Utopia, you are standing in it!

The War of the First Coalition was a set of wars that several European powers fought between 1792 and 1797 initially against the constitutional Kingdom of France and then the French Republic that succeeded it. They were only loosely allied and fought without much apparent coordination or agreement; each power had its eye on a different part of France it wanted to appropriate after a French defeat, which never occurred.

As part of the War of the First Coalition the forces of the French First Republic overran and occupied the Austrian Netherlands in 1792.

Foreign minister Charles François Dumouriez, who sought a war which might restore some popularity and authority to the King. Dumouriez prepared the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, where he expected the local population to rise against Austrian rule. However, the revolution had thoroughly disorganized the French army, which had insufficient forces for the invasion. Its soldiers…

Bette Midler in a classic performance of the classic Stones song, with a cameo from Mick Jagger.

Nuclear power isn’t expensive: the nuclear-powered French pay around half what wind and solar-powered Danes and Germans do (see above). And the French don’t suffer the power rationing and blackouts their German neighbours do, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in. Indeed, it’s nuclear power from France and coal-fired power from Poland that keeps Germany’s near-terminal power grid alive.

Since Vladimir Putin’s adventure in Ukraine, German power prices have rocketed, further still, recently hitting a record 40 US cents per kWh.

With the French experience in mind, just why those who jump up and down about human-generated carbon dioxide gas refuse to promote ever-reliable, safe and affordable nuclear power is hard to fathom.

That they continue in their obsessive fixation with unreliable, intermittent and costly subsidised wind and solar speaks volumes. They can’t be serious about supplying reliable and affordable power to all comers, nor can they…

A couple of weeks ago I did the first couple of posts in a series looking at the Reserve Bank’s stewardship of monetary policy since the start of 2020 (and the start of Covid). That proved to be too much for my intermittent (at best) post-Covid energy levels, and although I will come back and complete the series that won’t be this week either.

But I was glancing at the Reserve Bank’s page of selected OIA releases (always interesting to see what others have asked) when I found this release last Friday under the heading “Growth of RBNZ”. The Bank appears to have adopted a new strategy where the OIA request responses it chooses to release on the website are released there on the same day the requester themselves gets the information (a strategy often intended to reduce the payoff to the effort involved in actually devising and lodging an…

Just as relevant today, perhaps even more so

January 29, 2019

It’s the first episode of Season 2 and it’s great to be back. We’re kicking things off with a returning guest. Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com), stand-up comedian, Spiked Magazine columnist and Jonathan Pie co-writer discusses woke comedy, what makes someone left wing, identity politics, free speech and Brexit (just a bit) with the guys at TRIGGERnometry.

Electricity that can’t be delivered as and when households and businesses need it, has absolutely no commercial value. Hence the massive and endless subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar and the punitive mandates that force retailers to take it, ahead of the reliable and affordable stuff.

Random 3,000 to 4,000 MW wind power output collapses are at the heart of Australia’s self-inflicted renewable energy debacle. The consequences of an obsession with subsidised wind and solar were as perfectly predictable, as they were perfectly avoidable. Power rationing is now routine and power prices are soaring out of control.

What’s depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid during May, when there were more than a half-dozen occasions when total output amounted to less than 1,000 MW (or 11.6% of total capacity) and three occasions when output…