Andy Semple

The Windfather: How the Mob is moving into renewable energy

All the major political parties are involved in the renewable energy scam so it isn’t really a surprise to me that organised crime is now also involved.

Via Dailybail

Traditionally the mafia controls operations in gambling, prostitution, protection, extortion, and loan-sharking, yet recent evidence shows that they might actually be adding renewable energy to that list.

Italian police have recently discovered links between the Sicilian crime families known as the Cosa Nostra, and wind and solar power companies in the area. Law enforcement officers have taken around a dozen crime bosses off to jail, along with corrupt officials and company executives; they have also seized around 30 per cent of Sicily’s wind farms, and have frozen more than $2 billion worth of assets.

Back in 2010 a similar police operation saw the seizure of over 40 companies, land, buildings, factories, bank accounts, stocks, cars, and yachts from the Sicilian business man Vito Nicastri, also known as the ‘Lord of the Wind’ due to his investments in wind farms and solar panel factories.

It is likely that the Mafia has been attracted to renewable energy for several reasons; Sicily is a sunny, windy island that offers great alternative energy opportunities; much like Germany and Spain, Italy has been awarding generous subsidies to try and encourage the development of renewable energy projects; and also, the renewable energy industry offers a legitimate business which is likely to be around for many years and can provide a good front for the family.

 

 

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UK Conservative MP admits he was wrong to support the 2008 Climate Change Act

Maybe a few more LNP MP’s could follow Carswell’s lead and acknowledge that in addition to the scrapping of the Carbon Tax, the useless RET also needs to go.

My biggest regret as an MP is that I failed to oppose the 2008 Climate Change Act. It was a mistake. I am sorry.

On the very day the Labour government passed this fatuous attempt to "stop global warming", it was, if I remember rightly, snowing. Had I opposed the Bill, it wouldn't have made much difference, but I feel I should have known better.

Unlike much of the gesture legislation that goes through Parliament, this law has turned out to have real consequences.  The Climate Change Act has pushed up energy prices, squeezing households and making economic recovery ever more elusive.

The aim of the Climate Change Act was to create a low carbon economy. I fear the Act will do that, but perhaps not the way intended. The Climate Change Act is giving us a low carbon economy the way that pre-industrial Britain had a low carbon economy.

Cutting carbon emissions by 26 percent by 2020 – as the Act requires – means, in effect, making energy costs so high that some will have to go without. How is that progress?

The Act's carbon price floors push up prices. Instead of energy producers competing to supply households and businesses with a product at a price they are willing to pay, the legislation introduces a system of price fixing. Suppliers switch to so called "renewable" energy sources, and the end user pays.

An unaccountable quango – the Committee on Climate Change – gets to determine energy policy much the way that central bankers now run monetary policy. The precedent is not a good one. Adair Turner, head honcho at the Financial Service Authority, was its chairman.

The tragedy is that it does not have to be this way. Technological innovation is discovering new ways of obtaining vast reserves of fossil fuel. As our understanding grows, the idea that human activity alone causes climate change seems less certain than it once did. Wind turbines, it turns out, are renewable in the sense that they need replacing every 25 years – or perhaps even every 15.

Too often, public policy in Whitehall is shaped by residual ideas and assumptions – which turn out to be wrong. Nowhere is this more so than when it comes to energy policy. It is time for a fundamental rethink about energy policy – starting with an acknowledgment that 2008 Act has got it wrong.

Douglas Carswell - 25 February 2013 

Retiring Liberal MP, Alby Schultz, has at least has had the courage to call out the wind turbine scam.

Pity Liberal MP Greg Hunt doesn’t get it.Its obvious Labor will never ‘get it.’

We need an ICAC like investigation into all the corruption in the wind turbine industry.

 

 

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Germany's transition to renewable energy may cost up to 1 trillion euros says Minister

That’s around $1.34 trillion AUD

Germany's transition to renewable energy may cost up to 1 trillion euros ($1.34 trillion) in the next two decades, the environment minister said on Wednesday, piling pressure on his opponents to back plans to cap power price rises before the election.

With an eye on the September vote, Peter Altmaier, one of conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's most trusted ministers, has outlined plans to rein in subsidies for renewable power which have pushed up consumers' electricity bills.

However, his plans may be doomed as the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens have reservations and could block legislation in the Bundesrat upper house

"The costs of our energy reform and restructuring of energy provision could amount to around 1 trillion euros by the end of the 2030s," Altmaier told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

"We have maybe our last big chance to lay the right foundations to make this a success. That means the energy switch must be economically justifiable and must be affordable."

Soon after Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011, Merkel set out ambitious targets for green energy and accelerated the phaseout of nuclear plants.

Renewables are due to account for 35 percent of German power in 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

Absolute insanity.

 

 

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Pravda: Global Warming, the tool of the West

How ironic that the newspaper of the former Soviet communists – Pravda – writes that Global Warming is nothing but a Western invented scam.

Read the article here.

The following quote by American author H L Mencken best sums up the current AGW state of play:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I also think it is presumptuous to think we (humans) are a match for the sun.

 

 

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Rise in renewable energy will require more use of fossil fuels

Via the Los Angeles Times.

(my emphasis added)

The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid.

On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades — or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

As is true on many days in California when multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy plants are thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like the Delta Energy Center.

One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California's electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.

"The public hears solar is free, wind is free," said Mitchell Weinberg, director of strategic development for Calpine Corp., which owns Delta Energy Center. "But it is a lot more complicated than that."

Wind and solar energy are called intermittent sources, because the power they produce can suddenly disappear when a cloud bank moves across the Mojave Desert or wind stops blowing through the Tehachapi Mountains. In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity — the output of a nuclear reactor — can disappear and threaten stability of the grid.

To avoid that calamity, fossil fuel plants have to be ready to generate electricity in mere seconds. That requires turbines to be hot and spinning, but not producing much electricity until complex data networks detect a sudden drop in the output of renewables. Then, computerized switches are thrown and the turbines roar to life, delivering power just in time to avoid potential blackouts.

…The cost to consumers in the years ahead could be in the billions of dollars, according to industry experts. California's electricity prices are already among the highest in the nation and are projected to rise sharply in coming years. At the moment, the need for reserve power isn't considered a cost of renewable power, though consumers have to bear its costs as well.

This raises two questions. 1) What’s the point in having renewables in the first place? 2) By installing renewables with big enough back-up fossil fuel plants means consumers will be paying much higher prices for their power than they otherwise should be.

In short, it makes no sense what-so-ever to use wind and solar. If we’re going to spend the money, then build new hydro dams (the only real renewable power source) or bite the bullet and install carbon dioxide emission free nuclear power.

 

 

 

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Why our Carbon Dioxide Tax won’t do diddly squat to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions

Graphs via WUWT.

When a picture or in this case, a graph, is worth 1,000 words.

The data supporting this was all published by BP up from 1965 till 2011.

So there you have it, Australia, NZ and the 27 countries that make up the EU are “responsible” for a measly 13% of total global CO² emissions. Or put it another way, China, India, Russia, Canada, Japan and the USA account for over 63% total global CO² emissions. Yet these countries have not imposed upon their own citizens a Carbon Tax.

And remember, humans are responsible for contributing only 3% of atmospheric CO². So what’s the point of having a Carbon Dioxide Tax here in Australia if China and India are just going to keep on introducing more and more coal power plants?

The Kyoto protocol has been a completed failure, yet the die in the wool ecotards still cling on to their ideological view that all carbon based energy must be replaced with “renewables” wind and solar.

Wind power is a fiasco and solar is only good for heating water on your roof.

As the graphs above illustrate, the countries that really are increasing world CO² emissions aren’t in any hurry to change their ways, but Gillard and her assortment of ecotards are only too happy to purposely hurt the very citizens they have sworn to protect.

 

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China: We’ll sell you useless wind turbines and solar, but we’ll go Nuclear

While China is more than happy to sell to dickheads like Australia, wind turbines and solar panels, they have embarked upon a quiet revolution to become the world’s largest generator of nuclear power.

Rio Tinto Energy general manager of markets and industry analysis Stephen Wilson said China was currently about the eighth or ninth largest nuclear energy producer.

By the end of the decade, the emerging economic superpower was expected to leap to the number two position, Mr Wilson said, before overtaking the United States in the 2020s, producing 100 gigawatts of power.

"Their vision is to produce 400 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2050. That's been publicly stated by Chinese officials," Mr Wilson told the Australian Institute of Energy national conference in Sydney on Monday.

"That's more than the whole world has got today." The growth in nuclear energy in China would come from new third generation power plants that produced electricity more cheaply than coal and gas plants in coastal China, he said.

 

 

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The RET Penny has finally dropped as Labor MP Fitzgibbon gets it: Let’s scrap the RET

Pity Fitzgibbon’s Labor and LNP colleagues don’t get it…

Labor’s chief whip and former cabinet minister Joel Fitzgibbon has called on the Gillard government to "forget the ideology" of the renewable energy target and cut its fixed target to give households relief from rising electricity prices.

Mr Fitzgibbon, who represents the NSW coal-producing seat of Hunter, said he was "tempted" to call for completely doing away with the RET to make up 20 per cent of electricity production by 2020 but didn't want to create uncertainty for business.

Responding in parliament to the Climate Change Authority's recommendation not to alter the target for energy from wind and solar power, Mr Fitzgibbon said changes to the economy, including the start of the $23-a-tonne carbon tax, meant there had to be at least a lowering of the target.

"I do question the $23-per-tonne fixed price on carbon running concurrently with a renewable energy target that now goes through a quarter of our total energy consumption," Mr Fitzgibbon said.

…As far as consumers were concerned, Mr Fitzgibbon said the returns to renewable energy generators were funded by existing electricity users.

"We have to be really careful here that we are not just subsidising what some might describe as the rent seekers and have consumers subsidising those who are investing and making big returns in the renewable sector," he said.

Households and businesses were concerned about cost-of-living issues and about the rising price of energy, he said.

"All of us (in parliament) should be ever-vigilant about the costs on some of those more traditional industries and on households in our electorate and I think that, as energy consumption changes. . . it is appropriate to have a look at the renewable energy target.

"We should challenge the (climate) authorities' preliminary recommendations, have a rethink, acknowledge that things are changing in our economy, forget about the ideology and contemplate the idea of reducing the fixed gigawatt-hour commitment so that the percentage falls with it."

Didn’t take long for Labor’s ecotard alliance partners, the Greens, to chastise Labor…

Greens MP Adam Bandt says the way Labor responds to Mr Fitzgibbon's call is a "litmus test" on whether the party is serious about moving to a clean-energy economy.

"The right-wing factional powerbrokers within the Labor party are beginning their campaign against renewable energy," he told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday.

"If Labor is serious about a renewable energy future ... then Joel Fitzgibbon needs to back off in his campaign to wind back the renewable energy target."

There is no doubt whatsoever that the bipartisan support for the 20% Renewable Energy Target (RET) is the real culprit in allowing the price of power to skyrocket. The RET is illogical and economically reckless. Why Abbott and his shadow cabinet think its worth staying committed to the 20% RET is just mind boggling.

Below are the statistics on the cost of power generation in 2011 from the Australian Government’s own Productivity Commission:

• Coal fired power station $79 per Mw/h (megawatt/hour)
• Gas fired power station $97 per Mw/h – or 1.2 times the cost of coal power
• Wind power $150-214 per Mw/h – or nearly 3 times the cost of coal power
• Solar power $400-473 per Mw/h – or nearly 6 times the cost of coal power

You don’t need to be Einstein to work out that the high cost of Wind and Solar is the reason the public are being screwed with high electricity prices. The Carbon Tax just adds further pain.

 

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ACT Labor’s plan to commit economic suicide

This just proves some Labor people are as “dumb as posts.”

ACT Labor has unveiled an ambitious plan to source 90 per cent of the Territory's power from renewable sources by 2020.

…The strategy includes a mix of large scale wind and solar projects, a greater reliance on public transport and boosting energy efficiency in houses and buildings.

ACT rate payers should be worried. The facts are Wind Energy is terribly expensive and inefficient and the German experience with Solar suggests it’s an incredible waste of money – a staggering $300 billion euros or $377 billion AUD.

Naturally ACT Environment Minister Simon Corbell thinks ACT consumers will be winners. Pity the only winners are the rent seeking wind and solar manufacturers.

I concluded that the Greens 100 per cent renewable energy push would cost a staggering $2.3 Trillion by the turn of the century so how on earth does Corbell think ACT consumers will be better off?

The hard reality is that both Wind and Solar don’t reduce carbon dioxide emissions and worse, the energy they do produce costs significantly more than traditional fossil fuel sources. A fact the Australian Government’s own Productivity Commission confirmed:

• Coal fired power station $79 per Mw/h (megawatt/hour)
• Gas fired power station $97 per Mw/h – or 1.2 times the cost of coal power
• Wind power $150-214 per Mw/h – or nearly 3 times the cost of coal power
• Solar power $400-473 per Mw/h – or nearly 6 times the cost of coal power

You don’t need to be Einstein to work out that the high cost of Wind and Solar is the reason the public are being screwed with high electricity prices. The Carbon Tax just adds further pain.

ACT Labor is just too dumb to know this.

 

Special thanks to Tim for the ABC link.

 

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Andy is on holidays in a country that will probably never ever introduce a Carbon Dioxide Tax. He returns in early October 2012.

The World-Wide Renewable Energy Scam

And no, we’re not making this up. Read here and here for the facts.

If anyone besides the Government was involved in such a scam, it would be called organised crime.

 

Special thanks to Steve Hunter for permission to reproduce his cartoons exclusively on Andy’s RANT!

Steve Hunter is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator and lives in Buderim Queensland.

 

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Andy is on holidays in a country that will probably never ever introduce a Carbon Dioxide Tax. He returns in early October 2012.