Utopia, you are standing in it!

Backing ideology over sound engineering was never the smartest ploy. Now the ideologues are in a flat panic as the public begins to realise that they’ve been lied to, all along.

The ‘renewables are cheap’ story doesn’t seem to cut it anymore, with Australian households and businesses set for 25-30% increases in their power bills next month. Australians have been hit with double-digit percentage increases in their power bills every year since the Green-Labor Alliance ramped up the Federal government’s Renewable Energy Target back in 2010.

Their ‘more giant batteries will fix it’ meme is struggling, too. There is no grid-scale power storage system using batteries operating anywhere in the world. Australia is no different. The reason batteries offer no solution is all down to physics and economics.

As the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ collapses around them, the zealots and rent-seekers are reduced to accusing Australia’s coal-fired power plants…

Edward the Confessor (c. 1003 – 5 January 1066) was an Anglo-Saxon English king and saint. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 until his death in 1066.

Edward was the seventh son of Æthelred the Unready, and the first by his second wife, Emma of Normandy daughter of Richard I the Fearless Duke of Normandy and Gunnor. The names of Gunnor’s parents are unknown, but Robert of Torigni wrote that her father was a forester from the Pays de Caux and according to Dudo of Saint-Quentin she was of noble Danish ancestry. Gunnor was probably born c. 950. Her family held sway in western Normandy and Gunnor herself was said to be very wealthy.

Edward was born between 1003 and 1005 in Islip, Oxfordshire, and is first recorded as a ‘witness’ to two charters in 1005. He had one full brother, Alfred, and…

I am not an ACT party voter. I disagree too strongly with their liberal stances on social issues, which in my opinion are at least as important as economic management.

But damn, they are tempting me to vote for them this time around. They’ve always had a much better understanding of their values and ideology than National, who have forgotten their values and see their purpose as keeping Labour out of power, but not necessarily their policies.

Their party conference was held over the weekend. One of the guest speakers was Professor Elizabeth, a sociologist of education in the School of Critical Studies, the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland (that’s a mouthful!). She is also infamously one of the seven signatories who sent the letter ‘In Defence of Science’ to the NZ Listener in July 2021, decrying the assessment of Maori customs as being…

When Colin Craig launched the Conservative Party back in 2011, I was cautiously optimistic – maybe, finally, here was a party that could see that our societal fragmentation and lack of values was the cause of many (not all) of our problems. Boy was I wrong. Crazy Colin Craig turned out to be a monster, which was obvious even before it came out that he was a sex pest.

I never held any faith in the loonies associated with that party after that debacle. I felt it was a pity that the large minority of NZers with strong social values did not have a political home. But unfortunately, rather than winding up and letting something else take their place, people just kept trying to resurrect the very dead corpse of that party.

The first person to try to really flog the dead horse was Leighton Baker, a builder from Rangiora…

Wind and solar generation spreads like cancer. Dilute and diffuse, intermittent and unreliable the wind and solar generators’ demand for land is insatiable. And because every single MW of wind or solar generation capacity has to be backed up by another MW of dispatchable power generation (coal, gas, diesel or hydro) to accommodate sunset and calm weather, the conventional generators will continue to occupy the space they always have.

Which brings us to nuclear. None of what appears in the paragraph above applies to nuclear power generation. Concentrated, persistent and reliable, nuclear power doesn’t need batteries and it doesn’t need backup. Moreover, it doesn’t need an endless acres of land, as Ronald Bailey explains below.

New Study: Nuclear Power Is Humanity’s Greenest Energy Option
Reason
Ronald Bailey
10 May 2023

Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants last month. Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its…