Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a word association game, you’ll never find ‘reliability’ paired up with ‘wind’ or ‘solar’. Sunset and calm weather are very real things and so is the idea that power consumers want power as and when they need it, not when the sun’s shining at its zenith in a bright blue sky or the wind is blowing “just right”.

Meaningful power generators know the drill: deliver the goods, all day, every day, whatever the weather, and customers will beat a path to your door.

Wind and solar outfits, on the other hand, couldn’t care less whether you had power, or not. Their only real interest in their occasional delivery of electricity is pocketing the endless subsidies that follow.

We recently posted a helpful analysis by David Wojick on why claims about the grid-scale storage of wind and solar power are the perfect nonsense. This time David provides further detail about…

The Reserve Bank and the MPC will tomorrow emerge from their long summer slumber to deliver a Monetary Policy Statement and OCR decision. It is quite extraordinary that in this period, of considerable volatility, uncertainty, and inflation surging above the target range (even on core measures) we’ve heard precisely nothing from any of them (individually or collectively), and had no policy actions, for three months.

But, at last, tomorrow we will hear. As I’ve said repeatedly here over the years, I’m not really in the business of trying to guess what the MPC will do. There are plenty of people with a strong interest in that, and banks have people who nurture every little contact or conversation they can secure with Reserve Bank officials, analysts, or policymakers. As the Bank says little in public, and isn’t that consistent through time in how it acts, all one can say is good…

Never short on audacity, Britain’s wind industry is now peddling the myth that it’ll soon be lighting up all of Europe. Notwithstanding the fact that it was forced to fire up its coal-fired power plants to overcome the Big Calm in the last months of 2021, when wind power output collapsed across the UK and most of Western Europe.

Absent imports of nuclear power from France and what’s produced by the remnants of its coal-fired power fleet, the Brits would have been left freezing in the dark for weeks on end.

However, the cold hard facts never stand between the renewable energy rent seeker and a bucket of taxpayer’s cash.

Paul Homewood zeroes in on the latest piece of piffle from Britain’s great ‘green’ blob.

Who Needs Russian Gas? We’ve Got Windmills!
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
7 February 2022

A rather dopey article, which is…

Back in mid-December, the Reserve Bank fronted up to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee for the Annual Review hearing on the Bank. I wrote about it here. You may recall that this was the appearance where (a) the Bank (unsuccessfully) tried to kept secret before the hearing the loss of another couple of senior managers, and (b) seemed to mislead the Committee on just how many of their senior managers had gone or were going. In the wake of it, the Governor forced the early departure of his deputy Geoff Bascand a couple of weeks before he was due to leave anyway, over unauthorised contact with the media [CORRECTION: “shared information to a third party”] (most likely over those two new senior management departures).

But towards the end of the hearing (about 50 minutes in here) there was a brief exchange on matters climate change, with an unusually…

Germany set the gold standard for idiotic renewable energy policies, although the Brits, Californians, Texans and South Australians are keen contenders for that glittering prize.

Thanks to its unhinged obsession with intermittent wind and solar, Germans are in the midst of a power pricing and supply calamity.

Suffering Europe’s highest power prices, is just the beginning.

In a don’t say we didn’t warn you piece, Pierre Gosselin spells out the consequences of running with the dumbest energy policy on earth.

Germany Electricity Prices Soar To World Record Highs After Years Of Energy Policy Folly…Expensive, Unreliable
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 February 2022

Germany’s power supply, once mostly made up of a mixture of coal and nuclear power, used to be among the most stable and affordable in the world. Power outages were rare and grid interventions were infrequent.

Greens and socialists then tried electrical power engineering
But then in…

Is “austerity” a good thing?

Depends on how it is defined. Johan Norberg points out that spending restraint is the right approach.

Since I’m a fan of spending restraint, I obviously like the video.

But let’s expand on two points.

First, the definition of austerity is critical. Some fiscal policy folks (at the IMF and CBO, for instance) focus on deficits and debt. And this means they view spending restraint and tax increases as being equally desirable.

But that’s nonsense. As I’ve repeatedlyexplained, red ink is best viewed as a symptom. The real problem is excessive government spending.

Moreover, higher taxes usually exacerbate the spending problem since politicians can’t resist the temptation to spend at least a portion of any expected new revenue.

And since tax increases generally don’t collect as much money as politicians think they will, you can wind…