Utopia, you are standing in it!

With the debacle playing out in Europe and the UK, it takes a special brand of delusion the claim that increasing reliance on wind and solar will inevitably result in falling power prices.

And delusion, in that respect, is very much the order of the day amongst Australia’s Green/Labor Alliance.

When it comes to anything like sensible energy policy, Anthony Albanese, the PM (above left) and his witless Energy Minister, Chris Bowen (above right) are so far out of touch with reality, it’s frightening. Especially frightening for any energy-hungry businesses or industry, and terrifying for households already dealing with double-digit inflation and rising interest rates.

Brushed off as ‘cost of living pressures’, the predicted (by ALP modellers) 56% increase in electricity prices over the next two years, will wipeout hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and mineral processing (aluminium smelters we will be the first to go) and destroy…

Stardate: 5027.3 (2268)
Original Air Date: September 27, 1968
Writer: D.C. Fontana
Director: John Meredyth Lucas

“It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself.”

Dr. McCoy records something unusual in his medical log (a rare log entry from the good doctor) –Captain Kirk has been unusually irritable lately. Is it because the Enterprise has spent too much time on patrol? Or is something else agitating the captain? Kirk makes a seemingly erratic order for the Enterprise to enter the Romulan Neutral Zone. In “Balance of Terror” we learned what a volatile situation this can lead to. Suddenly, three Romulan ships de-cloak and surround the Enterprise as it sits in forbidden territory (apparently, the Romulans are now using technology borrowed from the Klingons).

Subcommander Tal of the Romulan fleet (Jack Donner) appears onscreen and demands the immediate surrender of the Enterprise. He gives…

In my post last Friday I highlighted how the Governor of the Reserve Bank had just been making up stuff, and apparently knowingly misleading Parliament, to distract from the Bank’s own responsibility for New Zealand’s current very high core inflation. There may well be a case to be made that central banks did about as well as could reasonably be expected over the last couple of years – “reasonably be expected” here set by reference to the general views at the time of other expert observers (none of whom, admittedly, had chosen to take on statutory responsibility for inflation) but simply making stuff up blaming the Moscow bogeyman helps no one, and detracts from any serious conversation about what went on with inflation – core and headline – and why. To put my own cards on the table, there are many reasons why Adrian Orr should not be reappointed, but…

The misanthropes who glue themselves to roads and berate us about the ‘horrors’ of nuclear, coal and gas-fired power aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, to be sure.

Living in a fact and consequence free zone, they’ve never stopped to think for a moment what life would be like without light, heat and power.

There are plenty of factors at play; an education system gutted of any rigourous content and filled with resentment-filled emotional claptrap; a mainstream media that simply parrots whatever crony capitalists tell them to write and say; cynical elites profiting from collective fear and ignorance generated by the press; and a political class who seem to think (with some justification) that the proles are simply too stupid to know or care.

But, leave hundreds of thousands freezing or boiling in the dark, and/or keep presenting them with power bills that they simply can’t afford, and the…

Despite Europe spending €1.2 Trillion on large-scale wind and solar generation, the amount of power being actually delivered in return is risible.

Which is precisely what you’d expect from power generation sources which can only deliver anything like their nameplate capacity when the sun is up, in a cloudless sky, and the wind is blowing at wind speeds greater than 6m/s. Drop the sun drops the wind speed and the whole lot drops off the radar.

For the uninitiated, Ed Hoskins tells the story in pictures below.

A Few Graphs Say It All for Weather-Dependent “Renewables”
Watts Up With That?
Ed Hoskins
5 October 2022

A few graphs say it all for Wind and Solar power

This is the 10-year productivity record for European Weather-Dependent “Renewables”: that is the annual power output divided by the nominal installation rating of the Weather-Dependent “Renewables” installations over the last decade.  The data is…

Many people have been baffled by the Bank of England’s decision to raise interest rates by a historically large three-quarters of a point this week, despite forecasting that the UK economy is sliding into recession. I understand this confusion, but there are three reasons why rates had to be increased.

First, the job of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is to worry about inflation, not growth. Some might like to change the MPC’s mandate, but for now it is tasked with keeping inflation at 2%. Currently inflation is over 10%, and forecast to remain high. With inflation now having spread well beyond food and energy prices, the MPC needed to act to prevent a temporary inflation shock from becoming permanent.

Second, the starting point is important. Even after the latest increase, UK interest rates of 3% remain historically low, and are firmly negative in real terms (after allowing for inflation)…