A few days ago, Christopher Luxon announced the first part of National’s new Electrify NZ policy, explaining:
Electrify NZ will help double the amount of renewable energy available and put New Zealand on track to reach its climate change goals.
The Labour government’s Maorification agenda simultaneously shreds our freedom while the Net Zero agenda tears the heart out of our national treasury. Continue Reading →
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Bryan Leyland has decades-long experience in electricity generation projects of all kinds. He applied to the NZ Battery Project to join its Technical Reference Group. This week he learned he had been unsuccessful. Their letter offered a summary of why he missed out. Continue Reading →
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— by Bryan Leyland
Consulting Engineer • Member, NZ Climate Science Coalition
Once upon a time New Zealand and Australia had some of the lowest electricity prices in the world. Unfortunately, imposing ill-conceived electricity “markets”, combined with the modern mania for renewable energy, has greatly increased prices in both countries. Newspaper stories on the steadily deteriorating situation in Australia abound. Continue Reading →
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India’s Coal Minister, Pralhad Joshi, said (5 August, 2019): Continue Reading →
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A little bird tells me of something rotten in the state of NZ Engineering. Continue Reading →
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Electricity wholesale prices on the spot market have averaged 25 cents/kWh (four times the normal 7 cents) for the last three weeks because the New Zealand power system is in an appalling state, with severe shortages of water, gas, coal and generating plant. Continue Reading →
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Ross McKitrick. Guelph is in Ontario, Canada.
In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour. Here is my response.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. Continue Reading →
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… much of it at the price of hard labour.
The man responsible for maintaining India’s power supply says he wants the country’s coal production to double within the next five years. Continue Reading →
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Last November the Herald said:
Plug pulled on tidal turbine projects
The tide has gone out on the New Zealand marine energy sector leaving every one of half a dozen proposed schemes high and dry. Continue Reading →
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The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on electricity consumers to boycott Earth Hour grandstanding by pampered people too silly to recognise the realities and benefits of reliable electricity.
The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, is supporting an alternative proposal that “Earth Hour” be replaced by “Energy Roulette Week”. Continue Reading →
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Under our post about US carbon dioxide emissions flattening out, Clarence gave a pithy analysis. I promote it and add links to verify the points he makes because they’re so devastating to the warmist cause. Clarence’s comments indented and bold.
The graph above shows the startling increase in shale gas output over the last few years. Continue Reading →
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You love trees – you’re even called tree-huggers. Yet I’m a tree, and you don’t love me. You won’t even feed me!
One of my indispensable foods is carbon dioxide. But you’ve demonised it by fabricating the story that it’s the most important “greenhouse” gas. You pretend that one of the world’s rarest gases, a mere 0.00039 of the atmosphere, will overheat the climate. You never mention that water vapour, up to 4% of the atmosphere (10,000 times more plentiful than CO2), is also the most powerful greenhouse gas of all, with each molecule having about 26 times more warming effect than carbon dioxide.
To support your corrupt fib about CO2, you’ve started referring to this tasteless, odourless, invisible, non-toxic, life-giving plant food as a pollutant. So you try to restrict my diet.
Imbeciles! Continue Reading →
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from The Global Warming Policy Foundation
The Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2012
Britain faces an increasing risk of power blackouts and higher electricity bills in the next four years, power regulator Ofgem has warned in a report.
An “unprecedented combination” of the eurozone crisis, tough EU environmental laws and the closure of ageing coal and oil-fired power stations, has increased “the risk to consumers’ energy supplies”, Ofgem said in its annual Electricity Capacity Assessment on Friday.
The regulator, which first highlighted the problems in its Project Discovery report in 2009, said: “Today’s report shows that these problems have not gone away.” Continue Reading →
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Electric cars are a great idea and they’ll save the earth, right? Well, sorry, but it’s going to be a whole lot harder to handle large numbers of electric cars than we hoped.
The whole point of electric cars is that they’re powered by clean, far-away electricity generators instead of petrol engines putting out that dirty carbon dioxide which dangerously heats our planet.
We would prefer to gently erect some pretty windmills or softly lay delicate and lovely solar panels to generate electricity non-intrusively, without antagonism and free of violence to our beloved Mother Earth.
But no matter what we might prefer, if we eliminate all those wonderful, rumbling newtons (known to Jeremy Clarkson as horsepowers) from petrol we must make them up from somewhere else. Ok. Simple question: can we make it up with electricity?
A long time ago, in 2008, the CCG published NZ sustainable energy supplies, a paper by local engineer Gary Kendall. Continue Reading →
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Energy News has announced an inaugural survey of the electricity industry. The headline promised to test the market on “renewables, smart grid, Huntly retirement, Brownlee reforms”.
Some folk saw “Huntly retirement” and took it to mean the station was about to be closed. Understandable, but that’s not the case. The first clue was in the description of the survey:
Key topics covered in the inaugural survey include the options to replace Genesis Energy’s coal-fired Huntly units
So the unadorned “Huntly retirement” becomes “replacement of Huntly coal generation” – not the whole plant, just the coal-fired parts of it! Big difference. It’s covered in the first survey question:
1. With the impending retirement of the Huntly coal-fired units (1000MW) this raises some questions around generation fuel mix. What should replace it? Taking an NZ Inc view and thinking about transmission capacity, dry-year risk, fuel diversity, smart grids and fuel availability what do you think Huntly should be replaced with as it’s phased out?
Industry insiders wouldn’t have been confused but this clears things up for the rest of us. When they’re filling out their survey, let’s hope those insiders aren’t persuaded that avoiding about 1 °C of warming is better than the multifarious benefits brought to us by public power reticulation. In other words, let’s hope they choose a properly reliable source of base-load power generation like gas, oil, coal or nuclear. Oh, that’s right, nuclear’s verboten in God’s Own. – h/t Robin Pittwood
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Ed Miliband, the [UK] Energy Secretary, last week announced that planning rules would be relaxed to make it easier for an extra 3,500 onshore turbines to be built as part of a £100 billion plan to generate more energy from wind power by 2020.
That’s a lot of windmills—and they’re just the extras. Including offshore windmills, he’s planning to build a total of 10,000 of them. You won’t be able to miss them. No way.
But then, in what could become the quote of the decade, Mr Miliband clarified matters:
“We need to change the default position so that people will come to understand the dangers of climate change to our beautiful countryside.”
The only danger is the unholy havoc Miliband plans to wreak upon the countryside and the drastic weakening he will achieve in energy security. And all for the sake of a tiny reduction in emissions of a minor greenhouse gas which won’t affect the climate.
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A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased. more…
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