You might have heard of Broken Hill. It’s a lonely town in New South Wales and it nearly just became a lot lonelier. Transgrid, one of Australia’s power companies that is “leading the transition to a clean energy future”, decided that Broken Hill could showcase operating on its own microgrid. In a display of monumental eco-hubris, Transgrid even tried to shut down and decommission the town’s two emergency diesel generators.
The experiment lasted just two weeks. According to the ABC, a windstorm – one of those normal events that Net Zero planning typically fails to foresee – brought down seven supporting transmission towers. Although Broken Hill had held on to its backup generators, one was being serviced and the other failed under the sudden demand. According to the mayor Tom Kennedy:
“There was only one generator that was put under extreme amount of load,” Mayor Kennedy told 7.30.
“Once that was put under load, that also tripped out and we were in a situation where some people in town were without power for 48 hours, others just over 24 hours.
“It was really lack of maintenance on generators that are worth probably $50 million each.”
The upshot was that 20,000 people were left without power and the mines that are the basis of the local economy had to be shut down too.
Even the Guardian covered the story but dodged commenting on the implications for Net Zero:
The outages have followed severe thunderstorms on October 17th that damaged power lines, with dodgy backup generators leaving 20,000 locals with on-and-off power.
Repeated brownouts, particularly throughout the evening peak, occurred when electricity supplied by multiple generators was unable to meet demand.
There was more concern in the Guardian about consumers’ bills:
Two power companies – Origin and EnergyAustralia – have agreed to defer bills to those who have been affected by the outages that crippled the region for the better part of a week.
Customers won’t receive free electricity, but won’t be hit with a bill for a minimum of 30 days and the companies will not chase outstanding debts.
Nick Cater provides more of the complex background in the Australian to how this scenario arose at Broken Hill, pointing out that unfortunately the expensive backup battery hadn’t clicked in as it was supposed to, either. It seems that the plan had been that in a situation like this Broken Hill should be self-sufficient:
Three years ago, Transgrid boasted that the outback town could run on a renewable energy microgrid if the line to the outside world went down. It was so confident that it sought permission from the Australian Energy Regulator to decommission the two diesel generators installed in the early 1980s. The AER said no, a decision criticised as “really silly and perverse” by Chris Bowen [Australia’s Minister for Climate Change], who held it up as an example of the antiquated energy market thinking he intended to fix.
Bowen has yet to comment on the fortnight of rolling blackouts across the NSW far west that began when seven transmission towers collapsed on the 260km high-voltage line to Buronga.
The power company concerned is AGL, “Australian Gas Light Company”. Pity it didn’t stick to its name.
Bowen was not there to witness the indignity of AGL’s new mega battery being recharged by diesel generators or watch the Silverton wind turbines sit idle because they weren’t connected to the grid. He didn’t see Broken Hill residents hunting for the off switch on their rooftop solar arrays because their fluctuating output tripped the diesel generators.
To describe the Silver City’s experience as a setback for Bowen’s dream of turning Australia into a nuclear-free clean energy superpower would be an understatement. Broken Hill was the renewable energy industry’s Potemkin Village, the recipient of $650m of green investment and the proposed location for the world’s biggest advanced compressed-air energy storage plant.
In 2018, Broken Hill City Council announced its goal to become Australia’s first carbon-free city by 2030. Three years ago the Mayor at the time, Darriea Turley, welcomed the announcement that AGL was proceeding with plans to build a grid-scale battery, which the company claimed would be a reliable backup power source for 10,000 homes.
“This is a great opportunity for Broken Hill and renewable energies,” Turley told the ABC. “What they will see is when there is an outage, the battery would click into operation.”
AGL had badly misled Turley and her fellow councillors. When the storm hit at about midnight local time on Wednesday, October 16th, the battery clicked offline, not on. The town sat in darkness for several hours until the single operating backup diesel generator could be turned on.
A $41 million battery!
AGL was not prepared to keep a $41m battery fully charged, primed for that just-in-case moment. The battery was dispatching power into the national electricity market from early evening on the day of the storm.
The battery was offline for more than eight days while it was reprogrammed to feed into the local grid and recharged with rooftop solar and diesel. Silverton and the Broken Hill solar plant did not resume operation until the region was reconnected to the grid last Thursday. Turley’s successor as Mayor, Tom Kennedy, was pictured wielding a shovel at the soil-turning photo-op for the battery in November 2022. He told the ABC the battery closely aligned with the council’s desire to see the Silver City at the forefront of renewable energy and energy storage.
Tom Kennedy’s changed his tune now:
Last week he told Chris Kenny on Sky News, “There’s no way that renewables at this time are capable of supplying Broken Hill… The reality is it’s not consistent power. You don’t have that baseload power, so for Broken Hill it’s almost useless.”
The principal lesson from Broken Hill is that a stable, consistent baseload supply produced by rotating turbines is essential for stabilising the grid’s frequency and underwriting fluctuating demand. Converting DC power from wind and solar to synchronised AC current becomes harder the more renewable energy is put into the system.
Not everyone has been as quick as Kennedy to wise up to the monstrous deception the renewable energy industry practised. Last Monday, Australia Institute Research Director Rod Campbell appeared before a Parliamentary committee on nuclear power to argue for the rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, “which is what climate science demands”. Nuclear power was a distraction, he claimed.
Campbell’s testimony involved insisting nuclear power was too expensive while admitting he had no idea how much a renewables-only plan would cost. “I haven’t researched that.”
Tellingly, the Australia Institute posted a video of Campbell’s testimony on YouTube, suggesting it wasn’t aware that he’d made a clown of himself. The anti-nuclear left is immune to contrary facts, paying homage to “the science” while disregarding the laws of physics, urging us to abandon fossil fuels by this time tomorrow while never once considering the constraints of engineering.
Is this a sign of things to come for Britain? Yes, but with the proviso that the costs will be astronomically higher, the consequences and complications of the engineering issues magnified, and the political fallout utterly catastrophic when people start discovering they have to sit in the dark, eat cold food out of lifeless refrigerators and shiver through a winter’s night.
The Broken Hill experiment shows that Net Zero is pie in the sky where pigs fly. We can make plenty of use of renewables but 100% will never happen bar some unforeseen technological revolution. Certainly not by 2030.
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Today’s Leaflet
Marianna Spring has just been ‘Verified’! She has been caught lying on her CV then had to admit it. Do you think that’s sufficient for the BBC to kick her out? Hypocrite! And calling herself a ”brilliant reporter” just confirms the arrogance at play here, that she presumed she’d get away with her lies.
”An article in The New European said that when she applied to the website’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava in 2018, Ms Spring claimed she had worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford on covering the ‘perception of Russia’ during the 2018 football World Cup.
Her CV reportedly bragged: ‘June 2018: Reported on International News during the World Cup, specifically the perception of Russia, with BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.’
Ms Spring is said to have sent an email apologising for her ‘awful misjudgment’.
She is said to have written: ‘I’ve only bumped into Sarah whilst she’s working and chatted to her at various points, but nothing more. Everything else on my CV is entirely true.’
The young journalist added that she was a ‘brilliant reporter’ and in their emails also admitted there was ‘no excuse’.
She said her only explanation was her ‘desperation to report out in Moscow’ and thinking it would ‘wouldn’t be a big deal’, which she admitted was ‘naïve and stupid’.
In the email exchange published by The New European, Ms Antelava told her: ‘Telling me you are a brilliant reporter who exercises integrity and honesty when you have literally demonstrated the opposite was a terrible idea.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12493713/BBCs-disinformation-correspondent-chief-fact-checker-Marianna-Spring-accused-lying-CV-falsely-claiming-worked-Beeb-journalist-applying-job-Moscow.html
LOL!….and she and the BBC have been working on their ‘perception of Russia’ ever since….none of it fair even or vaguely balanced….…..
…..Then again, I can’t think of any subject they do have any impartial balance on….maybe someone can think of one?
A truly “brilliant reporter” would conduct themselves with a large degree of modesty and refrain from singing their own praises preferring instead to await the accolades of others, when earned.
‘Only Sweden had the right Covid response.’
Probably not even Sweden.
The Head of this country’s Common Cold Unit, David Tyrrell, made it plain in his article ‘Lessons from the Common Cold Unit’, many years ago now, that the best treatment for a common cold coronavirus is simply to alleviate the symptoms and let the immune system do the rest.
Classic incompetent totalitarian socialism in this country spends a fortune of everyone else’s money on unlearning the lessons expensively learnt by spending a fortune of the previous generation’s money.
Vote for independent candidates.
I think South Dakota was a fair bit less interventionist than Sweden. The Governor thought about ordering stuff to be closed, then for some weird reason decided she ought to check if she had the power to do that, found she didn’t, asked the legislature for such powers, the legislature rejected her request by a huge majority, and as far as I know, nothing was mandated at State level.
Sweden stopped large public gatherings (I think over 50 people), and of course embraced the vaxx, and for a long time restricted entry to only vaxxed people, and I think closed senior schools for a short while.
“Nobody wants an electric car”
The production of the Ford Fiesta ended on 7th July this year, in a manner of speaking the Fiesta was the modern version of the Model T Ford, the people’s car that shifted our economy into a motor car driven economy. The end of the Ford Fiesta and the clear inability of Electric Cars to be the people’s car of the future does indicate that our motor car driven economy is coming to an end. It is not only the production, sale and servicing of cars that will decline but all the activities that require cars, leisure, sport, camping, caravanning and tourism will be knocked back. All the housing estates built on the idea of mass car ownership will be weird places if cars disappear.
Can our economy and our society withstand the end of the mass ownership of motor cars? If the World economy changes and the UK finds it harder to borrow will we be forced into an immiserated 4th World state? Trumpeting that we are now ‘Net-Zero’ will have a hollow ring when to have achieved that hallowed status we are also Zero in everything else.
Pursuing net zero, which is pointless and unachievable will turn this country into a Third World shit hole run on tribal lines.
Ive used Autoclaved concrete, or thermalite block all my working life fully knowing that it was only ever good enough for internal partitioning, was no good in damp conditions, and I personally, would never use it for load bearing of any kind! hell, you could easily make a dint in it with your knuckle! So why did/do architects not know this??
I always remember seeing a patient in A&E at Poole General Hospital in 1977. The guy was on a trolley, looking up of course, and inexplicably said, “I helped build this place. I told them they wouldn’t stay up.” I looked up, and sure enough a number of the fancy ceiling tiles were missing, revealing pipework and dirt above.
Later, when the rain was coming in the edges of the flush windows of one of the wards, another savvy patient pointed out that they wouldn’t have been built that way in the past, when keeping weather out was more important than cloning Corbusier. That building had a flat roof, too (apart from the doctor’s rooms they built on it because they forgot to include them in the spec!).
My wife also points out that the first school she taught in, in Gravesend, is one of those now falling down because of the poor concrete. To be honest I thought it had long-gone as the roof blew off in the hurricane of 1987, but perhaps it’s the rebuild that’s now falling down 30 or so years later: why build one school when you can pay to rebuild it every few decades?
Crikey, Poole is my local hospital! The latest wheeze is to close the A&E of course, which isn’t in any way overwhelmed so that should be fine – we can all toddle off to Bournemouth instead which they are making a bit bigger and it will all be great.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1810543/who-covid-19-new-coronavirus-winter-symptoms-vaccine
The scaremongers have missed a golden opportunity to scare the pants off the gullible.
The latest so-called scariant- pirola – should have been called pyrola, with connotations that those affected could spontaneously combust – shock, horror.
That could have been tied in nicely with the climate change claptrap and the rampant, engineered ‘wildfires’.
Oh, sack the lot of ‘em.They are failing miserably in their ongoing feeble attempts to propagate convid hysteria, apart from within the delusional crowd of convid hypochondriacs who believe all, or most, anything ‘the science’ spews out.
pirola – should have been called
pyrolapayola, with connotations… of paying to promote endless repeats of substandard creative works.Re the article ‘get a new Covid shot?’….I have to agree..I have never been able to find any good evidence or actual studies that show the flu vaccine works….…..and like the Covid vax, that it’s has made any difference to the numbers at the end point..death….
I was looking at something entirely different when I spotted this FOI which was interesting to me….
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/influenzadeathsintheukbetween2012to2022
a short list of deaths from Influenza in England and Wales..ranging from 2012-2020
As you can see it’s not many deaths?….and I think the flu vax wasn’t introduced universally here until @2014…I’m assuming this is a list of people where only Influenza was on the death certificate…
So…I suppose my question is this…while I appreciate that influenza is possibly a factor in many more deaths…(.although I’d like to know, specifically, how they decide on that…I’m now thinking it gets slapped on there whatever, much like Convid)..
…How much good does (or can) a flu vax do if only a few people (in proportion) actually die of ‘only’ flu each year?…If it’s not a big ‘killer’ on its own, how can it make a ‘big’ difference as part of something else?
We are constantly told there are high flu deaths nearly every year ..some worse than others..but they don’t mean flu exactly do they?
Looking at the stats many thousands more die of pneumonia or pneumonia related illness each year..but that’s a different jab altogether isn’t it?
Colour me a bit confused…..and I’m happy to be corrected or hear what others think…!?
….maybe linked is this from Jikky about Azithromycin in December 2022
3 tablets.
That’s what they withheld from the elderly that were diagnosed with “COVID pneumonia” because they were told not to treat. It was bacterial pneumonia. They died.
If they hadn’t had the test they would have had the tablets.
#3tablets
…plus a new substack on a similar theme from Jessica Rose….
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/a-follow-up-on-pneumonia-story
Norman, Martin, Jonathan and Jessica point to a study by Lewnard et al that looked at the interaction between bacterial pneumonia and SARS-CoV-2 whereby they investigated whether vaccination against pneumonia reduced the risk of COVID-19. They found that it did and significantly so!
As the authors point out in their article above, why wouldn’t these products have been endorsed as measures against COVID-19 in that case? This study was published in May 2022. The pneumonia vaccines were already on the market right? FDA approved. Many types. Easy peasy. Offer peeps these products to reduce COVID-19 risk. Why not. You’re recommending RunDeathIsNear, I mean Remdesivir, so why not an FDA-approved product shown to reduce risk.
The last three years have convinced me that ‘flu is NOT a major killer. There might be a lot of deaths recorded as ‘flu but that’s just for easy record keeping. I cannot recall any funeral that I have attended in my lifetime where the cause of death was ‘flu. However, if the population is scared into believing that ‘flu is a mass killer more are likely to rock up for a jab aren’t they?
I think flu (or just as likely any other respiratory illness, which can’t be scaremongered about in the same way as there is no lucrative vaccine – yet) very often “kills” people who were on their way out anyway, so really it’s just old age. I’m not one for believing that life should be extended at all costs when the quality of that life is poor – having watched grandparents die slowly of other things presumably not as important as flu, a quick death from pneumonia would be preferable. For me it would be preferable to entering extreme old age in which I was unable to look after myself, take pleasure in life or recognise those around me, this would also apply to many in care homes which is why (and I know this is controversial) at that stage I would personally see something such as covid as a release. But we are conditioned now to believe that most methods of death are cruel and bad and should be avoided, haven’t worked out yet myself what is seen as acceptable other than going to bed and not waking up in the morning (unless that was caused by covid of course).
…I think you are right…I suspect it’s a scam, I can’t seem to find influenza deaths, on their own, for the last few years..they’re always mixed with pneumonia and other respiratory viruses…..which makes the numbers much higher!!??
I believe seasonal ‘flu jabs for over 65s in the UK were introduced in 2000. There was no change in annual age-standardised mortality trends until 2011 when the steady improvement seen since at least 1922 flattened out. If it hadn’t stabilised we’d be on course for zero deaths by 2047-50… A different sort of dystopian Net Zero.
It’s long been known that more people die in the winter months than in the summer months. ONS have long published a series of calculated Excess Winter Mortality based on comparing the average number of deaths in December to end-March (winter) with the average of the preceding August-November and the following April-July.
Note that 2020 had the bad grace to have many deaths in the April-July period which made the preceding December 2019-March 2020 period look particularly benign.
New covid scariant already proving a thoroughly useful income-generator. Of such concern, that the planned UK vax schedule for autumn 2023 has been brought forward by a few (three?) weeks. And, in recognition of the ‘extra work’ involved, those administering the dose – principally GP practices, I assume – will receive an extra £10 for each care home patient injected (£5 for other groups) and an *additional* bonus of £200 for each care home completed. Every cloud…
BTW, you’re going to have to tell me what inspired your username. It’s dead funny!
It’s a phrase used by the oysters, just before it dawns on them that they are about to be devoured by apparently well-meaning ‘friends’, in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: “some of us are out of breath/And all of us are fat”. Which only makes them more attractive as prey. Seemed appropriate for the current times.
Aahh, I remember the scene but not the details. Well thanks for clearing that up.
Bookmark, print and send to your MP
“Sweden during the PandemicPariah or Paragon?
The main difference between Sweden’s strategy and that of most other countries was that it mostly relied on voluntary adaptation rather than government force.”
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/sweden-during-pandemic
Indeed, but who takes ANY notice of Jones, FFS?
“China is building new coal power so fast that ‘energy transition’ by the West is meaningless” – Even if the U.S. went completely off coal tomorrow, its coal-fired power stations would be more than replaced by China’s, writes David Blackmon in the Telegraph”.
China’s CO2 and particulate emissions continue dropping faster than any country’s. New build power plants are 2x efficient those they replace. China passed Peak Gasoline this year and all homes are now powered with renewables. How boring.