Utopia, you are standing in it!

There’s nothing like wind power when it comes to delivering grid chaos. It’s all about the weather, really.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, what’s depicted above and below speaks volumes about just how pathetic is the ‘performance’ of Australia’s wind power fleet. Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its 6,960 MW of capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of that.

Depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid, so far this month.

Collapses of over 3,000 MW or more that occur over the space of a couple of hours are routine, as are rapid surges of equal magnitude, which make the grid manager’s life a living hell, and provide the perfect set up for power market price gouging by the owners of…

On April 11, 1689 William III and Mary II were crowned as joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland, the only time in British history when two sovereigns sat upon these thrones.

Generally when a Queen Regnant mounts the British throne her husband will not share her royal title. Elizabeth I never married and the husbands of sovereign queens Anne, Victoria and the current reigning monarch, Elizabeth II, were never made King Consorts. Although Scotland is different where Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was made King Consort of Scotland upon his marriage to Queen Mary I of Scotland.

Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland

However, twice in English history the husbands of a reigning Queen Regnant were granted the title “King of England” but there were differences. One was a full sovereign and the other was a consort. Ironically these were the spouses of Queen Mary I of England and…

See the French and Czech translations

When a train crashes, authorities are on the scene to determine the cause. The COVID-19 coronavirus is fast becoming a global train wreck and unless we quickly assess the the mistakes leading up to this tragedy, more trains will pile into the station.

The longer the Risk-Monger gets in the tooth, the more global mass panic events he has witnessed. Every crisis is a learning opportunity and as I had written in mid February, COVID-19, the Wuhan-originated coronavirus, has created a rich pedagogic environment. Lessons are, unsurprisingly, being learnt the hard way with more mistakes sending the public health situation deeper into disaster. Worse, as our communications methods move from an expert-based model to a bottom-up citizen-based community model, our friends on social media become our main source of information.

The authorities in the West responsible for managing public health risks were made aware…

The UK government’s daily coronavirus briefing on Friday drew more attention to a question that has already been troubling many people: could the wider economic and health impacts of the fight against Covid-19 actually do more harm than the virus itself?

My view, for what it’s worth, is that it is right to err on the side of keeping the lockdown in place for longer. But it is also obviously right to have a serious and open debate about these issues – and very unhelpful to continue to vilify anybody who dares to raise them.

There are two main reasons for thinking that the lockdown could be counter-productive. The first is the impact that the collapse in economic activity might have on the nation’s health, although there may be some benefits here as well as costs (as I will explain later).

The second and perhaps more immediate concern is that…

Cross-country comparisons are often enlightening, even if they just throw up more questions. In matters economic I’ve often highlighted New Zealand/Australia comparisons – both distant, resource-dependent, economies, with a similar legal and political background, market-oriented economies etc.

Ever since the coronavirus issue started to come to the fore it has also seem natural to try to make a little more sense of the New Zealand experience by looking at what is happening in Australia.  After all, both countries took the China travel ban route (us dragged along a day later by the Australian choice), both are islands (to the extent that matters at a time of more generalised movement restrictions), both have just come off summer (to the extent that may, or may not, matter) and both typically prided themselves on being open and democratic societies.  In both countries, (lots of) returning travellers seem to have accounted for most confirmed…

As the Covid-19 pandemic plunges the  world  into a  recession – deeper probably   than the global  financial  crisis – thousands  of  New Zealanders are losing  their jobs  and the  country’s  economy is  already  under  enormous  pressure. Some authorities  predict  it will precipitate a  revolution in  how  we live.

What, then,  about that other revolution which climate change warriors insist is essential  if  we  are not to face  extinction? Can it be relegated in policy priorities as  the government  seeks   to  plot  a  way through the  human  and  economic  misery  of the pandemic?

Covid-19 has cleared the skies of pollution. Carbon emissions  from the worst polluters  (airlines and  land  transport)  have  shrunk  almost to  zero.   International  tourism has come to a  halt,  cruise  liners  are  being laid up, and the global  warming   which  appeared to be such a threat  only  weeks   ago  is  moving at a  much slower  pace.

Those  in…

H/T Sasha Via Bloomberg:

The world’s biggest developer of offshore wind farms issued a reality check to the industry, saying it has overestimated the amount of time its turbines are generating electricity.

Copenhagen-basedOrsted A/Sannounced that offshore wind farms wouldn’t produce quite as much power as previously forecast. The adjustment could shave millions of dollars of revenue a year off each project. It’s also a warning to other developers who may have used similar analysis to estimate the economics of their projects.

As soon as the government released its modelling of the pandemic a few days ago, I realised something was badly wrong. The modelling showed infections increasing even under lockdowns, which obviously wasn’t happening. The crucial parameter here is R, the number of new infections generated by each existing infection. If R is greater than 1, the number of infections grows exponentially, but if R is less than one, it declines, eventually approaching zero. The knife-edge case is R=1, when the number stays constant.

On checking the paper on which the modelling was based, I found that it did indeed assume R>1, even with social distancing. This was less surprising when I realized it was based primarily on data from the initial outbreak in Wuhan, before the lockdown in China had taken full effect. (I later discovered that the report had been given to the government in February, which makes its…

This story was originally published in the November, 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine.

The fighting for Aachen was fierce. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands.

Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Army Maj. Floyd W. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair…

A MILITARY HELICOPTERwas on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash. The place made him uncomfortable. It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men who looked like soldiers standing around. With guns.

The year was 1989. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces.

This article details one of the most ambitious—and secretive—cartographic endeavors of all time and how it came to light in the West. Continue reading at Wired, where it was originally published.

As night follows day, rocketing power prices are the inevitable consequence of the inevitable transition to subsidised and unreliable wind and solar.

The burden of all that glorious virtue signalling falls disproportionately on those on low and fixed incomes. Add the normal path of decrepitude, frailty and illness to impecuniousity and you’ve got a recipe for a national health disaster.

Enduring frigid weather in unheated homes is one of the biggest killers of the elderly. With power prices now so prohibitive, the poor and vulnerable drop like flies every winter as they ration their power use or find themselves cut from the grid, incapable of paying for power, at all.

That first world countries now see hundreds of thousands of households suffering energy poverty as a new ‘normal’ is criminal. Particularly when all of this was perfectly predictable and perfectly avoidable.

As the elderly face the existential (passing) threat of COVID-19, spare…