Camouflage illusions in the matrix: same mysterious temperature, same day, year after year Wait til you see what Lance Pidgeon has found. He was looking at the BOM website temperature archive maps of Australia for early last century (using AWAP data). He was wondering how the Bureau of Meteorology could possibly create maps this detailed for specific days that long ago. He was especially curious about the remote, vast areas where there were no thermometers, yet there were wiggly jiggly temperature lines on the map, shaded as if they had meaning. Then he noticed something positively strange — April 14th in 1915 and one year later in 1916 looked almost identical, as did the same day in 1917. It is not just ”April 14ths” each year that are suspiciously similar, it’s pretty much all days of the same month. Do AWAP maps and AWAP data matter? AWAP maps are used in press releases and in the news. Significantly, the BOM use trendlines from the AWAP data as justification that their all-homogenized ACORN data is virtually the same as the “unadjusted” data. Guest Post by Lance Pidgeon
More wind and solar than SA can use — we threw away 10% of the generation South Australians have so much wind power, too much, that in Quarter 3 last year the AEMO had to intervene to cut off excess wind and solar generation. Ever since the Great Blackout of 2016 new rules mean that there must be enough back up power running to cope with the fickle vagaries of intermittent energy. (Obviously, this wasting of sacred green electrons wouldn’t need to happen if people weren’t so persnickety about blackouts!) This graph is from the Quarter 3 AEMO report for 2018. It is technically about both wind and solar, but it appears to be mostly wind. Would we put up with any other industrial output that had such a dismal performance. AEMO Quarter 3 report page 7 Synchronous generation is the kind that comes from machines that spin at 50 Hz (like coal, gas, hydro, nukes). But ten percent of all the wind and solar power had to be thrown away in SA because there wasn’t enough reliable back up power to guarantee the stability of the system. Rating: 9.7/10 (68 votes cast)
Buddhist pagoda washed away as heavy floods hit Myanmar Posted Dramatic riverbank erosion in Myanmar has washed away a Buddhist pagoda, amid heavy flooding across large parts of the country that has displaced tens of thousands and caused two deaths. Video provided to Reuters by a Buddhist monk near Pakokku, 520 kilometres north of the commercial hub of Yangon, showed a gold-leaf-covered pagoda slipping into the raging waters of the Ayeyarwady late last week. The abbott at the pagoda, U Pyinnya Linkkara, said flooding was common in the area during the monsoon that runs from May to October, but this year's floods caused alarming erosion. Some riverside villages have been washed away entirely, he said. "The villagers are now scared to live here," he said. "The flooding has now decreased, but erosion continues." Water levels have risen steadily since unrelenting monsoon rain began to lash the heart of the South-East Asian country in early July, driving some people to higher land or seek shelter in Buddhist monasteries, a disaster relief official said.
Report on Aug 25 blackouts shows how fragile our grid is (and the real cost of cheap solar panels). Badly installed solar PV makes Australia’s grid fragile On August 25 last year there was nearly a system black when, improbably, three states of Australia were islanded by one lightning strike. Within seconds, trips were switching, two smelters were load shed to save the grid from collapse, and across the Eastern Seaboard of Australia frequency and voltages surged or fell everywhere. In Sydney 45,000 homes lost power for a couple of hours. Shops had to close. Trains were stopped. The AEMO final report on that day has just come out and shows us just how fragile our grid is. It turns out that another cost of cheap rushed solar panels is that many drop out with voltage spikes, suddenly going offline and leaving another hole to fill. If smelters are offline, hundreds of thousands of dollars are burning, and millions is at risk… Obviously the true costs of installing solar panels properly are higher than advertised. August outages underline risks to the reliability of the national grid
The climate one year on: exit carbon tax, enter brown coal ▪ More 2nd Degree A year on from the abolition of the carbon price, greenhouse pollution from electricity generation has rebounded as Australia burns more brown coal to meet its power needs. Carbon dioxide emissions from the national electricity grid jumped by 6.4 million tonnes in the financial year after the Abbott government repealed the scheme that required big industry to buy pollution permits, according to analysis by consultants Pitt & Sherry. The 4.3 per cent increase unwound part of an 11 per cent fall in emissions across the grid in the two years the carbon price was in place. It can mainly be attributed to Victoria's four large brown coal generators running at greater capacity more often as the electricity they generate became cheaper. Output from the ageing Latrobe Valley quartet was up about nine per cent. Loy Yang coal power plant near Traralgon in the Latrobe Valley. Get the latest news and updates emailed straight to your inbox. What you may have missed
Solar overload — “Costs a fortune” as the super Duck Curve flood of electricity hits Australia Ladies and Gentlemen, Australia is now romping in as Star-Crash-Test-Dummy in the renewables stake. Proportionally, we have more uncontrolled solar roof top generators than any other nation. We’re in uncharted territory: about 20% of houses in Hawaii and California have Solar PV, but in Western Australia, it’s 25%. In Queensland it’s 30% and throughout Australia we are adding 100MW a month and it’s like a whole new coal fired station every year (except it doesn’t work most of the time). Strap yourself in! Electricity at the wrong time is not just wasted, it’s a burden Too much electricity bumps up the grid frequency and voltage, potentially damaging equipment and risking blackouts. If you like your computer, you can keep your computer. Welcome to the Duck Curve Each year as more solar power arrives when we don’t need it in the middle of the day, the belly of the load curve swings lower and lower. The tail of the duck is the secondary peak at breakfast. I say, just stop.
Ten years ago Turnbull called out Peter Garrett on climate. What went wrong? | Graham Readfearn | Environment Ten years ago today Malcolm Turnbull was getting stuck in to a debate in Parliament House with Peter Garrett about climate change. Climate change, said Turnbull, was “an enormous challenge and probably the biggest one our country faces, the world faces, at the moment.” At the time, Turnbull was the environment minister in John Howard’s final term. Garrett, halfway through his six-year stint as a Labor politician, was Kevin Rudd’s shadow environment minister. “It is called global warming for a reason,” Turnbull told Garrett. A few seconds earlier, Turnbull had ridiculed Garrett as an idealist who “tries to change his spots all the time” and had “abandoned almost all of the positions he has had in his life — or has purported to abandon them”. Knowing what came next, Turnbull’s characterisation of Garrett as an opportunist with no political backbone should be deeply embarrassing for the prime minister. It has been a dizzying 10 years since Turnbull’s exchange with Garrett.
White elephant solar panels: “force-feeding” high voltage, raising costs, breaking things, shutting themselves down Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away. Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another drawback to solar panels, lo! Solar Panels are pushing up the voltage at midday often as high as 253 Volts when it supposed to be more like 230 to 240V. This means appliances are using more electricity, that makes bills even higher. Non-solar users are paying for this surge (and the appliances) — for every 1% increase in voltage, the costs go up 0.7%. The warning comes from groups running the electricity networks in Australia. Spot the key word missing from the ABC headline — starts with ‘s’, ends in ‘lar’: Power bills up? Liz Hobday, ABC Travel 40% of the way through the article to find the key point: Solution: give us more money, try another experiment Higher voltage means higher bills ”Lucky”, a quarter of transformers in Queensland might be working properly.
Australia warned it has radically underestimated climate change security threat | Environment As the Senate launches an inquiry into the national security ramifications of climate change, a new report has warned global warming will cause increasingly regular and severe humanitarian crises across the Asia-Pacific. Disaster Alley, written by the Breakthrough Centre for Climate Restoration, forecasts climate change could potentially displace tens of millions from swamped cities, drive fragile states to failure, cause intractable political instability, and spark military conflict. Report co-author Ian Dunlop argues Australia’s political and corporate leaders, by refusing to accept the need for urgent climate action now, are “putting the Australian community in extreme danger”. “Global warming will drive increasingly severe humanitarian crises, forced migration, political instability and conflict. “Australia’s political, bureaucratic and corporate leaders are abrogating their fiduciary responsibilities to safeguard the people and their future wellbeing.
Extraordinary powers triggered: Blackout threat from rooftop solar panels in Western Australia Panels are going in everywhere in Perth. In Western Australia the uptake of solar panels has rocketed as electricity prices leaped — there’s a slow motion solar train-wreck underway. Solar PV panels are now on more than one in four houses and growing at a phenomenal rate. The South West Grid is small, with around one million customers and a daily peak of around 2 – 3,000 MW. Solar panels are becoming an emergency in WA, equivalent to a bushfire The growth of panels is so disruptive the AEMO sometimes has to invoke the “hisk risk state” and force the baseload coal and gas generators off the grid for fear of an overload. Daniel Mercer in The West Australian Extraordinary powers designed for emergencies such major power plant failures or bushfires are being triggered to protect WA’s main grid from soaring output generated by rooftop solar panels. Experts have warned a looming crunch may lead to increased risks of blackouts and higher power costs for consumers. h/t to Vic, Pat
businessinsider The youth plaintiffs after a court hearing in Eugene, Oregon in March, 2016 Andrea Willingham/Our Children's Trust Over the course of one week in August 2015, Alex Loznak’s entire life changed. He left the Oregon farm that has been in his family for seven generations to attend Columbia University, and he sued the federal government for violating his constitutional rights. “As recently as a year and a half ago, I was a fairly normal teenage kid,” Loznak tells Business Insider. Loznak is part of a group of 21 youth plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against President Obama and various federal agencies for failing to protect the earth’s natural resources for future generations. The kids, who range from 9 to 20 years old, argue that by failing to prevent climate change despite detailed knowledge of the dangers it poses, the federal government is violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property. “During those heat waves, many of our trees died,” he says.
Oopsie solar-battery fail? Cloud causes System Black event at Alice Springs affecting thousands Welcome to the new complexified energy grid where a cloud can cause a system black event — knocking out power for as much as nine hours. This affected the hospital for 30 minutes and the prolonged problems caused many businesses and supermarkets to close. Alice Springs is an island microgrid servicing about 29,000 people in the centre of Australia. It was 38 degrees C yesterday when the power went out. Shame about those fridges and air conditioning units. Alice Springs is a mini version of larger grids showing how fragile these new complicated systems of multiple generators based on weather events and batteries can be. Looks modern, sometimes has electricity too. Yesterday: Thousands impacted by Alice Springs power blackout* Steve Vivian, ABC News Thousands of residents in Central Australia went without power yesterday afternoon, with some experiencing blackout conditions for up to nine hours. Today: Inquiry called, and explanations garbled — NT Chief Minister announces review h/t Dave B
Bushfires and extreme heat in south-east Australia « RealClimate Guest commentary by David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne in Australia On Saturday 7 February 2009, Australia experienced its worst natural disaster in more than 100 years, when catastrophic bushfires killed more than 200 people and destroyed more than 1800 homes in Victoria, Australia. These fires occurred on a day of unprecedented high temperatures in south-east Australia, part of a heat wave that started 10 days earlier, and a record dry spell. This has been written from Melbourne, Australia, exactly one week after the fires, just enough time to pause and reflect on this tragedy and the extraordinary weather that led to it. There has been very high global media coverage of this natural disaster and, of course, speculation on the possible role of climate change in these fires. Maybe there is a different way to phrase that question: In what way, if any, is climate change likely to have affected these bush fires? References and further reading: Karoly, D.