So here we are with this day's reptile chorus of complaints ... and sure enough, the whining, whingeing culture continues at the lizard Oz, with petulant Peta setting the pace ...
Australia’s apology mania is wrong and must stop
We have created an Aboriginal grievance industry that needs to perpetuate victimhood to justify its continued existence, to build platforms of power.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist
Speaking of apologies ...
The pond doesn't want to be seen encouraging the whinyblack bashing culture that's rampant in the Oz, so it was off to the intermittent, often failing, archive with her.
Ditto one note Dame Slap, still riding her latest hobby horse ...
The escalating war between Sally Dowling and Judge Penelope Wass has reached breaking point, with serious consequences for defendants and complainants caught in the crossfire.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist
Never mind the undermining of justice performed by Dame Slap in recent times.
As for Jack, the outsider on most issues, never mind the children, he was agitated for the parents ...
Soon we’ll see what Albo’s zest for the social ban amounts to after parents catch on they have to fork out for the seven volume set of À la recherche du temps perdu and an oboe.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist
Luckily the pond had a Wilcox for that ...
Ah, mum, too much reading of the reptiles will always put you in a tizz ...why not take up social media, it could hardly be worse than the lizard Oz?
As predicted and expected, the "news" section carried on the latest reptile jihad ...
Farrell family flies almost halfway to moon on taxpayers … within rules
Trade Minister Don Farrell flies family using $90,000 of taxpayer funds
Fresh scrutiny of MPs’ travel entitlements reveals Don Farrell’s extensive use of taxpayer-funded family flights and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s 78 publicly funded trips for her lobbyist husband.
By Noah Yim and Jack Quail
Geoff chambered another round but could manage only a two minute rant ...
Anthony Albanese runs ‘nothing to see here’ strategy and digs in behind big spender Anika Wells
Anthony Albanese’s defence of Anika Wells’s family travel expenses creates a stalemate where politicians accessing generous entitlements attack other politicians doing the same thing.
The only thing there to note was the yarn in another rag:
Meanwhile the reptiles were agitated by another yarn featuring mad King Donald ...
The Trump administration is proposing sweeping new travel rules that will impact Australian tourists.
By Joseph de Avila and Michelle Hackman
Relax, no need to travel, the madness can be safely observed from a distance...
And as well as the infallible Pope, there's always TT...
What a relief, a breath of stale air, to see Dame Groan out and about, burbling in her old biddy way about the usual ...
The header: Adding more renewables will not fix Australia’s energy price crisis; To Rod Sims’s way of thinking, the problem with our electricity prices is all about the cost of gas and our ageing coal-fired plants that are prone to break down.
The caption for Sauron himself, surrounded in the usual way by whale-killing windmills (you can see the whales on a daily basis on the Hume down Goulburn way): Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen
There was nothing new to see in the old biddy's rant. It was as stale as the pond's joke about whales being killed, but it took much longer, a full five minutes, running through the biddy's standard range of climate science denialist tricks ...
The pond merely catalogues it, so that it can join the pond's compendium of Groans ...
To Sims’s way of thinking, the problem with our electricity prices is all about the cost of gas and our ageing coal-fired plants that are prone to break down.
Windmills, solar panels, batteries, hydro and a touch of gas can do the trick of achieving the holy grail of affordable and reliable energy while also meeting emissions reduction targets.
Not everyone agrees. There is a logical disconnect to Sims’s story because he omits the ad hoc expansion of subsidised renewable energy and the consequences it would have for the workings of the electricity grid and prices. It certainly wasn’t market forces.
While early interventions in the electricity grid were small-scale, across time the preference given to sustainability over affordability and reliability has led to an overdependence on weather-dependent generation, the intermittency of which has led to a series of problems.
These include the need for a massive overbuild of renewable installations and the requirement for expensive backup to cover situations when renewables, even with batteries, cannot meet demand.
The reptiles graced the apologist with a snap, Rod Sims addresses the National Press Club. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Sure enough that set off another bout of groaning ...
By favouring renewable energy with financial backing and dispatch preference, the business model of the backbone of our electricity grid, coal-fired power plants, was quickly eroded.
In another scenario, these plants would been refurbished and/or rebuilt. Sims’s estimate of the cost of the new build of coal-fired power station is simply inaccurate. Using current sites and existing connections to the transmission system, Australia could have had a new suite of high-efficiency, low-emissions coal-fired plants that would have kept electricity prices competitive while providing free ancillary services that the grid requires.
It may be water under the bridge, but it is still worth thinking about what has been forgone.
It’s hardly surprising that China continues to build new coal-fired plants because they offer affordable and reliable power to service industry as well as provide cheap power to households.
Certainly, gas has increasingly become the price-setter in the east coast grid, the national electricity market. Open-cycle gas plants are a much better fit to provide backup to the uncertain flow of electrons from wind and solar than coal plants.
But it should not surprise anyone that the domestic price of gas has surged, given the strong antipathy of the Victorian and NSW governments to any new gas developments. For a long time, this aversion was shared by federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, although recently he has described gas as “the ultimate backstop in our energy grid”.
The fact remains many gas producers view Australia as a difficult place to explore for and exploit gas fields. Just look at the interminable delays in the development of the Narrabri project in NSW, the output of which is slated entirely for the domestic market. There is also insufficient infrastructure to support several potential gas projects, including in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Inevitably the dog botherer was enlisted to help out, Sky News host Chris Kenny says Chris Bowen’s solar share scheme is an “insult to taxpayers” as bills continue to rise.
On and on the old biddy ranted and groaned, her grief and sighing up there with the suffering of the Mock Turtle in Alice ...
The construction of the new transmission lines required to link far-flung renewable installations also has been delayed and the costs have blown out. The transmission companies are hurriedly ordering synchronous condensers to provide the ancillary services that coal provides for free. These costs will be added to consumer bills in due course, along with the costs of the extra transmission lines and other infrastructure.
The net effect has been to dramatically push up electricity bills for households and businesses. According to the recent consumer price index figures, electricity costs increased by nearly 40 per cent across the year ending in October. Were it not for the rebates in place – yes, more subsidies – householders would have really felt the pinch. The decision by Jim Chalmers to discontinue the rebates next year could prove to be a courageous one.
In the meantime, energy-intensive operations – mainly smelters and refineries – have been operating at a loss, in part because of rising energy bills. Both the federal and state governments have stepped in with substantial subsidies to prevent their closure.
The point is that once upon a time we had affordable, reliable electricity where the market determined investment decisions. After two decades or so of forcing renewable energy – a very low-density form of energy requiring a great deal of land –the situation in which we find ourselves is dire.
Realistically, there is no prospect of green hydrogen or offshore wind filling the gaps, although that was the federal government’s plan at one stage.
Consumers are reluctant to sell electricity back to the grid and the take-up of electrical vehicles has been disappointing.
It is simply disingenuous therefore to suggest that the way out of this pickle is to install even more renewable energy – the Sims solution. Adding more renewables doesn’t overcome the problem of intermittency.
Cue Dan the man to help with the whining, the chorus of complaining, though it has to be said that a 'dozer on top of a pile of coal is a quaint way to illustrate the deep reptile devotion to sweet, virginal, clean, lovely and decent Oz coal ... Shadow Energy Minister Dan Tehan calls out Labor’s energy policies as Australians face “higher and higher” energy bills. “No one says pursuing 82 per cent renewables in your grid by 2030, which is completely and utterly ideologically driven, is a sensible way to do this,” Mr Tehan told Sky News Australia. “We are becoming more aware of the need for proper baseload power.”
A final round of complaints just about did it ...
The Australian Energy Market Commission is now walking back from its prediction that electricity prices would fall over the decade due to the penetration of renewables. The expectation is that real prices may rise by 13 per cent over the coming decade; there are reasons to think that this is an underestimate.
Victoria’s Auditor-General is also warning that the state’s grid is not well-placed to cope with the anticipated closure of the Yallourn coal-fired power station in 2028. The expectation now is that further subsidies will be required to ensure its continuation. The state’s plan for offshore wind is in tatters as the recent round of auctions had to be cancelled. In any case, offshore wind is a particularly expensive means of generating electricity.
As for the proposition pushed by Bowen and other cabinet ministers that renewables are the “cheapest form of new energy” – note the inclusion of new – it is becoming clear that when all the system costs are included, this assertion simply doesn’t stack up.
Add in the risk of total blackouts, such as the one that happened recently in renewables-dependent Spain and Portugal, and the case for a Plan B that is not based on the further expansion of renewables becomes compelling. It would be better for everyone if some of these coal plants were rebuilt rather than allowed to limp on.
Recent? She's still banging on about Spain and Portugal? According to AI and wiki, the last big Iberian peninsula blackout was back in April but to the doddery old duffer, caught in a repetitive time warp, it probably felt like yesterday ...
Here, have a break, have a Golding in lieu of a Kit Kat ...
The pond wanted to end with a note that at last it's open season on that wascally wabbit Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame ...
Good old Ron - haven't heard from the old laggard in years - was out and about in the lizard Oz shedding crocodile tears ...
If you want to follow any of the links, you can do it via the intermittent archive.
The pond was mainly interested in the grieving, as if Tamworth's shame had ever been anything other than a blundering, deeply clueless Tamworth boofhead and git ...
The pond can never get over the undying stain of having been born in the same hospital as the boofhead ...
The pond resorted to the timeless Burroughs' cut and paste method as a way of continuing its war with roaming AI bots ...
Completely clueless ... but then Ron has always been that way ...
At last it came time to wrap up with a final gobbet of whining and moping...
Old Ron wants to think that it's a good start?
But then Ron has always been a completely clueless buffoon of the first water ...think way back to 2015 ...
Can a clueless clown of the first water carry any credibility berating another clown, or is it just part of a circus slapstick routine?
But this is Barners' hunting season, and the pond couldn't help noticing another attempt to nail Tamworth's shame in another place ... I take it all back. Barnaby is a fool, after all (*archive link)
Here it should be noted that anyone who didn't think Barners was a fool from the get go has to be marked as a most peculiar fool, sadly much like the town of Tamworth, repeatedly voting for the clown and then wondering why it was considered the country capital for an ongoing carnival of clowns ...
Barners was never politically dumb?
He always had the next 17 moves mapped out in 4D chess before anyone figured out he was playing 5D chess?
Who is this fool, this blithering, blathering idiot?
It made the pond insatiable, the pond wanted more ...
If anyone wanted to understand why Tamworth kept voting for its undying shame, there's a more than fair clue buried at shallow grave level in this nonsense.
Suddenly they're going to ghost him, as if he never did anything worthy of a ghosting before bedding down with Pauline?
Ye sainted aunt's collection of Tamworthian stupidities ...
He's never, until now, been a fool?
Really?
Oh it's been a long time since Tony Windsor ...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.