128 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  1. Interesting comparison with the Australian Open, despite record temps play was continued. Did the investment in the infrastructure and competition force organisers to deny the evidence of the weather?

    We can see the same with energy, investment in infrastructure (grid) is driving denial of renewables.

  2. Hermit, yesterday on ABC 24, they spoke with one of the energy guys about the prospect of load shedding in SA and Vic. He made the point of saying that the interviewer was mistaken in their portrayal of (presumably the likelihood of) blackouts in SA, saying two things about it:
    1) because SA has such a high household installation of PV (20%, he said), and because the solar power runs best at one of the peak power demand periods in summer heat waves, the actual effect was to reduce the change of hitting peak conditions which warrant blackouts. He even referred to the positive impact of solar on reducing instability of the grid in peak (daylight) times;
    2) he said that if they did need to do load shedding, they would attempt to do rolling blackouts of 30 minutes duration, minimising the impact upon individuals as much as possible.

    I’m afraid I can’t see the transcript of this on ABC website, but it should be there somewhere.

    Oh, and they also made mention of a general modest reduction in demand for power in SA, I think. So it is a combination of factors, but it is interesting, nevertheless, that the energy guy made explicit mention of the effect of household solar upon the peak demand profile in SA.

  3. Oh, my mistake, sunset in Adelaide is at 8:31 pm today, so the sun would be shining for two and a half hours after 6:00 pm. At least it’s getting close to setting now. Fortunately it will only be a balmy 5 degrees over human body temperature tomorrow with a cold front moving in late in the afternoon, although I guess a not quite so hot front would be a more accurate name for it.

  4. Blackouts in Vic were caused, not by failure of sun to shine and/or wind to blow, but by failure of one of the Loy Yang brown coal generators. Power restoration was further delayed by high temps raising the fire alert. So it would appear a centralised system has its downsides.

  5. JKUU

    I didnt read all the relevant posts, but I liked Vals line of inquiry at the time (as a mental exercise). I dont think others just tried to shut it down ,and, it seemed a mostly cordial and polite discussion. In the end Val didnt get the level of support for her idea that she was after ,but at least from my point of view it was a worthy question to consider.

  6. Once upon a time if you got sick and you were poor you went to a traditional healer or you relied on religion. Some of the healer’s herbs would actually work and some wouldn’t. Religious interventions might have a placebo effect. Walnut juice doesn’t help headaches even if the inside of a walnut looks a lot like brain but some of the herbs dispensed by the healer or the priest did work.

    After about 1200 if you were rich and lived Western Europe you went to licensed medical practitioner with a degree from one of the new universities, they would try to correct your humors by either bleeding or purging you and they were likely to vastly hasten your death. medical ‘science’ eschewed experiment and relied on classical texts.

    As often the texts were imported from Byzantium as the Muslim world, but that’s another story and in any case the Muslims got their texts from the Byzantines anyway.

    The weird thing is the four humors described by Galen dominated Western medical practice from about 1200 to 1820 and in all that time the doctor was not less effective than the contemporary economist or MBA graduate in our times, they were likely to kill you. But the traditional healers were burnt in large numbers and the doctors were paid vast incomes for bleeding and purging their patients to death. There were ‘sound science’ movements of doctors insisting that bleeding worked as late as 1871 and the last medical text to recommend bleeding was published in 1921. In the 1850s some doctors even opposed anesthesia because they were convinced it made bleeding less effective if you didn’t the pain.

    You may have noted that bleeding and purging are actually dangerous close to the contemporary recommendations for curing an economy or an enterprise and that the neoliberals tend to rely on ancient text and tradition almost as much as medieval and early modern doctors.

    The really interesting question is not why the doctors believed in remedies that clearly didn’t work. Why did the elite get themselves bled and purged, at vast expense and risk of life and health, while others went to much less invasive healers?

    I say this is related to the Rudd/Gillard mess which I think is more an Abbot mess than anything else. I don’t remember an opposition leader who was so relentlessly personal in his campaigning, so indulged by the media, or so vacuous in his political program. I don’t think that Abbot is the only bleeder/purger in this tale.

    Our contemporary Galenic medical professions are economists (with notable exceptions like our host), management consultants, political advisers and motivational gurus. Our dominant belief is magical thinking with a tincture of Arianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Zen or old-time Christianity in the case of figures like Sculler of Crystal Cathedral fame. They all tell you that if you think positive material prosperity will be given unto you.

    Sculler gave his last hugely profitable motivation seminar days before declaring bankruptcy. His relentless preaching at the seminar was “Cut the word ‘Impossible’ out of your vocabulary.” Quite often people are required by their employers to attend these motivational autos-de-fé. The few voices in the US financial industry calling for restraint before the GFC were ignored and anyone working for the great usurers like Goldman Sachs were likely to be sanctioned for not being ‘positive.

    This comment is already getting too long and I’ll relate all this brouhaha to the Rudd/Gillard thing in another comment some time today.

  7. Alan, Australia has a rich tradition of little Aussie bleeders 🙂

    As for the power of positive thinking, I prefer Bertrand Russell’s “The Conquest of Happiness” to the contemporary bulls**ters. At least he gave it some thought, and allows for the possibility that he is wrong on some things. Never could handle the positive thinker malarkey; interestingly, in Russell’s book he mentions the early positive thinkers, and not in a good way.

  8. @Alan

    Excellent post Alan.

    It does underline one of the paradoxes of elite rule — that to continue to hold unwarranted privilege one must as a group devise an intellectual paradigm consonant therewith and if one is ignorant of salient data and concepts, even ideas that will harm individual members of the ruling class will be admitted. For them too, the collective stands higher than the individual. Ignorance and incoherence impose themselves upon even the most self-serving.

    This reminds us why reason and insight is as fundamental to the liberation of working humanity and the full flowering of the possibility of every human being as the struggle against unwarranted privilege.

  9. @Donald Oats
    Interestingly yesterday, when the AEMO fellow was on he said that SA had access to extra capacity. When the ABC reporter suggested it might be LOY Yang, he corrected her and told her it was in fact Basslink. Go Tasmania!

  10. This is a sad story a lot like a road rage incident, only it involved a gun and popcorn throwing.

    I’m counting down until some NRA spokesman (it is always a man) says “If the texting guy had carried, he could have defended himself.”

    In reality, it is a tragic example of how someone “seeing red” can end up a murderer, simply because they were equipped with the tools to do it without even thinking about it.

  11. I’m hoping those who can turn the NEM’s obscure csv files into graphs and charts will be able to show the contribution of various power sources to this week’s high demand. For PV that would have to be an estimate though maybe when sufficiently smart smart meters become universal it may be possible.

    The use of Basslink as a reserve battery is limited by the present cable capacity and the safe water level drop in the dams. I see both Libs and Labs-minus-Greens in Tasmania want to duplicate the cable. If it doesn’t rain and there is an autumn heatwave the penny will have been spent.

  12. Fran, I’ve been looking at what Tasmania has been doing the last couple of days and it looks like they’ve been exporting hydrocapacity like mad during the periods of high demand in Victoria. It’s a nice little earner for them even though wholesale electricity prices are falling. Increasing solar and wind capacity in Tasmania, along with efficiency, is resulting in them having more dispatchable electricity to sell when demand is high across the straight.

  13. Hermit, will you write a comment saying you were wrong about how South Australia might suffer rolling blackouts or that the price might max out?

  14. If anyone is wondering how much electricity rooftop solar was providing yesterday, South Australia’s PV can provide around 360+ megawatts at around noon when it’s sunny. While one would expect there to be more west facing panels than east facing panels, I’ll be agnostic on this and pretend it’s a wash. This means that solar power would have been providing about 13% of electricity use at noon. For the peak demand period, starting at 5:00 pm rooftop solar would have been operating at very close to one half its noontime capacity and would have provided about 180 megawatts or about 5.5% of total electricity use. At 6:00 pm solar would have provided about 156 megawatts or about 4.8% of total electricity use. So without rooftop solar the grid would have to provide about 5% more electricity during the peak period and handle about 5% more load. And we know from plenty of past experience that last few percent is the most difficult and most expensive to provide. Rooftop solar has clearly saved South Australians a considerable amount of money in transmission infrastructure costs and wholesale electricity prices.

  15. @Ronald Brak
    Thanks – that question has been on my mind this week. While I am guessing that the contribution across Victoria, ACT NSW has been less that marginal amount may well have been significant as the AMEO admitted on interviews that the supply against demand balance was on a very fine margin.

  18. @Ronald Brak
    I’m pretty sure I said there might be rolling blackouts, merely repeating what a SAPN spokesman said. Maybe prices didn’t hit $12,000/Mwh yesterday but they did hit -$90 according to WattClarity. Not sure that reflects rational behaviour.

    We need to see an easy to read graph showing for example by how much electrical demand declined after sunset. If the east Australian grid (NEM) demanded 34 GW yesterday and all PV (including Perth and Darwin) totals about 3 GW I’d say rooftop is a helper not a salvation.

    Some factoids about Tas hydro. The Basslik converter station backs on to Loy Yang brown coal fired power station. Tas Hydro admit their policy is to sell at high spot prices and import brown coal power cheaply at other times to fulfill contracts to large electrometallurgical plants. Carbon tax (the unexempted bit) inhibits that to some extent when it goes who knows what will happen.

  19. Hermit, do you agree the situation is much improved upon than in the 2009 heatwave when when there were rolling blackouts in South Australia and wind and solar capacity was a fraction of what it is now? Basically I would like you to accept what happened yesterday as evidence that South Australia’s wind and solar capacity does not threaten grid reliability. If you could let me know whether or not you accept this as evidence I would appreciate it.

    PS: Electricty prices did not reach $90. Where was this supposed to have happened? I’ve heard the same nonsense repeated on another site as if it was some sort of repeated lie. And even if they hit $90 that’s still an excellent result for yesterday’s conditions. ‘Cause, you know, 2009 heatwave – rolling blackouts.

  20. @Ronald Brak
    That was minus $90. Possible explanation here
    http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/1/17/energy-markets/electricity-prices-go-sky-high-and-then-negative
    Other reasons for coping could include voluntary cuts by big electricity users. However in general terms we’re learning to cope with high energy prices and extreme events. Take bushfires for example; in the 1980s people ran into the flames like headless chooks nowadays they are more cautious. The problem is if it gets beyond our coping ability. For example an El Nino on top of general warming coupled with water shortages and mega fires too extensive for the emergency services.

  22. We’ve had a cold front move in and the wind is really blowing. It looks like in a couple of hours wind power alone may be able to generate power equal to South Australia’s entire demand.

  25. I’ll try this again to see if our friendly tyrant might let it through now!

    Just watched an astonishing film:

    Five Steps To Tyranny (2001)

    Released 1st February, 2001.

    I’m still banned from using links or even mentioning my own website for some reason – so those interested will have to look it up, but is available to watch for free from, eg, ‘films for action’.

    A Synopsis:

    This film analyzes the movement of a society from freedom to tyranny in five steps. It clearly shows how those in positions of power may cultivate the conditions of tyranny in any population by demonstrating how easily ordinary people may be manipulated into compliance with “authority”, into silence before criminality and even how easily most people may be coerced into performing profoundly immoral acts. Ultimately tyrannies happen because ordinary people are surprisingly willing to do tyranny’s dirty work. We all need to become sensitive to the conditions under which ordinary people can be led to do “evil” deeds and to take a position of resistance to tyranny at the very first signs of its existence.

    Quote from the film:

    “Over the course of human history there have been more crimes committed in the name of obedience than in the name of disobedience.

    So it is not the disobedient, it’s not the rebels, it’s not the unusual kind of deviant person who is the threat to the society.

    The real threat to all societies are the mindlessly, blindly obedient people who follow ANY authority.”

    – Philip Zimbardo

    Apart from the fact that it is a great doco, one of its central premises is borne out by the fact that it was first broadcast early in 2001 and within eight months the western world was acting out the very things depicted in the film.

  27. Quote from the film:

    “Over the course of human history there have been more crimes committed in the name of obedience than in the name of disobedience.

    So it is not the disobedient, it’s not the rebels, it’s not the unusual kind of deviant person who is the threat to the society.

    The real threat to all societies are the mindlessly, blindly obedient people who follow ANY authority.”

  28. Weird what gets eternal moderation, isn’t it?

    The film was first broadcast on UK TV in about February 2001.

    It was titled “Five Steps to Tyr….y” and I just watched it online.

    Here we are in 2014 and I can’t even mention its name.

    Nothing to see here folks, carry on.

  29. A Synopsis:

    This film analyzes the movement of a society from freedom to tyr…y in five steps. It clearly shows how those in positions of power may cultivate the conditions of tyr….y in any population by demonstrating how easily ordinary people may be manipulated into compliance with “authority”, into silence before criminality and even how easily most people may be coerced into performing profoundly immoral acts. Ultimately tyr…ies happen because ordinary people are surprisingly willing to do tyr…y’s dirty work. We all need to become sensitive to the conditions under which ordinary people can be led to do “evil” deeds and to take a position of resistance to tyr…y at the very first signs of its existence.

    Apart from the fact that it is a great doco, one of its central premises is borne out by the fact that it was first broadcast early in 2001 and within eight months the western world was acting out the very things depicted in the film.

    And it’s also interesting that the word in the title which is the central focus of the whole film cannot even be mentioned on an Australian website.

  31. PrQ

    Is it the case that Maurice Newman has withdrawn his ostensible offer to bet $10k with climate scientists that surface air temperatures will be cooler in 20 years’ time?

  32. Hermit, I am intrigued. What would you do if you were able to dictate Australian energy policy? You seem to be critical of everything (fossil fuels and renewables) but state no viable alternatives.

    To put my cards on the table, I would;

    1. Adopt the Zero Carbon Australia plan and push it through in as little as 10 years if possible.
    2. Introduce a carbon tax and rapidly push it to something like $60 per ton of CO2 emissions.
    3. Remove all fossil fuel subsidies in as little a five years.
    4. Institute large public works for rail and mass transit.
    5. Further stimulate the economy, if necessary in health, education and human services.

  34. Ike,

    The futile aspect of the Carbon Tax (nee Price) was that the collections were not used effectively. The biggest part of the problem is coal and gas powered electricity. For a rapid change to alleviate the problem most of those funds should have become the investment fund for new power infrastructure.

    The “spend the money then wait for market forces to correct the problem” approach has failed. Not because market forces do not work, but because political forces have damaged the process, and because there was far less than possible energy infrastructure creation undertaken, the one real opportunity to make a difference has been lost again. The largest investment made was in fattening up the power distribution network to better facilitate the distribution of fossil fuel energy.

    There was the opportunity to get 2 or 3 gigawatts of non wind energy renewable power generation machinery underway during the short period of environmental enlightenment , but instead we fiddled around the edges. South Australia’s wind energy achievement is indeed to be applauded as an example of what is possible when good sense prevails.

    The main development from Australia’s brief period of environmental enlightenment was the enabling of distributed energy production, and to an extent that there can be no reversal from this position. Availability of affordable solar energy systems gives us a degree of energy independence and a very valuable device for the protection of our standard of living. And there is a lot more yet to be done.

    I am predicting that our future living comfort will involve a long forgotten technology once used widely in outback Australia. Have a look at and a long think about the Hallstrom refrigerator and the Crosley Icy Ball, both fore runners of the famous kerosene refrigerator.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball

  35. @Ikonoclast
    ZCA is off the table for starters as I regard it as a fantasy. See the critiques by Ted Trainer and others. I would have a CO2 cap based system with minimal concessions. I’d not only phase out FF subsidies (which in my opinion are only moderate here) but the RET as well. I’d have unilateral carbon tariffs on goods made in China…see the Crikey article by Cathy Alexander. Repeal sections of the biodiversity and radiation acts so if someone wants to build nukes let them. If it means future price guarantees then give the same deal to wind power in lieu of the RET.

    I’m not sure fast trains and the like are ‘better’ than budget air travel. High fuel prices may make this clearer. Ditto spending billions on smart meters because we may get a similar effect more cheaply. The grey area is holding up future GDP. I suspect whatever we do most work will end up casual and people will spend a lot of time in the vegie garden. Ergo real house prices will be lower as people won’t be able to afford big mortgages even at 2%. Beyond that is the mist of time, future time that is.

  36. Good information Ronald B @ 13. South Australia continues to punch well above its weight in so many fields.

  37. Oops. Multiple incursions into Indonesian territorial waters? Where was the sextant? GPS? Did we get an invite? Did we have good reason (eg to rescue people from a sinking vessel)? Who knows?—after all, it is an operational matter!

    Multiple incursions does not sound like an accidental, inadvertent slip of the throttle: it sounds intentional; perhaps a single incursion could be explained away, but more than one? This is going to be very hard to explain away, especially in the wake of the Timor bugging event(s) being made public. Spy vs Spy, it seems to be, and we are not looking like the white-hat spy…

  38. Trains versus Plains? here are some figures

    http://blog.cafefoundation.org/?p=8586

    but watch the video to learn more about where aviation is heading.

    The problem with fast trains is that the cost of achieving them for Australia’s 30 hectare per person to Europe’s 1.4 hectares per person population density is not justified on the basis of the savings and the potential traffic. And air travel could well adapt to eliminate the benefits.

    ZCA is an aspiration, and 80% achievable for a committed community. I don’t believe that 100% is a practical target, nor is it necessary.

  39. In Spain last year they got more energy from wind than any other source (it just beat nuclear). But the world spends more on fossil fuel subsidies than on promotion of renewable s. The Spanish may have to step down their renewable support due to the state of their economy .

    This morning I find myself wondering why I usually expect that humanity would care about the Earths future .There is so much suffering going on all the time that people seem not to care much, if at all ,about -why would they care what kind of future the Earth has after they are gone ? That most people have, or know some ,children is the only reason I can find today.

  40. Donald Oates,

    The GPS on my phone is sufficient to stay within 10 metres of Australian waters, I tested this on a recent flight from Melbourne to Sydney where both TomTom and Rout66 were spot on accurate. And if Australia’s aircraft make the same kind of incursions then maybe the government should consider making the free App PFD Boeing (Android) available to all pilots. The government is totally without credibility in claiming that this was an accident.

    Is the minister going to claim that the ships were operating in a “radio silent” mode? All of the phones were turned off and the ships’ considerable navigation equipment was non operational?

  41. Re ; Operation Violation of Indonesia’s Sovereign Borders .
    Why did Morrrison suddenly volunteer this information ? does that not seem unusual ? Maybe the Indos found out and told him to make full public apology ASAP or else! .

  42. @BilB

    Perhaps the navigational equipment was non-operational, and that is why they could tell us about the non-operational incursions 🙂

    Ah, politics.

  43. One incursion – an accident, two incursions – check the competence of the navigator, multiple incursions on the one day – operating under orders and not willing to back off. Indonesian navy is going to help us out by sending down some ships to help us identify where territorial waters are. Very helpful lot

  44. Using these comments as a ‘straw poll’, it seems likely that a high proportion of Australian’s BS-O-meter went off instantly (and non-partisanly) when they heard about these ‘accidental incursions’, as did mine.

    Hopeful sign that credulity is not a given.

  45. I’ve just read some research that attributes proportionate cause to GHGs in the atmosphere between 1906 and 2012. Apparently 60% is down to seven countries:

    USA
    China
    India
    Brazil
    UK
    Germany
    Russia

    The USA accounts for 22% — nearly twice as much as the next country — China (12%) and from there it’s all single digits. Of course China’s emissions are very substantially the result of manufacturing goods for countries with lower emissions in part because China is manufacturing them. China’s breakneck industrialisation and subsequent openness to foreign investment was welcomed by the west as was that in other second and third world countries so ethically speaking one can attribute almost all of the responsibility for the global ecosystem anomaly to the west, and therefore expect that the richest parts of the world ought to shoulder the principal burden of mitigation, remediation and adaptation. Plainly we westerners are the principal beneficiaries of the malfeasant conduct and best equipped to make amends as well. If anyone should go first in taking action, it ought to be us. Yet instead, states like the USA, Canada and Australia are doing the exact opposite and also working to undermine moves towards an effective deal.

    It really is shameful and if we more plebeian westerners had a decisive role in shaping our government’s policies, we would own this shame.

  46. Hermit, I’m still waiting to see if you will answer my question. Do you accept the performance of South Australia’s grid in the heatwave we just had as evidence that wind and solar power don’t endanger grid stability? If you don’t accept it as evidence then what would you accept as evidence?

  48. So called “climate sceptics” created their own science journal (i.e. they were the editors), loaded it up with articles following the standard contrarian glibbish, and then got sprung by the publisher, Copernicus. Copernicus bandied about words like, ah, “malpractice”, and other cool things like that. They weren’t happy at Copernicus, being taken for a ride…

    Meanwhile, Andrew Dessler gave a most excellent presentation on climate science and global warming, to the US Senate, as discussed at the Rabett Run blog.

  49. @Hermit

    Ted Trainer is not a scientist in any of the hard sciences, nor is he an engineer. Simply put, Ted is not an authority on this issue. ZCA for stationary power is feasible according to scientists, engineers and economists familiar with the plan and not motivated by ideological opposition. The sums actually do add up physically and economically.

    The above does not mean we were out of the woods. There is still all the fossil fuel (oil and gas products) that we use for transport. How we replace our fossil fuelled transport fleet is a further big problem and I don’t know the answer.

    Then in terms of sustainability we have water issues and other resource limits. Plenty of problems but ZCA’s plan would be a step in the right direction.

    It seems some people won’t accept part solutions. We will have to accept part solutions in a lot of areas and hope they add up to a controlled power down to stable sustainability rather than a totally disastrous collapse. The personal automobile will have to be phased out for example. Even electric cars will only be for a wealthy minority. (I don’t expect social equity any time soon.)

  50. @Doug

    When Abbot was prime minster he asked to to go on a military patrol with actual soldiers in a real war zone. He is living in a flat at the police academy.

    Multiple incursions in one day, Abbot with a big video screen playing Jeb Bartlett or Francis Urquhart?

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