Utopia, you are standing in it!

Putin’s Ukrainian adventure has Europeans talking about nuclear power as if their existence depends on it. Threaten to deprive people of access to reliable and affordable energy and the love affair with wind and solar is soon forgotten.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain the relationship between total collapses in wind and solar output and sunset and calm weather.

True enough the political intelligentsia have done all they can to have the masses believe otherwise but, anticipating that the mob will surely revolt if left freezing in the dark for any length of time, the focus is now on power that can be delivered on-demand, come what may.

Following Europe’s Big Calm, when wind power output barely registered for months, the French President announced a wholesale reversal of their anti-nuclear power plant policy, no doubt driven by the need to ensure that they will never suffer…

Shell Oil scientist M. King Hubbert made a remarkable prediction in 1956. He had analyzed the depletion patterns of various natural resources, and proposed that the production rates of a given resource from a given region would tend to follow a roughly bell-shaped curve. More specifically, he used what is now called the “Hubbert curve”, which is a probability density function of a logistic distribution curve. This curve is like a gaussian function (which is used to plot normal distributions), but is somewhat “wider”:

Normalized Hubbert Curve. Source: Wikipedia.

Hubbert used various reasonable assumptions (which we will not canvass here) in formulating this model curve. Notably, it predicts that the peak production rate will occur when the total resource from that region is 50% depleted, and that the fall in production on the back side of the curve will be as fast as the rise in production…

When the National-led government took office in late 2008, the government’s books were in something of a mess. The Treasury’s projections were for operating deficits of 2 to 3 per cent of GDP each year over the forecast horizon. Since the mid 1990s, under governments led successively by National and by Labour, there had been 14 years in succession of OBEGAL surpluses (a very very small one in the June 1999 year). After all those surpluses there was, of course, not much debt (the Decenber 2008 HYEFU shows net Crown debt for the just-completed year at 0.0% of GDP). It certainly wasn’t, in any substantive economic sense, a fiscal “crisis”, but it was pretty substantially unsettling, both politically and at The Treasury (where I was working at the time).

There was a great deal of rhetoric about Michael Cullen, Minister of Finance in the outgoing government, having squandered the fruits…

Can they be reinstated or was that why Vlad waited so long?

France meanwhile enjoys 70% of it’s energy from Nuclear, and people suggest Germany is pragmatic, smart and efficient while laughing at the garlic munchers.

The inmates running asylums and who knew?

Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity is the product of policies deliberately designed to wreck reliable and affordable power supplies. Massive and seemingly endless subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar have done what they were designed to do: drive the owners of reliable coal-fired power generators to the wall, by allowing wind and solar generators to occasionally deliver power to the market ahead of the cheap and reliable stuff.

The relationship between weather-dependent wind/sunshine dependent solar and rocketing power prices is crystal clear; see above the trend identified by Dr Michael Crawford a couple of years back, a trend which continues mercilessly upwards (read on).

Thanks to the erratic and occasional delivery of wind and solar, wholesale power prices are surging out of control and major energy users are simply being chopped from the grid when wind and/or solar output hits the floor. And this is just…