Nick Cater has written another excoriating piece in the Australian. This time his target is the hopelessly unrealistic plans to turn Australia into a land of solar panels and wind turbines that can not only power Australia but also export power to Singapore. Worse, no one has yet factored in the colossal power demands of AI. His warnings cast an ominous shadow:
Renewable energy superpower status is supposedly in Australia’s grasp now the Government has given Mike Cannon-Brookes the green light to export solar power to Singapore.
Tanya Plibersek announced environmental approval for the tech billionaire’s eccentric proposal last week, taking a swipe at Peter Dutton’s “expensive nuclear fantasy that may never happen”.
By contrast, the Environment Minister would have us believe Cannon-Brookes’s plan to siliconise the NT Outback is a done deal. All that’s left to do is raise $35 billion in capital, install 120 square kilometres of solar panels, build a modest 788km transmission line to Darwin and lay a 4200km high-voltage cable on the seabed, and we’re good to go.
The Sun Cable AAPowerLink project feels like it was stolen from a Heath Robinson cartoon: a convoluted, unnecessarily elaborate and impractical contraption designed to accomplish a mundane task. It may mark the beginning of the end of the renewable romance, the point at which the transition to wind, solar and hydropower collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
There is increasing evidence the U.S. has reached the point of peak renewables, as the pool of private investors shrinks and winning community approval becomes harder. Research by the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory showed roughly one-third of utility-scale wind and solar applications submitted over the past five years were cancelled, while about half of wind and solar projects experienced significant delays.
The U.S. Department of Energy says the national electricity network needs to grow by 57% by 2035, the equivalent of approximately 21,000 km a year. Last year’s total was around 200 km, down from just over 1,000 in 2022.
Meanwhile, the challenges of grid synchronisation and storage remain unresolved, and the technical problems for offshore wind turbines, in particular, are mounting. Last week, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova announced an investigation into a blade failure in the 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea off the coast of the U.K.. It is the third blade failure this year.
In July, a newly installed blade crumbled at the Vineyard Wind offshore plant, creating debris that washed up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. At 107 metres long and weighing 55 tonnes, they are the most enormous blades deployed commercially. The failure of three in quick succession suggests the quest to increase output by installing ever-larger blades has reached its natural limits.
And here’s the rub. It seems no-one peddling the Green Dream factored in the massive power needs of AI:
The principal driving force is not electric vehicles but the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. AI requires at least 10 times the power of conventional computing programs.
In the U.S., data centres account for about 2.5% of power and demand could rise to 7.5% by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. In Ireland, data processing and storage use 12% of electricity produced, forcing the authorities to limit the number of connections to the grid.
Silicon Valley has long abandoned the notion it can be powered by silicon photovoltaic panels while burying stray emissions in the Amazon forests.
In April, the tech giant Amazon paid the best part of $1bn ($US650m) for a sizeable block of land next to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power station. It will be the site for a data centre powered by up to 480MW of carbon-free electricity delivered reliably around the clock.
Shares in U.S. nuclear power companies such as Consolidated Energy, Talem and Vistra have soared by between 80% and 180% in the past year. So-called green energy stocks, on the other hand, are static or falling, while coal is making an unexpected comeback.
The effect of AI on electricity demand was largely unanticipated at the beginning of the decade. AI chips will undoubtedly become more efficient, but there is no telling how much further the demand for AI will grow since the technology is in its infancy. Nor can we begin to guess what other power-hungry forms of technology might be developed by 2050.
What we do know, however, is that if Australia’s demand for electricity exceeds 313 TWH a year in a 2050, we’re in trouble. That’s the target the Australian Energy Market Operator has set in its updated blueprint for the great energy transition.
… that’s going to take a lot of solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Minister says we need 22,000 new solar panels a day and a new 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours just to meet our 2030 target of a mere 202 TWH. For the record, the speed of the rollout in the first two years of Labour Government is less than a tenth of that.
If they had, they would have to acknowledge that there are limits to the renewable energy frontier determined by energy density, the demand for land and the requirement for firming. The silicification of northern Australia cannot continue forever, nor can we expect to rely on China for most of the hardware and pretend there are no geopolitical consequences.
As for our nuclear-phobic Prime Minister’s dream of turning Australia into the Saudi Arabia of green hydrogen, while simultaneously sitting at the cutting edge of quantum computing, forget it. In 2006, as the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Anthony Albanese gave a speech at the Swansea RSL on avoiding dangerous climate change.
“Why on Earth would we want to take the big health and economic risk of nuclear energy when we have a ready-made power source hovering peacefully in the sky every day?” he asked.
If Albanese doesn’t know the answer to that question 18 years later, he probably never will.
If you can get past the paywall, worth reading in full.
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It is hard to understand the MSM culture of silence and avoidance of anything that seems like a critique of either the mRNA ‘vaccines’ or of the government health agencies, who refuse to review the collateral health damage even though informed consent and patient safety are at stake. The bodies that are meant to defend the patient and stand up for medical ethics remain quiet. The journalists, media outlets, celebrities, influencers and activists who speak out on ‘climate emergency’ or the UK getting there first on the vaccine remain deadly quiet when it comes to the greatest medical experiment inflicted on humankind” (TCW, my bold)
Not really hard to understand. I repeat my call for the Times muppets to give full disclosure on all direct and indirect links to the pharmaceutical industry. Whilst their welcome if belated story about harms from the experimental AZ coronavirus medication suggests at least some acknowledgment of the issue, they remain silent about Pfizer and Moderna, despite having a policy editor in Oliver Wright (Oliver Wright | The Times & The Sunday Times) who has written articles like these for the Independent in 2014 about unethical practices in the pharmaceutical industry, including AZ and Pfizer:
Big Pharma lobbyists exploit patients and doctors | The Independent | The Independent
Revealed: Big Pharma’s hidden links to NHS policy, with senior MPs saying medical industry uses ‘wealth to influence government’ | The Independent | The Independent
(Refresh page to show full story?)
Note particularly this section:
‘JMC Partners’ clients include blue-chip drugs firms such as Novatis, Astro Zenica, Sanofi and Pfizer. It also represents a number of medical device manufacturers and biotech companies who sell their products to the NHS, including Roche Diagnostics, Cyberonics and Bausch & Lomb.
The company’s website makes bold claims about how it has been able to influence policy. In one case study it says it represented a medical device manufacturer who was worried about a planned cut in the amount the NHS paid for a treatment with which it was involved. JMC boasted that it organised a lobbying campaign targeting MPs and ministers as well as mobilising doctors to support its cause. It concludes: “The market for the technology was saved.” ‘ (my bold)
I rather suspect that groups such as the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service (OMNS) and the Health Advisory & Recovery Team (HART) with the patient interest at heart do not have such lobbying powers. Having slandered btl commenters on this site for raising legitimate questions about the “covid ‘vaccines’ “, theTimes muppets owe us an explanation. Until they do so, and until they start behaving like proper responsible journalists, I will continue to regard them as anti-truthers. Muppets.
Not entirely unrelated to my above post, this interview with RFK Jr on the Mark Steyn show is well worth a watch:
RFK Jr runs for President :: SteynOnline
Highlights include disturbing information about the “sickest generation in American history”, how he is “anti pharmaceutical industry’s control of government”, how profit was more important than public health, and some interesting stuff on the Ukraine war.
RFK Jr and De Santis going for the “American presidency”? Now there’s a contest I could live with!
Hang it, I wish I was going on that Mark Steyn cruise…
This is just evil and sick. I sincerely hope this family get either a good lawyer to overturn the hospital’s policy or Tanner can go to another hospital where they are actually interested in saving lives.
”Tanner Donaldson, a 9-year-old from Cleveland was born with a rare birth defect that caused irreversible kidney damage in utero and has resulted in stage 4 chronic kidney disease as well as bladder and urinary dysfunctions as he grew older.
A kidney transplant from the proper donor could reverse his disease and put Tanner back on track to have a normal life for at least 20 more years. Before the pandemic began to unfold in 2018, Tanner had found that donor — his dad, Dane Donaldson.
Because a kidney from a live donor only lasts about 20 years, the family decided to wait a couple of years before carrying out the transplant to extend Tanner’s life as long as possible. Then covid happened.
Prior to the Emergency Use Authorization of the covid vaccine, Dane and Tanner could’ve undergone the surgery and be in recovery right now. But covid changed all that and the hospital is now refusing to conduct the surgery because Dane is not vaccinated against covid-19. Seriously.”
https://magspress.com/9-year-old-boy-refused-life-saving-kidney-transplant-because-his-father-is-unvaccinated/
Absolutely disgraceful isn’t it?
“Individuals who are actively infected with COVID-19 have a much higher rate of complications during and after surgery, even if the infection is asymptomatic,” the hospital stated.
Surely that should exclude all the jabbed from being donors, then?
It seems the hospital would accept an organ from a soon-to-die / brain dead individual – jab status unknown – but won’t accept from a healthy unjabbed donor.
Not only crazy, it’s bordering on evil, denying someone a chance of life.
Don’t know where the links from the word ‘surgery’ came from.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12077475/Starbucks-manager-sacked-transphobia-rant-activist-terrifies-neighbours.html
Why is it that people who demand tolerance and understanding have no concept of tolerance or understanding?
What ‘rights’ don’t the transpeople have that others have?
What do they realistically want?