From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
It’s long, but a great introductory piece from Kathryn Porter:
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From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
It’s long, but a great introductory piece from Kathryn Porter:
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
In the modern world, electricity is an essential service. It follows that dispatchable generation is an essential service.
Wind and solar are not dispatchable so are note part of the essential service. They are, in fact, parasites riding on the back of the essential service.
In the past 12 months to 29 September 2025, South Australia generated 72% of its electricity from weather dependent sources. Rooftop solar provided 22.4% of the entire demand, or 30.5% of weather dependent generation, and is now pushing out grid scale wind and solar because they are not essential services.
The need for dispatchable generating capacity in South Australia has increased because the peak demand is still increasing despite heavy industry shutting down due to the astronomic cost of electricity. The high cost of grid electricity provides strong justification for people who own a roof to make their own.
Sunlight is ubiquitous in Australia and many households can use rooftop solar to make their own electricity. South Australia is showing how the transition is panning out for Australia.
Australia will be the rooftop solar soupapower. Bereft of industry and energy sucking data centrtes.
Rio Tinto just discovered an high grade iron body worth 5.7 trillion dollars. Australia has been saved.
Hang-on,
I bet it was there all along!
You should check out this new website for acquiring and displaying weather and climate data. the home website is:
https://wwwexretremeweatherwatch.com
Click on highlight to get climate data for US states and many countries of the world.
This website is for acquiring and displaying temperature data from cities:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch/cities/adelaide/average-temperature-by-year.
The Tmax and Tmin data is displayed in table. Use the
“Select Cities” to get data from many cities of the world. Enter a city name in the box. If the data is in NOAA’s data base, it and other cities with same name or starting letters will be display. If no data is available for the city, no name appears below the box. A city name must be entered after …/cities/ or 404 error is displayed. I chose Adelaide since a long temperature starting in 1987. You have the option for display for the year or by the month.
This website is for acquiring and displaying in a different format.
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/adelaide/weather
At bottom of the page are links for options for displaying data.
You should also go to the late John L. Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at:
htttp://www.john-Daly.com. From the home page , page down to end, and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “Word Map” click on “Australia”. There is displayed a list of 21 stations Finally, click on Adelaide. A chart (See below) of a plot of the average annual temperatures shows no warming since 1859 to 1999. instead, there was slight cooling.
This empirical temperature data falsifies the clams by the IPCC that CO2 causes global warming and is the control
knob of climate change. After EPA Administer Lee Zeldin rescinds the 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding, he will put an end to the greatest scientific fraud since the Piltdown Man.
BTW: I have not visited your website for quite some time. I do that later today.
NB: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” in the circle to return to comment text.
Thanks Harold,
The biggest problem with temperature data irrespective of source, is that no datasets are homogeneous. Homogeneous refers to the conditions under which data were collected.
If conditions, or the instrument, or anything else changes and affects measurements then the measurements are biased. I think the step-down in the Adelaide dataset was caused by the switch from using data observed using thermometers held in a Greenwhich stand to thermometers held in a Stevenson screen. I can’t tell you the date off the top of my head, but Adelaide data before that date were biased-high relative to more recent data.
This problem points to another issue, which is “data-shopping” – looking for data that supposedly bucks the prevailing narrative.
Unless people are prepared to go the next step – independently assuring that data are not contaminated by site and instrument changes, most graphs, Excel trend lines etc. and conclusions related to them, cannot be trusted.
Data-shopping and taking data at face value is a fools errand. For a good example, see my investigation of maximum temperature data for Rabbit Flat – arguably the most remote weather station in Australia (https://www.bomwatch.com.au/data-homogenisation/part-9-rabbit-flat-roadhouse-northern-territory-australia/).
Who would know that they erected a heavy-gauge, 8-foot (2.4 m) high security fence around the site in 2015 and this caused average Tmax to increase 0.89 degC. The full report is here: https://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Rabbit-Flat.pdf – see Table 1 and Figure 5.
In order to create warming in homogenised data, the BoM, who paid for the fence pretends that it isn’t there!
(news tip)
All the best,
Dr Bill Johnston
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
And the usual crowd of rent seekers and activists, of all descriptions, are lining up to prevent its development.
Transmission loss rates are not reported and even batteries incur inefficiencies – I suspect something in the order of 20%.
Yours sincerely,
Bill Johnston
https://www.bomwatch.com.au/
That is why rooftops beat grid solar and wind in Australia because they are located at the load and not burdened by the high cost, capital and losses, of a transmission network.
Wind power transmitted from South Australia to Snowy 2 to pump water uphill then using that water to generate power in SA when the wind is not blowing at night will lose around 50% of what was initially generated.
Batteries in a household setting achieve better than 90% efficiency and the sun shines at least a little every day. (Maybe not in UK)
Sounds good- so then zero subsidies or tax breaks are needed for homeowners, I presume.
Thanks RickWill,
Of course efficiency losses compound.
Solar panels only capture 15 to 20% of incoming W/m^2; the inverter makes heat, so there goes another 10-20% of the original 15 to 20% of incoming; the batteries warm too on charging – another 5 to10% of 10-20% of the original 15 to 20%, then on discharging – another 5 to 10% of the 5 to10% of the 10-20% of the original 15 to 20% – looks like a pretty small gain per m^2, which is why one needs whole rooftops covered in solar panels to boil the jug and watch TV.
Then there is the EV that has to cart that huge battery around, together with the few kg of spuds one ducked down to the shops to buy — and its battery’s charging-discharging inefficiencies. Just as well the original W/m^2 is all free!
Plants are the same by the way – they only capture about 10% of the W/m^2 — they get harvested, perhaps 10% effective yield ratio; then processed, then transported, then eaten – when only 10% of the contained energy is used by the animal … add it all up and the original 100% gets depleted pretty quickly – such is the energy cost of life!
Hope its warming-up where you are!
Cheers,
Bill
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
Solar is ideal for a subtropical climate like South Australia. It’s useful but not possible as a mainstay in the UK. We need most energy in the winter when solar power generation will be marginal.
I doubt either wind or solar are “useful” in the sense of economic anywhere. It is just that rooftop solar in Australia has an economic advantage over grid scale wind and solar as many owners of roofs have established. Grid scale solar in SA is now a stranded assert and grid wind is not far behind.
When does the government start taxing the electricity from rooftop solar panels?
Already happening in the Netherlands. They’ve been charging €0.115/kWh for solar exports.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/05/essent-to-charge-solar-panel-owners-for-excess-power-from-july/
I guess you simply didn’t watch the video.
Piles of ashes to rule over are going to be huge.
Long video, but I watched it all the way through. Kathryn Porter is a treasure, not only about energy.
And by the end, I came to appreciate the power of the U.S. political system via presidential elections to change policies more quickly and dramatically away from the previous misguided choices. The UK is in a tough situation.
Well vote reform, and write to Nigel Farage explaining why she needs to be a special adviser to the Reform government.
I have on occasion come across people this good in my career. Sadly not often.
We could use Kathryn Porter here in NY if she ever wants to come to the U.S. to consult on energy system plans. And same for me, about the rare person I’ve come across in my 40+ year career in industry.
That YouTube channel, Triggernometry, is very good!
It is not.
Bloated dude goes hard after your average guest
but kisses BB’s butt as if he’s a member of congress.
I was unaware just how little power of Parliament and how much control the Civil Service has in the UK, all thanks to Brown and Blair. Anyone with the opportunity of leaving should go now.
No. We have to fix it, and probably only reform have the guts to do that.
A great video.
Not only all that she says, but more governments worldwide have begun to realize that Net Zero is unattainable after all, or not at least until major technological breakthroughs are made. Above all these would include large-capacity battery storage facilities capable of containing the energy equivalents of huge fossil fuel tanks that would have the capacities of powering entire suburban areas with electricity. These are still a long way of becoming realities, and everyone except the climate zealots seems to realize it.
Kathryn is very good when she keeps to her area of expertise but she’s not beyond promoting myths about the Spanish Inquistion. She rreally should stop taking about the Inquistion until she has done some serious research on the subject. As it is her understanding of the Spanish Inquisition is no better than Ed Milliband’s understanding of energy supply.
The person who was crushed to death by placing a door on top of her body and piling rocks onto the door until she was suffocated was Margaret Clitherow. Her offence was to help hide Catholic priests. In Elizabethan England Catholic priests were hunted down by the state and, if captured, horribly tortured and then put to death in a most horrible way.
As to Kathryn’s explanation of the Conservatives belief in Net Zero and the so-called susequent conversion, I don’t buy it. In addition there are still plenty of Conservatives, including Conservative-controlled Councils, who still happily believe in Net Zero.
Any why did the Conservatives not repeal Gordon Brown’s changes to the Civil Service. They had 14 years when they could have done so.
But her biggest departure from reality was to say that she believes that the Conservatives will win the next election. Yes, she’s right that there have been times (once?) when the polls did not suggest that the Conservatives would win but the polls at the time did not put the Tories on 17% and nor did they suggest that the Tories were the third (even fourth) most popular party.
Probably the best (let’s forget climate) analysis of at least the UK energy market I have ever seen
If she isn’t in government in some way in the next parliament it will be a great loss