Meanwhile, our government continues to spend about $5 million on the Flannery Centre, named after the bloke who predicted our dams would never be full again, the same bloke PM Gillard is paying $180,000 for three days “work” a week to peddle what the evidence has clearly proved to be nonsense.
The big story this weekend is what Jo Nova has dubbed FakeGate. On Thursday we saw the DeSmogBlog getting very excited that *shock horror* the anti global-warming-and-we’re-all-doomed mob The Heartland Institute received an evil $6.5 mil in funding. Never mind the likes of Greenpeace receiving $310 mil, no, the scandal of the day was directed at man-made global warming sceptics.
Still in the US, there is some good news however. Finally a step, albeit a small one, towards common sense; that is, not throwing good money at wasteful gimmicks.
The wind power industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit failed Thursday in Washington.
Ahh, subsidies. Because in what should be a thriving free market economy, governments picking winners and losers – kind of like in the old USSR – is surely the way to go (/sarc).
R&D, R&D folks. Ideas like wind and solar power aren’t bad per se. But what I don’t understand is why more people can’t see that these two potentially excellent technologies need considerably more development before we can begin to even think about them as viable options for replacing base-load power.
For example, a far better investment for the UK (Conservative???) government would surely be to throw £35 bil at research and development of wind power technology rather than agreeing to new subsidies worth the same amount for yet another wind project that, sorry, will make a negligible yet intensely costly contribution to the island’s energy resources.
Ho hum. At least they’re not being completely mad (although I think I’m being very generous here).
Again, who wouldn’t love it if they could buy a cheap solar panel and have their electricity bill slashed… without having to rip off their fellow taxpayer?
R&D, R&D.
Finally, back on home soil, I wonder how much flak this bloke is going to cop.
WakeUp2TheLies reports that ‘Former Bureau of Meteorology chief to hold forum arguing that “global warming is natural”‘.
Nasty, NASTY!
Cartoon by John Spooner at – wait for it – the Age.
Their arguments range from, “it’s got to be better to put wind turbines up”, to “other countries around the world are doing it”. One cites the example of Germany, which has led the world in subsidising solar panels.
Yes, Germany has spent more than $75 billion on inefficient solar technology delivering a mere 0.1 per cent of its total energy supply. And this will postpone global warming by how much? A whole seven hours by the end of the century.
The ads give the impression that solar and wind are ready to take over from fossil fuels. Yet, even in a very optimistic scenario, the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2035, solar and energy will contribute only about 1.6 per cent of global energy.
Read on.
Fancy that. The very people who will benefit the most from Julia’s carbon (dioxide!) tax via subsidies (read: your tax dollars taken from you and given to someone else) are the very people spruiking it.
OK, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but last night on Discovery HD World, after the main show, there was a little 10 minute clip on a mini program called e-novations (*groan*), or, apparently, Discovery Tech over in the US.
Anyway, the segment was about a new type of electric car that uses Vehicle-to-Grid or V2G technology. At first, perhaps, this sounds like a pretty neat concept. Charge your car off the grid in off-peak times then sell the electricity back to the grid during peak times.
But check out the nitty gritty, and it’s not such a sweet deal. And odd, too, that in 10 web pages I looked up (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10), all of them espouse the wonderful benefits, but none of them mentioned the cost.
Only the video did.
For starters, these V2G units cost about $70,000. So effectively, you will be paying four times more for your average car. Dr Willet Kempton, at the University of Delaware, who’s the bloke plugging this type of car, also acknowledges that if most of your electricity comes from coal (which it does), then the CO2 emissions end up being about the same as a regular car.
So far, we’re at four times the cost for pretty much no benefit.
And how’s this? It seems to be that in the video, the doctor charges up his car at the university, then takes it home to power his house… and a few neighbours’ houses.
How convenient.
So overall, it seems like a neat idea on the surface, and may well work after quite a few more years of R&D, but at present it is at best a gimmick, and at worst a fraud.
PS They don’t exactly go for 500-odd kilometres, either.
Tony from Oz at PA Pundits puts out some sobering info…
The problem is that renewable power just cannot supply the power that is needed absolutely for 24 hours of every day, and that in turn leads to another problem of an even more serious nature. Those renewable plants are being constructed instead of plants that can supply those levels of power. Because of that, plants that actually can supply the required power have fallen into disfavour so much, that they are not being constructed at all, and in fact, not even being considered. When the realistion that renewables cannot supply that power, perhaps decades will be lost, and have already been lost, and then further time will be needed for those plants that can do the job to be constructed, hence there is a looming crisis with respect to the supply of electrical power.
And as for wind?
At the bottom left of the page at that link is the total for Wind power. When culled out from the overall renewable power total, this shows that Wind only supplies 1.8% of the overall total power delivered to all sectors of consumption in the U.S.
The post goes on to explain that wind operates at a mere 22.5% of capacity on average. Not good enough for our constant power needs.
Solar is even worse.
Solar, well that’s not really worth looking at, because in fact the total power delivered from Solar sources over the last year has in fact gone down, and a simple calculation shows that all the solar power plants in the U.S. supply only 0.02% of the total power, and read that carefully, 0.02%, the same amount of power being delivered from one large coal fired plant every 18 days.
Read the entire post. For the more mathematically minded, there are some nifty calculations there.
RT @CatherineWPhoto: FAULTY POWERS: Gillard gov't gives $21.6 million for a Disney film but $1 million to Qld flood survivors.' http://t ... 1 month ago
@vexnews Nice to see you reporting again. That Gillard piece was lame. 1 month ago
@Polliwatch and much of the media love it. Ask Tony a sticky question and he has trouble getting out of it.... unlike our Queen BS artist 1 month ago
It isn't about Gillard being a woman. If that were so, why are Maggie and Julie Bishop so respected?Gillard is a vindictive incompetent liar 1 month ago
