Essay by Eric Worrall
What if all the private money they’ve modelled fails to show up?
$500m to establish Powering Australia technology fund through the CEFC
23 November 2022 4:02pm
The Australian Government is investing $500 million in the Powering Australia Technology Fund to help businesses progress innovative projects and technologies to reduce emissions.
This funding will be provided to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and will boost commercialisation of innovative clean energy technologies.
The fund aims to leverage off another $500 million from the private sector. It will include a ‘growth capital’ offering for clean energy technology businesses looking to expand.
Through amendments to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation Act, as part of a Treasury Amendment Bill, the $500m will be added to the CEFC Special Account and the details of the fund will be included in the CEFC’s investment mandate.
…
Read more: https://www.energy.gov.au/news-media/news/500m-establish-powering-australia-technology-fund-through-cefc
State Governments are also desperately shovelling money into the pot, though in Victoria’s case, they’re being a little more obvious about it.
‘Perilous journey ahead’ under Victoria’s energy overhaul
Patrick Durkin and Angela Macdonald-Smith
Oct 21, 2022 – 4.54pmClean energy investors have warned of an investment drought and large energy users say their survival will be threatened unless the Victorian Labor government gets its radical plan to revive state ownership of electricity supply exactly right.
Big industry fears they will be slugged with higher prices and be forced to take on more risk under the plan by a re-elected Andrews government to revive the State Energy Corporation to invest, own and retail renewable power.
The fears voiced by the group representing companies such as Brickworks and Bluescope Steel came as major renewables investors said they won’t invest the tens of billions of dollars required to meet Victoria’s proposed 95 per cent renewables target for 2035 if they are disadvantaged in any way against the new state player.
…
Private investors could face being squeezed out of new investment in energy under the plan, which the industry super sector – which would co-invest with the SEC – lined up to back. Morgan Stanley labelled the plan “a net negative” for major suppliers AGL Energy and Origin Energy.
…
Read more: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/perilous-journey-ahead-under-victoria-s-energy-overhaul-20221021-p5brro
Victoria’s state premier is Dan Andrews, who infamously claims to have never ordered police to open fire with rubber bullets on unarmed protestors during the Covid lockdowns.
My question, if renewables are such an attractive investment, why is there an ongoing need for State and Federal governments to keep pump priming the pot with taxpayer’s money?
In my opinion the desperate political effort to pump prime the green revolution is strong evidence that the green energy revolution engine is refusing to start.
As the Vestas and Siemens graphs at the top of the page show, renewable energy investment is not exactly soaring. Vestas closed three turbine manufacturing factories in 2021.
That green investment slump could be about to get a lot worse. US Republican Jim Banks (R-IN) just promised to defund Biden’s green revolution.
Without government money, the only way renewables can prosper is if they actually are cheaper than coal. Do I need a /sarc tag?
Holdouts like Australia and California might stumble along for a while, burning down their children’s future in a futile attempt to realise their impossible green energy dream. But in the end they, like everyone else, will succumb. Governments can only defy the laws of economics for so long, before the gravity of financial distress brings their green fantasies crashing back down to Earth.
I expect to see a lot of abandoned wind farms and solar farms in the next decade. Please post any links to photos you have personally taken in comments, along with a description of the location in the photo. Please make it clear if you are happy for me to use the photos. I’d like to use such photos, with acknowledgement, in future WUWT articles about the death of the renewable industry.
Under rule 303, wind turbines won’t work.
Yes sir, Lt. Morant.
And by Rule 303, I meant you need to watch the movie “Breaker Morant” to understand.
Rule .303 says the government can do what it wants because it has all of the guns (power). Constitutions and Common Law have no sway on the power-mad in charge of the various governments.
I have no sympathy for Australians who meekly gave up their weapons to their government in contravention of the natural law of self-defense and the English Common Law of individual freedoms. Your government has all the .303s and other calibers it needs to force you into compliance with its arbitrary edicts. Evidence your COVID 19 concentration camps and green dictates.
The Leftist/Marxists constantly rail against our 2nd Amendment here in the U.S. It would result in another bloody War Between the States if they were successful in their well-funded attempts.
FJB. FLeftists. FGun-grabbers.
[Still haven’t figured out how to get WordPress to change my name back to the one (Dave Fair) I’ve used at WUWT. Just another example of unintended consequences from any attempt to change things. Suggestions?]
More stuff headed to the fan ?
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/11/24/cleaving-beginning-climate-change-policy-makes-europe-too-expensive-for-low-cost-ev-manufacturing/
Factually incorrect, but by all means just keep blurting the fantasy that supports your gun narrative. I shot competitively most weekends, I must be doing with a slingshot that only looks like a Glock.
Are you saying that the average person in Australia can buy a gun anytime they want?
I thought that you Aussies across the Tasman were a bit smarter and had more common sense than this .
You have got some hydro which can be turned on and off as required but these politicians are so dumb that they cannot see that they need coal or gas backup and lots of it .
We have a lot of hydro in both islands and a Cook Straight cable to send power to the north .
We have some geothermal in the North Island and I heard our Prime Nut Minister say that she might shut some plants down because they emitted to much CO2.
One idea which is barely feasible is to produce hydrogen with the surplus wind power .
Splitting Hydrogen from water takes 50mwh of electricity to manufacture hydrogen that will only give you 40mwh.
The greens have stopped any further hydro development in the planning stage .
One of our ministers is pushing pumped storage when there is surplus wind energy which will flood a small lake over a lot of farm land . Thats OK with the greens .
The other scheme is that the aluminum smelter in Bluff may close and this power will become available .
Last of all we have the Huntly power station sitting on a coal field and importing a million tonnes of coal to fire it up two years ago .
Some of the turbines have been converted to gas via a pipeline from the Taranaki gas field .
The first action that our Prime Nut took when being elected ,she declared that she had a Nuclear moment and banned all further offshore oil and gas exploration .
We are in trouble and I don’t know which of our countries will win the race to the bottom .
Smarts left Australia long ago.
It is almost as though the fantasies about alien invaders impersonating humans, taking over covertly, then proceeding to destroy humanity as a step in totally cleansing the planet of competition were true.
From this side of the Pacific, it looks like you’re ahead by a few lengths, mate.
We’re not that far behind
Dementia Joe may still pull it out for us ‘Murcans. In the race to the bottom, don’t count us out. But the Kiwis have a strong horse to ride.
You might wish that Joe was back again in 2024 if Kanye/Ye gets in.
or a million other choices that arent going to happen
anything would be better than a cabbage sitting in front of secret committee
“We have some geothermal in the North Island and I heard our Prime Nut Minister say that she might shut some plants down because they emitted to much CO2.”
How did she conclude that?
It comes from her marxist training
Joseph Z,
My youngest brother was a geothermal scientist and worked all over the world assessing geothermal fields for development.
I asked him about this and he said that super heated steam varies from field to field on the amount of CO2 in the steam.
He did say that one of the stations near Taupo has a high CO2 content in the steam .
Volcanic eruptions can emit a lot of C02.
Ardern passed a law banning new offshore oil and gas exploration in 2018.
She is trying to take NZ down a rabbit hole .
I predict that when she loses an election she will leave NZ and go to work at the UN.
Ardern worked at the UN for our former PM Helen Clark who stood against Antonio Guterres for the position of Secretary General of the UN.
That is what she is aiming for .
Sounds like our twice-PM Rudd who left us to prostitute himself at the UN
Seems to me that left Australian and New Zealander party comrades are as flash as a rat with a gold tooth and as low as a lizard drinking water.
Eighty percent efficiency is just the starting point. Now that someone has his 40 mWh of hydrogen, what does he do with it? It leaks out of storage tanks, it ruins metal pipelines due to hydrogen embrittlement, there’s no place to efficiently store it in an automobile or truck, there are no hydrogen powered generators, etc., etc. Your best bet might be to flare it like is done with excess natural gas.
I am well aware of the problems with hydrogen for fuel but politicians don’t think rationally.
They have that demon CO2 on their minds and cannot see that there will be far more problems in the future with a high pressurized storage tanks and vehicles exploding as the metal becomes brittle and no one can prevent accidents .
“50mwh of electricity to manufacture hydrogen that will only give you 40mwh.”
80% my eye, splitting hydrogen out of water returns 18% of the energy invested.
I am no expert on hydrogen and I am not advocating any one to use Hydrogen .
Just quoting .
Hyundai manufacture fuel cellls that are powerd by hydrogen.
The claim is that fuel cells are 40% to 60% efficient compared with a petrol powered car that is 25% efficient .
Until some proper trials are undertaken and verified we wont know .
“Splitting Hydrogen from water takes 50mwh of electricity to manufacture hydrogen that will only give you 40mwh.”
You are assuming that the hydrogen can be converted to electricity at 100% efficiency. In reality 30% is the best you can hope for.
But remember that Cindy will disappear from the New Zealand political scene in one year’s time – probably to cause similar dismay and confusion at the U.N. Then perhaps logic and democracy, and even technical sense, will return to Wellington’s political decision-making! Does New York need yet another burger outlet?
“I’d like to use such photos, with acknowledgement, in future WUWT articles about the death of the renewable industry.”. Reporting, I hope, not predicting.
“Holdouts like Australia and California might stumble along …”
In fact, Texas wind energy generates more electricity than either of those entities. In 2021 it
generated (Table 5) 100 TWh out of a total 482 TWh. Solar made up another 15 TWh. And it continues to grow in this free enterprise environment:
So the enormous subsidies Wind receives in Texas have nothing to do with this?
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/06/17/why_was_66_billion_spent_on_renewables_before_the_texas_blackouts_because_big_wind_and_big_solar_got_22_billion_in_subsidies_781862.html
I could not find the 2021 Texas freeze fiasco on this graph. We have to look at the big picture only 🙂
Yep looks real good unless you look at daily totals then it falls apart. Unfortunately society is concerned with Daily Availability not annual production. HINT NICK…we need to use it DAILY
Heck with daily, it’s second by second that matters.
Little Nicky presumably believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as well! Santa only has to work one day out of the year, and how often does the Tooth Fairy have to sneak into children’s bedrooms in the dead of night?
If Unreliable Energy only works well one or two days out of the year, he sees it as perfect justification for dismantling our aging electrical grid until the new transmission and storage systems are completed some decades off in the future! What could go wrong!?
“So the enormous subsidies Wind receives in Texas have nothing to do with this?”
The source for your link is Bill Peacock. He gets a total subsidy, federal, state and local, of about $24B since 2006. But to get there, he throws in virtually all the investment in new transmission lines (CREZ) and property tax concessions.
And how much is $24B? He relates it to a supposed investment of $66B. But the current generation of 100 TWh/year would sell for about $10B/year. The subsidy may have helped get things started, but it obviously isn’t the major driver.
This represents about 11.4 GW of steady generation over the year from the Texan wind fleet. That fleet is over 33 GW in total. This graph from Nick again proves the efficiency of wind installation to be 33%. Maybe we should call that a reflection of its inefficiency? The only saving feature of this insane wind generation policy in Texas is it is still below the critical management level at ~16% of total, it allows the rest of the grid supply able to cope with its intermittency.
Don’t forget turbines lose ~3% efficiency per year on average
Installations at ghastly enormous cost of funds, land and wildlife. ‘T. Boone Pickens’ should be exhumed and replanted in a leper cemetery for his wind farm idiocy.
I recall T. Boone was responding to laws, regulations, and incentives provided by governments. One might claim that is what smart business people do. See Warren Buffett and Mary Barra.
T. Boone didn’t just advocate, he was a big booster, constantly agitating for more laws and subsidies.
So you’d need at least 3X average load in nameplate capacity plus the ability to store 2/3 of that capacity for up to a week – or you’d still need 100% demand back-up from dispatchable sources. Recalculate the cost of 100% RE = NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
Except in February, 2021.
“This graph from Nick again proves the efficiency of wind installation to be 33%.”
Doing the same arithmetic for 2021 for the whole Texas grid (Table 1), the net summer capacity is 139,751 MW. Net generation is 481844256 MWh, which averages to 55005 MW.
“Efficiency” 39.4%, not much different to wind.
How much more to hit Net Zero Nick?
Also his understanding of “free enterprise” is distorted.
According to most of the socialists that I know, anything that isn’t directly owned by government is part of the free market.
So the magic Texas wind farms produced one fifth of their nameplate capacity. But:
And how long do they sometimes go at 1% and below? Hint sounds like days.
And how many minutes of gridscale battery storage are in place?
“So the magic Texas wind farms produced one fifth of their nameplate capacity”
Actually about a third. And the whole grid? 139 GW capacity, 55 GW actual average production. About 40%.
Texas has a lot of wind and sun and vast open spaces so if any region could do well with renewables it’s Texas (ignoring vast subsidies, eco damage, etc.), but much of the world isn’t as well suited for it.
I take it, Nick, that you don’t live in Texas. Those of us who do, know how well this worked a couple of years ago….It didn’t.
Their output did drop a lot when they were frozen solid.
Wind did what should have been expected of it. Yes, the turbines should have had cold resistant innards, as do those in Iowa. But it’s just crazy to blame them for 2/21. Rather, the flaw was in not girding up the natural gas to electric infrastructure to respond to this parts per ten thousand, low probability, high impact event. Even now, it is mostly a faith based response. The low cost option is to do so, and to reward those needing to act. Natural gas is too valuable as a bridge fuel to use when it is not required. It’s similar to running your Generac 24/7/365 because “That way it will be ready when I need it.”
W.r.t. “subsidies”, let’s go bare for all of them. I.e., lose the TRRC indefinite “temporary” flare permitting Ben Dovers. Texas has resource waste laws, so let’s go back to enforcing them. Then, make the producers lockbox realistic asset retirement funds for the tens of thousands of high angle, hydraulically incompetent, hard to access multilaterals, each with dozens of perforated intervals requiring such isolation. As a bone throw, let the producers keep the preferable tax treatments of IDC’s, per Frank Semyon’s “You can keep your rings on. It won’t matter”. Then, go ahead and halt the relatively tiny, diminishing green start up helps. We’ll let our free enterprise system decide…
Could someone translate this into English for me? Thanks.
Energy producers need to plan ahead, and taxpayers need to stop subsidizing them.
Kind of boilerplate, even for you. I am guilty of using insider speak from time to time, but don’t see it here.* Mr. Johnson’s thoughts are a welcome, correct summary of my post, without the expansion requiring an attention span.
Please reread. Slowly. Take notes if you have to, like Lincoln. Any actual terms or POV’s that fly over you, aks about them explicitly. I’ll be happy to help…
*Not true, as in TRRC. Texas Railroad Regulatory Commission. I wrongly assumed that posters referencing 2/21 would know that.
“Texas Railroad Regulatory Commission” s/b “Texas Railroad Commission”. Too many years using the shorthand caps. bigoilbob regrets the error….
Ok. Loosely translated…The boob said that even though wind completely and utterly failed, we should have expected it to do that, after all wind is worthless unreliable junk. And it was the natural gas compressors that his moron regulator friends required to be electric powered rather than gas-powered that prevented gas from handling 100% of the demand. In what passes for his brain, it’s a logical thing to demand/expect from a system that will need to eliminate all fossil fuels if we continue on the path he and his fellow communists want.
Well also he wants his regulator friends to ramp up the unnecessary encumbrances to fracking, because free enterprise.
Thanks for that interpretation Rich.. Now I understand. Basically billyblob says wind is flawed and every other energy provider needs to be ready to carry the state funded failing wind for those days when wind stops.
If it wasn’t so serious we would be laughing our heads off.
A much better approach, just ignore the troll.
Bob,
#1 Who is going to pay for the removal, demolition and reclamation of all the lands damaged by the construction of wind and solar infrastructure?
@2 If The Fair Tax was instituted, where no business or individual was taxed on their income, then the playing field would be leveled for ALL sources of energy. Taxes would be on sales, so all industries and people would pay taxes on what they bought. Also, all tax INCENTIVES supporting various energy providing industries, tax rebates, tax deductions, etc., would also disappear.
Effect on the OIL and GAS industry, negligible. Effect on wind and solar would be massive. How do I know that? The recent Democrat green new deal legislation has close to 900 BILLION dollars in “renewable” ENERGY subsidies distributed primarily through the tax code.
Please point out where I approved of direct renewable subsidies. I specifically said I did not. FYI, only a small part of this BigFoot “ 900 BILLION dollars” is relevant to this discussion. The rest is for infrastructure comparable to that built publicly for the life of our nation.
So, stick with what I actually said:
“W.r.t. “subsidies”, let’s go bare for all of them.”
Why do you not want to have fossil fuels compete openly? If they prevail, ok by me. I’ve spent my life going for oil and gas, If it’s the best solution, fine…
Windmills are already expensive and inefficient, and you want to add heaters to them?
The solution is to increase the natural gas infrastructure?
Why not just skip wind and go completely with natural gas?
“Windmills are already expensive and inefficient, and you want to add heaters to them?”
Since they do almost everywhere else, yes.
“Why not just skip wind and go completely with natural gas?”
From my earlier post.
“Natural gas is too valuable as a bridge fuel to use when it is not required. It’s similar to running your Generac 24/7/365 because “That way it will be ready when I need it.””
you make it sound like its a capacity issue only. To maintain stability and recoverability the grid gets far more complex and expensive under “RE” generation. Continual use of some reliable power (coal/gas/nuclear) is required to achieve this. This is not “bridging” its required for operations.
There is no increase in “complexity”. The same methods used to control power factor apply. Yes, there might be more of them as power gets sent farther and goes away locally at night. But that will mostly happen anyhow as the sinks get farther from the sources, as will happen, renewable sources or no.
The failure to address the beneficial elephant in the room – the element that greatly biases evaluations in favor of renewables – FREE FUEL – is astounding to me.
“Continual use of some reliable power (coal/gas/nuclear) is required to achieve this. This is not “bridging” its required for operations.”
All but nuc are going away very quickly, relative to human history. Only Queens of Denial wish that away. Nuc as well, unless we continue to “temporarily” store waste in the back 40 of virtually every facility, old and new. So, we will be “bridging”, like it or no. I’d prefer to admit that, get a handle on it, and reduce the difficulties with some common sense planning.
That’s an interesting one. Does anybody have figures which show the fuel use crossover range for a wind/solar/OCGT mix compared to CCGT?
“Those of us who do, know how well this worked a couple of years ago”
That is silly. As people have noted, the wind sometimes drop to zero. But the system copes. It wasn’t wrecked by a few turbines having winter difficulties. It was the inability of gas generation to cope with the freeze that caused the blackout.
Just so. ERCOT/Abbott have been told this twice by commissions, but punt. Their solution seems to be merely more of the same faith based begging of the relevant players.
And to make matters worse, since I have considerable experience with the Texas natural gas part of the natural gas to electricity infrastructure I can attest to how easily it could be hardened for 2/21 conditions. I have no doubt than an all in incremental ROR calculation, as indirectly referenced by old cocky, using a “return to the past” base case of all fossil fuels, and an investment case of continued wind buildout, accompanied with backup system weather hardening, would pass any corporate hurdle rate assessment. This is even without a more sophisticated incremental, probabilistic assessment that includes consideration of other 2/21 like events.
I was just asking about the overall fuel usage of the 2 basic technology mixes. Financial calculations are way, way, way down the track. You need to quantify the fuel use / CO2 emission savings of various tech mixes first.
Agree. But do you in turn agree that the goal would be a reliable, probabilistic, incremental, all in ROR evaluation? By commending you for aksing for an element of it I was giving you credit for such understanding.
Fair enough, but there are a hell of a lot of steps involved to get that far.
First, define the goal, then evaluate how well the proposed strategies meet the objective.
BTW, RoR, internal rate of return, payback periods, etc are all a bit iffy compared to Net Present Value.
Incremental Internal Rate of Return is not iffy at all. It tells us how fast our money will grow if we take the path being investigated instead of the present path. It requires no more data and estimates than any other measure.
Spending on projects with high NPV’s and/or quick payouts, without a good enough ROR, is not the best ultimate use of assets.
IRR has trouble with time-varying returns and the duration of the cash flow.
NPV has problems as well, mostly to do with setting the appropriate discount rate. There are a number of additional assumptions involved in calculating comparative NPVs, the most important being to compare apples to apples.
I suspect your incremental IIR calcs come out much the same as comparing NPVs.
“IRR has trouble with time-varying returns and the duration of the cash flow.”
How? All incremental IRR is is the evaluation of incremental cash flows, to find the discount rate where they add up to zero. The worst outcome is the possibility of dual rates, one of which is nonsense. Liken that complication to the pick of which of the the positive and negative solutions to a quadratic equation solution to a real world problem is correct. Hint: Pick the positive or negative solution that is possible in the real world.
“I suspect your incremental IIR calcs come out much the same as comparing NPVs.”
What will be the IRR from spending a million to make a million and six in a year? Now from spending 10 to make 16 in a year? They both have an NPV of 6* (1- annual discount rate).
That’s why it has to be an “apples to apples” comparison. They both have the same rate of return and normalised NPV.
It all gets very murky, with far too many subjective figures.
Counter-question:
We have 2 net income streams (leaving out all risk)
1/ 1.1m, 1.21m, 1.33m, 1.46m, 1,61m
2/ 1.1m, 1.21m, 1.33m, 1.46m, 1,61m, 1,77m,
What are their IIRR and NPV?
D’oh! There is a 5m up-front outlay for each 🙁
To know the incremental rate of return, you need to know the timing of the cash flows for both 1 and 2. To know the incremental NPV, you need a discount rate.
The evaluations are not “murky” to me, save for exchanges of views about probabilistic inputs. But I’ll certainly admit that your parameters are indeed required by project managers for every big decision they approve.
BTW, I can be quite acerbic, but I certainly appreciate the civility you bring to the forum.
Thanks. I participated in enough flame wars when I was younger to finally realise that the best you can hope for there is a Pyrrhic victory.
Not a bad summary of NPV vs IRR – https://www.thebalancemoney.com/irr-vs-net-present-value-392914
Thanks, but the conclusion is both unsupported and fundamentally incorrect. FYI, the author describes an NPV with an unknown discount rate, but his equation for NPV includes one – as it should. Second, IRR is what we all want. I.e., to make our money work as hard as possible. You would fire a financial manager whose guidance resulted in a “high” NPV but a low IRR. You trusted her with big bux and she returned them to you with a combination of very little more quickly returned and/or more more, so far out that its value was greatly reduced. I.e., a low IRR…
Sidebar. Many, many rusted up Gulf of Mexico platforms that hardly cast a shadow are kept operating for just this reason. The green eye shaders ran the numbers and realized that an incremental IRR with an base case of properly plugging wells, removing the structures, cleaning up the sea bed, and an investment case of marginally operating, even with little to no oil revenue coming in, provides an acceptable IRR into perpetuity. So, with the enabling of Ben Dover regulators, paying later (or never, if they can fade away successfully), they will be paying/not paying, later.
It looks like you’re misunderstanding NPV, but this probably isn’t the place for arguing the merits of obscure financial accounting methods. Proponents of each know they’re right, so nobody will change their mind in any case.
And, yes, NPV can be very sensitive to the discount rates used, so really benefits from sensitivity analysis using lower and higher rates.
On a slightly related esoteric economics topic, out-year discount rates are the sleight of hand used by Public Policy Economics,
Free Enterprise environment??
Crony Capitalist you mean!!
Nothing about free enterprise would support the construction of expensive, redundant, unreliable electrical generation capacity.
Crony capitalism is just another word for government picking the winners and losers, which in turn is just another name for socialism.
We are now in the 12th day of NO WIND, except for one day in the middle with 5-10 knots.
Where is that? Not a helpful comment without knowing the location, because “the wind is always blowing somewhere”.
We’ve had a moderate Santa Ana blowing for several days now here in Southern California.
What’s sad is that Nick is still trying to convince himself that anything less than pure communism is some form of free market.
saw the freeze warning for Texas yesterday? warning of outages ahead of it
like last time the turbines wont be working
Doesnt matter how much you generate if its not there when needed
Don’t follow the old country…
“”You haven’t got more than five years or so to actually get this right and make some decisions about what you want to do if you’re going to scale those things sufficiently to be ubiquitous by 2050.”
Sir Patrick made the comments ahead of being awarded the SCI’s (Society of Chemical Industry) Lister Medal at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on Thursday.””
https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/sir-patrick-vallance-issues-warning-over-net-zero-goal-42172099.html
5 years and then another 5…. zzzzzzzz
“Holdouts like Australia and California might stumble along for a while, burning down their children’s future in a futile attempt to realise their impossible green energy dream.”
And Massachusetts, which I claim is even more “woke” than Australia and CA. This thanksgiving- we had Biden on Nantucket and Obama on Martha’s Vineyard. Both are islands that commoners seldom go to- only the servants for the rich and of course they can’t afford to live there.
Two things about the turbine orders. Prices have increased about as much as the drop in orders so maybe same income. Also if new entrants, Chinese for example, are taking market share there may be no downturn in capacity additions. This is just two old companies.
Renewables are still way out of control.
All of Europe’s five wind turbine manufacturers are operating at a loss. For example, Siemens Gamesa issued a press release (26th Sept 2022 – ‘Europe’s energy independence impossible unless wind power considered a strategic industry’) which said
“As a result wind turbine manufacturers are operating at massive losses and cannot invest to satisfy growing demand for wind energy”
Wind Europe has said the same and bemoans the fact that Chinese manufacturers are expanding across Asia, Africa and South America as well as winning orders in Croatia, France, Italy, Serbia and Ukraine. (Wind Europe letter to Ursula von der Layen, President, European Commission, 22nd Feb 2022).
They are pleading for more subsidies.
Plus some news which may do certain people’s heads in.
Norwegian turbine manufacturer Equinor supplied its first electricity from its Hywind Tampen floating windfarm on 14th November 2022 and is on course to install 7 of 11 floating turbines by the end of the year. They are supplying electricity to North Sea fossil fuel facilities.
“Tapping wind, including from floating turbines, as an alternative power source for offshore oil and gas is gathering traction around the world”
https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/on-oil-gas-shoulders-equinor-powers-up-worlds-largest-floating-windfarm-off-norway'2-1-1353447
Convince your local and federal politicians that they can help by requiring all wind turbines and solar array components are 100% produced by wind or solar energy generators.
Forbid the use of any nuclear, hydro or fossil fuel energy in producing wind turbine or solar arrays.
Tell them that this law would ‘help’ renewable energy manufacturers approaching bankruptcy.
“Governments can only defy the laws of economics for so long, before the gravity of financial distress brings their green fantasies crashing back down to Earth.:
**********
As a demonstration of their usual lack of rational behavior and thought, govts can ignore what feasibility studies have to say about wind turbines and solar panels indefinitely. Govts provide the incentives, mandates and money for wind and solar specifically because they don’t work.
And the political clout of the environmental movement has a lot to do with it.
CD,
“Governments can only defy the laws of economics for so long…”
What about the laws of physics and social science? Lysenkoism remained in vogue in the Soviet Union for two decades with no discernible benefit. How long can Western gov’ts that have been terminally infected with neo-Marxism hold on to power as the serfs begin to rebel? I guess it depends on how much control they have over the media and their elections!
The next couple of decades are going to be VERY interesting
“I expect to see a lot of abandoned wind farms and solar farms …”
Sorry – hit the wrong key —
A strategy used in market economies is for poorly performing facilities to be sold by the originators to a group that will operate the place for the lesser returns while ignoring maintenance and/or selling still useful equipment to external parties. As the facility continues its decline parts can be cannibalized as scrap.
In a few cases, the originators — knowing the sequence — have created a new company to buy at pennies on the dollar, the now bankrupt facility.
Thus, there is a transfer of tax-payer money in a domino-like process from middle- and lower-middle class folks to the well-off.
One doesn’t see the “abandoned” facilities. If you go back 50 years you can find abandoned facilities. There is an abandoned Darrieus wind turbine near me that was completed just as the company went belly up. It never generated electricity and there was no one with a reason to tear it down. Using Google Earth, it can be seen at this location, look east:
47.101072, -120.751234
Might the explanation lie in the improving level of knowledge of the populace about technology?
Surely we have all noticed that there are fewer and fewer supporters of the technically-illiterate belief in solar and windmills even amongst politicians? In ealier days, with encouragement from media and the likes of Gore and Greta, those with less inclination to curiosity became supporters of the Green lies. With low-hanging fruit now less accessible, perhaps it is now the turn of “our lot” to convince the doubters? There are certainly many folk expressing their doubts about the claimed advantages of EVs!
Latest from Oz on that cheaper wind and solar power –
“Shh! Despite a bloodbath quarter for electricity prices, hated Brown Coal still sells at just 4c per KWh”
https://joannenova.com.au/2022/11/shh-despite-a-bloodbath-quarter-for-electricity-prices-hated-brown-coal-still-sells-at-just-4c-per-kwh/
media says andrOOZE has managed to hang on
dunno
postal votes etc yet to be counted
praying the scumbag is OUT
if hes in Im leaving the state
not that SA is a hot option either;-((