century according to real world data, which makes it even more ludicrous.
If no subsidy is required,
the cost of EV are the same as the average car today,
there is a reliable way to charge whenever needed and
there is an easy and cheap way to recycle old EVs
the goal would be easily achieved by market forces.
But . . . . .
And I’d want one that will do 1,600km a charge, and with some serious off-road capabilities for my property. If that’s not possible, I’d have to have two cars.
If you are charging off the grid, then you are heavily subsidized since gas and diesel are highly taxed and electricity isn’t.
I don’t know where you live, but even highly subsidized electrics are substantially more expensive compared to equivalent ICE cars.
He might have a high IQ but he has no brains
Electrification requires massive infrastructure
The Eastern Interconnected Grid in Australia is a disaster in the making
It relies on large coal fired stations
These are been shutdown
It relies on interconnectors to Tasmania – one failed a couple of years ago
It relies on interconnectors to South Australia
and the list goes on
And yes the new Battery in Melbourne is also unreliable It caught fire the day it was turned on
So yes I can do a calculation to prove 1+1 = 3
It does not make it true tough
Please. Someone. Go out and find Saul’s lecturers and slap them repeatedly around the ears. Do Saul as well while you are at it please.
And, we know that NSW Energy and Environment Minister, Matt Kean, is a bit of a genius too … NOT. Anybody who swallows this BS is seriously brain cell challenged.
I thought that part of Oz (NSW?) Already proved that you could not run on wind and solar if you wanted to keep the lights on. California proved that last year when hot weather hit the whole South West.
That was Southern Australia. Victoria just proved that batteries are more complicated and dangerous than Musk wants you to believe.
NSW are currently just demonstrating extraordinary general incompetence.
A sad case of run-away markjacobson disease.
The problem is that everyone knows solar panels can charge batteries and batteries using inverters can power the grid. It is the magnitude of the storage (and so the cost of that storage) required that MSM continually ignore, on the basis (I suppose) that technology is going to solve that problem real soon now. If it doesn’t the grid (on which modern society relies) will collapse.
Wind mills in his backyard, I don’t think so. hypocrite.
So finally we find true identity of WUWT’s griff.
Well at least he is honest about what this could look like.
One thing that amazes me is how many leftists are absolutely convinced they are geniuses. I guess it’s all those participation trophies.
Batteries for EV’s are extremely expensive, and all batteries have a limited number of charge and discharge cycles before they must be replaced. Why should EV owners allow use of their EV-batteries for grid storage purposes, which would reduce the lifetime of their battery? In emergency cases, maybe they would use this for their own house… Forget it.
Couldn’t people place a diode in their charging circuit to stop it going the other way? I guess they would make that illegal.
It would have to be a really big diode to handle the current of a super charger.
Beyond that, the voltage drop across the diode would make electric vehicles even less efficient over all than they currently are.
If he was a genius he would recognise that CO2 causes fewer cold deaths, higher crop yields, alleviates famine, makes plants more drought resistant, reduces cyclones, and makes the entire planet greener.
Instead he is an idiot,
I work in this field, engineer designing bi-directional EV chargers. I am also fully on the side of WUWT, I want coal to stay, providing the pollution is cleaned up – CO2 can stay.
There seem to be a few misconceptions flying around in the comments. EVs in grid support mode will only allow discharge up to a certain level, quite a modest amount of discharge is allowed, plus owners can override that amount. Control is by no means in the hands of the grid operators. Also, the amount of kWh stored in a typical current-day EV battery is quite huge – 50-100kWh is common. You can run a house off the EV battery for days before it is depleted. Assuming every household has an EV and it is plugged in, that is quite a large backup. No problem for handling extra cold mornings, plus the safeguard against discharge beyond a certain point won’t allow it.
While i haven’t made any calculations for a whole grid supported like that, and even though I would like coal to stay, I don’t immediately spot a problem either (except charging all those batteries in the first place, of course).
You can run a house for days, provided you don’t use the AC, heat pump, electric stove or electric hot water heater.
Nope the average usage numbers show you can. Each of those is used a fraction of the day in typical use. Nobody uses their stuff 24/7 full on.
I can just see those B Doubles thundering down the Highway with 40 Tonnes on board. Only problem is the 30 Tonnes of batteries!
I think we are all making the mistake of thinking that you would have a job that you needed to drive to, or that you had a job at all.
Has this genius asked the copper and silver miners if there is capacity to meet the demand that such a plan would imply? I have yet to find anyone in the industry who thinks there is. Maybe he knows otherwise. Geniuses often do.
I wonder how he thinks they can build all that marvelous stuff without fossil fuels.
This is the sort of crap you get when you talk to a physicist instead of an engineer……..
“Oh yeah,” says Griffith. “We could shit it in.”
The recent lockdown policy is now starting to make sense. Keep everyone from leaving their houses and they won’t need their cars.
This guy is an embarrassment to both the engineering profession and MIT….not unlike Jacobsen in US
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/landmark-100-percent-renewable-energy-study-flawed-say-21-leading-experts/
Make sure your EV is parked outside, whilst it’s on charge.
They suck the value out of your money while you sleep too.
The dude is a collectivist. All your stuff is his.