Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Paul Homewood

.

https://timera-energy.com/european-gas-prices-drop-to-pre-war-lows/

.

There are increasingly strong signs that European gas prices are back to pre-war lows and may stop that way. [TTF is the European benchmark]. As Timera explain, part of the reason is demand destruction in Europe and Asia, with gas replaced by coal and slowing economic growth in China. Gradually as well LNG capacity is starting to expand.

Catalyst Digital Energy, the UK energy consultants, agree, with day ahead UK prices down to 178p/therm at the end of December.

Naturally this has an effect on consumer prices for gas, but there is also an effect on power prices too, and these are back down to £160/MWh on the wholesale market.

You will recall the many references a few months ago to the claim that gas power is now nine times as expensive as wind power. As was pointed out at the time, this was…

By Paul Homewood

Fear is very easy to spread. Make a television documentary in which footage of extreme weather events is overlain with vague statements about climate change, and you sow the idea in viewers’ minds that we are headed for a hellish future.

There can never have been a time when some part of the world was not in a heatwave, another part was not flooded, another suffering unusually high temperatures and another unusually low temperatures.

Yet if you report on every extreme event and throw in the term ‘climate change’, you will very rapidly plant the idea that the world is in some freakish transformation.

Even when it demonstrably isn’t. A Pentagon report that came to light in 2004 claimed that by 2007 large parts of the Netherlands would be rendered uninhabitable by flooding and that by 2020 Britain would have a ‘Siberian climate’ as the system…

It’s not just sunset that sends solar power output to the floor; dust, ice and snow do an equally good job, demonstrating that solar power is, and will always be, utterly useless as a meaningful power source for businesses and households that require power as and when they need it.

Solar is simply incapable of increasing output to meet rising demand and perfectly capable of collapsing in a heap when demand hits the roof (think breathless 42°C evenings when air conditioners are running flat out and the sun sets; or bitter freezing weather when panels are carpeted in snow and ice, and householders are scrambling to add light, power and heat to their homes).

And even when the going is good, solar panels produce power a tiny fraction of the time, especially in higher latitudes, as John Hinderaker explains below.

Solar Energy is Useless
Powerline
John Hinderaker
10 January 2023

Primitive economics, with its pattern of reciprocities, its enmeshment in the wider social structure, its hostility to accumulation, its rigidly regulated rules of distribution, its come-one, come-all dispersal of domestic resources, is largely what he says it is. Primitive attitudes toward nature, which emotionally fuse the secular and the divine, are just that.

To me that passage very much strikes a chord here in New Zealand.

It’s from a fascinating lecture that was delivered in the far-off days of 1997 by a New Zealand born Australian anthropoplogist, Roger Sandall, and it’s the subject of a post over at the Bassett, Brash & Hide blog site.

Mr Sandall was deeply worried about modern government attempts to protect and revive tribal life among the Australian aborigines. He argued that although it had been done with the best intentions it was actually a bad thing because it had prevented them from moving into…

Daniel Yergin writes at Project Syndicate The Energy Transition Confronts Reality.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Given the scale and complexity of the transition away from hydrocarbons, some worry that economic analysis has been given short shrift in the policy planning process. A clear-eyed assessment of the transition’s prospects requires a deeper understanding of at least four major challenges.

Overview

The “energy transition” from hydrocarbons to renewables and electrification is at the forefront of policy debates nowadays. But the last 18 months have shown this undertaking to be more challenging and complex than one would think just from studying the graphs that appear in many scenarios. Even in the United States and Europe, which have adopted massive initiatives (such as the Inflation Reduction Act and RePowerEU) to move things along, the development, deployment, and scaling up of the new technologies on which the transition ultimately depends…

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]
Sounds vaguely sinister — where does education end and indoctrination start? No prizes for guessing which climate theories would get to be ‘taught’.
– – –
Academics from Durham University are urging that climate change education should be made compulsory across the core law curriculum, says Eurekalert.

The researchers evaluated students’ engagement and their broader views concerning climate change education by integrating climate change and environmental law into the core curriculum at the University of Exeter, a Russell Group University.

The results showed that law students want to study climate law and the climate context of law as part of their core curriculum.

Students also said that climate change education should be compulsory and taught across the programme.

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dennis Ambler

In a tumultuous year of change in the world, high impact drilling in 2022 remained at a similar level to 2021, with 81 high impact wells completing (Figure 1). Performance improved with discovered resource increasing from 7.4bnboe in 2021 to a preliminary estimate of 9.2bnboe in 2022, and the commercial success rate, i.e., the proportion of wells which may result in a potentially commercial development, increasing from 29% in 2021 to 36%, Westwood Energy authors wrote in their report this week.

In the last few years, the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) has lost some of its credibility, but during World War II, it was a vital source of information for resistance groups in the Netherlands and other occupied countries.

The caption of the picture above said “January 4, 1944. Jammers and betrayal make listening to the B.B.C. not easy. We listen at night, 11:45 p.m., B.B.C.”

An employee of an illegal newspaper listening to the BBC.

The founders of the first illegal newspapers came to their initiative out of indignation about the German invasion and annoyance about what the equalized newspapers wrote. There was also a need to warn the population against National Socialism and to call for united opposition to the German measures. In 1940 there were about 62 underground magazines and within a year this number rose to 120. Some magazines had succeeded in finding printers and were, therefore…

Giant Tesla battery at Jamestown South Australia.

Rent-seekers would have us believe that battery storage will soon cure wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency, notionally smoothing out the highs and filling in the lows (aka sunset and calm weather).

The only thing wrong with that narrative is the fact that it is an outright lie.

Lithium-ion battery technology is probably as good as it will ever get; the natural limits on storing releasing electricity over time are best explained by the laws of physics, starting with thermodynamics.

However, it’s the law of economics that David Wojick deals with in his piece below.

Astronomical battery cost looms over “renewables”
CFACT
David Wojick
15 December 2022

The amount of storage needed to make renewables reliable is so huge that even if the cost dropped fantastically we still could not afford it.

We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid…

By Paul Homewood

.

.