As readers of this substack know, I am a huge admirer of the work of Australian Jo Nova, which I make a first read every morning. Her latest post on wind energy may be her best ever and teaches so much about the frailties, the idiocy and the outright theft involved with supposedly “green” energy. It’s only green with respect to humongous pile of greenbacks earned from the globalist grifters promoting the stuff. Here is what Nova offers up today:
How much back-up do we need for our 11.5 gigawatt wind system? About 11.4 gigawatts.
Wind energy failed on Thursday at what must be close to a record low — with barely 88MW of production from 11,500MW of wind turbines. That’s about 0.7% of total nameplate capacity.
With construction costs running at $2 million for every theoretical megawatt of turbine, that’s $20 billion dollars of machinery sitting out there in the fields and forests of Australia producing about as much as two diesel generators.
We have 84 industrial wind plants across 5 states of Australia, and the green band below was their total contribution to our national electricity needs on Thursday — put your reading glasses on.
Things were even worse in Western Australia, where at the one point that afternoon when I happened to look the state’s total wind generation was minus 11MW. Some wind turbines were drawing a megawatt here and there, perhaps to keep the turbines rolling so they don’t get flat spots on bearings.
It was an attack of another climate-denying high pressure cell on Thursday. There was no place in Australia good for wind generation except (maybe) for our research stations in Antarctica.
Again, this is now a feature of our weather dependent electricity grid, unless the government can stop these high pressure cells or conquer New Zealand and build a bridge.
But sadly, there is no “building” our way out of this. One thousand more wind-plants won’t keep many lights on, and $100 billion dollars of interconnectors will not connect us to wind power if there is a high pressure cell 5,000 kilometers wide, which there is every two or three weeks.
Wind power went from producing 7.2GW in the early hours of Wednesday to 0.09GW by lunchtime Thursday. It was sheer luck it bottomed out at lunchtime on a sunny day when solar panels were at their peak. Seven gigawatts of power disappeared in just 36 hours. If we lost 7 gigawatts of coal plants in a week, we’d never hear the end of it.
It’s the minimums that matter
Paul McArdle at WattClarity has all the grid data, and provides a spectacular graph of the system-wide peaks and troughs of our wind generators over the last 13 years which he has updated recently to highlight how bad the months of April and May were for wind production in Australia.
Click to enlarge this graph to really appreciate the devastating message. While the total wind farm “capacity” has grown massively (the grey columns on the graph), the minimum lowest guaranteed production has not shifted much at all. This is the generation we can rely on, the minimum monthly points are marked in dark green at the bottom.
Ten years ago the lowest monthly minimum was practically zero (reaching just 3.7MW one day in July 2014). But since then we’ve built 8,000 MW of extra wind power, at an effective cost of $16 billion, and only bought ourselves effectively two diesel generators worth of reliable electricity?
If someone asks how much wind can we rely on, the answer is “about one percent.”
I rarely quote all of someone’s post, as I always encourage readers to go to original sources and, by visiting, contribute to their numbers. It was essential in this case, though, as this is one of the most educational pieces of work I’ve seen on the futility of green energy. It demonstrates what’s really going on; $20 billion or so was stolen from ratepayers and taxpayers to build a wind energy system that is all but worthless when it matters. That money when into the pockets of wind developers, financiers and suppliers, not to mention politicians on the take. It' is nothing less than the greatest robbery ever.
#Wind #WindEnergy #Australia #JoNova #Minimums #Dispatchability
Great post. Can't wait to share with all the East Coast wind warriors. 😍
The wind drought problem has been well-known in some circles for a decade thanks to Anton Lang and the Paul Miskelly team while the official meteorologists never warned anyone and still don’t mention wind droughts while they highlight everything other kind of extreme weather that can possibly be ascribed to global warming. May be something to with the role of the World Meteorological Organization which was at the epicentre of the global warming alarm set off in the UN.
People just need to know the ABC of intermittent energy
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
And the phenomenon of the tipping point which is approaching in all the places where net zero policies are in place. Five minutes to midnight!
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/11/approaching-the-tipping-point/
The net zero ponzi has hit the wall, “it’s all over Red Rover“.
For ages we have been explaining that due diligence demands attention to the low points, the low point of the fence or the flood levee, the weakest link in the chain, the slowest ship in the convoy.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
Time for a new narrative, change the game!
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/Change_the_narrative_change_the_game___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
Look forward to a book titled “How wind droughts almost destroyed western civilization.”
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf