The Krazy Klimate Kult really are the most demented loons this side of Bedlam. From the nutters gluing themselves to everything in sight, to the deranged suits using institutional wealth – usually, working peoples’ compulsory superannuation money, the Keating gift that just keeps giving to the far left – to herd entire countries off the cliff of energy collapse.
Everywhere “renewables” have been tried, they bring disaster in their wake. Penetration of wind and solar into the grid goes in lockstep with spiralling electricity costs – and worse and worse grid instability. South Australia is supposedly “100 per cent renewable” – except when it’s mooching coal and gas-fired power off the other states. The entire state was famously completely blacked out when a cascading failure of wind generators brought down its entire grid (apologists try to claim that falling pylons caused the outage, but the grid collapse in fact occurred before the pylons went down).
Renewables fantasists – including the green-deranged Australian energy regulator – claim that the answer to the inherent unreliability of renewables is “big batteries”. But, to date, even the biggest in the world have failed to work as advertised.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve, famous for being Australia’s world-first so-called ‘big battery’ (or battery farm), has been fined $900,000 and promised to repay some of the money it received after it fell short on its energy promises.
It was sued when the company failed to provide enough power when the Queensland Kogan Creek coal-fired power station failed in 2019 despite being paid as a standby energy provider.
Klimate Kultists have jumped on that as proof that coal stations are “unreliable”, but that’s an obvious lie. The only reason Kogan Creek was so vital is because so many other coal stations have been shut down and the few remaining left to deteriorate – due to Kultists’ campaigns against coal investment – to the point of breaking down.
Battery farms like Hornsdale are essential parts of the renewable energy grid, smoothing off the wild fluctuations in power provided by wind and solar. Without something stabilising the power, renewables are virtually useless to the requirements of a national grid.
Except that the battery farms repeatedly fail to match expectations when they’re needed.
Lithium-ion battery farms have a long way to go before they come anywhere near to being the sole backup provider of energy. They also have a worrying habit of bursting into flames, with several giant fires in other Tesla-made mega batteries causing havoc (and spewing a lot of toxic smoke into the atmosphere it’s meant to be saving).
If a battery like this catches fire, its smoke may contain mercury, lead, selenium, manganese, chromium, arsenic, cadmium and aluminium – and it can burn for days, with one incident in Victoria persisting for 76 hours despite 150 firefighters trying to put it out.
There have also been fires at battery farms in Arizona, South Korea and Europe. Electric cars – using the same battery technology – are turning into infernos with alarming regularity.
Because the fires do not require oxygen, take a stupid amount of water to extinguish and burn hot enough to melt aluminium, they pose a unique safety a risk – particularly with the explosion of residential batteries.
Instead of increasing safeguards around battery farms, green-deranged governments are actively lowering standards, “to make it easier to construct large batteries to store renewable energy from solar and wind farms”.
It’s all part of the Net Zero, low-Carbon, let’s pretend we’re not still using coal initiative by Western governments to look virtuous in front of United Nations climate panels.
But how ‘green’ is a runaway toxic fire coating the surrounding area in heavy metals? How environmentally friendly is the mining-intense rare earths industry that threatens to destroy the ocean floor or enslave third-world children? Do we really believe that short-lived technology headed for landfill after a few decades is really ‘renewable’?
Specator Australia
How dare you, indeed.
