Utopia, you are standing in it!

Net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions targets are designed to destroy the reliable and affordable power supplies that have brought prosperity to billions around the globe. Dressed up in marketing blurb, net-zero targets sound cheap, but with energy supplies there is no such thing as a free lunch. Plenty of household and businesses have already worked out that the great wind and solar scam brings with it rocketing power prices and routine power rationing.

But that is precisely what punitive mandated renewable energy targets and massive subsidies to wind and solar were designed to do.

On 21 May, Australians will line up to vote for candidates who might form a Federal government later this month. However, what’s on offer is like choosing between swallowing a string of razorblades and jumping into a pool filled with starving saltwater crocs.

Both main parties, the once conservative Liberals, and the once worker’s champion, Labor…

Intermittent wind and solar are a natural guarantee of grid chaos and rocketing power prices. every single country that’s chased the wind and solar pipe dream has watched their power prices go through the roof, with no exception.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. STT has been banging on about this since December 2012. The graphic above from Dr Michael Crawford spells it out: add massively subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your power grid and watch power prices spiral out of control.

As STT has pointed out a number of times, the gaming that’s the subject of the ACCC’s interest is a natural consequence of a very natural set of phenomena: wind and solar power output collapses, that occur whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in:

Wind Power Output Collapses Send Power Prices into Orbit: The World’s Biggest Joke Just Got Serious

and

South Australia’s Unbridled…

By Paul Homewood

Extreme Weather during the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715 A.D.)

The region around the eastern Mediterranean (the Ottoman Empire) was severely affected by adverse climate during the Maunder Minimum.

Most areas suffered drought and plague in the 1640’s, the 1650’s and again in the 1670’s, while the winter of 1684 was the wettest recorded in the eastern Mediterranean during the past five centuries, and the winters of the later 1680’s were at least 3° C cooler than today.

In 1687 a chronicler in Istanbul, Turkey reported ‘This winter was severe to a degree that had not been seen in a very long time. For fifty days the roads were closed and people could not go outside. In cities and villages, the snow buried many houses. In the Golden Horn [major urban waterway and the primary inlet of the Bosphorus in Istanbul], the…

(Written on 2 May) Ouch! It looks increasingly likely that the headline measure of consumer price inflation is going to start with a ‘9’ in April (official data will be released on 18 May).

Most economists had expected a jump from 7pc in March to around 8.5pc. This assumed that the price increases we already know about – notably the 54pc hike in the Ofgem cap on domestic energy bills – would be at least partly offset by slower inflation elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to have happened. In particular, petrol and diesel prices have edged up further, despite the 5p cut in fuel duty, and food price inflation is continuing to rise. These pressures have been compounded by the geopolitical risks that Liam Halligan explained well in the Sunday Telegraph.

I have therefore upped my own forecast to 9pc for consumer price index (CPI) inflation in April, with the…