Utopia, you are standing in it!

Before the obsession with intermittent wind and solar took hold, gas was rarely used to generate electricity if coal, nuclear or hydro sources were available. Gas-fired electricity, in the main, was simply too expensive, by comparison with coal-fired power.

Coal-fired generators are designed to run around-the-clock. Wind turbines and solar panels only run according to the dictates of the weather and, in the latter case, where the Sun sits in the sky.

The crazy and chaotic intermittency inherent in wind and solar has created a place for Open Cycle Gas Turbines and even piston-engined diesels, of the kind used in oceangoing vessels.

Both are referred to as ‘peakers’ in the electricity generation trade, because they’re designed to run for short bursts to pick up peaks in the load (ie rapid increases in demand). Their running costs are such that they were only ever meant to run at the margins…

It turns out all the panic mongers were wrong. Lockdowns etc worked worse than the Swedish approach, even without taking into account all the long term damage to life expectancy, educational outcomes, economic prosperity that the authoritarian states incurred.

As of reporting date June 19th 2022, of all the countries analysed by theOECD, Sweden has the lowest overall cumulative excess deaths tally.

And New Zealand took all that pain for long term damage rather than gain.

Yesterday’s announcement from the Minister of Finance that he was reappointing Adrian Orr as Governor of the Reserve Bank was not unexpected but was most unfortunate. I was inclined to think another commentator (can’t remember who, so as to link to) who reckoned that it may have been Robertson’s worst decision in his five years in office was pretty much on the mark.

When Orr was first appointed, emerging out of a selection process kicked off by the Reserve Bank’s Board while National had still been in office, it seemed to me it was the sort of appointment that could have gone either way. I captured some of that in the post I wrote the day after that first appointment was announced, and rereading that post last night it seemed to at least hint at many of the issues that might arise and come to render the appointment problematic at…

The Ardern government has reappointed Adrian Orr for a second five-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson said the RBNZ board unanimously recommended his reappointment.

He said the central bank had been going through considerable change during Orr’s first term and his reappointment would make sure the changes were bedded in.

But the reappointment has brought a chorus of criticism from Opposition parties. National’s deputy leader Nicola Willis says

National is “appalled” by the Finance Minister’s decision to re-appoint Orr without first completing an independent review of the Bank’s performance.

“In recent years, Adrian Orr as the Chair of the Monetary Policy Committee signed off on an extraordinary programme of money printing and cheap lending that pumped tens of billions of dollars into the economy.That programme directly contributed to house prices rising 28% in one year, inflation rising to a 32-year high…

CO2 is not pollution
Without sufficient dispatchable electricity generation the UK could become a low-energy power on windless nights. Alarmist talk of ‘worst droughts in 500/1000 years’ begs the question: what caused those historical events? Demonising a vital atmospheric trace gas makes no sense.
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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is to call on global leaders to speed up the transition to renewable energy when he addresses the UN COP27 climate summit today, says Energy Live News.

He travelled to Egypt yesterday after a U-turn on his earlier decision to not attend the event, attracting much criticism from environmental activists and political opponents.

Mr Sunak will also tell politicians and business leaders that Britain will work with international allies and be at the “forefront of this global movement” towards clean energy.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney made the striking claim that ‘in 2016 the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70%’. This claim is garbage, for two reasons. Unfortunately, it is just one of a tsunami of fake statistics which is helping to turn public opinion against Brexit.

Indeed, Mr Carney went even further on the Radio 4 Today programme last Friday, when he appeared to blame the current surge in UK inflation and the latest increase in interest rates on the decision to leave the EU.

Let’s start with the Germany comparison. Mr Carney has attempted to contrast the sizes of the two economies over time using the prevailing market exchange rates. This in itself is dodgy. But even his own numbers are wrong, because he has mistakenly compared real…