Utopia, you are standing in it!

The makers say: ‘To charge the battery, we take CO2 at near atmospheric temperature and pressure and we compress it. The heat that is generated during compression is stored. When we exchange the thermal energy with the atmosphere, the CO2 gas becomes liquid.

To generate and dispatch electricity, the liquid CO2 is heated up and converted back into a gas that powers a turbine, which generates power. The CO2 gas is always contained and the entire system is sealed. We don’t use any exotic materials.’
— Looks like another net user of power.
– – –
Italian startup Energy Dome, maker of the world’s first CO2 battery, is officially entering the US market, says Electrek.

Energy Dome’s battery uses carbon dioxide to store energy from wind and solar on the grid.

The latest monthly data on the UK’s public finances included the first of many payments from the Treasury to cover losses made by the Bank of England’s Asset Purchase Facility (APF). This may seem like an arcane subject, but the sums are huge and at least partly avoidable, so bear with me.

First, the technical details. This is yet another unwelcome hangover from Quantitative Easing. Under QE, the Bank’s APF bought government bonds, or gilts, by crediting the accounts that commercial banks hold at the central bank, using newly-created money. These accounts, known as central bank reserves, pay interest at the Bank Rate, which is currently 3%.

The APF also receives interest on these gilts from the government, like any other bondholder, in the form of coupon payments. When these payments are higher than the cost of the reserves, the Bank has been making a profit which it has paid…

Lack of information sparks speculation

Rather coincidentally as I was preparing my Ombudsman compliant (actually there is no such thing as coincidence) against NZTA’s refusal of my Official Information Act request on the City Centre to Mangere Light Rail project (CC2M) (see: Inadequate Response from NZTA on City Centre to Mangere Light Rail sparks Ombudsman Complaint) a fellow Tweeter shared a link from Interest.co.nz on Treasury being at tension with Transport Minister Twyford over CC2M and its complexity.

For the full article see: Treasury report shows tensions with the Minister of Transport Phil Twyford over ‘extremely complex’ Auckland light rail project

That article was published yesterday the same day I got my OIA request back and it looks like NZTA were showing the same level of contempt in withholding information to Interest as I got with my OIA request.

Let’s break down the article as it is a pile of…

The claim that wind and solar guarantee falling power bills is being revealed for the big fat lie that it truly is. It’s a reality that is catching up with a vengeance for Australians gullible enough to have bought it. Tens of $billions have already been squandered on subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar and, under the truly deranged leadership of Anthony Albanese and his Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, there is much, much worse to come.

Retail power prices are already amongst the highest in the world; the hot tip is for power bills to jump somewhere between 30 and 50% in the next 12 months.

What that means to small businesses and households is the subject of this timely piece by the Australian’s Gemma Tognini.

Green zealotry will not save battlers from power pain
The Australian
Gemma Tognini
12 November 2022

Up the road from where I live…

*Editors’ note: this post is part of a series on ‘The Human Rights Act After 22 Years’, following theSLS Annual Seminarheld in November 2022.You can read the first post in the serieshere.*

With the reinstatement of Dominic Raab as Secretary of State for Justice, the Bill of Rights Bill, currently before Parliament, is once again a possibility only weeks after Liz Truss halted its progression on account that it was a ‘complete mess’. This post examines the Bill’s provisions on overseas military operations, how they compare with the UK judiciary’s approach, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence. Also highlighted  are other extraterritoriality issues outside overseas military operations that the UK will have to consider. 

The main extraterritoriality issue that the Bill addresses explicitly is overseas military operations. Clause 14 states that a…

Mary and her husband Felipe

In September 1554, Mary stopped menstruating. She gained weight, and felt nauseated in the mornings. For these reasons, almost the entirety of her court, including her physicians, believed she was pregnant. Parliament passed an act making Felipe regent in the event of Mary’s death in childbirth.

In the last week of April 1555, Elizabeth was released from house arrest, and called to court as a witness to the birth, which was expected imminently. According to Giovanni Michieli, the Venetian ambassador, Felipe may have planned to marry Elizabeth in the event of Mary’s death in childbirth, but in a letter to his brother-in-law Maximilian of Austria, Felipe expressed uncertainty as to whether Mary was pregnant.

Thanksgiving services in the diocese of London were held at the end of April after false rumours that Mary had given birth to a son spread across Europe. Through May and…

It doesn’t take a genius to connect calm weather with total collapses in wind power output. Even the functionally illiterate have the capacity to understand just how incapable wind power is of delivering power on demand.

For example, depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid in June 2020. Back then, all of the wind turbines connected the Eastern Grid had a combined notional capacity of 7,728MW. Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia these whirling wonders routinely deliver a risible fraction of their capacity.

During June 2020 there were lengthy periods when the combined output of every wind turbine connected to the Eastern Grid struggled to top 400 MW (5.1% of total capacity). Such as: 11 June when output collapsed to a trifling 86…

We have a database of high-speed rail construction costs up.

Separately, because of Noah Smith’s opinions about high-speed rail, today there is going to be an event featuring me and him in which we are going to discuss the issue in an American context, alongside a presentation of the database and what lessons can be drawn from it. You can register here; it’s at 13:00 Eastern US Time, or 19:00 Berlin time.

A few notes regarding our database, because I’m being asked on Twitter, and also because it’s relevant for our research:

This is a well-studied topic

Literature on comparative HSR costs already exists, and some of our internal cost references are to studies on the subject. This is not like subway costs, where the biggest databases I know of prior to ours are a Flyvbjerg paper and a Spanish analysis each with a number of items in…

Following on from our recent events and blogs marking the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the secret ballot, Dr Philip Salmon explores some of the Act’s lesser known and unintended consequences.

The Ballot Act of 1872 sits alongside the three major Reform Acts of the 19th century (and various Corrupt Practices Acts) in helping to transform British elections into their recognisably modern form. As some of our earlier blogs have shown, it ended a system of open voting and public nominations that had become increasingly associated with bribery, the intimidation of voters and disorderly behaviour, often fuelled by drink.

The calmness and order of Britain’s new secret elections, by contrast, was striking. At the first by-elections to be held in Pontefract, Preston, Tiverton and Richmond, it was widely reported that there was none of the usual ‘horse play’ and ‘excitement’. Some…

Few regimes in the world are more despotic than the current rulers in Iran. Sadly, there is little sign yet that the Iranian population can be freed from it.

New Zealanders got a glimpse of the conditions under which Iranians are living when earlier this year two NZ travellers were detained by the regime, and were only freed after tense negotiations by NZ diplomats.

A deeper insight comes from Green MP Golriz Ghahraman who in an article that appeared in last week’s Guardian Weekly wrote that being an Iranian woman is a heavy birthright.

“It comes with knowing a true, deep, feminism,while also knowing violent oppression at the hand of the government ruling our homeland.

“And for millions of us, it means displacement”.

She goes on to relate how she and her parents were granted political asylum in Aotearoa New Zealand when she was 9 years old. “We were never…

At the end of June, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon set out the Scottish Government’s roadmap for a referendum on Scottish independence. The centrepiece would be a Bill to be introduced into the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a referendum in like terms to the 2014 independence referendum, but absent an accompanying section 30 order giving the Scottish Parliament express competence to legislate for a referendum. In addition, Scotland’s Lord Advocate confirmed that she would be making a reference to the United Kingdom Supreme Court (‘UKSC’) for a determination of whether such a Bill, if introduced, would relate to a reserved matter. The rationale for the reference would be to provide definitive legal clarity as to the scope of the Scottish Parliament’s legislative powers.

On 23 November, the UKSC gives its response to the Lord Advocate’s request for legal clarity. In an earlier blog coinciding with the making of the…

We heard a lot in the last week about the 636 fossil fuel lobbyists who took over the COP27 process and were the main cause of the failure for the final agreement to have any teeth. The conclusion was obvious: We must prohibit industry from involvement in all policies! Mainstream media covered this NGO campaign, repeating the claims and target messages, amplifying the anti-industry dogma without actually going into the research to see if the numbers were correct. If journalists and political leaders had done some basic research (even just clicking on the link to the research data), they would have quickly discovered that the claims and the data were completely false, grossly exaggerated and contrived to create fear and outrage. Once again we have been hoodwinked by a group of unethical political opportunists preying on public vulnerability and fear in order to propagate their interests and spread their…

South Australia’s infamous Statewide blackout on 28 September 2016 was caused by wind turbines that couldn’t handle a vigorous spring storm front. Wind speeds exceeded 25m/s (90km/h), which meant turbines at the bulk of its (then 18) wind farms shut down automatically to protect themselves from catastrophic self-destruction.

Metropolitan Adelaide was without power for hours, regional centres without power for days and mines in the north of the state were without power for close to a fortnight. The cost to businesses and households – first estimated to be in the order of $367 million – was all thoroughly avoidable.

This is a state that trashed its perfectly reliable coal-fired power plants at Port Augusta, closed in May 2016, and blown up in November 2017, with its Labor Premier and MPs exultant at the result.

Well, in another ‘we told you so moment’, thousands of South Australians have been left without…