Along with giant batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen, pumped hydro is touted as the solution to wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency. Five years ago, Australia’s PM, Malcolm Turnbull pitched his very own mega-pumped hydro project, tagged Snowy 2.0.

The numbering was meant to be a nod to computer program upgrades and signal an improvement on the original Snowy scheme – without doubt – the single greatest renewable energy project ever built in Australia – with a mammoth 3,950 MW of capacity, which is available on-demand (unlike the pointless nonsense that is wind power). It cost $1 billion (in today’s money) to build.

Except that five years later the 0 in Snowy 2.0 looks more like a quantification of the amount of power the scheme is likely to deliver.

The plan never stacked up economically – see our posts here and here – and is never likely to.

One of…

By Tim Graham ~

During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, his Saturday Night Live impersonator Dana Carvey joked as Bush that Vice President Dan Quayle was “still gaining acceptance.” Kamala Harris has never received negative press attention like Quayle did. Instead, as she bumbles and falters, the media elites offer reports worrying about the negative perceptions getting cemented in public opinion.

On Sunday, USA Today White House correspondent Francesca Chambers demonstrated the trend in an article titled “Democrats want to fix Kamala Harris’ image problem. Some VP allies fear it’s too late.”

“This is a textbook definition of stenography,” tweeted Tom Bevan, co-founder of Real Clear Politics. Chambers began this way:

WASHINGTON – Republican attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris are taking hold, and the White House is running out of time to reframe the narrative, Democrats say.

At a meeting two days after President Joe Biden…

Nuclear power’s timely renaissance is being led by Canada and the US, with plenty of others following suit. Any country that’s serious about reliable and affordable electricity is getting serious about nuclear power.

Britain is crab-walking away from its offshore wind power disaster, with its government recently announcing plans to pump up nuclear power generation, including by investing heavily in Small Modular Reactor technology.

Nuclear power is the only, stand-alone generation source that can deliver reliable, affordable power without generating CO2 gas, in the process, which means nuclear should be the perfect candidate for those fretting about carbon dioxide gas emissions in the electricity generation sector.

Putting aside worries about the direction the weather might take in future, the self-inflicted wind and solar calamity playing out in Europe has focused attention on the need to have power around-the-clock, whatever the weather.

Australia’s Federal Shadow Minister for Climate Change and…

By Steve Goreham~

The Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would set stringent limits on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from US power plants. Utilities would be required to retrofit existing plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or to switch to hydrogen fuel. Others call for the use of CCS to decarbonize heavy industry. But the cost of capture and the amount of CO₂ that proponents say needs to be captured crush any ideas about feasibility.

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from an industrial plant before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and storing it for centuries to millennia. Capture may be accomplished by filtering it from combustion exhaust streams. Pipelines are proposed to transport the captured CO₂. Underground reservoirs could be used for storage. For the last two decades, advocates have proposed…

By Tim Graham ~

NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith, who heads the White House Correspondents Association, created unintentional comedy in her speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

It’s a “challenging time for our country,” she proclaimed. “People are choosing their news in part based on what they want to hear. And this makes us all vulnerable to conspiracy theories, to seeing the worst in our fellow citizens, to losing sight of our shared humanity.”

Does Tamara Keith think NPR listeners aren’t choosing their news based on what they want to hear? Liberals have a terrible habit of thinking the other side lives in a silo, and their side is so tremendously open-minded. In much the same way, Keith can bizarrely proclaim that she and her colleagues “pull no punches” and “hold the administration accountable.”

So let’s offer Tamara some easy proof that she and her NPR clan live…

Civilised societies demand civilised power generation; not stuff delivered at the chaotic whims of mother nature. Untamed and untamable, wind and solar are simply incapable of delivering power as and when we need it – which is the starting point for every modern society.

You’re reading this thanks to a modern phenomenon that rests on having electricity available – around-the-clock – whatever the weather.

The giant server farms that store the data uploaded today – that’s called up by Internet users as the information of tomorrow – use phenomenal amounts of power – 24 hours a day.

The likes of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google consume staggering amounts of electricity – a fact that their marketing departments recognise as a potential brand negative.

It’s pretty hard to hold the high moral ground about ‘carbon footprints’ etc and berate the broader populous about their power use, when your business chews up…