And what’s next? An assertion that there is a paedophile ring operating from a basement under the BOM?
4 Likes
Why do you even bother engaging with him @Benny40 ?
You always give so much to conversations.
All he ever does is have a go at people and call them pathetic.
1 Like
Yeah I know. It’s all been tried and ignored before.
Legitimately was curious though.
3 Likes
From way back in the daytripper days on this thread, i learned that there’s some denialist conspiracy theory that the BoM is rigging temperature records by moving weather stations or applying compensatory calculations as spreading urbanisation meant that the urban heat island effect was impacting their readings. Sounds like old mate subscribes to this one, which should come as no surprise.
2 Likes
They did it everywhere:
That paper is mainly about the impacts of climate change to our planet and doesn’t really go into the impacts for its inhabitants.
Have noticed a big push for awareness of the dangers of skin cancer on middle-aged men in Sydney lately. They seem to be statistically overrepresented in deaths from the disease.
Yeah, we are pretty much locked into a 2.5 future, and that is a best case scenario.
The next 9 months will be very interesting. I think after the next northern summer a lot more people will come the realisation of just how screwed we are.
1 Like
When you get your drought or fire you are going to be the first one coming with your cap in hand.
It’s the nature of the far right. The core belief is that everyone is in it for themselves, so they fight tooth and nail against any collective policies and then rort the ■■■■ out of them because they believe you’d be stupid not to.
Anarcho-capitalist loonies are my favourite, they love to prep for the breakdown of society but they also tell everyone about it, which completely defeats the purpose
1 Like
BBC has much better coverage of Australian Climate Change issues than most/all of the Australian media. I have noticed the BBC actually cover quite a few related climate change which are not covered in Australia. This is a bit sad really.
Our own ABC used to cover a lot of these stories, now they don’t.
2 Likes
This means nothing if you live in southern Vic. All good there apparently! 
2 Likes
Not far off, the morning news program has become unbearable. Remember to smile girls!
Felt like being an energy nerd today…
This is the dilemma that the energy grid is adapting to at the moment. It’s a fair bit more pronounced than this graph with 5 years of extra rooftop solar growth. Rooftop solar is an absolute bargain for consumers, driving total energy prices to record lows, but it has broken the coal business model. Coal plants were built to meet the stable overall energy demand, but they can’t compete on price when solar is available and need to wind down, but still costs money on standby. It means that in the evenings when they are the last man standing coal can demand enough $$$ to pay for the full day’s operations and make a profit. Even without climate change hanging over our heads, that isn’t viable long term, which is why a lot of coal plants are bringing their end date forward.
So how does this get resolved? Well the coal and nuclear camp want to pretend that cheap rooftop solar never happened, because simple is better. Have one big generator and run it at capacity like we’ve always done. That doesn’t address the evening price spike where big generators have a pricing monopoly and make mega profits.
Instead we are shifting to a blend of generation and storage, with the cheapest technology winning government tenders and commercial contracts. If on demand generation is cheapest, then that gets finance. If storage is cheap enough that it can capture earlier generation and sell it when needed for the lowest price, then storage gets finance. It’s free market, survival of the cheapest.
The future energy mix will be a mix of the cheapest of these sources:
- Rooftop solar
- Commercial solar
- Onshore wind
- Offshore wind
- Biomethane
- Gas with carbon offsets
- River flow hydro
- Geothermal
- Wave
- Nuclear
And storage will be a mix of the cheapest of these options:
- Pumped hydro
- Grid scale batteries
- Domestic batteries
- Car batteries
- Green hydrogen electrolysis
- Compressed air
- Flywheel / mechanical storage
- Demand shifting
I’ve probably missed options in there. But the theme will be a mass of small to medium sized generators and storage providers. The intermittent generation like wind and solar will be used preferentially, with on-demand generators competing on price with storage. When there is a shortage of storage, evening prices will increase, which will quickly result in a build out of extra batteries to take advantage of those high prices and thus bring costs back down. Supply and demand. Amazing new technologies and services will appear in the coming years, which will take advantage of this environment and make our world far more efficient than we’ve ever known.
Stability will come from the broad mix of storage and generation sources, supplemented with interstate connections. No longer will a mechanical failure at a coal plant take out the grid on a hot day. If a wind farm goes down, it’s maybe 0.5% of the grid and everyone else takes up the slack. If a coal plant goes down, it might be 20% of the grid and everything falls over. If wind or solar flatlines in western victoria, it will still be strong elsewhere in the country. We will overbuild renewables, partly to charge batteries, partly to play the weather odds. And when the day every few years comes where renewables, gas and storage can’t limp along, heavy industry would probably get a generous payment to wind back demand for a day.
The failure of the SA grid a few years back wasn’t due to renewables, it was due to the interstate connector getting hit by a freak storm. SA had the generation to get through, but it relied on the rotating mass of Victoria’s coal generators to maintain frequency stability in the grid. The SA grid is about 5% of the size of Victoria, so when that momentum was lost the SA grid bounced around all over the place and shut down for safety. That’s what the Tesla battery was installed for, more for ironing out the bumps and holding things together than providing backup supply. As coal is removed from the grid that stability will be provided by batteries with grid forming inverters, creating the stable frequency that is currently driven by big rotating steam turbines.
Despite the critics, Small Modular Reactors and large scale nuclear are competing for a home in this mix. They’ve been reviewed a number of times and come out consistently as the most expensive, slowest and highest project risk options available. For that reason they haven’t got traction, purely because they are not competitive against the other very cost effective options that Australia has. For nations like Japan with poor renewable resources, SMRs will probably be a critical part of their future energy mix.
11 Likes
You are joking aren’t you. Govts do not assist farmers they are too busy trying to win city slicker votes. Just wait for a 45 degree day without power and the penny will drop for you unrealistic people. Regrettably many old people will die due to your lemming like rush to get rid of fossil fuels.
…the LNP lining their pockets and being in denial for the last two decades.
Edit: however this is an improvement from you denying that climate change, and particularly longer and hotter heatwaves, kills people.
So…progress of a sort.
4 Likes
It’s interesting that you write that because amongst my friends the one who is hardest charging and most outspoken about the need to move faster on the transition to clean energy is also the one who has spent his working life in oil and gas.
1 Like
Spend your life working in oil and you’re probably doing quite well, plus lubed up enough to maybe fit through that eye of the needle. Mafioso also get absolution on the regular. Kidding aside, if people don’t buy it when fossil fuel production experts are saying it, then they’re too far gone. And deserving of mockery and worse.
3 Likes
Fixed. You know it’s true. Your petrol daddies have admitted it. They’ve known for many, many years and kept it on the low down. You can’t dispute facts.
1 Like