Climate, environment & energy

Donut Labs, an offshoot of a Finnish company, created an electric motor that is actually part of the wheel. No drivetrain or transmission needed. Check out the stats: 845 hp, over 4300 Nm of torque, and weighs only…

Our home battery (Tesla Powerwall 2) has a warranty that says it’ll still provide 70% of its original storage after 10 years. So still perfectly usable well after 10 years has passed. But if I run the diagnostics today,…

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

This is the Financial Times, in the UK. One of the most conservative papers. I’ve been saying for many years that China is a far better superpower to be leading the world. It’s been doing it for nearly 2000 years. It’s…

All the poll numbers look terrible for Trump, particularly in the groups that he brought across to the Republican side, like Latino voters. Total collapse in support. This is how populist surges always end, the crazy…

Imagine aliens observing human life today. ‘Oh, they have some shit to deal with - climate change, energy, water and food availability, terminally ageing populations etc. etc.’ ‘OK, so what are they doing?’ ‘They’re all…

I think it’s worth noticing that in this record week of outrageous heat, there hasn’t been one story in the news about potential grid collapse and the need for people to conserve energy. That’s because of renewables.…

Be prepared in Australia for the targeting of rural and regional people by One Nation, including their newest recruit Barnaby Joyce. They see real opportunity to steal lots of Nationals votes. They’re also targeting…

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that…

Petrolheads think they’re being clever when they call EVs ‘appliances’. None of them can explain what that even means. On all the measures of car performance they themselves have masturbated over for years, EVs wipe the…

This is the ideas about status and identity I post about a lot. For example people who oppose or support renewables, or EVs or petrol and diesel cars, or this or that band, brand of bags or shoes, political parties…

'Rural character' just the latest of a long list of bullshit obstructions anti-solar and wind farm activists throw up. Thankfully the court threw it out. Most farming land in Australia is a a wasteland, from years of…

I can’t engage in what’s called ‘politics’ because it’s really just social team sports overlaid upon the material realities of human life. It’s literally like a football Premier League added to what keeps societies…

When the pre-eminent scientific journal in the world says hang on, AI easily already passes all of the tests for intelligence we devised years ago, and MUCH more, but humans keep shifting the bar higher to try to deny…

Meanwhile, in Australia brainless lemmings complain about wind and solar farms destroying the view.

Trump came to power promising to end the renewables transition in America. In 2025 88% of all new power added to the grid in the US was wind and solar. That’s projected to grow to 92% in the next three years. The…

It's activists who don't even live in the areas who are responsible for new solar and wind farms being bogged down in 'community' objections.

I’m always up early, about 4.30am. I love early mornings. Today I’ve been listening to the beautiful gentle rain here, that has been falling for hours. It makes me think about information I saw yesterday about other…

WiIl be rainy and dark today, not a lot of solar generation. But no matter, the battery has topped up with grid power at overnight rates. 5 times cheaper than the daily grid rate.

The spoilers are making hay with electricty prices still being high. They’re high because our ‘peaking’ plants, in peak times, are still run by gas, which is hideously expensive. But batteries and pumped hydro are…

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of…

If elected, One Nation plans to dismantle the government response to climate change, which it doesn't believe is man-made, wind back access to abortion care, and abolish the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). The…

You can see the boy racer mentality that dominates everyday road driving on display right now in F1. The new cars are more technical, 50% combustion, 50% electric, and require a lot smarter driving to create, conserve…

Toyota is late to the party, but arriving at last. The Highlander is called the Kluger here. At this stage only available as a hybrid here (which I have, it’s superb). The full electric version just planned for the US…

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) makes the rules for Australian energy markets and advises government. It wants to make an outrageous change. Right now your electricity bill is mostly based on how much…

Katie is one of the Trump administration insiders. The contrast with what Trump says is hilarious. They all know it’s over for fossil fuels. And look at the piddling amount nuclear is in the mix. From the country that…

Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change,…

This is actually a great deal, and decent EV. In reality they used a Chinese firm's design and hardware (Deepal). Japanese and European carmakers make big bluff and bluster statements about how 'the combustion engine…

We're living inside a revolution that will be written about for generations. Just imagine the current Opposition and One Nation coming to power right now, shutting all this down in favour of their old policy of…

‘What happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine’ is a common brainless criticism of renewable energy. But even in Europe, which has much less sunshine than Australia, those ‘dunkelflaute’ times (no…

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still…

Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he…

There’s a lot of public reporting on the cost of electricty for Australian families. Much less reported is that it’s less than 30% of their energy budgets. 70% is petrol and diesel, for their vehicles. And gas. Those…

Starlink is becoming a vital resource for remote regions, like Pacific islands, poorer nations without broadband and even remote parts of Australia. An NBN spokesperson told me once Starlink is so good they even advise…

The perfect day to sell your combustion clunker and buy an EV. Iran just closed the main shipping way for 20% of global oil, to sweeten the deal for you. Tesla isn’t your enemy. Your combustion clunker funds Trump’s…

The electricty grid is a wonder of the world. There’s a perception that it delivers electricty (electrons) to homes and businesses like water flowing through a pipe. But that’s not how the grid works. The grid is an…

AI is already super intelligence, far beyond what humans can do in almost every way. Those who deny this are like those who deny renewable energy or EVs. They’re just throwing every made-up obstacle in the way of them…

Meanwhile in Straya we're still driving around in Tonka Truck utes that are shit *as* utes, with no driver dynamics or comfort for passengers, lethal for other road users in collisions, zero aerodynamic design (they…

From an F1 engineer. The cars this year will be noisier, because some like that, but the engineers say they'll get quieter again because that's just wasted energy, which will make the cars faster if they get rid of it.…

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams.…

Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia and Ras Laffan in Qatar are the global home of oil and gas production, respectively. Nowhere else churns out production like these, they’re the original and biggest sources of oil and gas.…

You can see here why China began a major push towards renewables a long time ago. The rest of us are sitting ducks. Note this isn’t per capita figures, China’s larger consumption is mostly that they have so many more…

There seem to be credible hints that Tesla will release Powershare for Juniper models, in homes that also have a Powerwall, some time this year. Apparently the needed power electronics are already onboard. It looks like…

I don’t post so much about renewable energy and electric cars because I’m some ‘fanboy’ of them. I hate the whole fan/kidult culture we live in, where you join a team as a fan and then fight other teams for status. I…

This is Omar Yaghi. You may have seen hm in the news recently, he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He invented a technology using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) that will pull moisture out of air, even in…

Watching the first Formula 1 race for the year. This year the cars are very different, they’re 50% combustion, 50% electric. They were hybrids before this too, but not with this much electric. Many purists want just…

It really is a symptom of how fundamentally baked-in stupid social media has made the world that this ever even became a fake debate. We argue over whether to use cars that run on more or less free energy, need next to…

This is cheering. A nuclear war would also likely shut down social media, so the ANZAC nations may also stop arguing about everything, start vaccinating again, driving electric cars and using free energy from the sun…

Tesla is about to open the factory for mass production of its semi. It'll be able to build about 50,0000 trucks per year. The semi does over 800 km in range. China has been building thousands of electric trucks per year…

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same…

It seems that rather than admit petrol and diesel is an energy source that will never be cheap or reliable again, the latest invented outrage we’ll use to try to not change what we do is to say it’s a massive conspiracy…

It's beautiful to see the social status mechanism brought into the light like this. 'Load-bearing for people's sense of self'. That's glorious. "Here is what the shock jocks and the Murdoch machine and the fossil fuel…

In Asia some countries have already started 4-day weeks and widespread work from home for professional jobs, to ration fuel. Unlike under Covid, where we decided to open up everything again and just all get infected…

What concerns me about this is that we already live in a culture where adult life was replaced by adolescent gangs, fighting for their respective ‘brands’ in everything (cars, coffee, clothes, energy, etc.). If petrol…

Australia ships in 81 tankers of fuel every month. That’s almost 3 per day. It’s an insane way to live. It costs us $60 billion per year. Australian-made energy is free. And doesn’t need to be transported.

The US is famous for having a national 55 mph (about 88 km/h) speed limit on its roads. That limit now varies across the country, controlled by States. The history of the 55 mph limit has echoes for us today. Richard…

The disruption to global energy supply is an existential threat, particularly to Western nations, who are energy pigs. And unsurprisingly, what's their level of concern or action? Virtually zero. The kidult 'just…

Here are some electric Tesla semis, charging at one of Tesla’s truck charging stations. Tesla builds the whole infrastructure when it builds vehicles, including the charging for longer distance travel. The genius of…

For those who like everyday comparisons, Kell just quarter-filled our Kluger (hybrid). The fuel cost $55, for a quarter of a tank. To fully charge the Tesla costs us either nothing, if we use solar and the home…

The same free homemade energy you can drive your car with will also power your stove. I love how people think things like work from home are a choice we get to make, as a society. With no fuel, there will be no choice.

Referring to this article:…

We’re doing nothing in social media society to prepare for this disaster, for fear of enraging the social media mob. Prepare yourselves for what’s coming, folks, because nobody is coming to help. Maybe the anti-EV and…

The fuel tankers that deliver the fuel to all parts of Australia travel a distance each year equivalent to travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use over 200 million litres…

Redwood Materials, a company headed by one of the engineers who set up Tesla, takes old car batteries and stands them up in the middle of the desert, linking them and controlling them with software. This creates massive…

Innovations that succeed follow the famous S-curve pattern. For a while nothing much seems to be happening. Then suddenly the change explodes and everybody is doing it. It’s not gradual. This is the status thing again.…

When you think that we knew this 20-30 years ago, and did nothing. That last Coalition government in particular should be in jail for national vandalism, with the exception of Turnbull, who tried and was rolled by…

Potholes are the next fake hysteria to try to scare people off EVs. It isn’t working. The Murdochs and friends also invented range anxiety, battery fires, ‘only the rich buy EVs’, ‘cheap Chinese shit’, and ‘EVs are…

For many years another anti-EV message was that they have no resale value. How the worm has turned. Some people are selling their used EVs now for more than they paid for them, new. Meanwhile second hand petrol and…

There have been debates for years between people who believe in ‘socialism’ (i.e. government-led life), and those who believe in ‘capitalism’ (a life led by individuals in markets). And me? I don’t think either -ism…

There's no such thing as 'the community'. Community consultation will mean getting the views of a whole range of people, many if not most of which will disagree with each other, and nearly all of which will just be some…

The real tragedy about Elon Musk being so repugnant to so many people is this. What Tesla are doing and planning to do is almost beyond belief. All of the sub-companies and products, like Space X, xAI, Starlink, the…

To illustrate the nonsense about the range of cars. Few realise that the average range of combustion cars hasn’t changed much in almost 80 years. That upper average of around 650 km in that time is already the range of…

You may be surprised at how many Australians think this guy is terrific. Some of them are even local councillors elected to local councils. Many more Australians who can’t stand him will happily vote for Pauline Hanson,…

And with the vehicle emissions standards, wait until people see the price of wankpanzer utes in the next few years, to buy when new. All of life involves collisions between people's beliefs, and reality. This is one of…

Fortescue (Andrew Forrest's company) has just added its 15th fully electric excavator to its mining operations. Check this - the diesel versions of these excavators use a MILLION litres of diesel EACH, every year.…

There is some sort of fascinating link between the geographical regions most opposed to the idea of climate change, like Queensland, or the middle and South of the USA, also copping the biggest brunt of the impact of…

The supply of fuel we’re still getting all left the Middle East before the war began. It’s about to run out, globally. In populist politics it will all of course be ‘Albo’s’ fault. When really it’s the fault of…

The head of Australia’s largest super fund speaking the truth about housing that Australians never want to hear. ‘Supply’ won’t fix the housing crisis. Nobody is going to flood the market with cheap houses. It would…

Great piece from Ian Verrender about why the idea of drilling for our own oil, to try to solve the fuel crisis, is complete idiocy. We’d have less than a decade of fuel if we did it, and it would cost a fortune to…

And this is for electricity at 15c/kWh. Most EV charging plans are half that, so over 80km for each $1 of electricity. If you charge with solar, it's free. Australians are some of the slowest in the world to adopt EVs.…

What's not as often said about the fertiliser crisis is how completely dependent on fertiliser our farming methods are, to grow anything. And that fertiliser in turn comes from fossil fuels. Agriculture will be smashed…

A fascinating insight into how driving changes qualitatively as an activity, once you’ve had prolonged experience of semi-autonomous technology. Just as these cars change the nature of cars fundamentally, they also…

I've been preparing for this 'shock' for many years already. It wasn't rocket science to see it coming. My various interests I share on here, like renewable energy and EVs, are all part of that.

Towing is another glorious example of human status games. When the BYD Shark was released for example, many people refused to buy it because it ‘can only tow 2.5 tonnes’. But in reality BYD’s engineers in China, removed…

Trump’s idiot adventures in Iran are dramatically accelerating this shift. I’ve posted a lot here about how cultures need to be broken, catastrophically, to make meaningful change. Otherwise status always rules, the…

A common anti-EV myth is that we’ll need vastly more electricity, if we all shift to EVs. EVs use 3-4 times less energy to travel the same distance, as combustion cars. 70-80% of the petrol or diesel you put in your…

During this energy crisis, I think it’s helpful for more of us to know the basic (mind-boggling) numbers behind the fossil fuel world we’ve all grown up in. Here’s a just a few. The world uses 16 BILLION litres of…

Autumn is nearly two-thirds over. The leaves on the deciduous trees at my place and around it are not only not falling off, they haven’t even changed colour yet, in many instances. The people who deny climate change are…

The cost of the cut to fuel excise is about the same as what the battery rebate scheme cost. Annual subsidies for diesel fuel cost 3 times what the battery rebate scheme cost.

Tiny numbers of people drive all social activity. For example, the ‘love the sound of a combustion engine’ crowd is absolutely tiny, compared to the number of drivers on the road. Listen to all modern cars, the most…

The energy market regulator has a dilemma. Paying for network upkeep is done on the basis of a daily supply charge based on how much electricity people use. But because millions of Australians have now installed solar…

Lovely example of how the socials create a fantasy world, separate to the real world. This lady represents farmers who want to embrace renewables. Many of them won’t speak up because social media gives the impression…

The idea of 'natural', through the lens of supported shoes vs barefoot shoes. The proponents of barefoot shoes argue that this is the more 'natural' way that feet behave, it's how we evolved to walk. The problem with…

Another miraculous revolution happening in broad daylight, which almost nobody knows about. Sitting alongside the Gliptins (the magical ‘weight loss’ drugs that do so many more semi-miraculous things) is a new type of…

Heh, the Nats only care about land clearing when it involves renewable energy. Andrew continuing his clutching the pearls tour.

I knew people who worked on the original Snowy Hydro scheme. It made modern Australia. The way it took that enormous influx of refugees from WW2 and mixed them with the locals to unify everybody behind massive nation…

Dolly did a long selfie video to explain why she’s disappeared from performing. Her immune system stopped working. You can fool yourself Covid is a nothing burger for a while. Dolly is a master of putting a happy face…

Andrew Hastie telling the truth about electricity prices, gas, and Pauline Hanson. The Liberals picked a complete dud to lead them, in Angus Taylor, who's trying to out-Trump Pauline.

You can see how social media/kidult culture turns everything into a fake debate. The AFR is another sewer, notice the 'slug' in the headline - designed to enrage people. This will be just one more service electricity…

The softly-softly 'market' approach to transition to renewable energy and EVs won't work. For starters markets are a fiction. And humans simply won't change if important change is needed, unless they're forced to. For…

Supporters of all political parties are now rushing to adopt EVs. Even One Nation. Politics is a waste of our time, it’s nothing but a popularity contest between groups of people fighting for status. The material…

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away…

Another reason I went with Tesla is that they, by design, allow you to integrate all of your energy use in the one brilliant app. This includes your vehicle use, by far the largest energy use of any family, as well as…

Strip all the bullshit away from 'politics', which isn't even a thing anyway. It's different social groups in the community fighting for status. Modern conservatives are the old landed gentry and industrialists trying…

The electricity prices you're paying right now? That's coal power.

Formula 1 now has its own anti-vax movement. The anti-battery/anti-electric crowd. F1 cars have been hybrids for years already, it’s made them faster than they’ve ever been before, while using much less fuel so…

China just turned on the world’s largest offshore solar farm. 2.3 million solar panels. 2,934 steel platforms. 11,736 piles driven into the ocean floor. Built to survive force-11 gales and sea ice. It sits 5 miles off…

I'd qualify this. We're ALL 'idiots', outside the areas we actually know something about. What social media did was let everybody's opinion on things they know nothing about suddenly have real power. That's literally…

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v…

Tesla introduced AI to its Powerwall units, to help explain to people in real time what's happening in their energy management. For a lot of people who don't engage with the more technical side of things, it's a…

I love how anti-renewables farmers use terms like 'visual amenity' now. Force-fed by Bananaby and his army of mental midgets. The greatest damage to the visual amenity of the Australian landscape is far and away caused…

A longish but very interesting read about why the airline industry can never make money. This actually links to my dislike of travel more generally, a culture that would be simply impossible without jets and jet fuel.…

This was the energy use of the new Tesla, driving 62km to Bathurst yesterday. To translate that into a comparision with a petrol or diesel vehicle, the standard dual cab ute (Australia’s favourite cars), if it could use…

I have pretty much zero time for Michaela Cash, on anything. But this exchange with the Australian Human Rights Commission on trans women and pregnancy in the workplace should be watched, so people can really see the…

There is no public backlash against AI. Just as there is none against windmills, and solar farms, and EVs and vaccines. ‘The public’ is not a thing, thinking and acting. Activists enlist members of the public to their…

What China has done in the last 50 years is miraculous, unprecedented in all history. It’s lifted 900 million people out of poverty. In doing that it also made the rest of the world richer, most countries’ economies…

Saying ‘if you stop taking a GLP-1 drug (Ozempic, Mounjaro), you just put the weight on again’ is actually the point. Obesity is a medical condition. If you stop taking your drugs for any other medical condition, you…

The irony here of a party representing the original land-grabbers in modern Australia, the huge 19th century stealing of most of the continent (and its communities) by the early pastoralists building their empires,…

Clarkson led generations of men down the climate denial path. Reality bites.

Snowy 2.0 cost a fortune, but it'll be a huge national asset. And a real kick in the groin for those who think we'll always need coal and gas to power the country overnight. Batteries already overtook gas for that.…

It’s been very dark and cold and wet in this part of world in the past week or so. That pushes down solar production, but would have been outstanding wind generation weather, day and night (even more at night). Except…

Batteries have now overtaken gas as ‘firming’ power for the grid, in peak time. Before the mega hydro-battery Snowy 2.0 even comes online.

I often post about how only catastrophe brings meaningful social change. Cars are a good example. Until World War 1, horses were the dominant way people got around in their daily lives. 8 million horses died in that…

The great lie of the Covid pandemic was that public health action against the virus was both unpopular, and damaging, to people and the ‘economy’. In reality millions were lifted out of poverty for the first time in…

The current hysteria over resource usage of AI data centres. Driven by social media, because trending hysterias is its bread and butter. It drives revenue. Humanity has always devoted enormous resources to cognition.…

When social media came for: - gender, I ignored it - windmills, I ignored it - solar farms, I ignored it - EVs, I ignored it - democracy, I ignored it. It transforms everything into social comparison, the fight for…

It takes twice as long to boil an electric jug in the US, because they use a 110V mains supply to homes. Even longer in Japan, which uses 100V. The reason is interesting. Edison was the early inventor of mass…

A car enthusiast I know was crowing last week that ‘those who went and bought an EV because of high petrol prices will be sorry now the prices are coming down again.’ An EV costs the equivalent of about 12c/L to run. If…

NSW has announced interest-free loans up to $15,000 (up to 10-year terms) for home electrification and efficiency improvements. That's a huge boost for urgently-needed changes. Most of these upgrades will actually save…

The grandad of lad culture, leading an entire generation of men into eternal adolescence through broom broom cars, Tonka Truck wankpanzers, and a general all-out assault on all change, has now hit the brick wall of…

By far the biggest billing at this launch of the Obama Centre is musos. It’s a big gig. Like all countercultural political movements, it’s just another leftover Woodstock movement. Not only is modern popular music just…

At a time regional towns are ceasing to have any reason to exist at all, every attempt to actually build something there, whether it be wind and solar farms, or data centres, is met by organised teams of social media…

Some who get solar are part of the off-grid movement. Like the self-sufficiency movement of the 1970s. Don’t do this, it’s an idiot idea. (Another viral trend, go figure. ) The grid is a wonderful resource. Off-gridding…

For all the nuclear fans and social media experts out there who couldn’t even draw an atom, nuclear reactors use a shit-tonne of water. As do coal-fired power stations. Both are just big steam engines. And it has to be…

I genuinely believe many if not most are simply unaware we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution. That thing that transformed civilisation itself a few hundred years ago, completely upending all comfortable…

There are 14 essential technologies that are required to get a car to drive itself. These same 14 are what’s needed to get AI to operate in the real world, in anything (you’ll soon see it in Tesla robots). Legacy…

One bit of advice I’d give to people as homes and lives become increasingly powered by electricity, is the value of sticking within the one ‘ecosystem’. Sticking to a single brand for your different electrical products,…

Combustion car sales have fallen off a cliff. Battery-electric cars are showing the opposite.

This. Regional areas have no real reason to exist now, that their founding rationale of resources for the cities is increasingly irrelevant. But as renewable energy and data centre hubs, they can become important again.…

The anti-renewables and soon anti-data centre movements in rural and regional areas (again copying the US, where these viral outrages emanate from) are an existential threat to the survival of regional life. Regional…

I live in the regions, and I want them to survive. They won’t when their only idea is to become tourist locations for bored city people. Tourism generates activity, people passing through, it doesn’t and can’t create…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

Farmers and the Clean Energy Council have quantified what’s at stake in the idiot war some in politics have invented over renewables in regional and rural areas. This is the projected income to both local towns and…

Anthony Albanese announcing a national approach to AI today. Having largely missed the opportunity to lead the world with renewable energy because of a decade of ignorant pigshit from Australia’s conservatives when they…

"I use data centers as a prism for much larger but invisible environmental problems, hidden by our tendencies toward populism and localism that data centers offend. This post focuses on the ridiculous ways we use land…

This is the sort of gap that exists between the bullshit fake reality many live through social media, and what actually happens out in the real world. Not only are renewables now the leading source of electricity…

Kings and other high status individuals exist because status hierarchies control the spread of imitation, and therefore violence. Imitation produces rivalry, rivalry produces violence. That’s the fundamental law of…

I thought a good example of the way social media works. Pretty much everybody would read this and assume it was about AI. The big growth in data centre electricity use in Ireland happened before the introduction of AI.…

Nuclear power stations, the darling of people who know as much about engineering as my cat, use a lot of water. Solar and wind power use no water.

Tesla is finalising another genius bit of engineering. If you have the home battery and wall charger and vehicle, it will allow you to use your car batteries to top-up your home battery, as needed. This is a post about…

It’s so important the LNP or One Nation don’t win the next federal election here, so we can continue this transition. Both have promised to wreck it with completely idiot ideas about prohibitively expensive coal and…

This table tells you why your Council rates keep going up. And why we can afford to buy ridiculous nuclear submarines for the US to use as missile launch platforms in the Pacific against their hated ‘commie’ rivals in…

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more…

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an…

The material infrastructure of our lives is something that needs to be much more visible. I’ve mentioned before the exorbitant use of energy that travel-based flying is, for example. But I’m not sure people see just how…

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often…

I remember when coal-fired power stations opened, how people treated it as an event, something interesting to see. And when wind turbines started in Australia, the same, people flocked to have a look in a wow this is…

The importance of 'right-sizing' a home battery. This is the data for our place yesterday, a typical winter day. You can see from the green line that the battery charges once per day, and that's enough to get us through…

The thing that saddens me the most, as I approach retirement, is seeing the probably unfixable damage social media culture has done to public health. I grew up in a world where widespread public health was still new,…

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those…

The huge jump in the price of meat in Australia in the past decade got me wondering. We produce a LOT of meat, it didn’t make sense. It turns out the main reason is the same reason gas (and through gas, electricity) got…

“…the vast majority of New England is in favour of the REZ. It’s jobs, whole new industries. It drought-proofs so many farmers.” New England is Barnaby Joyce’s electorate. When renewables started rolling out there years…

If you’re swept up in the viral outrage over data centres, here’s a tip to make them go away. Get off social media and the internet, and stop streaming and using AI in record amounts. You’re the cause of the data…

The name ‘astroturfing’ is clever, what it means is people creating the impression of a ‘grassroots’ movement, a ‘community’ movement, that is actually a planned strategy from a small group to generate support or…

How do people not notice these waves-upon-waves of protesting outrage? The pattern that dominates our social media culture? No 'community says no' to anything. The community is not a person, with points of view and…

The times they are a 'chargin'. The Bathurst Tesla Superchargers used to sit empty most of the time, except on busy holidays. (Which is normal, most charge at home.) Absolutely packed today, and a new car arrived with…

It looks like the chunk of mountain that broke off in Nepal was up to 20 million (metric) tonnes. And that it fell up to 2 km. That would create a force of impact equivalent to over 6 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Imagine…

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them.…

Trending viral social media outrages become real-life rage. Farmers were openly embracing renewables projects, a desperately needed added source of income immune from drought and other bad years, until the Nationals…

Treasury has warned the Australian government that we're missing out on the AI revolution. And that the feared job losses from AI aren't occurring in the places adopting AI. The Anglo nations - the US, the UK, us, to…

I don't think the magnitude of global ice is widely known, and what melting it all will do to sea levels. For those sceptical sea levels can vary much, historically we know how high the seas were the last time all of…

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones…

‘Local AI’ is a term to become familiar with. Increasingly AI *in use* is local devices doing the inference work. Your phone has been doing it for years already. Data centres increasingly only train the AI models these…

None of the public narratives about AI understand the first thing about what AI is or how it works. Most fundamentally, AI is changing what computing itself means and does. Traditional computers operate symbolic…

I can’t decide if it’s more crazy that people believe you can live with a pandemic, or that climate change isn’t an emergency.

That’s over 222 days. On most of the other days of the year, the energy draw from the grid was a pittance too. You don’t need to wait for idiot energy wars over nuclear and fossils vs renewables to finish to get free…

It's winter in LA. I'm sure some will tell us again that 'the climate always warms'. Yep, last time it was this warm, dinosaurs roamed the Earth, about 200 million years ago. Dinosaurs were reptiles. We're mammals. The…

Just one sporting ground in the UK. This is climate change, they're no longer even denying it. This particular ground has flooded 8 times in the past year alone. Many big clubs are not confident they will survive.…

There’s no water to fight the LA fires. That’s because an urban reticulated water system isn’t designed to fight massive fires across thousands of homes at once. Another example of the catastrophe of climate change…

Oceans absorb 90% of the heat produced by us burning fossil fuels. They’ve hidden just how bad the warming is. Here’s the temperature of the top 2km of water in the oceans, since the 1950s. To give an indication of just…

‘Dynamic pricing’ is a growing rage in commerce. Meaning prices that can be changed quickly to reflect changing conditions. For example if lettuce is getting a bit old, the price quickly made cheaper to get it off the…

The feed-in tariff for solar is how much you get paid for exporting to the grid. In Victoria the proposed minimum rate retailers have to pay owners is now only 0.04 cents per kWh i.e. effectively nothing. Down from over…

I still recommend Bill Hero, the automated price comparison service for all your energy bills. It will automatically take all your gas and electricity bills and compare them with everything else on the market, to make…

Propaganda and hysteria now dominate public life. Anti-renewables propaganda, sponsored by fossil fuel companies, encourages Australians to believe that vast areas of Australia will need to be covered with windmills and…

It’s nearly election silly season again, and I don’t play those team sports. I often criticise the modern LNP (as do many who have left the coalition) because they’re not a political party, they’re now entirely a…

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else…

A stat for fans of ‘baseload’ power. In the past decade, households have used nearly 5% less total electricty. The cost of this electricity grew by more than 70%. This is coal and gas-fired ‘baseload’ electricity.

Dick Smith is sponsoring this, another one of his fact-free crusades, like Dick Smith peanut butter. What does nuclear mean for Lithgow? Nothing. Australia will never build nuclear reactors for electricity. Nobody will…

One of the common fossil fuel-funded criticisms of China and India is that they're the ones with the most emissions. It's offensive bullshit. The USA is an absolute carbon pig, and always has been, and will get far…

I do get that Elon Musk is putting many people off Tesla in any form. But Tesla is 130,000 brilliant people, doing urgent things the world needs. For example way bigger than its cars is its provision of battery storage…

One of the most compelling reasons to get a home battery. Grid supply is going to become more and more unreliable, and every Flat Earther out there protesting against windmills and solar farms is going to make that even…

This is the car Kell and I just bought. Not the actual car in the picture, but the exact same model, colour etc. The Model 3, Long Range. People know I spend a lot of time looking at all the EV options out there. What…

I’m looking forward to firing up the car-solar-battery-home integration in the fascist app. I might invade Europe with it.

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

Trump and others hate what they call the ‘Deep State’. Sounds scary! All it means is the professional civil servants that actually run countries, who annoy popularly-elected dickheads who can barely tie their own…

The sorts of electricity prices renewables are making possible. The red rectangle is completely free electricity between 11am and 2pm every day. The red circle is electricity at only 8c/kWh from midnight-6am, to charge…

Kris the actual climate scientist, trying to cut through the ocean of bullshit on social media. Which is where we all live now, so what else can he do?

In Australia heat pumps (air conditioning we use in homes and many businesses) are not really a debate. Because they don’t really threaten status hierarchies here. In the UK it’s a furious fight, with the sorts of…

Did my calculations long ago for the new EV. If we stick with grid power to charge it at home, at full grid price (not special EV price), it’ll cost about $15 a week to ‘fill’ the Tesla. That’s for 300km of motoring per…

Some worry that they’ll need to replace the battery in an EV, at great cost. EV batteries last for years longer than you’ll actually own a car. A million kilometres or more. They’re even better in real world conditions…

What I really like about Tesla, and a huge reason I went with one of their vehicles (already had the home battery) is in that underlined bit. A ‘fully integrated’ home energy ecosystem, to create energy independence.…

Thanks to @[1257795447:2048:Christine] for sharing. If you talk about climate chnage, many will pop up and tell you the science isn’t settled. That’s a lie, propaganda that many swallow because they believe what they…

Glad to see even mainstream media now reporting that EV batteries last and last and last, and you can buy a secondhand EV with no anxiety. Battery ranges well in excess of 90% of new, even after 120,000km.

Such a ridiculous idea. Fuel excise doesn't go to roads anyway, the whole thing is a con. If they want extra revenue, cancel the diesel fuel rebate, massive subsidies to utes, and other subsidies to oil and gas and coal…

Whenever fossil fuel companies feel a threat, mysterious ‘personal’ stories about the dangers of free energy appear. Anybody who uses oil heating instead of a heat pump is a (rich, or soon to be very poor) moron.

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here,…

The top level of the Tesla app showing the solar, house battery and car all currently being charged for free by the sun. The app has many more layers and functionality, the best software I’ve ever used.  Feels really…

I have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and…

After firing the people who oversee the US nuclear arsenal, then realising uh oh we need these people, the Trump team now struggling to rehire them because they also deleted their email access. The war on ‘red tape’ is…

For people with the debilitating condition of range anxiety, more real world examples. To drive to Sydney from Lithgow with an EV battery at 100% to start, you arrive all the way over on the coast with a battery still…

More real world numbers for people thinking about making a switch. My weekly commuting in a petrol or diesel cost $120. With a hybrid I got that cost down to $70. With an EV that cost is now $3.60. Per week. That’s…

My $3.60 in electricity for a week of commuting between Bathurst and Lithgow was based on an estimate. I re-did the calculation using actual data from the car this morning. It's $2.40. Per week. If I was working in the…

I have a few friends here who use OVO (myself included now). With an EV their overnight 8c/kWh charge is fantastic (AGL offer similar). They also give you completely free electricity between 11 and 2 every day. You may…

The beauty of a home battery is that you get to control your energy costs. As an example, I program the battery to top up if needed between midnight and 6am, when we get super cheap electricity from the grid, and also…

Australia might go one better. It might elect a halfwit who wants to spend $600 billion (of your money) on foreign nuclear technology that nobody needs. Imagine the roads, schools, trains, hospitals and affordable…

Have been trying Grok AI. I told it all of the details of my energy system at home. It said: “You’re basically running a masterclass in energy optimization here”.

A bidding war between the two major parties on household batteries is the best news.…

Of course it will. Remember the ‘plan’ is to spend $600 billion taxpayer dollars - that’s ’your money’, as they like to say - to build nuclear plants for electricity. Electricity you can already get for free at home…

Electricity is still very cheap in America. This is cost per kWh. In Australia most people pay at least twice these rates, sometimes triple. Why the difference? It’s mostly the last place people expect to look.…

It’s politicians who approve building on flood plains and who do nothing against climate change. They need a distraction, and insurers are always it in natural disasters now. Queue the next mob pile-on. Heck it may even…

The Sealion 7 is now for sale in Australia. Like most BYDs, you're getting a LOT of high quality car for a small price. This is BYD's Tesla Model Y challenger, though it's not as hard to challenge Tesla in the current…

This was a major reason we ended up with a home battery, even more than the cost savings. It was to have reliable power even in disasters. It’s already saved us multiple times, in only just over 2 years, while streets…

The idiot memes about broken windmills never mention that in the past 2 years, there hasn’t been a single day when one or more of our coal-powered generators hasn’t had a breakdown. The nuclear ‘plan’ for Australia…

The genius of the renewables transition is that everybody wins. (Except foreign fossil fuel and nuclear companies.) For example, with OVO's supercheap overnight rates, and free energy between 11am and 2pm every day,…

If only there was a way to have no electricity bills. Or petrol or diesel bills...

A whole street, yesterday afternoon, people sitting in their stationary petrol and diesel clunkers with the windows up, engines and air con running. That’s the stupid of old energy thinking in one 4-second clip. Lovely…

Rio Tinto is Australia's largest user of electricity. Not least because it runs aluminium smelters, which use huge amounts. It's just announced it will be powering these using solar, wind and batteries. The reason?…

A brilliant idea. And even if you’re not a renter, it’s a brilliant option to buy a home battery and tap into the super cheap and even free rates some retailers are already offering, even if you don’t want to install…

They can now recycle and re-use every square millimetre of an EV battery. How much petrol or diesel can you recycle in a vehicle? None. 70% of it doesn’t even move the vehicle, it goes straight out the exhaust as heat,…

Another urban myth. Citronella candles are useless against mozzies. DEET is the gold standard, like in Aeroguard. Roll or spray a bit of that on, forget the candles. This is starting to really matter even in temperate…

Let’s say people decided that those who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are supporting the authoritarian Saudi regime and causing dangerous climate change, so others should key their cars, set them alight and abuse the…

I’m at an age where the body often stiffens, and the doctor and physio will advise regular stretching to keep it loose, to stretch out those stiffnesses. To release tensions in the body. The problem with this though is…

The biggest story in the world yesterday, that was barely reported. PNG turned off social media. It’s had enough of these platforms trashing its society. But just wait, it won’t last. Ordinary people and businesses…

Wanted to reshare this for those who still question whether human activity is causing a dangerous change to the climate. People have seriously no idea of the magnitude of the emergency.

The ALP is offering $150 electricity bill rebates, and the LNP 25c off every litre of fuel. It's a great example of how big the savings are by going electric. With 25c off every litre of fuel, at current prices of…

No builder wants to build cheap homes because they’ll send them broke. No gas company wants cheap gas for the same reason. This is primary school maths. The LNP has also stopped talking about nuclear, because they know…

Household electricity use is actually quite a small component of household budgets. A much, much bigger component of those budgets is what it costs for people to fuel their vehicles. That’s also part of your energy…

For those still wallowing in memes about fascism and Nazis, here are the 4 main aims of Project 2025, the blueprint Trump is following. 1) Restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”. 2) Dismantling the…

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would…

Last night a local councillor described net zero as climate 'extremism'. Giving people the vote is the dumbest thing humanity ever did.

If you want to see how social media allows the widespread manipulation of public opinion, this is a bot farm. Automatically searching for particular topics, like climate change, renewable energy and EVs, and then…

I think all elections are pointless hot air. Strip away all the parties and just look at the material needs of societies, and see who’s actually doing anything about those. I think The Greens have some really…

lol, is Channel 7 peak stupid in Australia? It’s a tough field. They go to a scary-looking industrial nickel refinery in Indonesia and say this proves EVs are environmentally unfriendly. Nickel refineries have been…

So, who’s getting a battery? Tesla batteries are still the best, which will challenge the Nazi-shy, but that ridiculous hysteria will be a memory soon. This should have been done years ago. There’s an ocean of free…

Every engineer in the country told them this years ago. Nuclear is the thirstiest of all electricity generation methods. Bananaby hitched the Nationals' train to nukes, in his anti-windfarm crusade, to try to win back…

I challenge those spruiking the superiority of petrol and diesel vehicles to start their car in the garage, close the garage door and sit with it for a few hours. I'll do the same with my EV. We'll compare notes. (P.S.…

Driving an EV, another noticeable thing is the complete absence of either of these gauges. No fuel, and no need to regulate temperature. Battery percentage replaces the fuel gauge (and it can go UP as you drive, good…

Marvel at the engineering. A Tesla electric motor is only around 20 cm long and round. It weighs just over 30kg, you could carry it. Compare that to the combustion engine in the front of a car, weighing around 200kg.…

Probably the only thing combustion car enthusiasts have left to distinguish the technology is the noise those engines make. But have a look around at the overwhelming majority of cars being made today, how much quieter,…

What makes you fat is also what causes pretty much all major chronic disease. Microbes, and infections. We’re happily infecting ourselves now with everything. Avoiding infection is the secret to a long life. And to not…

Ties with nuclear energy as the most fundamentally stupid idea in the history of Australian politics. Vote-buying desperation.

Ah Jacinta, sprung. You can find terrific photos of local councillors in some towns doing the same.…

Classic example (in an otherwise good review) of a misunderstanding I think we're seeing with the Shark. (And yes, it's an older article, posting to highlight thinking in it, not to share a new review.) "Once the…

The new LNP government in Queensland went the full Trump and ripped up the State's renewable energy plan. Took a day for one of the major coal plants they wanted to use instead to then explode. Their response? To sack…

The UK's energy system is privatised. It also has nuclear power. The whole thing is such a train wreck that a growth industry there now is energy theft, with ordinary people and organised crime finding ways to steal…

Australia, this is literally like burning cash for energy. Almost every cent of that money goes offshore, where OPEC members use it to buy gold-plated Rolls Royces. The same Made in Australia jingoism the likes of Dick…

When you're in the middle of a wave of outrage and euphoria, like we've had for women (metoo), Tesla, and here for climate change, it feels like you're changing the world. You're not. Sometimes protest movements cash in…

Nissan, like Toyota, has been playing with us. In public they’ve talked down the transition to EVs, because they don’t have any good ones. But behind the scenes they’ve been going flat out developing them to try to…

Another example of what Bill Hero can do. It costs less than $50 a year and automatically finds average savings for people of $350/year on their energy plans. This is my data, I was already on the best available plan,…

Tesla is launching cheaper versions of its major cars like the Model Y and Model 3, reportedly from the middle of this year. They'll take some of the more luxury elements out of the vehicles, that aren't needed for…

Australia follows a pattern also seen in the US and other places. The real tension is between urban and rural environments. The more urban a society is, the more cosmopolitan voters tend to be. Living in cities…

There's a deluge of new renewable capacity coming online, provided no idiot politician gets in the way. 40% of Australia's electricity last year came from renewables. That number is going to climb very fast now, if…

I really admire what Simon Holmes à Court has done with the Climate 200 group. Unlike lobby groups, who line the pockets of existing parties with donations, C200 just offers funds to any independent who wants to promote…

The ALP is sometimes called ‘the natural party of power in Australia’. That’s historically true, and has nothing to do with which party you may prefer. It’s the only party that can and has ever won elections in our…

Real-time energy read out from our solar arrays. Has a Kubrick vibe to it. The red arrow is the shade from the chimney, we got micro-inverters (one per panel) so that this doesn’t matter. If you have a series inverter,…

Zali Steggall, when called a 'Climate 200 candidate' by a political journalist, brilliantly replied, why don't you call LNP politicians Gina Rinehart candidates then? Because that is exactly what they have been, for…

The recently opened Flyers Creek wind farm, near Orange and Bathurst, produces enough electricity alone to power both towns. Expect to see a dramatic and welcome acceleration in renewables now the LNP have been kicked…

Matt does great videos. But I wonder if BYD really need to step in here and start publishing some more information to drivers about how to best drive a hybrid.  Matt getting just over 300 km on a tank as the full range…

In Australia household solar generates more electricity than all of our coal-fired power stations combined. And it’s still growing at an enormous rate. That was thanks to John Howard, who introduced the subsides for…

You can see here in an article about Peter Dutton that conservatives deliberately target young working class men, tradies in utes, who historically voted for the ‘Left’ side of politics. Many of these young men have now…

I was delighted to see the Nats and some Liberals are still committed to nuclear power. That should bed them down for several more terms in opposition, by which time the grid will be mostly renewables. In Lithgow the…

The building industry serving the housing ‘market’ is falling off a cliff. It can be saved if it shifts to building affordable homes for government, to use as affordable housing for ordinary people. But it won’t like…

A secondhand Tesla is probably the best value used car out there. This one has done nearly 300,000km and still has 90% of its original battery capacity, and drives flawlessly. It also shows just how much value you get…

If you burn energy that took 3 million years to accumulate, in 300 years, you incinerate yourself. Even if you’ve never studied science, that basic fact should still be graspable. Also why nothing else really matters,…

All of those who love the sound of a V8, like Jeremy, always forget that the sound they love is not the engine. It’s the exhaust, a metal tube. Invented to get rid of the truly horrible sound of an engine, to ‘muffle’…

Nobody cared about energy until social media politics turned it into one more 'debate' to generate fights, to generate votes. The comments on posts like this show how the simple-minded were vacuumed up.

Two of Australia’s most popular cars, the RVA4 hybrid, and the Ford Ranger ute. Under new vehicle emissions standards coming into effect on 1 July this year, the price of the RAV4 could jump by $10,000. The Ranger could…

Remember the term ‘superpower’. Understand it. It’s not about comics, it’s the technical revolution solar, wind and batteries (SWB) are introducing. SWB doesn’t just replace our existing fossil fuel energy, it floods…

The Nationals destroyed the Liberals at the last election with their Gina-funded anti-renewables nuclear lunacy. It’s hard to see how the Coalition survives this. The average Coalition voter is a white man aged 70. The…

I posted a few times last year about the persistently high ocean temperatures off Australia, the cause of our seemingly never-ending torrential rainfall on the coast. The oceans are enormous heatsinks, absorbing much of…

When you burn energy that took 3 million years to accumulate, in only 300 years.

You can still choose to believe climate change isn't a catastrophe. Insurance companies don't agree.

The kids drove back from Sydney last night. They didn't charge while down there, and when they got to Katoomba they were already below 30% charge. But the car told them they'd have 22% charge when they got home. And…

I shared this before. Humans copy each other, to attain status in groups. This also means it’s easy for the tiniest handful of bad faith actors to create havoc. For example, installation of wind and solar farms has been…

Estimates of payback times for home batteries. The more electricity prices go up the more these payback times go down. Worth remembering too that a battery isn’t just useful to save money on electricity, it also gives…

One of the great myths of democracy is the idea of ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. There is no such thing. A tiny handful of activists stir up trouble, and then attribute that trouble to ‘the community’. We see that…

Have mentioned Bill Hero (https://www.billhero.com.au) here a few times, the bill comparison service that will automatically check your personal energy bills every month (it does very detailed calculations, using your…

It’s now cheaper to build fences out of solar panels than it is to build them out of wood. And the fence will power your home. We’re living inside a revolution, people. Stop status scrolling and get on board.

Using your ceiling fan in reverse (winter) mode, or a circulating fan like a Vornado, can cut the amount of energy a heater needs to use by 50%. Huge.

When I think about climate change, I think about Venus. Venus was once covered in oceans and rivers of fresh water, about the temperature of a lovely Spring day here on Earth. It then experienced runaway climate change,…

It’s worth letting this graphic sink in, to let basic science and engineering inform car choice, rather than the pissing contest of branding. How much the fabled range of petrol and diesel cars is bought at the cost of…

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over…

Hugely lower energy costs and phenomenal power and performance. Now is an incredibly fun time to own an EV, because the roads are still chockers with petrol and diesel clunkers that you can embarrass.

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free…

Sigenergy has become the number one home battery in Australia. Fantastic technology. Personally I don’t think quite as good as the Tesla battery, particularly with Tesla’s software control and analytics, but either are…

Ah Queensland. "If we don't do it somebody else will" is an excuse to never shut down anything. Child slavery and prostitution, drug trafficking. Etc. "The Premier also said his government would fast-track approvals for…

Imagine if we powered our vehicles with Australian-made energy. Those that do won't be impacted.

I get very tired of ‘debates’, and rarely engage with them. They define our age too because they’re the team sports I often talk about, driven by social media. The algorithms there prioritise people arguing, it drives…

Used EVs are the hot buy in America now, people have figured out they’re an absolute bargain. The same here in Oz, you’re getting a luxury supercar for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Just one more of the empty…

I often call petrol and diesel vehicles rubbish technology. To clarify, I mean that in a very precise, engineering sense, it’s not just a casual insult. Here’s one of the specific ways they are. The energy produced by…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of…

In activist culture, what we used to call ‘the public’ is long since destroyed, replaced by a continuous shift in what’s ‘trending’ on social media, where we now live. A more accurate name for activists is gangs, it’s…

Classic example of a factoid. Something that is wrong, repeated so often that people come to think it’s true. Modern electrical devices are designed to be left turned on at the wall continuously, in fact cycling them on…

You will hear people say that EVs create as many or more greenhouse emissions than petrols and diesels. If somebody says that to you, tell them to go back to their job frying chicken.

Europe went from getting about 25% of its energy from coal, to only 6%, in only 10 years. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV ‘debates’ are fake, stirred up and funded by vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, to…

Sharing my own data. This is what it cost to charge the EV in June. An average of $5.50 per week. That’s 2-3 return trips to Bathurst every week, 1-2 return trips to Sydney a month and everyday driving around Lithgow.…

The range EVs already have now, with current batteries, is equal to or greater than the range of the cars most of us grew up with. The things we forget. What’s even more interesting is that the range of combustion…

With the new federal rebate many wil be buying home batteries for the first time. This is a great thing. However a word of caution, don’t be suckered in by thinking bigger is better. New modular batteries allow you to…

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

If you’re getting solar, do a shade analysis before buying (good installers will do it for you). For example this mighty tree in my street was factored into our system. By 3.30 most winter days, it shades our entire…

EVs reduce exhaust emissions to zero in cities and towns. And they also reduce the amount of brake dust by up to 83%. EVs use regenerative braking rather than brakes a lot of the time, meaning the electric motor spins…

Renewable energy is Australia’s superpower. And we have bottom-feeding scum like the federal Coalition actively campaigning to knee-cap that advantage purely to score pathetic points and votes in the social media…

Meanwhile in the loony bin of social media society, people spend every day genuinely believing that things like electric cars and renewable energy are some sort of lifestyle choice. Playing team sports with the…

Of the total fossil fuel energy used every year for every purpose, 63% is completely wasted, leaving just 37% of the original energy actually used to do things. In money terms that's $4.6 trillion of wasted energy,…

"...referred to the IPC because it received 83 objections – the trigger for IPC referral in NSW is 50 objections – but 77 of these objections came from people living more than 50 kms away, or even interstate. There were…

Ricky is one of the well-meaning, smart younger generations that think belief in God is belief in fairy tales. But they then adopt the *exact* same structure of belief, of an independent, ‘objective’ something that…

The idea of carbon passports, where people would face restrictions on the amount of air travel they do each year. Bring it on, it shouldn’t even be one trip per year.

The EV not only measures how much energy is used on a trip, if you’ve driven the road before it has a memory of your last trip there. Every little peak and slope on this graph corresponds with a different part of the…

The world’s most powerful battery was switched on in NSW this week. When the transformation to renewables is complete, there should be ongoing mocking and accountability for every dickhead who tried to stand in the way…

I like sharing this stuff, not because I’m some middle-aged hobbyist but because it shows the brilliant things that are available for us to use today, if we can escape lives enslaved to social conformity. High school…

Trump appointed a fossil fuel executive to run his energy policy. This is the BS at the heart of the US as a culture, this belief in freedom and free speech is really sponsored horseshit from its corporate barons, who…

Why do taxpayers pay for new airports? They long ago stopped owning any planes or airlines. It's a huge subsidy to airlines and freight companies. Some analysts also see airports as stranded assets nobody will want,…

While China builds the future at staggering pace, we trot out Yellow Peril racist ‘cheap Chinese shit’ themes and do nothing but bid up the prices of our houses, and call that an economy. As the article says, one of the…

When Albanese first came to power, Saul Griffiths, the Australian engineer who helped revolutionise renewables in the US before Trump, suggested Australia target households first, not the wider grid. It took until the…

Electrochemistry is one of the hot fields right now, obviously with the explosion in interest in and demand for new types of batteries. What’s interesting is that the main element that features there, lithium, has…

All of those 'stories' sponsored by car and fuel companies, about how EV sales are in decline. Yeh, nah. The latest fear campaign is the 'EV Tax'. If that worries you, wait until you see what your favourite combustion…

The Nats are doing the rounds of Central West towns to whip people into an idiot frenzy about windmills again. You know what the future of most of these towns is right now? Nothing. Do the Nats have a single idea what…

Sodium-ion batteries have arrived. Even now less than half the costs of lithium batteries, and much longer lifespans. An EV battery using sodium chemistry would run for well over 5 million km (yes MILLION), and still…

Mazda is in big trouble. Many, many Australians drive Mazdas. Many, many Australians have no idea about the impact new vehicle emissions standards will have on traditional carmakers that don’t make EVs. Most Japanese,…

One of the reasons I never go to gyms is because they encourage a view of the body as like a lump of plasticine which you have to bash into shape. We live in extreme times and sport and exercise are no different, the…

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond…

Subsidised home batteries have been a thing for 8 weeks now. Installations are averaging 5000 per *week*. Let that sink in. It’s the equivalent of adding a new Mt Piper power station to the grid every FORTNIGHT. This…

A solar panel that weighs only as much as a primary school-aged child will produce as much energy as 8 tonnes of coal, or 40 barrels of oil.

What Chirs Bowen should also point out to counter the idiot ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ social media slogan is, we’re ASLEEP mostly when the sun doesn’t shine. We don’t need anywhere near as much energy then. Even…

Heh, you couldn’t make up just how unbelievably stupid our way of life is. 40% of all global shipping is transporting fossil fuels to other countries. Countries that can now produce all of their own energy, pretty much…

Nampijinpa Price got the boot yesterday, from her own side. One of Australia’s leading Trumpians. For Bathurst residents it’s worth noting she’s also a pin-up poster girl for the social media-led coalition dominating…

Batteries are selling at astronomical levels now. Which means the shonks are out there. Like this deal, I wouldn’t touch it with a stick. 42 kWh is way beyond what most households would ever use, and they couple it to…

I recently discovered SailGP racing. The F50 catamarans are outrageous! They can do more than 100 km/h, with their carbon fibre hydrofoils which lift the whole boat out of the water. And the sails aren’t fabric, they’re…

The world is going nowhere in the fight against climate change. This is like an enormous asteroid heading for Earth, as in the movie Armageddon, while we all choose to ignore it and go on holidays. Millions who failed…

There seems quite a bit to like about Sussan Ley, including that she flies planes, and added a second S to her name just to piss off her parents. I doubt she actually believes all the small government, anti-welfare…

The industry knows it. Electric cars: - are much more powerful - are non-polluting - are silent - run for years without servicing - are dramatically cheaper to run, and - can be fuelled with free energy, made locally.…

The big drop in costs for batteries have made them the hot new thing in grid planning. Will delight many protesting against wind farms and pumped hydro. The real test of what they actually stand for will be whether they…

How fast things are moving. NSW is running almost entirely on renewables during the day now, close to 80%. This is the last 7 days. The gap is mostly filled by coal, the red line. Overnight though NSW needs more wind…

Alan Kohler consistently shows how even the world’s modest climate targets are completely out of reach. Some are delighted by that, they feel like that’s a ‘win’ in the idiot online debates. Here’s the most basic way to…

People know I’ve campaigned against DST for years. But this is a world where knowledge has no currency. Only what’s popular survives, no matter how stupid it is. We live with lethal viruses, we do nothing as the planet…

The battery rebate program has been hijacked by wankpanzerism. A lot of the rebate money is going to people supersizing home batteries to ridiculous sizes they’ll never need. Like people buying RAM Utes, it’s ’my…

Robert is chief climate scientist at Berkeley. I posted earlier and in the past about how the oceans have absorbed a lot of the heat generated by our burning of fossil fuels. They’re now full. And it’s worse than that…

So many think renewables is still a choice for people to make. The energy sector made that choice years ago, and not because it's full of Greenies. Renewables are so much cheaper and faster to roll out. That's it. The…

Fear not if you think climate change is a big con, your Great Intelligent Leader has your back. The rest of us are just 'stupid people'.

Not only will installing solar save you thousands of dollars in electricty costs and pay for itself (easily the smartest investment for your spare money), but it also significantly increases the value of your home at…

The meeting between all of those with 'opinions' on climate change, and the reality of it, has been brought forward.

Got your solar yet? Tip: get us much as you can afford and will fit on your roof. That way you have a 'superpower' system i.e. maximises winter production, while giving you a vast excess in the other seasons to do what…

One of the great cons of our time is politicans and others telling people that only existing energy is ’reliable’ and ‘affordable’. They tap into deep-seated reluctance humans have to change, it’s always easier to sell…

If you want to understand why the status quo is fighting so desperately to save fossil fuels, and funding wave after wave of propaganda drivel to try to get ordinary folk to help them, just follow the money. Seriously,…

Trump's decision to reject renewables is leading America into a full energy crisis. They're critically short of electricity, and coal and nuclear, his (and all the loons worldwide who ride the Trump train) favourite…

Australia has vast areas of desert and arid land, and much of its farmland is completely rooted too, and needs anything to help restore it. Solar panels help restore that land, bringing it to life again. Again, we…

One for your amateur climate expert friends who say 'the world has always warmed'.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the U.S. “Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”…

It's exciting to be there at the start, to feel the ground shake. But also worth remembering combustion race cars rev the crap out of their engines at the start because otherwise their combustion engines have zero…

People who’ve never studied much science, which is most people, need to understand what’s at stake with climate change. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK have done the sums. Actuaries are not ‘Greenies’…

What I like about Tesla vehicles is that they reclaim motoring from kidult car enthusiasts, often adults whose identity as teens focused heavily around their cars. The need for EVs to focus on efficiency, to preserve…

Finn, electrical engineer and one of the reasons solar in Australia is world-leading, sounding a bit like me today. Frustrated that a revolution is being stalled by kidults. Using Tesla as an example, people opting out…

Opponents of the pumped hydro in Lithgow cite damage to platypus populations as one of their main arguments. One of the loon things anti-renewables people do is suddenly develop a fake interest in ecology. It’s the…

What’s happening with Covid right now in the UK is so important to help people understand the mess we’re in. That 10 months of relatively low Covid low levels wasn’t interrupted by a new Covid variant. There is no new…

Quite a bit of public chat about the energy and environmental costs of AI. Let’s compare it with just one trip to Europe in a year.

Had an interesting conversation with my podiatrist recently, about barefoot shoes. At the time he was recommending Birkenstocks for me, for summer holidays, as he wears himself. I went barefoot one summer and ended up…

Tony Seba is probably the pre-eminent thinker on disruption and innovation. He has a rule he calls the “10x” rule. If an innovation is 10 times cheaper and better functionally, change is inevitable, it’s just a question…

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making…

TB is the canary in the coal mine for immune damage.

Putting to one side all of the pollution and energy arguments for petrol and diesel vehicles vs EVs, I can promise if you go electric, the majority will never go back simply because driving a combustion engine is a SHIT…

Anti-renewables people dishonestly blame higher electricity prices on renewables. The real cause is the use of gas to generate electricity, with the failure of coal-fired plants. Gas is hugely expensive. As batteries…

The status games that we see with wankpanzer utes, caravans and camping gear has now entered the solar and battery world too. I saw somebody say their house has 30 kW of solar panels (!!), and a 40 kWh battery, and…

400,000 km and still going strong, including the battery. You can drive an EV for years and years without any maintenance. Nathan had some things done on suspension, air conditioning compressor and the motor housing…

Wholesale electricty prices have tumbled in the past year, due to the renewables rollout. The cost of electricty from coal and gas has exploded in the other direction. You won’t see these reductions fully in your actual…

Imagine living through the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago fighting to 'keep the horse'. You'd look like a moron today. Renewables will double again in the next 5 years. Exponential growth. You're living…

Chris Bowen has organised for all Australians to get 3 free hours of electricity in the middle of the day, as some retailers were already offering. This will give people an opportunity to load-shift their heaviest…

And then let's build new steam trains. This person is paid a lot of money by you to run the country. Every single person in the energy industry is laughing at him.

We’ve had so many years of brilliant PR from farmers about being poor and downtrodden that it’s always forgotten that farming was the original wealth and privilege in Australia. The settler land-grabbers, who literally…

If you ever feel anxious or stressed (all of us), here's (I think) genius health advice. Just let yourself breathe through your nose for a while. Gently, without noise. Don't try to suck air in or blow it out. Close…

The great swindle here is to make unthinking Australians believe their power price rises are due to renewables. Even a Year 7 science student could find the data in about 5 minutes. The surge in power prices is due to…

These are of course known as miracle weight loss drugs. The GLP-1 drugs. But they’re showing signs of doing far more, in areas that medicine has been historically powerless. Chronic disease, like ME/CFS, mast cell…

It seems certain the LNP will ditch a commitment to Net Zero, and try to spin their way out of it by pretending they're prioritising cheaper electricity through coal, gas and nuclear. Only complete idiots don't already…

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of…

So the LNP did it, they decided to become the Dad's Army of climate (in)action. One part of their spin will be that Australia is only a small contributor to global climate change. Australians are carbon/energy PIGS.…

It's glorious that companies like Globird are announcing plans like this only one day after the LNP announced their idiot 'let's use lots of expensive coal and gas and nuclear' policy. 4 free hours of electricity in the…

It’s reported Gina is going to help fund a mass propaganda push leading up to the next election, on the evils of Net Zero and also mass migration. To try to turn the public on Net Zero the way they did on the Voice…

Very well said. Doesn’t matter if Minns isn’t your pathetic political ‘team’ (I don’t have any political team). This is basic engineering. Like he says, the anti-renewables crowd are ‘bullshitting’ people.

This is what the LNP is hoping to do now with Net Zero, leading up to the next election. The total backflip of the Australian population on The Voice, in only a year. They’re hoping to engineer a similar viral…

Two things to see here. One, the energy/climate debate is a fake debate. The entire industry already decided the answer years ago. It doesn’t matter whether your political team disagrees, it’s irrelevant. Second, the…

To those who like ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow’ as an argument against renewable energy, it’s worth remembering that off-peak power was invented decades ago because people *weren’t* using power…

Humans decided to burn energy that took millions of years to form, in only 300 years. Oops.

If you’re not convinced how much climate influences sea levels, for most of the past 25,000 years sea levels were between 40-140 metres lower than they are now. METRES. If we want to keep melting what’s left of the ice…

The climate crisis is reaching tipping points. This is Tehran, capital of Iran. 14 million people live there, about half the population of Australia. Preparations are underway for imminent possible evacuation of the…

Hilariously, Musk tried to reveal anti-American forces on social media by forcing Twitter accounts to show the country of origin of their owners. What it actually revealed is how much of Trump’s rise was due to the…

The level of stupidity out there in the anti-EV crowd. Looks like a KIA Seltos, which is a petrol car. The smoke coming from under the bonnet gives it away anyway, the battery is in the floor of an EV, not under the…

In just under 5 months, Australians have added 175,000 home batteries to the grid. The demand is immense. The negative drivel you see on social media about things like renewables and EVs is a sponsored tiny minority of…

Even NSW, which was a laggard, now on most days provides most of its electricity from renewables. Those red arrows show the tiny remnant of coal used during the day, quickly collapsing. Overnight you can see what impact…

Sigh. The wankpanzer effect has hit batteries too. Humans run on status, the home battery program dominated by people putting truly ridiculously huge batteries on their homes, in a pissing contest. I want to leave high…

Great to see this scheme almost tripled in funding. And also more evidence of what most deny, how status runs societies. The moment this incentive was first announced, people rushed to put the largest batteries they…

A deal like this is going to introduce you to a world of pain. $3,999 for 50 kWh of storage is snake oil. Go with a reputable firm like solarquotes to get access to reputable battery installers.

Ryan expressing a common view here, that because he was still using grid power in winter, there was a problem, and so he better get another battery. That the aim should be ‘self-sufficiency’. Being ‘off-grid’. Actually…

A brilliant side-effect of electrification, which will also revolutionise plane travel. Unlike fossil fuels, you can generate energy from renewable energy anywhere, without having to truck in fuel. It will make even…

Because they don’t need to make room for a whole range of mechanical things, smaller EVs actually have more room inside than much larger petrol or diesel cars. I noticed this with the Tesla Model 3, which doesn’t look…

It's so hard to talk about anything today without people defaulting to their team in whatever fake 'debate' has been set up around it. Like discussing Tesla things, it fires up the anti-Elons and the anti-EVs and…

Snow skiing is disappearing, as the climate warms. Hundreds of ski resorts already closed for good. Resorts in Australia have relied upon man-made snow already for years to stay open. High altitude snow is a magical…

South Australia's Hornsdale battery was the biggest in the world when it was switched on, in 2017. Australians are now adding the equivalent storage with home batteries every 3 and a half DAYS. I post about renewables…

On New Year's Eve, AEMO said new demand (not supply) had to be found for electricity in Victoria, or else some solar farms would need to be shut down. There was too much electricity. Remember being told by coal-carrying…

Re-using this graph to counter another slogan, 'when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow'. This is a full 24-hour period. 2 is day time, and thus the huge surge of solar in orange. 1 and 3 are night time,…

Another of the fear-mongering slogans about EVs is that you have to replace their batteries, and it costs a fortune. Tesla has the data on this. After over 320,000 km of driving, the batteries are still at 90% of their…

The most popular EV in Australia, Tesla’s Model 3. Can be bought for less than the price of Australia’s favourite car, the Toyota Hilux. But that’s just the sale price: - fuel costs for the EV can be close to zero -…

Why is the East Coast so wet this summer? For the same reason I posted in the winter. The ocean is cooking, due to climate change. All that heat ends up as evaporation and rain. Surprisingly, our strategy of buying lots…

I like that this helps make visible to people the astronomical amount of fuel/energy we use for our recreational travel.

There's such a fundamental lack of respect shown for these experts in climate science, by people who wouldn't know their climate arses from their elbows. I still imagine how they'd feel if climate scientists turned up…

Another legacy carmaker backing hydrogen not because it’s better, but because it means them not having to retool their factories as much. Green hydrogen costs a fortune to make, and wastes astronomical amounts of…

David is an engineer, and as you can see, a grid run by renewables isn't really that difficult. Out of every 24 hours, you only need storage for 5. It will change all of our lives, and those of our descendants, to no…

Another not as often mentioned benefit of solar panels, in summer, is that they shade the roof. Just like they shade paddocks in big solar farms. What used to be the hottest rooms in our house, on the top floor, are…

Living things don’t generally use engines. They don’t build a structure, then look for something to move that structure along. They turn the structure itself into the engine, transforming forces like gravity into…

Nobody is investing in any of the old stuff like oil or coal or nuclear, or even gas now. Haven't done for years. Businesses are telling us who's winning here, and they're not Greenies, or Lefties, or any other stupid…

Andrew Forrest is investing hugely in renewables. This is him turning the first sod for NSW's biggest wind farm, near Wellington. He has 14 GW of renewables projects in the pipeline around Australia. Again, definitely…

An El Niño means cooler ocean temperatures off Australia. But right now, that ocean is 2.5-3 degrees hotter than normal. That’s ENORMOUS. The difference between heat (energy), and temperature. 2.5-3 degrees doesn’t…

If I was in the market for a car right now, this is is what I’d probably buy. The BYD Seal, EV. Designed by ex-Audi engineers, has superb build quality, and the performance version does 0-100 in 3.6 seconds. It has a…

To say this makes Australia look like yokels is unkind to yokels. That solar farms can now be rejected because they spoil the view. Having lived near two butt-ugly coal power stations for the past 30 years, I can…

This stuff is dishonest. Firstly it uses the most expensive electricity in the country, in fast-chargers, up to 70c/kWh. That's more than twice what many pay at home for electricity, and more than 10 times what you pay…

EVs are already changing the culture of Australian towns. Many towns are bypassed by big highways with big servos on them. Now those towns are adding chargers and suddenly people are visiting them again. The service…

Many have no idea of the apocalypse climate change can be. All of these species aren't like things in a zoo, to look at. They're vital cogs in the engine that makes the planet livable. That makes it possible to breathe,…

Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie will have no power for up to a week. Storms destroyed several transmission towers. Backup gas generators have failed as well. There’s no fuel, because service stations can’t operate without…

The huge untold story of petrol and diesel vehicle range is what it costs the country, never spoken about. The range of a vehicle is a property of its energy supply network, not of the vehicle. Without that network, its…

This very interesting graph compares the cost of driving 100km for petrol and EV, at different prices for electricty. Yellow is one of the EV rates of 6c/kWh now on offer from some retailers. Blue is an average grid…

Personally I think we need to see more of this. The ‘sovereign citizens’ and other loons who bog down basic services with their ridiculous conspiracies and funded slogans in areas like renewables, Covid and basic town…

The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million TONNES of ice every HOUR. To those who still pretend this is all normal, a tip. It wasn’t losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour in our lifetimes, or anybody else’s, for at…

One of the things I like to try to do in the garden is to tap the ecology that will happen by itself. Far too much gardening in my view is about control, about imposing a form on the landscape, that then takes a huge…

Scientists calling for the declaration of a planetary emergency. Civilisations don’t survive massive climate changes, it’s that serious.

We’ve now had solar a full year. I did the sums. Electricty used = $2774. What did we pay? Nothing. We made $110. Which means the investment made us $2884. Current lifetime return on investment is over 240%, about 10%…

Could be two cyclones in a month. When you pump enormous amounts of energy into the oceans for over 250 years, it has to go somewhere.

A climate denier trick is to claim that every change to climate we experience is just normal variation. Luckily we have data to show this isn’t true. Take sea temperatures, a hugely important measure, because the oceans…

Renewables have cut the wholesale price of electricity in half in the past year. Consumers should see that in their bills from mid-year, when the regulators update the pricing for retailers.

When it pays off. Pretty yuck weather out there, hot and windy. Got 5 air conditioners going, and the double-glazing means they’re not working hard, as well as blocking any hint of the wind outside, perfect silence.…

When politicians refuse to act on emergencies like climate change and Covid, the risk doesn’t go away. It gets privatised, individuals have to deal with it themselves. Insurance is the way they try to do it, insurance…

A school over 1,100 km from the coast, in the desert, has had to close because of mould, due to sustained humidity this summer. And where did that humidity come from? From oceans that are cooking. I think many really…

State governments are now taking control of renewable projects, to bypass the local obstruction, often mobilised by Nationals MPs. Solar panels can improve farmland, have a look at how much shelter has been traditional…

There were 131 local objections to the Glanmire solar farm. Only 6 letters of support. It was approved by the State Government. If that seems strange, objections included: - risk of fire (?!) - noise (?!) - impact on…

Hinkley C nuclear power station, in the UK. When building began people were told it would be done by 2017, at a cost of about $20 billion. Now the project is expected to be HALF finished by 2031. And the cost has blown…

Two stories today showing the sort of catastrophic damage climate change is already causing. It’s not really sinking in that this is the only problem we all have to urgently face now. None of anything else we’re doing…

I find many are unaware of political strategy. The Nats had lost a lot of farmers, because the party became addicted to fossil fuel and mining dollars. Now they’ve found a way to marry those two together, by whipping up…

Solar system data for January.

What Hemingway said of bankruptcy, that it happens gradually then suddenly, is also true of natural disaster. This ‘tipping point’ would be a catastrophe, an extinction-level event. And it will happen fast, maybe inside…

The Powerwall 2 ships with a capacity of 13.5 kWh. But because it’s chemistry and not neat, you’ll often get more than that. You can test how much the capacity of your battery has degraded over time, it’s warranted to…

How's the slogan go? 'Affordable, reliable power'? Victoria's biggest coal plant completely offline, in their heatwave. Some irony there, given that these plants cause most of the heatwaves.

Look at what the collapse of the coal plant in Victoria has done to the wholesale electricity price there. Nearly $17,000/MWh. OUCH. Compare with South Australia, with its renewables? They're giving the energy away…

Private health, education, housing, electricity and roads are all catastrophic failures, kept afloat only by huge injections of taxpayer dollars. Let them all live by their beloved market rules, take the taxpayer…

Diagnostics on the Powerwall after more than a year of use. You can see they’re sold as a capacity of 13.5kWh, but you can end up with more, as ours is, 14.7kWh. And 0% degradation for the battery after more than a year…

Solar farms in the UK take up less space than golf courses and Christmas tree farms. People forget that farming was the activity of the most privileged parts of the population, who now don’t want their lifestyles…

Researchers track climate denialism. It’s shifted now, from denying climate change itself, which has failed, to now denying the technologies which create the solutions, like solar and wind and EVs. Funded by the fossil…

This is what I think many still don’t understand about climate change. The damage from one storm has crippled many of these communities. Just as a climate storm destroyed our gas supply a couple of years ago, for weeks.…

And another climate event. Beyond the capacity of councils to afford. Meanwhile communities spend a huge proportion of their weekly incomes on personal entertainment, dining out and travel, and then complain when…

Another astonishing breakthrough by materials scientists. (Disclaimer: my original training was as a materials scientist ;)) Battery development is on steroids right now, put the engineers to work and watch them go.…

Hilarious. German farmers want the exact opposite thing to what Australian farmers say they want. In both cases because it means opposing government plans for renewables. It shows that it's all really just about…

Humans as we know them have existed for about 300,000 years. Compare that to dinosaurs, who lived for about 165 million years. They lived for 550 times longer than humans have currently existed. Changes in climate…

In the UK, some energy companies are now offering EV drivers completely free charging. All they need to do to qualify is allow their cars to be used for vehicle-to-the-grid (V2G) use, i.e. plug it in at home and the…

South Australia planned to be net 100% renewables by 2030. It’s now brought that forward to 2027, it’s going so well. Only 3 years away. Just takes brains and determination. They’ll be an economic powerhouse, using the…

To give an indication of just how corrupt fossil fuel politics is, it's worth remembering that university students pay more of Australia's bills through their HECS payments than all of the coal, oil and gas companies…

Exactly what's happening. Muppets regurgitate the slogans these think tanks release into the wild, actually believing it's their own ideas.…

The government has launched a consumer guide for people interested in solar. My personal preference is still the Solar Quotes company, which as well as providing you the best quotes from reputable installers, also has a…

One of the cool things about EVs is that on really hot or cold days, you can turn on the car's cooling and heating remotely so that when you get to the car, it's already at a comfortable temperature. No need to run any…

Anyone want a nuclear power station at Wang or Mt Piper?

I know, all this health and climate change stuff isn’t as fascinating as me on a cruise or at a gig. I apologise, I will eventually get to pretending to be a forever teenager, at some point. (That may be a lie.)

Coastal residents say windmills spoil the view. They prefer big rusty coal carriers.

The Pompeiians sculpted by a pyroclastic cloud almost 2000 years ago at the eruption of Vesuvius are like the old death masks, applied to an entire body. Very powerful. The facts and figures are too. The volcano ejected…

"Last month was the warmest February on record globally, making it the ninth month in a row with record temperatures for the time of year, scientists have said. Global sea surface temperatures are also at their highest…

“It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a…

This is the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, under construction in the UK. (Actually a model, it’s years away from being finished.) Keep this one in mind as the debates around nuclear power heat up here. When…

Just normal autumn weather, I'm sure climate deniers would say. Maybe in the time of the dinosaurs. (Climate change killed the dinosaurs.)

Having worked as an engineer at Lucas Heights, I can promise you Matt Canavan knows as little about this as he does about everything else. This isn't even the Lucas Heights reactor (in the picture), it's Australia's…

Together with 'range anxiety' for EVs, many have battery anxiety, thinking they'll be up for thousands to replace faulty batteries. Both myths originating in social media slogans. EV batteries last way longer than you…

The beauty of climate change is that it gives you the option of being fried (on land), or poached or boiled (at sea).

“It’s not like we’re breaking records by a little bit now and then,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said. “It’s like the whole climate just fast-forwarded by fifty or a hundred years.”…

Here come the renewables, doing what they do. Make things cheaper.

Some BYD cars are already cheaper than their petrol/diesel equivalents. And this trend is really accelerating, by 2027 EVs should regularly be cheaper than ICEs. It's absolutely beyond me why somebody would now buy a…

Shell also owns the big battery being installed at Wang.

If your German is no good, what this diagram shows is the network of infrastructure needed to get energy into your car, for the current fuelling options. To the right of each car is the outputs (pollution). EVs at the…

Alan Kohler making the brilliant point that fossil fuel export projects, which make us bugger all anyway, are hogging more than half of the workforce we need to build new homes and our renewable energy infrastructure.…

The big gas companies shipping our gas offshore? They paid $30 in tax, on over $58 billion of income last year. Feeling like suckers yet, Australia? Speed up renewables so we can kick these parasites out.

This is what the chassis of an EV looks like (in this case a BYD Seal). The battery forms the floor, and because it’s so low down in the car, you don’t really notice the weight. It’s weight higher up that impacts a…

So many problems we face are just artefacts of social media. Like the current ‘youth crime waves’, seen across many countries. Imitative rivalry, driven by social media. Our refusal to act against Covid, or to vote Yes?…

So far we've paid $10 billion to the UK and US, for them to use on their own nuclear production facilities. And we're also taking their nuclear waste. They saw a sucker coming when ScoMo inked this deal. Right up there…

Lots of criticism of EVs from those who say they can't tow because it destroys their range. To take a common towing vehicle, a Toyota Landcruiser. Towing a caravan for example about DOUBLES its fuel consumption. Petrols…

If/when the ice melts at Antarctica, sea levels will rise by 60 metres. We know this as well because that’s how high the seas were in the last period when there was no ice at the poles. You can find the fossils in…

Australia is an international embarrassment with this rubbish. Nobody says boo with 70+ coal ships queued only a few hundred metres off Newcastle, but some windmills 20km offshore are apparently destroying the Western…

Home battery installations jumped 21% in the past year. And still climbing.…

Poor farmers, thinking warning people about climate change does anything. They should go to YouTube and social media, chock full of Dorito-eating masturbating armchair experts to tell them there's nothing to worry about…

There’s no need to go off-grid, it’s a stupid choice. A home battery creates a micro-grid for your property, so if the main grid goes down yours still functions. Best of both worlds.

We don’t have a power bill, so it’s not true that people will necessarily pay more. But he’s making the obvious point about the scale of change needed, and fast, and how expensive it will be. And more importantly, he’s…

This should make people think long and hard about any resistance to EVs. Tally up the real-world experience: - over 666,000 km using the same battery - the owner only bothered getting his FIRST service at 200,000 km…

The basic engineering that explains clearly why EVs will always be a far superior performance vehicle, as well as dramatically cheaper to run and maintain. They have HUGE amounts of ‘grunt’, way more than any combustion…

7 countries now generate ALL of their electricity from renewables. When you look at the list, they’re mostly not rich countries. And they managed to do it even ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’. Another…

Comment about a hybrid vehicle. A very common misunderstanding among the anti-EV crowd. An EV is a vehicle that uses electric motors. *Where* it gets the electricty from is irrelevant. Because electric motors are so…

A 7-star energy efficient home built today, under only a moderate projection for climate change impacts, will have the comfort of only a tent by 2070. The amount of energy needed to cool these homes will double. The…

In Nevada, JB Straubel, one of the founders of Tesla, has now set up a new business to recycle lithium-ion batteries. About 95% of a Li-ion battery can be recycled, meaning for every 100 EV batteries for example they…

I suspect many have not heard of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). In October 2020 a group of ‘scientists’ signed a short statement suggesting a way out of the Covid pandemic. The Covid ‘strategy’ we’re following…

Most local councils are tens of millions of dollars short of having enough money to do even basic road maintenance. Climate change will now make many roads unusable. Meanwhile the public, hypnotised by social media,…

In just over a year of ownership, our solar panels have exported enough energy to the grid to: - drive an EV from Sydney to Perth 25 times, or - power 2 additional homes for an entire year. That's *with* a battery to…

No matter what anybody's opinion is, renewables are doing everything they promised to do, and more. As are EVs. Social media is a hopelessly distorted view of the real world.

I don't think there's a more important lesson to teach kids than this: that what's said on social media mostly has almost zero connection to actual reality. On renewables, EVs, gender, personal appearance, how happy…

Farmers in Australia can earn up to $40,000 per wind turbine, per YEAR, if they have them on their property. And $1500 per hectare for solar farms. At a time when farming is a dead business, it's a lifeline. Making it…

Climate change is making its way into our lives, pieces at a time. We used to buy these large tins of olive oil, to use for deep-frying. For years they were about $18. They’re now $65. Because most olive oil comes from…

The entire family surviving a 75m fall onto rocks is some sort of testament to the strength of a Tesla. And its battery, there was no fire. A petrol or diesel car would likely have exploded.

EV battery development is so fast now. This latest one has over 1000 km of range, and can charge to 600 km in only 10 minutes. Remembering too that most range anxiety is nonsense anyway, the vast majority of people…

Those who still refuse to accept the crisis that climate change is can hopefully point us to the last time in their lives when home insurance was completely unaffordable for large parts of countries. Insurance is my…

Good on the Irish for now publishing comparisons of costs of fuel. And you can get the electric cost as low as zero, if you charge from your own solar.

A litre of petrol contains 8.9 kWh of energy. A standard petrol car might use 7-10 L/100km. So 62.3 - 89 kWh of energy, for every 100 km travelled. A good EV will use 14-20 kWh of energy to travel 100 km. While a petrol…

There’s enough energy in a standard tank of petrol to power an EV from Sydney to Perth, and back again. The petrol car is so inefficient that it won’t even get out of NSW on the outwards-trip, on one tank. Some chuckle…

Penrith Solar are as good as it gets. If anybody wants $200 off an installation, let me know.

A technical guy I know recently bought a BYD Seal. A no-nonsense bloke. His review below (note he uses standard grid power to charge at home, you can get much cheaper rates again than what he's using). I got a BYD Seal…

It'd be worth a bet that Lithgow/Wang will be on Peter Dutton's list of nuke options, given neither town tends to vote for the LNP anyway, so they're less likely to lose important votes. Which is all any of this is…

Brilliant series, watching him stuff everything up on a farm, but with help struggle through. What makes it compelling is Jeremy confronting some of the realities of the environment and climate change, things he’s…

This sets the locals off. Like Council puts the algae in the dam, or something. Welcome to climate change, blue-green algae in mid-autumn. The dam had only just reopened from the last algae alert. Quite a beautiful…

Hmm, every Australian to get energy bill relief in the budget. Now I need an energy bill. Maybe it’s cash.

Ultimately the federal government needs to stop using taxation revenue to buy useless things, like nuclear submarines, and give it back to towns. Or even a fraction of it back to towns. In the meantime people spend more…

I know many are thinking about EVs for their next car. To share my thoughts on the relative merits of the two biggest options right now, Tesla and BYD. Other makers like Kia, Toyota, Subaru and European brands make…

Why anybody going to an election promising to slash immigration is lying to you. We desperately need every worker we can find.…

I worked at Oz's only nuclear reactor. And still every day somebody tells me on social media that I don't understand the nuclear thing, and I should watch some guy they like on YouTube.

Lithgow had two coal plants. One was smack bang in the middle of Wang, and only a few minutes away. Now shut down. Mt Piper is not far away. Local doctors have tried to raise awareness for years that the health of the…

It seems the local member was excited about the prospect of nuclear power, until somebody told him Mt Piper and Wang are on the list of possible locations. How many Lithgow folk know that? Good morning Springfield!…

From November in NSW this year, you can get up to $2400 from the NSW Government to add a battery to your solar installation, as part of their Peak Demand Reduction Scheme. They should have been targeting households a…

This is a brilliant video. Renewables, which are near-100% efficient, don’t need to replace all of the energy fossil fuels produce. They only need to replace 20-30% of that energy. Fossil fuel technologies are so…

Olympus Mons, largest mountain in the solar system. It’s on Mars. 25 km high. That’s 3 times the height of Mount Everest.

I’m sure Adam will nod! I did a comparison of the energy used by leaving a reverse cycle heat pump on all night, to heat the house (blue circle), and leaving it off at night and then turning it on in the morning to heat…

(Kris is a climate scientist.) It’s summer now in Greenland. The average temperature in summer in Greenland is about 7 degrees C. Right now it’s 15 degrees C. The enormous quantity of ice in Greenland was already…

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for the tip. A BYD Seal, an absolutely superb car which insiders liken to a Mercedes in quality, costs $50K in Australia. That's almost giving it away. In the EU and soon US, the price?…

Heat exhaustion is a horrible death. The blood thickens, kidneys fail, your muscles start to liquefy, the person becomes disoriented and confused, the heart stops. What’s tragic about it is sufferers rarely know this is…

It’s difficult to see this as anything except an act of political suicide. There was a time in Oz when opposing climate change action won you votes. That had already passed at the last election, where the Liberals lost…

The clear winner is split systems. I had all our gas heating and its ducting removed. The ducting was obstructing the subfloor ventilation anyway. It was a ridiculously cumbersome system. The problem with ducted…

Running the reverse-cycle units 24 hours a day activates the thermal mass of the building. In winter the heat produced is stored in the walls and other materials of the house, where it can release back into the house.…

Have been running the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps in techno language) 24 hours a day this (cold) winter, as an experiment. You can see in the yellow circle that overnight, in a cold Lithgow winter, they use hardly…

What’s caused the ‘cost of living crisis’? What’s not well understood is that our lifestyles have ALWAYS been expensive. Western lifestyles are the most expensive lifestyles in human history, they’re ruinously expensive…

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at…

There are 55 GW of generation capacity in the Australian electricty grid. At current prices, it costs $25 billion per GW to build a nuclear plant. To make our electricty system nuclear would therefore cost over a…

A good reason to not use ducted systems. You can clean them, but most don’t bother. And it’s a bugger of a job, or will cost you money to get somebody else to do it. And the ducting absorbs energy. (Not our house in the…

Notice that this farm is owned by a company in the Philippines. People offshore aren't stupid, they know renewables is the gold mine asset to own right now. Meanwhile in Straya, we're going to ANOTHER election trashing…

This was Saudi Arabia’s first major oil well, in 1938. We know the rest. The Saudis make up to a billion dollars per DAY from oil. They’ve been selling it for 70 years. Just imagine how much money that is. Right now the…

Mt Piper nuclear power station announced today. NSW Premier ruled out any nuclear in NSW (Victoria the same). Game over. Vote for somebody who isn't a fool.

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch…

Do you remember Tony Abbott's string-and-tin-can NBN being fact-checked multiple times? It made no difference, we still got it (it's still being fixed now). And the facts clearly say nuclear is a stupid idea. Peter…

It should still amaze us that a modern air conditioner can provide about 6 times more heat or cold energy than it uses in electricity. 600% efficient. That’s AMAZING. We’re so blasé. It provides 6 times more energy than…

The energy system is falling apart. Years of delays has led to this. The idiots who did the delaying will blame renewables, even though it’s fossil fuels that are failing, not renewables. Why we invested in our own…

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is…

The people who don't understand this think nuclear is a tremendous idea. It would also take 20 years for nuclear to be 'ready'.…

Australia has about 16 operating coal-fired power stations. The nuclear proposal is replacing these with 7 nuclear plants. Nuclear power stations don’t produce more power than coal-fired ones. So how do you replace 16,…

Tested the thermal mass of the house. I turned the AC off overnight, to see how well the house held the heat. It did brilliantly, dropped only a degree. The heat it stored yesterday was gradually released overnight. So…

I know people don’t like discussing things like this, because they say it’s ‘politics’, and they don’t like conflict. But putting politics to one side, I’m genuinely curious how people can genuinely believe nuclear…

Nuclear power plants share something in common with the rubbish petrol and diesel engines I’m always so unkind to. They’re hopelessly inefficient. About two-thirds of the energy they produce goes straight up the…

One turn of these big wind turbines generates enough electricity to power 5 homes for a whole day. Only one rotation. Just one of these can power 5000 homes, day and night.

Humans act socially, always. Ask them individually what they think of nuclear power? They hate it. But make it the rallying cry for their team, their political party? How great is nuclear power! Peter Dutton knows this,…

Only 60% of Australians think dangerous climate change is caused by humans.

Anthony Albanese has a real opportunity right now, to steal the debate. To do what Saul Griffith, the Australian engineer who also advised Joe Biden, suggested he do 2 years ago. To heavily subsidise Australian…

We haven’t done significant travelling in years, nor do we invest in a lot of other popular recreational lifestyle things. But we did invest in the house, with proper windows, ripping the expensive gas heating out,…

Things going well in $2/litre land. Reckon you can siphon charge out of a battery? Buy an EV.

For the climate sceptics. Natural disasters in Northern Europe have increased by 1000% in our lifetime. 1000%. We haven’t even arrived at the serious end of the climate scale yet.

-5.5 here this morning. Have 7 heat pumps running, keeping the whole house toasty warm (as it was all night). Collectively they’re drawing less electricity than a single standard column or bar heater.

WInd turbine fire in Victoria. ‘First in 20 years’, locals say. No problem at all to deal with, say local firefighters. Queenland coal mine on fire. Authorities pumping nitrogen into the mine and telling all locals to…

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it…

History shows time and again that the only thing that makes humans act meaningfully outside the existing status quo, is total catastrophe. Read Alan Kohler today if you want to understand just how much that's us right…

17 years ago today, dad died. That's him on the left. From the generation whose young lives were taken by war. Never spoke of it. Part of that huge wave of European migration post-WW2 that transformed Australia, with…

In 1997, over a quarter of a century ago, the world agreed to act to save us all from out of control climate change. Since that time, our use of fossil fuels has INCREASED by 55%.

It’s difficult to believe just how stupid this situation is. We give away our own gas to foreign fossil fuel companies, who get obscenely rich selling it overseas. (We literally give it away, they pay as good as nothing…

The Tesla Model Y is a brilliant mid-sized SUV. It’s also the world’s best-selling car. You can buy the base model in Australia now for less money than a Toyota RAV4 hybrid. It’s a much better car than a RAV4 hybrid.…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

From within our own region. Loved the response from the ute-driving moron in Rockley. We worship the ute-driving moron, by all buying gutless utes we don’t need that handle like tractors on the road, and guzzle fuel.…

I know that what people most want to see on FB and other social media, is what’s happening in other peoples’ lives. It’s what I refuse to post here, and thought I’d explain why. Do we think about what it means, to…

Last Thursday one of the big generating units at the Loy Yang coal power station tripped, just before 2am. This caused a frequency collapse in the national grid (red line). That's a very bad thing, it can stop…

You get insights into weather from your solar data. This winter has been very cold, and quite dark. You can see it in the different amount of solar our system generated in June this year, compared to last year. We’ll…

Scientists are excited, because it appears China has reached peak fossil fuel, with electricity from renewables now becoming its dominant energy source. Massive investment in renewables and EVs in China has done what…

Government ministers visit for actual things. Nobody came to visit us for the nuclear fantasy. Without this, Lithgow is toast.

You can see in what happened here how modern politics works. Turn everything into a ‘fight’. When Trump say he’s fighting, he means his own people, in the US. But on the other ‘team’. Which some call the ‘Far Left’. But…

America is toast. I welcome our new Chinese overlords, and their ‘authoritarian’ free energy and cheap electric cars.

House toasty warm all winter. Icing on the cake right here. Thank you solar. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV folks out there, maybe you could burn cash in the fireplace to keep warm.

In this week’s Antarctic cold blast, a third of Australia’s electricity came from wind power alone. As the regulator explains here, ‘baseload’ never meant the base amount of power we need to run the country. It always…

The most humid place on Earth is the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East. Mostly desert. Sea temperatures there are currently 35 degrees C. That’s the SEA temperature. Heat indices on the land range from 50-65 degrees C.…

Peter Dutton pretends he’ll stop of all of this if he wins goverment, and replace it with nuclear. He won’t though, because he can’t. The coal plants will fall over years before nuclear could give off a single watt of…

West Connex was promoted, as all new freeways are, as the answer to traffic congestion, in this case along Parramatta Road. It’s been fantastic for people like us, who rarely go to Sydney, a super easy (but bloody…

When I was a kid, nobody talked about energy. When Wang opened in 1957, nobody did either. We just left it to engineers to sort out, the best possible power grid for Australia. And got on with our lives. That’s what’s…

A home battery doesn’t just save money. It’s insurance against disasters (and with climate change there are a lot more of those). The whole street will likely have no power today while this is fixed on the neighbour’s…

Powerline repairs underway. The battery cuts the solar feed while it’s full, to prevent overload. As the battery runs down it then automatically turns the solar back on, to top up any used. The process happens in…

Just for those interested in batteries and how they work. The Powerwall ran down to 90%, after which it automatically turned the solar inverters back on again and began powering the house and re-charging the battery,…

Yesterday was the 55th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. I still remember the sense of disbelief and excitement, like a Jules Verne novel become real. The magnitude of achievement of what’s happening with…

I ran the diagnostic on the Powerwall today, it’s heading towards nearly 2 years of use. Battery degradation in those nearly 2 years? (Warranty is for it to have 70% capacity still after 10 years.) Degradation so far is…

There’s a trillion tonnes of water in this iceberg. Not one mention in the description below of the disaster this ‘calving’ represents. If (when) all the Antarctic sea ice melts, sea levels will rise between 60 and 70…

"When it comes to batteries, roughly 70 per cent of the original energy produced at the source performs useful work in the vehicle. With hydrogen, that drops to between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, while internal…

If you want a sense of the reality of what’s happening in the car world, rather than the social media bubble filled with whining petrolheads, have a look at the staggering number of EV utes under development. The Nissan…

It’s fascinating to experiment with this stuff. On a sub-zero night, I run the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps) all night, because as you can see they use only trickle amounts of energy to keep the rooms at temperature,…

BYD will have two mid-sized SUVs in Australia this year. I mention BYD because seriously, we’re living inside a revolution right now. The quality of the engineering here is premium/world class, and the price defies…

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or…

If you like a hot bath, and who doesn’t? The North Atlantic has plenty of room for all. The aim of international climate action was to to keep the rise in global temperatures below an average of 1.5 degrees. In the…

And what does all the heat in the air and oceans do? It melts all of the ice. If you know anybody still sceptical about climate change, try blowing gently in one of their ears and see if the air comes straight out the…

More chargers opening in NZ. Re-capping the stats I did for Australia about the massive untold story of the shift to EVs. Getting fuel tankers and refineries out of commission. These chargers don’t need fuel tankers to…

The trucks that deliver fuel to service stations in Australia every year use approximately 8 BILLION litres of diesel, just to fuel the tanker trucks. That’s before one drop goes in your tank. When vehicles shift to…

The smoke-filled room experiment I think is one all people should know. Because this is the principle that runs all of our lives. Have a watch, it’s short. We think that the peer pressure of school is left behind in…

Tesla do brilliant software, this is just one small analysis the Powerwall does. Showing how much money we haven’t needed to pay for electricity since installing solar + Powerwall in December 2022. On track to pay off…

One more slice and dice from the Powerwall. ‘Solar offset’ is how much your solar has offset your home energy usage. In our case, it’s provided almost twice what the house needed (with Spring and Summer still to come,…

Important to understand this story. Firstly it doesn't mean people are buying petrols or diesels instead. Like the rest of the world, they're buying hybrids. 'Range anxiety' has them spooked, they want an EV, but are…

BYD have updated the Seal. Major changes to the charging (from a 400V to 800V platform, which will significantly increase charging speed), addition of new semi-autonomous driving features, and a new flash interior. And…

Parents doing this. Kids as products to be sold. I’m well aware that pretty much everything I post to social media isn’t the sort of thing people log on to see. Imagine turning your own life into a product. Even those…

Suncalc.org is a fantastic site for tracking the sun’s movement during the year. Critical if you’re planning solar panels and your roof isn’t straightforward, for example if it has shade in a given direction. You can…

Great honest assessment after nearly 100,000 km of driving a Model Y, from somebody who isn’t a Tesla fan. Notably, obviously zero fuel costs, except cheap home electricity. And not one service or repair needed, in…

This is Jonnie Irwin. People who watch UK lifestyle shows will recognise him. Jonnie died earlier this year of lung cancer, aged 50. Had 3 very young boys. I mention it because many assume lung cancer is only about…

Just to stress again, there will never be nuclear power in Australia in our lifetimes. And there's no intention to actually build it.…

If oil companies were confident in the future of petrol and diesel, they'd be flooding the world with cheap fuel right now, to encourage people to buy more petrol and diesel vehicles, to obstruct the take-up of EVs. But…

All of the things described as problems in this article are the things I use to remove our energy costs completely. Smart meters rock (I asked to have one years ago). Time of use rates rock. A home battery gives you the…

Just one of a huge numbers of ways you can slice and dice your energy use, with the Tesla battery software. You can see the clear increase in use (blue) in the winter, with heating. And the clear decline in solar…

They have no intention of ever building a nuclear power station, anywhere. It's just a way to pretend to care about climate change, while still burning coal. And turning farmers into zombies screaming at windmills so…

Solar panels will last 25-40 years. At least. Don’t put them on a roof that might last 5 years.

What we don’t seem to get is that climate change is *infinitely* bigger as a problem, than Hitler. Has anybody noticed their life being disrupted in the way entire societies stopped, to fight Hitler? For 7 years? No.…

Carbon capture and storage and 'carbon offsets' are both bullshit in plain sight. Like nuclear power. None work as solutions to climate change, but corporations and politicians promote them because they allow the fossil…

Rooftop (home) solar provided almost half of Australia's electricity during the day last weekend, creating a record low draw of power from the grid. This caused negative prices (they pay you to use electricity), and…

It's been extremely windy, and you can see that here in South Australia's energy generation for the past 7 days, the wind in green. Yellow is solar. Purple is imports from the national grid, orange is gas. There was…

Here's NSW by contrast, for the past 7 days. Obviously daylight hours correspond with the yellow (solar). Black is coal, green is wind, purple is imports from the wider grid, blue is hydro. There's as much or more wind…

We’re starting to see electricity retailers now who offer completely free electricity in the middle of the day. Renewables mean the wholesale price (circled in red) is negative for much of the day now. The retailers get…

Human civilisation exists within a very narrow range of temperatures of the past 10,000 years. The trajectory we’re on for climate change will shift that range to levels not seen in nearly 3 million years. Those…

The wholesale price of electricity is negative all day today, from 6am until 5.30pm. (The red circle.) Coal generators have to pay retailers to use the power, or if you buy wholesale electricity yourself through a…

In a rapidly heating world it’s important to know how much heat the human body can withstand before the heat kills you. (Heat is already the greatest killer of all natural disasters, killing more than all other natural…

Nothing is cheaper than solar. Nothing else is even close. This includes the cost of storage, for 'when the sun doesn't shine' (which is when windmills do most of the work anyway).

It's hard not to be rude with people who deny that climate change is an emergency. They're like people who open doors on planes, mid-flight.

This is why both physics and economics will destroy fossil fuels. This is Germany, not atypical. Almost two-thirds of the energy generated by fossil fuels is wasted, as heat. The grey box at top right. Renewables don't…

The Waratah super battery at Munmorah is ready to go. The biggest power source ever connected to the Australian grid. Took only a year to build. A nuclear power plant would take 10-15 years and cost at least 30 times as…

This is the reason anti-EV and anti-renewable piffle proliferates on social media. Collapsing fossil fuel companies fund it, to try to maintain their status. It's over, they're just trying to buy time.

Mt Arthur coal mine, in the Hunter Valley. To file under ‘windmills spoil the view’. Some facts about it, a window into the industry. - BHP owns it, and in recent years all of its coal has gone offshore - it’s…

In the absence of catastrophes, like natural disasters or wars, human societies just battle each other for status, in status hierarchies. Like we do at school. Only catastrophes force societies to stop doing that, and…

Johan Rockstrom is an international expert on climate change.

Professor Rockstrom's full talk, people should watch it. We had 2 global wars for piddling dangers, compared to this, we dropped everything we were doing for over a decade to fight them. We're doing nothing, against…

I’m genuinely curious how we think travel can survive as an activity in the way we do it. Travel destinations are already overwhelmed, and less than 5% of the world is travelling. Let alone carbon emissions from all of…

The last week of August was a watershed moment for Australia. Coal provided less than 50% of Australia's electricty for the first time. The total collapse of coal will accelerate rapidly from here, and it will have…

China is installing wind and solar at a rate the equivalent of 5 large nuclear power stations a week. Renewables are not only cheap, they’re super fast to install.

A tale of two States, SA and NSW, over 24 hours this week. This is electricity generated over the 24 hour period. Black is coal. Green is wind. Yellow is solar. Blue is battery storage. Purple is exports to other…

In the UK there are annual media stories about how 'coal is making a comeback'.

About twice as many households have solar in poorer suburbs than in richer suburbs. The rich don't care how much electricty costs. Similarly most EV buyers live in poor suburbs, because they save a lot of money owning…

Nuclear power has been in decline everywhere for a quarter of a century. It’s enormously expensive and complicated, and renewables are incredibly cheap and incredibly fast to put together. Even China, who was still…

The most expensive wholesale electricity has been today. Never happened until there were renewables. Before right now it's been negative prices again all day - they will pay you to use it.

The main reason we’re seeing a massive influx of bats to places like Bathurst is still the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. Those fires destroyed enormous amounts of native habitat. Bats are actually a main way that…

China is literally saving the world right now. Which is why Yellow Peril politics is being ramped up, our existing status quo knows the threat. China is not only single-handedly building more renewables and EVs than…

Ths shows the whole new set of possibilities EVs bring to something like camping. An EV carries enough energy to run an entire house for days. So sleeping in air conditioned/heated comfort while camping is a doddle.…

We’re back at the evil supermarket ‘duopoly’ again. Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. Aldi and IGA for example have been other options for years. Aldi is cheaper than either of the Big 2. But people mostly…

At the exact moment yesterday when Peter Dutton announced another fact-and-costing-free nuclear fantasy, South Australia was running on 113% renewables.

Households are installing LOTS of batteries. Enjoy the revolution. Each household that does takes load off the grid at peak times. They're national benefactors. They also help drive prices down for people who can't get…

The average age of nuclear reactors worldwide is 32 years. Nuclear power plants usually last up to 40 years.

Your taxpayer dollars run this disinformation hub. Even the Coalition didn't want him. EVs weigh less than many wankpanzers. And what about trucks on the road?

One of the toughest shifts needed to beat climate change is a massive reduction in this. Travel. People won't give that up. Which means catastrophe will force them to.

I often call combustion engines puny and gutless. It’s not just slander, it’s engineering. Combustion engines only provide significant power or torque at one tiny place on the rev curve, at the black arrow. At higher…

Range is the wrong measure for cars. A petrol or diesel vehicle gets long range by putting enormous amounts of energy into them, 80% of which then goes straight out the exhaust, unused, as pollution.

The impact of climate change. The Swiss and Italians have had to redraw their borders, which were previously defined by a lot of ice and glaciers. Many of which have now melted. Switzerland has lost 12% of its ice in…

Electricty bills are issued quarterly. The quarter that covered the first half of winter, our bill was $0. The next bill will cover the second half of winter. It will be a profit. The energy company will be paying us.

Leicester in the 1950s. The golden age of coal. I think of this sometimes when people still choose wood burners for heating. In the vast expanse of the universe, what distinguishes us is a breathable atmosphere. Which…

Electric charging stations will be modelled more on airports than service stations. Petrol and diesel fuel stations are more like the Tinder of energy supply. Wham bam, 10 minutes, out of there. Energy brothels. Here’s…

12 men walked on the moon. Only 4 are still alive. I was born just as the Apollo program was doing this. I’d sit for hours staring at the NASA photos of all the missions, amazed by the audacity of the engineering and…

This is the second US hurricane in a fortnight. The reason is the same reason Australia has been so wet in the past 2 years. The oceans are boiling. Water in the Gulf there is 1-3 degrees hotter than normal. That…

This is such an important window into long-term EV ownership. 165,000km of driving. No servicing required that entire time. Battery still with 90% capacity. The car looks brand new, both inside and out, incredibly…

James worked at NASA from the early 1980s, and is sometimes called the ‘father of global warming’ because of his early identification of the problem.

The Governor of Florida recently signed legislation forbidding reference to climate change in the State's law. Reality said "uh huh".

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled...more and more scientists have begun to research the…

Perfect example of how EVs are much more than differently-powered cars. They carry enough usable energy to run an entire home for days. That gives you enormous potential to do all sorts of things with them.

A few friends express fears about having to replace an EV battery. You will never need to. The longer these things are out on the road, the more the data shows that they’re even better than anybody thought…“the average…

They should invite BYD and Tesla to enter a team each in the V8 Supercars. Sadly it won’t happen, not least because the electrics would be half a lap ahead already on Lap 1. And for those wondering how they’d recharge…

Europe's car industry is under assault from much cheaper (and better) Chinese EVs. You can see here the often reported drop in 'demand' for EVs is actually Western governments removing subsidies for those vehicles,…

BYD again are incredibly fast to respond, with their vast toolmaking and engineering resources. The Sealion 7 is their Model Y competitor, to be released in Oz early next year. (Doesn’t it look great). They’ve upgraded…

Our current fossil fuel energy system is like having a shower you need to run 24 hours a day, just dipping in and out of it occasionally as you need it. Ridiculously wasteful, stupid engineering. That’s what ‘baseload’…

Yesterday was a new record for Australia. 75% of our daytime electricity came from renewables. For those who say 'yes but what about the night', well you have water even when it isn't raining, hey. Storage. In fact a…

They were talking about cars today. I tried an experiment, asking people if they would ever buy an EV. ‘Why would anybody do that!’ ‘The batteries cost a fortune when you have to replace them!’ ‘Even when you charge…

Off-roading is one of the key arguments used against EVs. But an EV off-roader can get almost 3 times the range of a petrol or diesel equivalent. The reason is pretty simple. I’ve shared lots of times, that petrol and…

Yes they do, they explain it all the time. Australian electricity is so expensive because it uses so much gas to generate it, and our ageing coal plants cost a fortune to maintain. And gas is now hugely expensive. If…

One of the profound changes EVs bring is the degree of remote control and diagnostics drivers have. Tesla pioneered this with the extraordinary Tesla app (which if you have a Tesla home battery also integrates with your…

Good on Gav. The argument I make about combustion engines can be seen in a single picture. Ridiculously complex, needing constant maintenance. And after all that work, they can only use about 20% of the energy you put…

Fuel bowsers should be in units of energy, not litres. Then people would see that a petrol or diesel vehicle uses about 10 times as much energy to achieve the same range, as an EV. 1 litre of petrol is about 9 kWh of…

In 2022-23, Australia exported a record $107 billion of oil and gas. Tax paid by exporters was only $1.9 billion. That’s about a cent in every dollar. Australia is hostage to these companies. Politicians in receipt of…

All HECS debts should be waived and the entire system scrapped. Pay for it by ditching idiocies like nuclear submarines and nuclear power stations. The younger generation are in critical trouble.

Every day is a new revolution. This technology can even retrofit existing batteries. It will take an EV battery from 0-100% charge in 5 minutes.

Have mentioned Amber electric before. A huge opportunity for ordinary people, but also a risk if they don’t know what they’re doing. Amber allows you to access wholesale electricty pricing, directly. That can be an…

It’s funny that some who are horrified at the election of Trump would still vote for Peter Dutton. Dutton is Trump-lite. I thought Trump was going to fall asleep during his victory speech. He’s only in this for personal…

I share renewables stuff because it saddens me that we’re all living through the greatest revolution in centuries, and many aren’t even noticing. Take this, the other night, those with a battery could sell energy back…

It’s one of the genius design elements of the Model Y. The glass roof means you still get the big open sky as you sleep. Also incredibly useful if you’re just visiting friends on a trip, you don’t need a room. Some who…

One of the things that makes me chuckle is just how aggressively Ford and GM (Holden) are developing electric vehicles, in the US. Many of the ICE knuckle-draggers in Australia are the Ford/Holden brigade, completely…

Lithgow doesn’t want pumped hydro. But it probably wants a big nuclear power station.

The excellent rebates people can get for installing rooftop solar are reduced from 1 January next year. Not hugely, you may be about $500 worse off than if you got something installed in 2024. But worth knowing, get in…

The cost of desalinating water has plummeted. So much so that it's now often cheaper to provide freshwater that way than using rainfall and dams. This is another revolution underway, which combined with so much cheaper…

Normally a 4WD copes with loss of traction to wheels by locking the diff, so that power is then split evenly between the wheel in the air and the one still on the ground. EVs are much smarter than that, you can see it…

The Australian's 'exclusive' story today is the CEO of the second biggest coal mining company in the world, a Swiss company that makes over $30 billion a year from Australian coal, telling Australia we need to use more…

Australia should use the coal from the mines owned by companies in Korea and Switzerland to power coal-fired power stations it doesn’t have and nobody wants to build, which would be at least 3 times more expensive…

The UK has nuclear power. It costs them a fortune. Guess what's now filling up their grid in super quick time?

In the inevitable transition to electric cars, the existing industry throws up one fake scare campaign after another. Like ‘they all catch fire, or ‘range anxiety’. Or now, ‘they have no resale value’. One of the most…

Grid-level battery projects are taking off. Pretty soon your overnight electricty use will come from one of these big batteries, plus from wind power (there’s more wind at night, ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’, as morons…

Combustion clunker fans often say 'EVs are powered by coal-fired electricity!' Even where they are, they use only a third of the energy of a combustion clunker. If we kept coal and gas-powered electricty, and all…

A ‘cost of living’ post. By this time of year, mid-Spring, we’ve already generated enough surplus to pay for all of next winter’s heating. That’s heating the entire house, 24 hours per day. We also still have some…

Origin is another energy company offering amazing electricity rates to EV owners. 8c/kWh, that’s about $5 to fill the ‘tank’ of an EV. Have a look at the difference, it will cost you at least 15 times that to fuel a…

We will probably buy a Tesla next year. Because I finished school almost 40 years ago, I don’t play the “we don’t like Elon so you should all avoid him” games. This video is a great set of reasons (there are others) why…

Hopefully we get through this fine. I know we personally will, our air conditioners will be running all day to cool the house walls for us when we get home, and won’t use one electron from the grid doing it. We’ll be…

That peak mid-afternoon has the government and AEMO a bit worried. Ordinary people and organisations asked to cut electricity use. "About 6 gigawatts of coal-fired power station capacity remains unavailable, including…

Spot wholesale price has now reached its maximum of $17,500/MWh in NSW. Meaning there's urgent calls for more power in the grid. That's $17.50/kWh. Most people pay 20-30c/kWh, showing just how much the grid is now…

Some say 'but China still burns coal, it's the problem'. Approvals for new coal plants in China fell 92% in 2023. In the first 9 months of 2024, 86% of all new power sources added to the Chinese grid were renewable. In…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ and problems with domestic violence are really the same problem. They’re the social model of the nuclear family under strain. The nuclear family is the expectation that children will move out…

The NSW grid nearly went down this week, and as the article says, the conditions were relatively moderate. We’re not even in summer yet. The reason? Nearly half of our coal plants were offline, being repaired. They’re…

I shared the projections of system collapse in 2025 from AEMO here a couple of years ago already. We’re known for years solar would overwhelm the ‘baseload’ power idiots thought was in short supply. Now we have exactly…

There's so much focus on the price of gas and electricty in cost of living. But by far the greatest energy cost for households is petrol and diesel. Driving an EV can cut your energy bill at least in half, and by as…

Asking ordinary people whether Australia should have nuclear power is like asking them to do their own brain surgery. They have no idea, and it's not a decision they should be asked to make.…

How's a 1.5 million km, 15-year warranty sound? Car batteries are already superb. And they're getting even better every day. People who worry about the batteries are not engaging with the reality out there.…

As an indication of how fake the 'debate' is between fossil fuel and electric cars. Electric cars use batteries. But fossil fuel is also a battery. Both are the chemical storage of energy. The difference is, 70-80% of…

Climate change warnings. We had maybe one blackout in the first 10 years of living in this house. Since the end of 2022, there have been 12. One of the reasons I bought a house battery was to provide some energy…

Peter Dutton often uses Canada as an example of nuclear power driving down power prices. It made the Canadians laugh with disbelief. He's a dangerous bullshit artist. The fact he's competitive in the next election is a…

It’s wet in Australia again. Unseasonably wet. And the main reason is the same, nothing has changed. The oceans are boiling. Heat from climate change has to go somewhere. I find there’s widespread misunderstanding of…

The impression given by Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is that it’s nuclear vs renewables. Actually it’s nothing like that at all. He doesn’t even deny renewables will generate by far the most electricity into the future,…

The CSIRO has done detailed modelling of bushfire risk into the future for each part of Australia. You can plug in your postcode to see. Lithgow is at the upper end of increased risk. This will flow through into higher…

Again, who do you believe on energy? Australia’s top scientists and engineers, or an ex-Queensland cop? Pick door two and you’ll pay out of your own wallet.

Mark is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, talking about a Bitcoin miner buying a major wind farm and re-purposing it for Bitcoin mining. I have friends wwho are fans of Bitcoin, some no…

Australia is going nowhere with greenhouse emissions. The whole thing is being gamed by the status quo. That red circle is ‘carbon offset’ programs i.e. planting trees and avoiding cutting down other ones. That’s a…

Looking at the list of approved new renewable energy projects on the latest government tenders. Number 1, a local. Attracted lots of whining and whinging, until the State Government thankfully took it out of local…

There are between 68 and 70 new EVs coming to Australia in 2025. Here they all are. Enjoy the revolution, folks. And it is one, I still meet people who honestly think this is some sort of competition between EVs and…

Today Peter Dutton releases laughable ‘modelling’ to say nuclear power is the best option for Australia. Do you know anybody who’s ever worked with nuclear technology? I do - me. I can tell you right here, nuclear power…

Even Peter Dutton’s own party know what he’s proposing with nuclear is BS. They know it’s vastly more expensive, they just won’t say it publicly. But they’re leaking it to the press. "There's a flood of misinformation…

20% of the projected cost of nuclear power in Australia could put solar on every rooftop, free of charge. And that electricity would then be totally free to the householder too. Unlike nuclear electricity, which would…

As an indication of just what a disaster the Trumps and Duttons of the world are, calculations show that if the US were to convert its electricty grid to renewables, electricity there would cost under 3 cents per kWh.…

4 million Australians already have solar panels. Under Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan these panels would be forcibly switched off on many days by the grid operators, to protect the planned nuclear power stations, which…

The combined cost of proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, both LNP policies, is close to $1 trillion. All taxpayers’ money. The LNP calls itself the party of small government.

Planning relative energy independence for both the home and cars has been my main ‘bucket list’ in recent years. My ‘living my best life’. I funded it by foregoing idiot selfies in front of world tourism landmarks, with…

The solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage you to read history much more carefully. How’s an 8 million…

Peter Dutton’s only policy is ‘Peter Dutton for PM’. Seriously, he has no other policies. Turns out he’s the biggest critic of his own nuclear wet dream as well, have a quick listen. Only 5 seconds.

Just saying BYD Auto Australia, if you as the second-largest battery company in the world did for home batteries what you’ve done for cars, offered the same fantastic technology but much cheaper, you would absolutely…

It amazes me people are worried about battery life in cars, they’re already warranted for eight years or 160,000 km as a fairly standard warranty. As the research is increasingly showing and peoples’ experience with…

Another day where NSW will be hanging on by the skin of its teeth at dinner time. Tomorrow as well. Prepare for possible blackouts. As last time, the problem is ageing coal-fired power stations out of commission, the…

Tesla has some of the best electrical engineers in the world. They're scathing about Peter Dutton's nuclear plan, correctly pointing out that the grid won't function with that much 'baseload' power, and millions of…

Change doesn't happen gradually. Nothing happens for a while, and then everything happens all of a sudden. See if the history below rhymes with changes to transport (EVs) you see today. "In the early 20th century...the…

I'm going to post about this curve a lot. It explains why experts call renewables not just a replacement energy source for the grid, but a 'superpower' source. Students of economics will recognise it as a marginal cost…

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire…

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” The energy problem is already solved. You can live it right now. You don’t have…

More marginal cost curve for renewables. At the bottom of the u-curve, an increase of investment of only 20% creates up to 200% more power. That’s ‘superpower’. With that extra 20% investment, the energy produced can…

The Zeekr 7X is confirmed for Australia next year. This is a very special car. Mid-sized SUV, so competes with the world’s best-selling car, the Tesla Model Y, which is about to have a new model within the next few…

They’ve openly admitted nuclear energy does nothing to lower prices (it actually would make prices go up hugely). So they’re scrambling with a gas backup plan, which was always really what the nuclear plan was about…

Second family Christmas ruined by Covid now. Thankfully not here in this household, but the extended family celebrations now wrecked. I wonder how many more years of this stupidity people will tolerate. I’m not sensing…

Pretty standard day in the warmer months. Used no grid power at all, exported enough to run 3 or 4 other homes. Maybe you got some of our electrons. That’s a few hundred kms of EV driving also, in just the amount we…

Solar is a breathtaking revolution. A juggernaut.

I added the price of electricity in red, for EV drivers.

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’…

Insurers in Australia now have let people know that replacing an EV battery is cheaper than replacing a petrol or diesel engine. Battery prices are plummeting, and EV prices will go below the prices of petrol or diesel.…

The industry has known this is true for years, it’s why these plants are being shut down, often even before their projected lifespan. There’s not a single element of Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan that is anything except a…

Another example of the huge chasm between the reality of the world out there, and the crazy opinions on social media. The largest solar companies in the world already easily dwarf the amount of available energy for the…

The UK uses nuclear power. The latest estimate to clean up the waste produced by its nuclear reactors is $526 billion. Plus another $107 billion to build a new waste facility to process new waste. That’s about $640…

Discussing ‘baseload’ power yesterday. One of the most misleading and misunderstood concepts. Baseload power is NOT about supply of power, it’s about demand for power. It is NOT the baseline amount of power we need to…

A while back Peter Dutton promised people ‘small modular’ nuclear reactors, a sort of cutesy, calming idea of little emissions-free power units. They don’t exist. Not in a commercial way, and the experimental ones that…

The next 5-10 years are going to be brutal for Australia’s energy. We invested our own money here at home to offset some of the risks of that, by installing solar and a battery. That will not only save us money and pay…

Coal, oil and gas are all forms of solar energy. All are dead animals and plants, who got their energy directly from the sun, via photosynthesis. But concentrated over millions of years, which is why they have such a…

Costs a minimum half as much as a diesel to run, with more power. And electric semis can have a battery swapped out in 4 minutes, about a third of the time of refuelling with diesel. Even John Deere is shifting to full…

This is funny, in a tragic sort of way. A device that allows energy companies to shut down a person’s solar system completely, if the State has too much solar power going into the grid. Remember 10-20 years of…

This is if you use grid power. Way, way less than paying for petrol or diesel. Plus you get more power and torque, total silence (it’s bliss), and almost zero maintenance. Electric cars will do a million miles without…

For those interested in the shift to indoor farming (it will blow your mind), Landline did a nice story on it. With increasing climate disruption, it may be all that keeps food on tables. It definitely keeps farmers…

I enjoy watching people posting about electric cars to social media, because it always prompts a pile-on from Flat Earth fossil fuel fans. Always the same idiot grinning emojis, with comments like ‘hope it won’t catch…

This is the side of solar that is less spoken about. Every person you see with solar panels on their roof is a mini power station. They’re providing some of the electricity you use, and they used their own money to…

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s unique about Lithgow, in Australia. I’ll likely never leave. I think that it’s the transplanting of a British industrial village, into the Australian landscape. The picture below is…

When the entire valley was flooded to create water for a coal-powered power station, and a whopping concrete dam wall was constructed to do it, nobody said boo. Calling the BS on this.

Portugal achieved this in only a handful of years. For comparison, that price is about 0.6 cents per kWh. In Australia that price is currently 30c per kWh. We’re paying 50 times more for electricity. This is what will…

Chefs increasingly agree with me, nothing beats an induction cooktop. You can even buy an excellent portable one for less than $100, if money is tight, we did that for a few years before upgrading the kitchen. The…

Ours are down about 200%. The energy company is paying *us*. These changes brought in by government will help prices not go up much further from their current very high levels, but they won’t bring them down. Only the…

Reading more sites discussing EVs. One of the most common questions always seems to be ‘how much does it cost to replace the battery?’ It’s an easy one. Zero. Batteries are warranted for well past the usual lifetime of…

I am provocative on this, but as an engineer I’m a bit tired of the rubbish. Just look at the difference in efficiencies here. If you put $100 of petrol or diesel in your car, $80-$90 of it goes straight out the exhaust…

Inflation soaring, electricity prices a big contributor. If you pay for electricity.…

Another way to look at the future of vehicles is to compare actual energy use, per km. While it takes the same energy to move the same mass the same distance, what that leaves out is efficiency of conversion of the…

EVs again. Range is a biggie for many. The average EV even today has enough stored electricity in its battery to power the average Australian vehicle for two weeks. (Newer Teslas - 4 weeks.) And costs less than $20 to…

Don't you love how oil companies keep fuel prices high through the school holidays and on public holidays? And look at diesel, often people buy those to use less fuel, but the savings are easily wiped out by higher…

Ski fields are the playground of many of the planet's greatest climate change deniers. Climate change found them. The French Alps, end-2021 on the left, end-2022 on the right.

Social media is destroying societies. It sounds a big claim, but only a handful of years ago Trump used it to mobilise an insurrection on the Capitol, in the world’s most famous democracy. But social media’s damage goes…

I like to give use-case examples for those who don’t have solar, so they can get a sense of it. Right now, still 2-3 hours from peak solar production. But with the clothes dryer, oven, dishwasher and air conditioner on,…

You know what I'm going to say. Stop making Texans and Arabs rich. Go electric. Home-grown, Aussie energy.

Let's unpack this one (declaration - I worked at a nuclear power facility, as an engineer). - we would need over 15,000 new nuclear reactors to power the world - these reactors cost over $20 billion to build, EACH -…

Hydrogen-powered cars is another topic that generally has a ratio of 0% engineering, to 100% bullshit. It won't happen. Hydrogen may be used for larger industrial purposes, including jet planes. But for cars hydrogen is…

The battery in a Tesla car will last for between 500,000 and 800,000km. That's between 3-5 times more kms than the average Australian drives a car before upgrading. 30-50 years of motoring. It's just finishing…

This one factory churns out enough large battery storage every year to replace more than 7 power stations the size of Mt Piper. (Mt Piper powers nearly 1.5 million homes in NSW.) We need to remember too that the time…

What a load of steaming bull turds. The fantasy that all we need is a 'market', consumer choice, to drive prices down. That rubbish is what has been driving prices UP, for years. I've used all of the energy comparison…

Forget the politics, do the sums. Go electric, even in stages. I notice the same people who opposed all progress on energy for the past 20 years are now trying a new argument, that going electric is too expensive, a…

More new EV models. 600km range (enough for about 3 weeks of motoring for the average Oz driver), costs about $36 to 'fill'. Estimated launch price here around $70,000. You'll save at least $20,000-$25,000 in fuel over…

I see quite a few people refer to John Campbell’s videos on YouTube when minimising the dangers of Covid. Campbell is an ex-nurse. If you look at Campbell’s bank balance, you can see what’s really going on. Like all the…

The people who scour YouTube and other online forums looking for reasons to deny the emergency of climate change need to spend a day with the road crews in local councils. Humans have zero chance of surviving dramatic…

Yep. And there isn't a Plan(et) B. Ignore everybody who doesn't believe in climate change being an emergency. There isn't time to engage in their silly debating points, which are drafted by comms teams in fossil fuel…

Nissan has come up with a new type of very interesting hybrid. Instead of the petrol and electric motors working together, the petrol motor only functions as a generator for the electric motors and battery. This gives…

It’s hot out there today. Got 4 air conditioners and a dishwasher running. Cost = 0. In fact making money, back to the grid. Battery charged ready for more free power tonight.

All following the exact timeline I often post about here. We have more than a decade of criminal inaction to catch up on. If that work had been done we’d all be looking at huge drops in energy prices by now. Home solar…

This is the profile picture of a senior manager, seen on Linkedin. (Some people here may know him, I won’t identify him.) It caught my eye because while digitally altering your face is now rife, with filters on social…

More than 11,000 people die each year in Australia from diseases caused by the breathing in of vehicle exhaust emissions. And yet people still cheer on crap petrol and diesel technology, which not only kills them, but…

This is the problem I've posted about a lot. We have oodles of 'supply'. We just can't get it anywhere, because we didn't build new transmission lines in the past 10-20 years.…

Solar energy is now already the largest source of electricity in Australia. And it's growing faster than ever. Most of the energy powering your home is coming from the panels you see on other peoples' houses and from…

Lovely exponential curve. Not even the pandemic slowed the momentum much. You can be on the wrong side of this history, it'll just mean costing you a lot of money and pride. And think about the benefits: - no more…

The range of a horse and cart was way beyond what the cars and trucks that replaced them could offer. Unpacking the slogans and spin that now dominate our lives, nobody said ‘I can’t buy a car, what about the range?’…

This is the $3.6 billion Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. This is a post about why I post about electric cars. It’s not just because I like them (though I do, I think people will wonder in a few years why we ever drove…

The Tesla Model 3 is already significantly cheaper than owning a Toyota Corolla, over 5 years of ownership. (It has next to zero maintenance costs, and electricity is much, much cheaper than petrol or diesel.) The…

There’s a genuine risk of stagflation this year. Like the worst of all possible worlds. High prices, high unemployment, nobody buys anything. It happened in the 1970s, when Big Oil formed a cartel to drive oil prices…

This is a very useful, practical article (ignore the ‘Error’, the link works) that explains what a 10kW solar system can run in your home. 10 is large, many have less than that, but because the cost of panels has…

Good to see government funding new EV charging points in towns, including Lithgow. But we should electrify the whole town, everything. It would make it the cheapest place to live in NSW. We’re already a town with a long…

Trangie has no petrol or diesel. But it’s on the electricity grid. Simple solution staring right at us here, which not one person mentioned.

Next stage here at home of driving energy costs down will be replacement of all windows and doors with double-glazed uPVC versions. The windows in Australian homes have traditionally been rubbish, though at least most…

70% of the average family’s energy bill is the fuel they put in their car. Petrol or diesel. You can see here that even if you use existing grid power, and switched to an EV or hybrid, your fuel costs for cars would be…

Most countries have the same problems right now. Big jumps in cost of living, the need to reduce emissions. The problem is the solution. Dramatically reducing household energy use goes a long way towards fixing both…

Working for local government is a bit of a hiding to nothing thing. Everybody almost universally hates it, and treats you with contempt. The pay is some of the worst in the job market. And there’s no funding, to do…

Australian data. A 2.5 tonne hybrid on average uses even less fuel (significantly less) than a motorbike. And unlike any other type of vehicle, you'll get maximum power across the whole rev range. The average petrol or…

A trick people use is to suggest that going electric will take some enormous amount of minerals (which they imply either don't exist, or will cover the world in mines). Lithium is one of the key elements mentioned.…

Recent engineering studies have realised something about our transition to full renewables. The grid as a whole only needs 12 hours of storage for us to go 100% renewables. To do that you install 150% of your usual…

Because of renewables, gas consumption to make electricity last year was 30% lower than it was just 5 years previously. In the next 4 years it's projected to fall up to another 66%. It's not a debate, it's engineering…

Origin’s new scheme to try to get people to use less electricty in peak times. This behavioural approach has been missing in Australia, so good on them. If you use less electricity in those peak times, you get bonuses…

On Thursday we set a new record in NSW. 7600MW of power was generated by renewables alone, in the mid-afternoon. On Thursday about 60% of the State’s total power was provided by renewables. That’s the majority of power…

In the week of nuclear subs. A few years’ old now. They even got the amount almost exactly right, $400 billion. https://youtu.be/MTCqXlDjx18

We’re destroying younger generations. Their health, their wealth. Our birth rate is so low we’re not even replacing ourselves. It’s difficult to get older generations (of which I’m one, only one year off being a boomer)…

Fiji shows how out of touch we are with the climate disaster underway. No debates there about climate change, they’ve already had to move 6 entire villages, to avoid the rising sea. Another 42 villages are listed to…

As a kid I remember wondering, why can cars do speeds that are more than twice the actual speed limit? Isn't that a waste of energy and engineering? And the answer is - yep. But they had to do it for a reason that isn't…

Ths graph shows the cost required to extract fossil fuels, compared to the energy we get out of them. By 2024 25% of the energy we get from those fuels will be needed just to extract them. By 2050 that climbs to 50% -…

I was 1 when humans landed on the moon. The thing that interests me much more about it now is how society has changed, since then. Look at the pictures of that day in 1969, people gathered around the handful of TV sets…

NASA climate scientist. He shoulda posted pics of himself on holidays. Then people would care.

Shale Oil was mined near Lithgow for about 10 years, from 1940-1950. Shale oil is known as ‘tight’ oil in the oil industry, tough to extract and usually uneconomic. The extraction process uses a now famous method -…

One of the many objections to EVs that people throw up is that they can't work in more remote parts of Australia. In fact, as the Americans show here, they make even more sense there than in the cities. They save even…

One for the ‘energy must be affordable and reliable’ folk. There have been blackouts in those months, didn’t even notice them. So there’s reliability. And Origin is paying us, we’re not paying them. So there’s…

Have been to Harvey Norman twice in two weeks to buy things. It was deserted, you could have heard a pin drop. I asked the salespeople how business was going, and they said terribly slow. The ‘economy’ is imploding. One…

What people living in rural and remote areas do. A revolutionary game-changer for them, the most secure and cheapest energy supply they’ve ever had. Some have been doing this for over a decade.

Two messages. One, from the late James Lovelock, scientific genius, who helped NASA determine a way to detect life on other planets, and then used the ideas and technologies he developed to revolutionise climate…

I think Australia needs many more mines, and far fewer farms. This one though is using some of the water that Lithgow historically looked to in drought times, from the coal mines. Being piped all the way to Blayney. I…

O dear.…

"More than three million households across Australia now own solar panels, with the time it takes for a 7 kilowatt (kw) system to pay for itself in lower power bills falling to a record low 3.4 years." The panels…

The rai line over the mountains was electrified in the 1950s. Nearly 80 years ago, we understood that electric motors are not only much more efficient, but need much less maintenance and are also more powerful. We’ve…

Autonomous driving cars are very close, in fact you can see Bill Gates driving in one in this short video. Around London, so a very challenging environment. It performs beautifully. Cars and trucks are the only form of…

Older houses often had unflued gas or coal fires, and without these vents people would potentially die from the exhaust gases. I’ve had a few air con specialists tell me to seal these up, because they ‘lose heat’. But…

The same Senator who was lecturing the other day about how gravity keeps the heat from escaping the Earth, and that's what's causing climate change.

That ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy is good stuff.

We're about to see coal-fired power fall off a cliff. What isn't clear in the public debates, this is already happening. Nobody is waiting to make the decision, it was made long ago. For the 'when the sun doesn't shine…

Australia makes about $70 billion a year exporting iron ore, for other countries to turn into steel. If we created the steel here with renewable energy, and then exported it, we could turn that $70 billion easily into…

Lithgow has had some very wintry days already this autumn, dark and wet. A good test for the solar. The last two days a good example. On both days the solar produced easily enough to run heating, washing, clothes dryer,…

More on wood heating. It has its benefits, it’s a renewable resource for example, and can capture emissions when you replace cut wood with new plantings. (How often that happens is a bit questionable.) Here’s another…

While the Liberals and Nats are a coalition in much of the country, in Queensland they're a single, merged party, the Liberal National Party. It's now the only State where the federal LNP wins many seats, driven by a…

For those interested in solar and EVs, it’s a full-time job keeping on top of the amount of BS social media generates about them. Here’s another myth, that solar panels cause a disturbing number of house fires.…

This graph again, that astronomical climb is the Industrial Revolution. What isn't said about it is that it was a response to massive human problems, like disease, starvation, poverty, pollution etc. It changed…

The benefits of a battery. Been a wintry few weeks in Lithgow, lot of cloud and rain, but the solar still produces more than enough power. This morning when I got up the battery was still 54% full, from yesterday’s…

Cars fixed a major environmental problem. Horse shit. At the time cars were introduced, major cities were overwhelmed with the amount of horse shit in streets, as you can see in the photo. Cars went on to make the air…

The work in progress. Can see the fresh roof, solar panels, heat pumps, and windows underway. (I even threw in an Oxford comma, as a bonus.)

It's fun getting an electricity bill when you made twice as much as you owed. And it's even (much) better than that, because you also made all the money you didn't pay for electricity.

Hybrids are marketed to the public almost exclusively as fuel-saving vehicles. Some reflections on driving one now for nearly a year, and why I think that marketing is a mistake. Firstly because for quite a few…

I'd factored in using surplus solar (credits on the electricity account) generated over summer, spring and autumn in winter, to make up for any grid power needed then because of much shorter days, and needing to heat.…

The Tesla Powerwall home battery has had another price drop, this time to $12,900 (uninstalled). Still the best home battery, including for its outstanding software. The software is as if not more important than the…

Yep! Electrify and insulate your home. No other investment will make you as much money, as the article says, it’s thousands per year. Generate some or most of your own electricity and the savings multiply hugely. And…

The Americans are shifting to two-thirds of all car sales to be EVs in just 9 years, by 2032. From a starting point of only 5-6%. Notice the EPA there doesn’t need politicians to agree to it, it just sets vehicle…

It's hard to get people to see the magnitude of the emergency climate change is, because they're focused on daily weather rather than climate, and mixing up heat and temperature. For example I'd bet very few would guess…

Fraction of electricity generated by renewables in 2022, by State. Queensland - 22.6% NSW - about 30% Victoria - about 30% WA - about 30% South Australia - 71.5% Tasmania - 99.1% Nationally more than 35% of our…

I sometimes say Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Rod Sims, ex head of the ACCC (a very conservative, ‘economic’ institution), spells out why very well here. In fact per capita we should be the…

Chile gets it. They have even more lithium than us. Leaving it to the ‘market’ (which is a fantasy) would just mean foreign firms coming in, mining the lithium and flogging it offshore, with piddling amounts to us in…

You can also use a home battery with no solar panels at all. For example, you could use it to store off-peak electricity overnight, to use in your house during the day. That alone can cut your electricity bill in half.…

Australians have been taken for a ride by offshore fossil fuel companies. Other countries make more in relative terms from their fossil fuel exports in a year than we’ve made in the past 30. That’s no accident, the…

Have a look at this. SST is sea surface temperature. Where do you think the vast amounts of heat 150 years of burning fossil fuels creates goes? Over 70% of the planet is covered by water, the oceans. The oceans have…

CATL is the world’s biggest producer of lithium-ion batteries. This week it did something huge. It announced its new batteries have a storage capacity of 0.5 kWh per kg. That’s about double existing batteries. This will…

I’d like to do a few posts on climate change. The whole topic is infected with political slogans, but the real knowledge is fascinating. Probably the greatest slogan is that ‘the climate always changes’. People arguing…

One of the most common criticisms from the anti-renewables Flat Earthers is that solar panels waste good agricultural land. But they don't, in fact they improve it hugely. Sheep are much happier and healthier, as are…

Liddell was Australia's largest coal power station when it was built 52 years ago. It closed today. Last year it broke down (needed restarting) 23 times. That's an average of about once a fortnight. How's the slogan go?…

An extensive listing of things that make an actual difference to reducing emissions. The longer the bar, the more useful.

When you get solar installed, a good installer will give you projections of how much you will generate per day, for every month of the year. This is ours, for those interested. They’ll also give you an estimate of how…

Spot on. Both the gas and housing industries say the problem with energy, and houses, is 'supply'. Of course they're going to say that, it means them being able to sell more of what they offer. The problem isn't supply,…

Why battery software is as important as battery hardware. The home battery did this while we all slept last night, monitoring the weather and charging the battery to capacity from the grid, in case the severe winds…

This is the greatest engine ever built. The Mercedes turbo-hybrid F1. The battery is on the right. Normal combustion engines run at a thermal efficiency (how much fuel energy they convert into movement) of 29%, max,…

This is what the people who argue there isn’t an intergenerational problem pay no attention to at all. The massive costs now to maintain an ageing population. At the same time as that older population pays almost no…

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US was seriously contemplating using nuclear bombs as earth-moving equipment. This was the crater from one of the tests they did, so huge it's now listed as a national monument. The explosion…

Formula 1 is planning something pretty amazing, even if you’re not into car racing. They’re taking their current hybrids (best engines in the world, I may have mentioned, once or twice). But they’re making them even…

$2 billion for green hydrogen in last night's budget. Hydrogen is a dead-end for Australia I think. With our vast renewable energy resources of sunshine and wind, and spare land, we're crazy to invest too much in…

This is Lake Eyre, our biggest inland lake (when full) and the third largest salt lake in the world. My father in law always says they should flood it with seawater. For years this sort of idea was tarnished by the loon…

New Lithium-sulfur batteries look set to give EVs a range of 2000km, and a battery lifetime of 2 million km. What ya got, petrolheads? Bring it :) https://youtu.be/Pgmk183Vans

I’m fascinated by hybrid cars. The human body is also a hybrid. You have the energy generated by your metabolism, from what you eat. But that energy is hybridised with gravity, captured by the elasticity of your…

Having crippled our Covid response, the morons on social media are back to attacking meteorologists, about climate change. Social media was invented by Americans to implement their political views of how societies work,…

Stories in the news this morning about how Australia’s homes are hopelessly cold in winter, because they’re built for summer heat. And how that’s bad for peoples’ health, many homes averaging only 10 degrees celsius…

‘The private sector is more efficient’ is one of those myths that is believed only because it gets repeated so often. Have a look at how much MORE it costs to bring in the private sector (dark blue) to do the same work.…

Even with today's technology, an EV's battery will last 20 years. Most people get rid of their petrols or diesels in a much shorter time than that.

I track usage, exports and total costs for us at home. So far running at $0 cost for electricity every day, and it's been as cold as -7 overnights. And still carrying a big surplus from the warmer months with their…

This is more of the subtle politics that infects all of our lives now. Trying to paint solar power as a rich person’s way to escape skyrocketing power prices. There are internet-free loans that will pay for your entire…

Posted about this a few weeks ago. The massive melt in Antarctica is creating enormous icebergs, that when melted then slow deep ocean currents. Those currents transport food and heat throughout the world’s oceans. To…

More than half of the world’s lakes are drying up. This is a major lake in Turkey, in the news this morning because it’s completely disappeared. The cause? Some of it climate change. But much more, it’s dams. The things…

The difference adding a fan to your room can make to heating and cooling costs. Heating here as an example. A heater at floor level without a fan, in the image with all the red. Notice the heat accumulating at the top…

I wonder what the resort uses gas for. Electricity could be used for anything that they might need gas for right now.

Those who oppose renewable energy say that there will be an enormous amount of waste from used solar panels. Of course they never tell you any numbers (they don't know any, it's just a slogan). So here they are. Column…

People mostly consider cost-recovery when deciding on a home battery. This is just one other reason I went for one. Stability of home supply, even in blackouts. (If you have solar but no battery, your system won't work…

People have been plundering warship wrecks from WW2. You’ll never guess why. They’re after the rarest metal in the world. It’s actually just steel, but a special type of steel, it’s called ‘low background steel’. Making…

Another bit of anti-EV spin is that they lose range in extreme cold and heat. The spin often says this is due to battery performance. It’s actually because people use heating or cooling in the car. And EV manufacturers…

Staggering that with the magnitude of the apocalypse facing us, some still choose to believe fantasies about continuing to burn oil, gas and coal. Or they pay no attention to any of this at all, and think 'having a good…

Make it about the money. If you can find another investment that gives you a 20% return per YEAR, for the next 20-25 years, go for it. I bet you won’t find one. An investment that gives you a 20% return on your money,…

70% of French electricity comes from nuclear power. They’re in trouble now, because nuclear power uses a LOT of water. And with climate change water is drying up there. The Loire ran completely dry in places this year.…

Things are happening. Mt Piper mentioned too. The debates about all of this are just hot air. In real life companies are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, not least because they'll make more money.

Great piece on some of the engineering behind the electricity grid. And how the shift to renewables, batteries and inverters, EVs and a range of other technologies is making the grid much more resilient, sustainable and…

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for…

I have a passion for glass. It’s magic, invisible as air, but solid. And as a materials scientist knowing about it was my initial training. There’s a secret about glass, next paragraph. The thing about glass is, it’s…

The only part of the renewables shift the Flat Earthers tend to support is Snowy 2.0. Using the Snowy scheme as a big pumped hydro battery. The problem is, it’s a disaster. A typical example of private sector firms…

The sea temperatures around Europe 🤔 I feel for them, they actually try, with climate change. The countries that don’t (including us) are boiling them alive.

Yep. Listened to research on benzene emissions from gas cooking and heating yesterday. Terrible stuff, carcinogenic. Found in every room of the house, with people who own gas cookers. Ventilation made little difference.…

Got notification from our electricity retailer yesterday of big price jumps on 1 July. Though they’re also raising the feed-in tariff for solar, which is interesting and nice. I suspect they’re doing very well out of…

Smart words from Finn Peacock again here. Note that the system in this common scenario would pay for itself in under 3 years. And that you win on cash flow too, by doing this you have more money each week, not just when…

One of the reasons I went with a battery for us is this. I'm not confident the deadlines are going to be met, and if they're not, the whole electricity system in Australia is in serious trouble. 2-3 decades of total…

Putting major transmission lines underground is ludicrous. Buy a battery, folks, we were already not within cooee of getting thousands of km of urgently needed new transmission built by 2030. Australia will be lucky to…

Australia has some of the worst petrol in the world. It's one of the reasons we're slower to move to EVs, because car manufacturers dump their rubbish on us. But look at the second graph. Improving emissions standards…

Australia's existing high capacity electricity transmission lines. You can see the problem we have, and why we need 10,000 km more. They don't link up. For example if Eastern Australia wants to use Western Australian…

How did the gas industry respond to the price caps the government put on it? It refused to create any new contracts for supply with local users, forcing them to buy from the international spot market, which is way more…

We probably won’t ever find out, but I’d have a bet that the bodies of the 5 men in the Titan are actually there, directly beneath where the sub imploded, on the ocean floor. Just as the debris they found was, as James…

The seas around the UK are choked by jellyfish at the moment. The reason? The ocean is like a bath, climate change has heated it to levels that make jellyfish thrive.

Backs up what I’ve posted here for a while. The next 5-10 years could be pretty nasty, with energy prices and grid stability. Invest in yourself and your home. It’s the best way you can spend money that will also make…

Remember all that political blah blah about how we couldn't go renewable, because China wasn't? China was. And how. We're pathetic. It's doing more than the rest of the world combined. Much more.…

The Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile has been digging this enormous hole in the ground (more than 1100 metres deep) for the past 103 years. They’ve stopped digging down now and are shifting to underground mining. The…

Penrith Solar are superb. This video partly explains why.

The Vision AVTR is a Mercedes concept car. The AVTR uses four electric motors nearly inside each of its wheels. Each motor and each wheel can operate independently of the others, meaning the car can move sideways like a…

Banning mobile phones in schools is a great idea. Though the real problem is the social media apps on the phones, not the phones. And to take it a step further, the disruption those apps cause to education (huge) is…

If you think climate change just means a couple of extra toasty degrees of temperature, believe me when I say we cannot survive it unless something is done, and very fast.

I don’t think it’s widely understood just how much energy human-induced climate change has added to the oceans (which are now releasing it back into the atmosphere, they’re full). In the past 150 years the heat added to…

Battery manufacturing is increasing worldwide at over 250% per year. Costs are also plummeting. Together that makes a battery plant profitable inside 2 years, unheard of in energy. The coming battle will be between, do…

You can listen to people who tell you that climate change is not something unusual, not something humans are doing. Or you can just look at the weather forecast today for Europe, and tell them to shut up.

Flu has killed two children in Australia this month, and is rampant in children in particular. Likely children with immune damage from Covid infection. And now see the UK, just another of a long list of pathogens…

Already hearing the climate deniers roll out their You Tube wisdom, about the European heatwave. That ‘Europe has had heat waves before’. This isn’t a heat wave, it’s a heatING, a permanent shift upwards in temperature.…

These three figures show weekly energy use in our house, in 3 different weeks. Blue means electricity imported from the grid, yellow electricity exported to the grid, by us. You can see the past 2 weeks have been…

Read British journalism when England is doing well in sport, and you get a window into the psychology in play there now. ‘Little Britain’ as some call it. Desperately clinging to old ideas of empire and world…

21 of the 30 hottest days on record on Earth happened in July this year. The other 9 have happened since 2016. We’ve reached a tipping point with climate change, things are accelerating so much faster than even the most…

I know a lot of people doing this with climate change too. They just define the problem away.

Got that mate who tells you the climate stuff is crap? How confident are you? Were they somebody who even did science at school, let alone did it well? Worth asking.

Smallpox was eradicated in 1980. One of the joys of climate change is that victims of smallpox buried in ground that froze, for example in permafrost regions, are now thawing. There are fears smallpox will again…

This week the head of the UN said we’ve shifted from global warming, to global boiling. Here’s an example, the Florida Keys. The ocean temperature there this week was recorded at 38.4 degrees C. That’s a comfortable…

Sometimes when people say ordinary folk can’t afford things like solar panels, induction cooktops and electric cars, I scroll through what the same ordinary people pay for second-hand caravans, to tow behind their…

We only need services like these because we privatised energy in Australia, a monumentally stupid thing to do. But given that's what we have, this is an excellent service, it'll assess your every bill and let you know…

Have a listen to Professor Kevin Anderson (short, promise it’s eye-opening), a professor of energy and climate change, talk about how action for climate change is really only an ‘incremental’ change for most of us. The…

Both climate change and Covid smashed this mass event. We carry on as if life is normal. In reality it’s falling apart, I don’t know a single important industry that’s not in serious trouble.

Many living in climate denial have put their faith in hydrogen, to avoid the bog obvious answer right in front of them, of solar and wind. (Actually what motivates them is that they just don’t want to agree with the…

Nothing cuts through the bullshit of peoples' opinions faster than insurance (a big part of my current job). For example, you can believe climate change isn't a human-induced disaster, or that you can 'live with Covid'.…

Again, you have to be some form of just bloody stupid to think nuclear energy is the answer to anything. Costs a fortune, takes decades to build, the small modular reactors they’re talking about here don’t even work,…

This is a very standard story most days now. The wholesale price of electricty is negative across the country. In other words, generators will pay retailers to use it - they’re not just giving it away, they’re paying…

It’s about respect. There should be no debates on topics like climate change, or Covid. There are thousands of people highly trained to know what to do, for both. They can’t do it, because of millions obstructing their…

There are many more homes approved than are ever built. In the industry it’s called ‘land banking’, where developers get a lot of building approvals, and then don’t move to construction until they feel they’ll make the…

The collapse of the dollar is another thing driving petrol and diesel prices sky-high. We have to buy all of our petrol and diesel from overseas, and a falling dollar makes it massively more expensive. So tell me again…

We’re all used to the idea of a ‘power station’. But already now, by far the greatest source of electricty used by Australians every day is the solar panels you see on ordinary homes and businesses. Not just by those…

Like most countries, Australia's peak electricity usage is at dinner time every night, around 6pm. About 10 gigawatts of electricity. To give some perspective for how many solar panels would be needed to generate that,…

Companies are fighting for the opportunity to install solar farms and batteries. They know it's a licence to print money. Our area (Bathurst-Lithgow) is highly prized because it's near existing high-voltage transmission…

One power station already gone, the other already planned to shut down. The coal mines will go with it. Lithgow is very well placed with the existing grid to provide renewable alternatives. There's not much appetite for…

David is an engineer who runs simulations of the national electricity grid to determine how many hours of storage we need in the grid for 100% renewables. He consistently finds it’s only about 5 hours.

Posted about this one a while back. I think they have stock now. Fantastic car, incredible warranty. Has the petrol engine as hybrid for longer trips, and like other modern hybrids that engine is used together with the…

A fun climate change story. The Panama Canal was constructed as a short-cut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The blue route. Before it existed, ships had to take the red route. But now, climate change-induced…

Energy, and range. The reason petrol and diesel vehicles tend to have higher ranges is that the fuel they use has enormous energy density, as you can see. Every litre of the fuel contains enormous amounts of energy. By…

Visual summary of my earlier long post. Engines need to be compared on energy used, not fuel used. A petrol or diesel with an 800km range? The same amount of energy will drive an EV over 3000km.

I wouldn’t wait for ‘urgent investment in generation’. Do it yourself, with solar panels, and a battery. AEMO even recognising that this may be a key way we can get out of the mess of total inaction for the past 20…

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to…

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was…

Since installing solar in December last year, we’ve used $2166 of electricity. We’ve paid $0 (we’re hundreds in credit). That’s with 6 extra heat pumps for winter heating of the entire house.

Don’t listen to the people who deny climate change. They’re the kids who ate the copper sulphate in science.

This is my favourite method of storing electricity. A gravity battery. Surplus renewable energy in the daytime is used to lift very heavy blocks to the top of the tower. Then as the sun goes down they’re lowered slowly,…

The cheapest energy in the world by a mile is Australian rooftop solar. It’s so cheap that even if power stations (coal, nuclear) made energy for nothing, it would still cost more than rooftop solar. You pay nothing…

Coal, oil and gas are all distilled sunlight. The world is boiling because we burned millions of years of distilled sunlight, in under 300 years.

There’s a double-dip in demand for electricity every day in NSW. One at about 3.30-4 every morning, and one around 1pm. By far the biggest dip is that 1pm dip. The ’when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’…

We need the climate deniers up at the ski fields to reassure folk that the snow has always disappeared during the ski season.

Your house as a power station. Imported 0.1 kWh (about 3 cents) from the grid (circled in red). Exported enough to power between 2 and 3 other homes. The 0.1 kW wasn’t even needed, what happened was likely during…

The battery does all of this automatically, it monitors the weather conditions. It will use grid power to charge too if needed in situations where it thinks supply could be interrupted and there isn’t sun available.

Greece has just had 3 years of rain, in 2 days. Scientists say new permanent lakes may have formed. The oceans are carrying astronomical amounts of extra heat energy. It has to go somewhere.

Australia lagging here, as in so many other areas. I’m sitting here right now with a temperature of nearly -5 outside, and I don’t even need a heater on, the temperature is about the same as when we went to bed last…

You might think this sounds like a lot, but it's nothing compared to what we spent on WW2. And the danger is far greater. It's also a third or less of what we're spending on a handful of submarines, and about half what…

I have friends who are actuaries. Actuaries are an excellent BS detector, because they calculate risks and those calculations are tied to peoples’ money. So no matter how much spin and propaganda is out there, reality…

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

I sometimes think it’s just a total absence of basic science. Here’s the argument for fighting climate change, in the most basic scientific terms. Fossil fuels took HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of years to accumulate, from…

I think of travel as a relationship, because that's what it is. A relationship with place, as opposed to just people. It takes time to build a relationship, a lot of time to 'get to know'. My criticism of travel isn't…

In simple terms, catching Covid is likely just the on-ramp for the virus to take up residence in your body. It may persist there for the rest of your life, causing potentially crippling and even fatal disease.…

The idea that solar is only worth it if you have a lot of north-facing roof dates from a time when the panels were expensive. The panels are now ridiculously cheap. You can face them north, south, west or east and still…

I hope Wang 9 (one of the biggest batteries in the world) gets the same public enthusiasm when it opens as the original Wang coal-fired plant did in 1958. Wang 9 will have the same capacity as the old station…

Landline had a great story today about how the biggest obstacle to building the new electricity grid is community opposition, to solar farms, wind farms, pumped hydro and new transmission lines. This isn’t the Australia…

The oil and gas industry has made nearly $5 billion profit per DAY, every day for the past 50 YEARS. Never be in doubt who funds climate denialism. Anybody who lines up to cheer on petrol and diesel is doing the dirty…

Anybody who thinks nuclear power is the answer for Australia is scientifically and economically illiterate. I worked in nuclear engineering. This is Dutton creating an argument with outrageous fantasy ideas, to fire up…

In Spring, Summer and Autumn we accumulate surpluses to pay for any winter grid power we need. We had hundreds in surplus even after winter. A licence to print money. Can heat or air condition the entire house, and…

And here’s the oil companies screwing everybody again, as they do every holidays. Know what doesn’t change price in the school holidays? Electricity. I like this picture, giving the middle finger to fossil fuel…

If you want a sense of just how inefficient petrol/diesel engines are, one tank of fuel is enough energy to power an entire home for a month.

Shows how much energy each source contains per kg. The tiny energy density of a lithium battery shows the extraordinary efficiency of electric motors. EVs already get close to the range of a petrol or diesel vehicle,…

The huge amount of electricty renewables are producing during the day is making energy retailers charge huge amounts in peak times. That makes batteries even more financially viable, if you use them during peaks times,…

Love the explosion of Spring growth. Behind the 2-storey section at the back with the solar panels visible is the large Chinese elm, which we had the crown raised in a few weeks ago, a big job. With the increasingly hot…

Petrol prices are eye-watering right now. When I was planning the solar system for the house, I was looking ahead to having full-EVs as vehicles. Here’s the system this month, nowhere near peak production yet. Green…

The insurance industry invented fire brigades. It was in their obvious interest to try to protect the property they insure. It's the place I always go to to strip away the bullshit political spin around a topic. With…

I admire that people will basically bankrupt themselves, rather than admit the solution to this is sitting right under their noses. The same people who love 'Australian Made' campaigns. Except for energy, where sending…

The first Industrial Revolution was an energy revolution. Fossil fuels, about 150 years ago. This pollution is the result, and is not something we have to 'balance' against any fictitious economy. It's much simpler,…

Australian households are smashing solar world records every single year. Most Australians are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, and EVs. A tiny minority of simpletons infected with social media memes and…

I worked at a nuclear facility. Here’s what the proponents of nuclear power never say. Nobody wants the waste. What does somewhere like the US do with its nuclear waste? Nothing. It’s all sitting at the nuclear plants…

Finally got an electric mower. Ozito is often considered an el cheapo brand, but everything I read about this mower was 5-star, not one flaw. And costs about half what a ‘brand’ electric mower would normally cost. It’s…

The grid is changing fundamentally, have a look. It’s no longer a one-way grid, where the electricity flows from power stations to homes and businesses. It’s two-way, most of the energy is actually now generated at…

The previous government turned Australia into a quarry for the rest of the world. And we were practically giving the stuff away anyway. That’s all coming to an end. Right now, renewable energy and its associated…

With solar growing so fast, demand on the grid at midday now is what it used to be in the middle of the night, at 2-3 am. Look at that huge drop from the purple to the dark green line, only one year. And this is 2 years…

Bathurst’s bats. This will happen more all the time now, as we trash the rest of the landscape and plants and animals come looking for somewhere to survive. I came up with a concept of ‘reality-based politics’, which…

Ordinary cars waste huge amounts of energy in braking, as heat. You can see it, the brake discs glowing red. EVs and hybrids capture 90 percent of this energy and use it to recharge the battery. Instead of only using…

Underneath all the hot air of social media, reality continues to create a tsunami of change. Electricity is now like water or food, we’ll store it and just use it as we need it, rather than having to run dinosaur power…

‘Baseload’ is another slogan politicians use. It encourages the public to think we have some sort of minimum amount of ’base’ power we need coal-fired power stations to supply, and without them all the lights will go…

Amortisation. Why things like solar and hybrids/EVs make you lots of money, at a time money is very tight for people. The ticket or sticker price can seem high (and is dropping fast anyway), but you have to do the…

Say you buy a new car, and drive it for 100,000 km. If it's a petrol or diesel car, the fuel over the lifetime of the car will cost you around $25,000. if you buy an EV, the electricity to drive 100,000 km will cost you…

Reality, vs social media. “…electric vehicle sales had topped Bloomberg NEF’s mass adoption tipping point on track to 30 per cent of sales by 2027; AEMC research showed most domestic batteries will hit the affordability…

You won’t convince most No voters to change their minds, because they’re not using their minds. As with EVs, climate change, renewables, Covid and everything else, they’re cheering on their ‘team’. It’s team sports,…

My politics? Get rid of all elections, all referendums. All political team sports (parties). There are very simple, clear things that need doing to fix our worst problems, none of which need a popularity-based mechanism…

Australia broke a new record on Friday. Over 70% of its electricty came from renewables during the day. That number will hit 100% by 2025, in just over a year. Between 8 and 4 every day right now, the energy is not only…

Latest electricity bill. For winter. All of our heating is electric too.

South Australia's big battery paid for itself inside 2.5 years. That's off the scale in energy infrastructure, which never pays for itself. It also saved people of South Australia about $150 million in electricity…

The problem is easy to see, and nobody wants to admit it. Social media is a disaster for societies, a 24/7 assault on the trust that holds them together. It makes all views equivalent, the most pig-ignorant, bigoted…

My dad once said it’s every generation’s responsibility to plant trees. That way every generation gets to enjoy them. It’s cheap, and quick. Imagine every street looking like this, mid-Piper Street in Bathurst. Not even…

We haven't paid a cent for electricity in over a year. We're making money from it. The previous government vomited endless propaganda about 'cheap, reliable power'. It was never cheap or reliable, because coal power…

I drive this road every day, and it's made me think about whether we've got lazy with road building. Lots of hilly bits like here, where instead of cutting the road into the topography of the land, to prevent large…

Battery research is going gangbusters. Sodium-sulfur batteries are what Toyota is rumoured to have ready to go within the next few years too, 4 times the range, much cheaper to make, and much faster to charge. That will…

The French are looking to cover all their large car parks with solar panels, generating as much electricity as 10 nuclear plants. At a *tiny* fraction of the cost. And no nuclear waste. And shaded parking for all.

A few times over recent years I’ve posted about the debacle the Snowy 2.0 would be. 4 Corners last night showed it in all its sad detail. (And it’s actually a $10 billion debacle, and growing.) The biggest mistake the…

Peer-to-peer electricity trading may be coming. It's like 'Uber' energy. What this means is somebody like me, who has lots of surplus electricity every day, would be able to sell it to friends and family at heavily…

Over 100 communities are now building their own power stations, owned by them with profits going to them. Solar farms. They're cheap, and quick to build. There's a farmer here who doesn't like what it will do to his…

There's no price on Allan Border. As a heads-up, if you're paying $7291 for a fully installed 13.2 kW system, you're almost certainly buying rubbish. Use solarquotes.com.au to organise 3 reputable quotes for you. That's…

This is Capital Wind Farm, NSW's largest wind farm. It powers the Sydney desalination plant, producing 250 million litres of fresh water every day when needed. And has energy to spare.

Yep! Got the bills to prove it. I think the government is finally realising targeting households is the fastest and cheapest way to go. The LNP still agitating for nuclear, which they don’t actually want (it’d be…

Social media has made all needed social change almost impossible, bogged down in endless fake debates. The smartest thing the ALP can do right now is target households with full electrification for their homes. Heavily…

You can see here that even if we decided not to use renewables, shifting to EVs using our current grid electricity would still cut the cost of motoring by 50%. Add renewables and that’s 70-80%. And that doesn’t even…

Even without climate change, the world would shift to solar and wind power. Because it’s enormously cheaper. The energy industry is like any business, it will go where it can make the most money. And it makes huge…

This is what social media is doing. Australia already built virtually nothing, we’re a quarry for other countries, with our local political flag-saluting halfwits obligingly ripping up what puny royalties we got for…

Great Central Coast company, converting prime movers to EVs. You can see how they swap out the battery when it needs charging, takes only a few minutes, much faster than filling the truck with diesel. Swap-out stations…

Last week South Australia got 99.8% of its electricity from solar (yellow) and wind (green) only. That's day and night, not just days. On Saturday it actually hit 264%, but because prices were negative in the grid…

Roy Hill mine (owned by Gina Reinhart) takes delivery of a 100% battery electric-powered long-haul locomotive. By using regenerative braking, it will charge its battery on the 344 kilometre downhill run from the mine to…

Yep. Again, it's not that I love cars particularly or even renewables. It's that these obvious facts of physics and economics are hidden by the bullshit of social media. Energy is also central to all economies, so if…

Having a home battery opens up many doors, not just your own use. Amber Electric one of the new companies that allow ordinary people to access wholesale electricity, rather than retail. This can be a way to make big…

These are the bats currently occupying central Bathurst, the grey-headed flying fox. Australia’s largest bat. Some facts about them that help shape how we can view what’s happening. - they only live on the east coast,…

When the petrol and diesel fetishists run out of EV posts to dive-bomb, they move onto solar. This was a post about the NSW Government’s new solar scheme for low income earners, promising to slash power bills. Losers…

‘Building batteries and other EV parts is more polluting than petrol or diesel.’ Not even close. ICEs are rubbish. And the gap will get even more huge as years go on as components are recycled and electricity is all…

I focus on cars and renewables because they’re the centre of a new industrial revolution. And therefore of a whole new society. Our petrols, diesels and coal-fired power are 19th century technologies, over a century…

As an indication of how amazing this technology now is. The solar panels on our house generate enough energy every week to drive an EV from Sydney to Perth. Just from sunshine, on one roof. That’s up to $1000 worth of…

I don't apologise for fixating on this revolution. What's happening out there should astonish people. This will change our whole society, not just energy. (These numbers are projected to double again by 2030.)

We’ll soon have had the solar for a full year. On current calculations, we’ll end that year with zero bills for electricty, plus over $500 surplus, straight into our bank account. Add that to the around $3000-$3500 we…

This is why we should be furious with the idiots who spent the past 10 years saying the problem with our energy was supply. 'Baseload' power. Bullshit. This graph shows how much solar and wind energy is TURNED OFF…

Every single slogan below is a lie. This industry creates them to cast doubt, flooding social media with them, to create resistance to change. Why so much of my social media is about countering this nonsense. Renewables…

Who remembers petrol at 70 cents per litre? It’s currently about $2.17. If you convert electricty costs to cents per litre, filling an EV costs about 40 cents per litre. And that’s using grid electricty, which is…

I'm thinking about setting up on LocalVolts, so we can sell our surplus energy to friends and family at much reduced rates to what they're paying electricity retailers right now. Have a look, only a short vid.

Who remembers the big South Australian blackout in 2016? And how the mind midgets at the time were crowing about how this was an example of how unreliable renewables are? Have a look at the performance of SA. It's been…

Remember the slogan 'cheap and reliable power'? Look at South Australia. A wholesale price (purple line, the green is demand) of near ZERO. ALL DAY. Already easily the most reliable grid in the country. 99.8% solar and…

The science. Most of the energy produced by fossil fuels and nuclear is wasted converting it into usable energy. You can add petrol and diesel to the list.

Its almost miraculous that social media protest groups emerge so fast at every new renewables development. Except it isn’t, it’s very deliberately planned. The Atlas Network is a key player here, funded by fossil fuel…

I share the solar stuff for those interested in how it pans out in practice. Here’s our highest-level use per quarter, in the past year. Yellow is electricty imports, green exports (we earn $ for those). Not shown is…

Most Australians live on the coast, making offshore wind a superb method of electricity generation for us, active now overseas for over 30 years. Offshore wind is often strongest at peak usage times as well, like when…

Tesla Powerwall sales in Australia are booming. The thing I love about the Amber wholesale company is that it allows people with batteries to sell their excess power into the grid at peak times, which is the only time…

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is back in the news, with a multibillion new gas project approved for Santos. They swear it will be ‘carbon neutral’, that they can capture the carbon through CCS technologies. CCS is…

The mind midgets are going to have to dig pretty deep on YouTube to counter this one.…

My EV did 900km on its latest tank. 45 litres. These labels are on the number plates, one of the things less understood about EVs is that they don’t have to be fully electric to be an EV. In a hybrid the petrol motor…

A really excellent service, especially with cost of living pressures. They find the best energy plan for you, and they continuously assess the market and let you know if there's an even better option. There is a small…

Oil and gas are both decomposed plankton. Coal is decomposed plants. All three are really just sunlight, compressed over millions of years.

The mining industry is one of the fastest to adopt EV technology. This truck is entirely electric, battery-powered. It will fast-charge in only 30 minutes, and carry nearly 250 tonnes. It will use its massive weight to…

This should make us ashamed. We have probably the greatest renewable resources in the world, and a tiny country in not particularly sunny Europe is way ahead of us. Worth remembering every time you see anti-renewable…

A daily vaccination against social media slogans. This one for the claims that solar panels and windmills produce as much if not more waste than fossil fuels.

This is what street-level chargers look like for EVs. Many countries have already installed thousands of these. Unlike petrol or diesel, electricity runs down every street, it’s an easy thing to tap into it. Useful for…

An example of carbon capture and storage (CCS), often promoted by people who think we should just keep burning fossil fuels. Here’s a stat for you. You would need 40 MILLION of these plants worldwide, to capture just…

We passed the projections for 2 degrees of warming this week. That’s the entire atmosphere heating by 2 degrees, phenomenal amounts of heat. 1.5 was the target to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, so we’re now…

There are over 2,000 offshore wind farms globally, producing 64,987MW of energy (doubling roughly every 2 years).

Social media has won another election. Argentina, this new president is a big fan of Trump. Spend a couple of minutes watching just how crazy he is (short YouTube video). Social media won Trump the US presidency, and…

Nuclear power plant in China. China is now dramatically slowing its rollout of nuclear power. Why? Because wind and solar are so much faster and cheaper to build.

This is a HUGE shift. Essentially the government is (rightly) saying that privatisation of electricity has failed. This is the sort of brave public policy we haven't seen in Australia for years. Hats off to them, well…

This really is brilliant public policy. They'll use reverse auctions to drive prices down from bidders (what we should do for housing too). And they've put a ceiling and a floor on profits, so that the investors get a…

We’ve had years of hot air about how coal-fired electricty is cheaper for consumers. The reason our electricty prices are currently so high is the price of coal, which became prohibitively expensive. Just one more…

Fossil fuel power fails again. Imagine if it had been a solar or wind farm, the mind midgets would be like chattering monkeys.

This is the main mechanicals of an EV. Beautifully simple. Electric motors (in red here) on the axles so no energy losses through having to translate motion to the wheels. The drivetrain in an ICE is so ridiculous,…

Costs per megawatt of different sources of electricity generation. Nuclear (regular plant) - $220-$350 Small modular nuclear reactor - $189 Wind - $45 Solar - $35 Solar and wind could generate twice what the entire grid…

Wholesale electricity prices fell 76% in the past year. And are still falling.

The reason we've experienced such a dramatic rise in electricity prices over the past 2 years is that we generate most of it (in NSW) using coal. And look at the price of coal. Meantime the price of renewables has been…

All burning of fossil fuels is grossly inefficient. Two-thirds of the energy is lost as heat. For example a petrol or diesel car’s fabled ‘range’ is actually bought by putting over 3000km worth of energy into a tank,…

A very astute observation *peers out at solar panels on own roof, not powered by a Korean coal mine*

The Chinese are scaling back their nuclear power plans dramatically. They realised solar and wind are exponentially faster and cheaper for them to build. They built more solar and wind capacity in 8 months than their…

Tesla semi again, so many amazing stories about this one. The engineers designed the truck to drive just like a car, so that (get this) the truck is less likely to disrupt other traffic. They recognised that a lot of…

The only thing keeping our coal industry afloat is China. Imagine the irony of that export now collapsing, as China shifts at warp speed to renewables, leaving us with nothing. While we have all the natural advantages…

Towing, something very few people do in % terms, is another anti-EV favourite. (Electric motors are much better at pulling weight than ICEs, and towing impacts range for both.) Engineers have already solved it. They add…

What happens when solar panels are upgraded. Nearly everything is recycled.

A new trick the anti-EV crowd use is to compare costs of charging an EV at the most expensive public charging infrastructure with the costs of petrol or diesel. As this petrolhead influencer explains well, this…

These plans are becoming more common, with the huge amount of renewables in the middle of the day pushing wholesale prices below zero, to negative. OVO still makes money from this, giving you electricity for nothing,…

An EV will run a heater for 60 hours or more if a car is frozen in place like this. It doesn't need to waste any energy keeping a ridiculous combustion engine idling to generate heat, for starters. You'd get about…

This bus from the 1950s had a novel form of battery to power it. It used a flywheel. Flywheels are a mechanical battery, you can store a lot of energy in a rotating heavy disk. NASA designed a space probe with a…

High electricity bills are caused by high prices for coal and gas. Like Yvonne, you can be free of them in about a day. For those who can’t, the sooner we can get those parasitic fuels out of our energy system, the…

It's on these hot days when you can run the air conditioning all day at zero cost that solar really hits home runs.

Solar is even more of a revolution than is realised, why I talk about it so often. The prices are in free fall worldwide, it’s now so incredibly cheap to use that even if the world decided to do nothing about climate…

A new record for rooftop solar in Australia in November this year, over 330 MW of new installs in a single month. I invented a new unit of measurement, the ‘Mount Piper’, after Lithgow’s remaining coal power station.…

PepsiCo’s factory in Australia. Rooftop solar doesn’t just mean homes, it means businesses. Many businesses are doing this not because they have a single ‘Green’ bone in their bodies. They’re doing it because it saves…

Broken Hill is getting a new type of energy storage, using compressed air. It already has over 250MW of solar and wind farms, which are often switched off because the grid can't cope with the extra power. Now they'll be…

Upstairs can be a hot place in this sort of weather, as heat rises in a home. Tried an experiment last night, ran the AC all night upstairs. Still had well over 50% of battery remaining this morning. Cost nothing, and…

Many use France as an example of how nuclear power might save us. It has 56 reactors. It’s government owned and run, because no business will touch it with a stick, it’s in astronomical debt. And estimates just of costs…

Some say that you need to ‘balance’ things like climate change or Covid, against ‘the economy’. It’s a myth, have a look here. The Panama Canal is drying out, due to climate change. Huge parts of the world ‘economy’ are…

I share this stuff not because of a particular love of EVs or renewables. But because these shifts are shifts across our entire societies, everything links back to energy. An energy system that allows you to generate…

And here comes battery storage, galloping into view. Reality has little resemblance to the fairy tales on social media.

Again it's not a particular interest in energy that makes me post about it. It's because energy is the centre of societies, everything they do. The black line is the US. Australia (not shown) is close to that black…

It’s an international embarrassment that the LNP went to COP28 and advocated for Australia to do nothing, and just wait a decade or more for nuclear power to be built. Reactors that don’t even exist, that nobody wants…

Big Oil will not be denied. I doubt most know how much they run the world. Everything in the world, energy is at the centre of everything we do. The only thing likely to stop them now is the continued explosion of…

The famous Le Mans 24 hour race introduced hybrids just over a decade ago, thinking it would just be a good way to say they were doing their bit for climate change. The hybrid won, and hybrids have won every race since.…

The US, land of gas guzzlers and climate denialism, will install 55% more solar in 2023 than it did in 2022. Solar is the disruptor, so cheap even the biggest sceptics are forced to move in that direction. 

I find it hilarious that so many wind and solar projects are being held up because of communities complaining about the 'visual impact'. Coal-fired power stations are butt-ugly, and I bet weren't delayed when they were…

Telstra has now finalised all of the energy it uses being renewable by 2025. Day and night. This is one of the solar farms. Some people don't like the look of solar farms, but nearly always they're on land that's been…

Can see here why AEMO is nervous tonight, this is NSW. Green line is demand, purple price. That’s huge demand. People with batteries can sell electricity into the grid right now at nearly 70c/kWh. Next post shows…

The even more interesting bit. The current spot prices in mainland States. Negative prices mean retailers are paid to use the electricity. NSW and Queensland both at huge positive prices. I’ve circled in red the…

Real change doesn’t come by convincing everybody it’s needed. It comes by pushing them out of the way, making them redundant. That’s what solar is doing right now, smashing fossil fuels and everything in our culture…

AEMO's latest projections say all of Australia's coal-powered electricity will be gone by 2038. I'd place a bet it will be even earlier. Given the speed of the decline, for all intents and purposes it's game over even…

Solar capacity in Europe has grown by more than 40% per year for 3 years in a row. Graphs like this ram home what absolute fantasy most of what you read on social media is. (Except my posts, of course.)

The UK isn't very sunny, like much of Europe. So a greater emphasis on wind. Wind blows 24 hours a day, often even stronger at night. They're still faster than us at getting rid of coal. Our 10 years 2013-2023 of doing…

The word ‘economy’ comes from ancient Greek, where it meant ‘management of a household’. The economy is just households. Instead we’ve said it’s business, a terrible mistake. Business was invented to serve households,…

The amount of energy humans use in an entire year from all sources is the equivalent of 90 minutes of sunshine. Oil, gas and coal are also sunshine, just stored over millions of years. Never bet against sunshine.

Germany has been trialling hydrogen trains to replace diesels. All now shifting to battery-electric instead, because it’s so much cheaper. The people who back hydrogen do it for one reason only. Team sports. They’re the…

Brilliant idea out of the UK, where polluting firms pay (as a form of carbon offsetting) to retrofit social housing with energy efficiency changes (like insulation), solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps for heating…

Race cars rev like crazy at the start of a race because petrol engines have zero power except at high revs. It’s exciting, goosebumps, the sound. Though that’s just the cars farting, literally. Some equate the sound…

Alan Kohler is so consistently brilliant. Like here, pointing out that the US (and the wider Anglo world) is handing total domination of the next century (or two) to Asia, because of our ridiculous culture wars on…

The pace of change is so fast there’s almost a new announcement like this every single day. All of these projects will be completed inside 5 years, some inside 2. It’s very quick to install a big battery, remember Tesla…

It's the hottest ever start to summer on record. Those who still deny climate disaster talk about the Earth being this hot in the past. Yes it was, when dinosaurs were alive, tens of millions of years ago. Reptiles…

Less than 15% of new energy in 2022 came from fossil fuels. Look at the tidal wave of renewables. There are no debates, the debates are hot air on social media. A revolution is underway, we’re living in it.

The owners of Iowa’s last nuclear power plant are turning the facility into a solar farm. You can’t get a clearer picture of the global shift in play. And incidentally, it takes 20-30 YEARS to decommission a nuclear…

One of the most bizarre anti-renewables stories is that renewables only work because of big government subsidies. These graphs are from the International Energy Agency (IEA), and show the astronomical subsidies fossil…

Oops. https://reneweconomy.com.au/coalitions-nuclear-smr-poster-boy-cancels-flagship-project-due-to-soaring-costs/

Huge. South Australia will be able to feed its huge and growing renewable energy into the national grid. Companies will now add lots of extra solar and wind farms and batteries all the way along this connector.

Another anti-slogan thing. For the people who say renewable energy is just as environmentally damaging because we need to mine so many new minerals.

Seems worth a try for some cleaner, more powerful cars, almost free electricity, and clean air.

The untold story of this distribution of global energy is the efficiencies. Say this pie chart was in kg instead of percentages. So 100kg of energy used by the globe, and 64.2 kg of that energy comes from fossil fuels.…

Meanwhile millions of tonnes of coal ash sits unused, a real disposal problem. And nuclear waste sits in drums with nowhere to go at all, and has done for decades. All the slogans people use to oppose renewables are…

Our obsession with flying will need to change, with climate change. But there’s no sign the industry itself is paying any attention at all, look at the massive surge of new airport building. Many of these could become…

In only a handful of years, Uruguay transformed its electricity production to between 90-98% renewables. How? They asked a nuclear physicist to lead the change. His first action was to abandon any use of nuclear as a…

Home battery prices should fall significantly again in 2024. Renewables and EVs/batteries are about the only thing acting in consumers’ favour right now. Because fossil fuels own the world and couldn’t care less about…

The Shetland Islands for decades has been powered by diesel generators, the top picture. In the middle of 2024, it will shift to being powered entirely by wind. So much wind power that they will export nearly 10 times…

Think it’s worth saying again that Covid and climate change are the same issue. Clean air. All known life in the entire universe is in that thin blue line. You can’t see the Economy from space.

As we hopefully watch the rotting carcass of the federal LNP disappear from the front benches in Canberra, another earlier reminder of their disgusting legacy. Remember year after year, the relentless bullshit about how…

We’re at the 50th anniversary of what some call neoliberal and libertarian ideas. Basically ideas that say government is the problem, get it out of peoples’ lives and life and prosperity will flourish. Reality tells us…

Once upon a time I worked for ANSTO, at the nuclear reactor in Menai. I love the warning on this radioactive rod (this one from overseas).

Tired of hot air from the LNP, Cannon-Brookes decides to offer to buy AGL and shut the coal power stations himself. Ballsy. AGL are blocking the bid for now. It shows how the transition to renewables is appealing not…

Superb from Stan Grant today. These are the deep currents underneath our lives and our politics. All politics comes down to identity. In the West we fractured into a million competing individual identities. Russia and…

Everything seems to be becoming a ‘mental health’ issue. Much of what we call that is really people being treated like battery hens by the politics of the Economy. The neoliberals already medicalised a pandemic so they…

Paul Keating, in 1997. Back when we had leaders, and not just marketing men spewing empty slogans at us. Read this and then turn on the news. "The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech…

Some say technology will fix climate change. The same people who think military hardware wins wars. We developed nations have war machinery unrivalled at any time in history. But…name the last war we actually won.…

How the Murdoch press works. Same commentator, different times. The first, when Bill Shorten was ALP leader talking about using government intervention to control electricity prices. The second, now, where private…

To this day I struggle with the idea that even Lithgow falls over itself to vote for the National Party. It's testament to the skill of the State LNP in rorting targeted grants that the impression is given that the Nats…

They say the quiet bits out loud now. Not even a pretence of doing public health work. Get back to work, the lot of you, even if you’re infected. The life of battery chickens.

John Howard used to say fuel prices are political dynamite. At current prices many will go to the wall, not just directly through the cost of buying fuel, but through the costs passed all the way down the supply chain.…

This sort of thing could mark an abrupt end of civilisation as we know it. There's no reason climate change has to happen gradually. Temperatures 30-40 degrees above normal, at both poles. 30-40 degrees!

In my lifetime already I predict we’ll look back at internal combustion engines and wonder what the hell we were doing using them as long as we did. Rubbish technology, hopelessly inefficient, thousands of moving parts…

I fear for Lithgow’s future. The end of coal and of coal-fired power won’t come gradually, it will be sudden and brutal. It won’t be because of ‘greenies’. It’s basic economics, already happening everywhere in the…

There’s probably not a better contrast between two understandings of Australia, the land. Aboriginal people didn’t use fences, instead they cultivated the land in a way they knew animals would love, to attract them.…

Most modern conservative parties are coalitions. This is because they don’t actually believe in anything much, except protecting the interests of those who are doing well. That’s how the parties originate, as a…

Every single home renovation or building show I’ve watched in the past 20 years has removed fly screens from homes. I think that’s a terrible mistake that will have to be fixed at some point, with climate change already…

If politicians had to pass even the basic due diligence you need at a job interview, many would be unemployed. Who remembers Pauline snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef, to prove it isn’t damaged by climate change?…

I fear for Lithgow. This will have nothing to do with Greenies. Cold, hard, brutal economics will shut the coal industry, and much faster than we think.

With climate change on path to incinerate much of the planet, those who made fun of Lithgow for this are going to be our amusement, as they burn.…

I’m guessing no matter what else happens in the election today, Calare will get another term of Nationals doing nothing for Lithgow. Look at the latest NBN upgrades, as with the original rollout, Lithgow isn’t even on…

Two bits of Australian political trivia. 1) The ALP is called the 'natural party of government' in Australia, because it's the only party who's ever won government alone. It's only ever been defeated by coalitions of…

It's inspirational to see young, smart and cashed-up Australians calling enough on decades of obstruction to needed change in this country.…

Drive past any farm and you’ll see stock fighting over any tiny bit of shade they can find. I remember people arguing against solar panels because they said they would destroy good grazing land. Just another of a long…

One of the urban myths I’ve heard from several car enthusiasts now is that around the world there are electric car graveyards, where electric cars are dumped because it’s more expensive to replace the battery than buy a…

I find many people assume Lithgow is lower than Bathurst and the Blue Mountains, in elevation terms. That it’s ‘in a hole’. (For the geographically challenged Lithgow is in a valley. Like alpine towns around the world.)…

What a joke. They're not even serious, it's politics, not a serious proposal, the reactors they're talking about aren't even available or tested. To think the clowns in the LNP drove Australia's world-leading solar…

‘Base load’ power does NOT mean ‘a base amount of energy needed to keep society running’. That’s politicians using slogans to change the facts. Base load power is the amount of power we all need to USE, to prevent…

Australia is being literally robbed by fossil fuel multinationals. (Note this is true for coal, as well as gas.) And what do Australians say about it? They attack everybody who tries to build domestic energy capacity to…

Lithgow is not unlike most other regional towns or even Oz cities. Some key facts which I think the city needs to come to grips with, to survive, because I think its image of itself is about 150 years old: - the biggest…

Long past time energy production is re-nationalised, like all essential services. Imagine ever thinking putting it out to the private sector was a good idea.

'Private industry is more efficient than government' is one of those empty, meaningless slogans designed for numpties who want to avoid thinking about anything. We're living that lie right now, with electricity.…

Wow. Boom. Who knew that regulating a basic service was the answer all along.…

My favourite take on the current energy crisis is "this is why we need more coal-fired power stations". Like the ones currently falling apart and costing a fortune to run, which no business will touch with a stick. A…

This is the end of petrol and diesel vehicles. And the comparison is even more dramatic if you use solar rather than ordinary grid power, where the cost to drive 100km drops to $1.28. With current petrol prices, that…

Good piece, describing the disaster of using the ‘market’ instead of regulation for our energy. The reason the market doesn’t work, is that it doesn’t exist. It’s another name for the ‘Economy’, which also doesn’t…

The ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ nonsense. (Most of us are in bed and need bugger all energy when the sun doesn’t shine, though it can be windy 24 hours per day.) This is South Australia’s big…

Australia and electricity. Remove heads from anuses with a loud satisfying pop, and have a look. This is AEMO data, the regulator. - 100% of our electricity needs, Australia-wide, will be met by renewables at times…

3 decades of spin has prevented people finding out about the genius of electrifying our energy and transport. For example, cars. Electric cars will not only be vastly more efficient, require almost no maintenance, have…

Another ripper from AEMO. Have a look how fast coal disappears from the energy mix, only a handful of years away. And also important is the massive *increase* in energy we’ll then have available, over the next 50 years.…

There are massive solar and wind farms near Wellington, from a distance you think it must be some bluey-silver crop, like lavender. Companies from around the world have been queuing for years to try to get these…

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They…

Managing building environments for people who always feel cold is extremely difficult. Often the entire building ends up heated to sauna-like temperatures to appease them. Great article about alternatives.…

It’s nearly always the same people trying to make out Covid isn’t a problem, that have regaled us about how climate change isn’t a problem either, for years. It’s time to have zero tolerance for dumb. Dumb kills.

"The planet’s had enough of our shit, so it’s decided to kill us. Some will burn, some will drown, and most will starve. Enough people have woken up to that now that denying it for the sake of a few backhanders from the…

For those who have or are thinking about getting solar, and would love a battery but the price of a battery makes them go pale, here's the cheapest battery by far you can use instead. An electric hot water heater. A…

A solar panel is installed in Australia every 44 seconds. We easily lead the world in household solar, more than 20% greater than other heavyweights like Japan and Germany. Just look at the graph, the growth (yellow is…

Talking about solar because energy right now is the key that unlocks a lot of what looks crazy about society. Here’s another reason to install solar, if you haven’t already, and to install as much of it as you can…

That 'minimum demand' note on the graph is another way to counter the myths of 'baseload power'. Australia is swimming in home-grown electricity, growing exponentially, and at that minimum point the grid itself will…

James Lovelock died on Tuesday, on his 103rd birthday. People may have heard of Gaia, the idea he developed together with Lynn Margulis. Often misunderstood as saying the Earth is alive, a superorganism. What they were…

People don't get fat because they over-eat, they over-eat because they get fat. An obese person is metabolically 'starved', their body keeps storing fat because it thinks it's starving (and the person feels that as…

You pay a lot of money to see water as clear as this. But there’s a dark thing going on in the oceans, more of them are looking beautifully clear and blue like this, even outside the shallows. Climate change is heating…

The marginal cost of most things we use in society now is actually pretty much zero. Industrial manufacturing is so efficient that we long since haven’t needed most people to work at all. The only reason they do work is…

No matter what type of heating (or cooling) you have, I think the cheapest and fastest way to get your bills down is still to buy an air circulator, as pictured. This is the ‘Vornado’, one of the best. Because heat and…

I like to share vehicle technology, because I’m convinced people are not really aware yet of the revolution underway. Mitsubishi’s new Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid) is a case in point. It has an 84km full-electric…

Thanks to @[585851453:2048:Adrian] for this great piece on why Australia is the canary in the global coal mine.

And this happened despite 30 years of a federal government running resistance to renewables on behalf of big donors in the fossil fuel industry. Australians never subscribed to the economic hoo-ha they were peddling,…

In the UK people are mobilising to refuse to pay extortionate electricity bills. The often claimed efficiency of private industry, which nobody actually checks to see if true. Well, reality has now checked. This never…

I think heat pumps are incredibly sexy. They can deliver up to 15 times as much energy as they consume. Which makes them actual producers of renewable energy. A country can cut its entire energy bill literally in half…

This is the car I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Completely sold out in a fortnight. You hear so much whining about things like electric cars and renewable energy. But that whining represents only about 5% of the…

By global standards, Australian homes are absolute rubbish in terms of energy efficiency. Like our car fleet. For the same reason, property developers lobby relentlessly to prevent higher standards, and the fossil fuel…

Have a look at the comparison of what it costs to install good quality solar here, and in the UK and US. I saw a UK news report say a heat pump there costs the equivalent of $17,000 Australian dollars, madness.…

For my European and US friends, don't assume severe winters are a barrier to heat pumps. Maine gets to nearly 40 below zero, heat pumps work just fine. Gotta love engineers, that we can extract heat from air at that…

Excellent run-down. New petrol and diesel vehicles will quickly become stranded assets. Fuel prices are about to climb quickly again, OPEC is planning to cut supply to boost prices and profits to themselves. And the…

An estimated 110 trillion (!) tonnes of ice is forecast to melt on the Greenland ice sheet, even if we could stop accelerated global warming tomorrow. It’s already too late. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to…

I'm a bit amazed by the hostility to renewables in Lithgow. It's going to need every tiny bit of help it can get, when Piper and the coal mines close.

When governments genuinely want individuals to manage things, like their choice of bank or energy retailer, they give them online tools with lots of information to help them compare the best deals. With Covid they…

The energy needed to boil a litre of water would also lift a 50kg person 683 metres in the air.

Here's a way to think about Queens and Kings, in the time of Covid and climate change. The Queen reigned for 70 years, and we know almost nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her personal opinions or beliefs.…

While I'm talking about energy...

Those who say coal and oil are cheaper energy always leave out the part about the Australian taxpayer subsidising those industries to the tune of over $11 billion per year. Even with those subsidies they're still way…

“The glacier itself contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 60 centimetres. But it also acts as a buffer, holding back a large part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If that is released, it will raise sea…

A land tax of only 0.1% would wipe out the $500 billion debt we incurred fighting Covid. Who resists it? The people who own most land. Who owns most land? The wealthy. Who are the wealthy? Overwhelmingly the boomers…

Huge news. This gas field is enormous, 10 years ago it was a licence to make billions. Now our 2nd biggest energy company is pulling out without even starting it. Just as other companies sold coal-powered power stations…

Peter is a climate scientist with NASA. That ‘too big to put into words’ should scare the absolute crap out of us. But it won’t, until it’s much too late, and we’re collectively incinerated and drowned. It’s probably…

I’ve been quite surprised how many people I know trade in cryptocurrency. It’s a scam, get out now while you can, everything you’re told about it being a pathway to wealth is bullshit. The other fascinating thing about…

This has been one of my pandemic projects, though it started well before the pandemic. Electrifying the household. It’s nearly 100% done. Solar panels will go up before Christmas. Ditched gas space heating over 5 years…

Because we mistake weather for climate, every cooler shift like we’re experiencing now in the East can make us think global warming is overstated. But yesterday was actually the hottest ever recorded day in Australia,…

This is the Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia, USA. The only nuclear power plant the US currently has under construction. For those drunk on the hopium of nuclear power slogans from politicians, here's fun facts…

Australian vehicles use about 40 olympic swimming pools of fuel every day. Over 90% of that fuel is imported. That’s almost a billion dollars per week, going offshore. When the vehicle fleet shifts to electric, all of…

I post about changes to energy because what’s really happening out there should amaze people. And help explain why I say the change will be fast and brutal, much much faster than people are thinking. Some examples: -…

Thanks to Ed for this. The oceans are masking just how bad global warming is. They’ve absorbed over 90% of the extra heat we’ve produced by burning astronomical amounts of carbon-based fuels. The amount of heat they’ve…

You wouldn’t know from the stories we hear just how much amazing, fast change has already happened with renewable energy. Most of regional WA for example will soon not even bother with the grid. And this will be a much…

The WA power system is under pressure because the foreign-owned coal mine that provides coal to its power station is about to go belly up. It’s another fossil fuel stranded asset, that nobody wants because the industry…

If you don't have solar and can afford it, now is the time. (Worth pointing out again that the ROI on solar panels is orders of magnitude greater than any other investment you can make with your money right now.) The…

This beautiful satellite image shows a mine in Inner Mongolia that is the key to the whole modern world. The Bayan Obo mine. Most of the rare earth minerals used in modern technology come from China, it produces over…

For solar, bypass all the salespeople and energy companies selling you panels (nearly all of them will rip you off). Use the Solar Quotes website, it does all of the work for you, brilliant. Set up and run by an…

I imagine if this was an electric vehicle charging station, how it would be plastered over the news everywhere by the petrol and diesel fetishists. Funnily, electric vehicle charging stations don’t tend to blow up, nor…

Climate change has so many ways of destroying society, and I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The damage to local road and rail over the past few years isn’t sustainable, enormously expensive to fix.

Weather permitting, my solar panels should be installed by the end of the year. Just in time. If you’re a fan of coal, oil and gas power, I hope you have deep pockets. And a memory, of being told those were the path to…

Read this, these utes are already on the boats on their way here, arriving within weeks. Why are businesses lining up to buy them? They’ve done the sums, it will save them LOTS of money. At least 5 times cheaper over…

My first real insight into the genius of electric motors was a line trimmer (whipper snipper) my dad bought me more than 30 years ago. The Ryobi Electro Scorpion. It’s still going strong, and hasn’t once in more than 30…

Saul Griffiths is on a mission to electrify everything. Which is what we need to do if we’re not all going to be incinerated by climate change. And we have to do it fast. He’s an engineer, and amongst other things he’s…

Great article showing the brutally fast changes underway. This was Australia’s newest coal-fired plant, and remember many were calling for us to build even more. It’s gone belly up, entirely for economic reasons. None…

Almost word for word everything I’ve said about Lithgow in relation to coal and power. Because it’s what the businesses themselves say, I just listen to them. The change will be fast, and brutal. The town will only…

Those who are so deeply infected with slogans about renewable energy cling to hydrogen as some sort of last-stand of resistance. Hydrogen is an excellent fuel, but is 3 to 4 times as expensive as just basic solar, wind…

Out of interest I rang the local Mitsubishi dealer to ask what the waiting time is now on the Outlander hybrid. 13 to 14 months. The reason for this (which the salesperson didn't tell me, but I already knew) is…

Australia is swimming in solar-generated energy from our own rooftops. More than twice what any other country produces, per person. The big jump in electricity prices is caused by the previous government not building…

For background on why your wallet is bleeding at the petrol pump, OPEC is the cartel of oil producing countries that have held the world to ransom for the past century. If we electrify everything, the tens of billions…

Freemantle, outside Bathurst. I think climate change is often thought of as something that just impacts the weather. But our infrastructure isn't set up to cope with even this earliest phase of warming. What comes next…

My no-gas shower hack (for those who don’t live near me, gas infrastructure was damaged in flooding, so multiple towns have no gas for several weeks, maybe even months). I heated a big pot of water on the stove, and…

The International Energy Agency projects net income for oil and gas producers will double in 2022 to US$4 trillion. Always follow the money. That’s the 4 trillion reasons to electrify everything. They use their spare…

The energy crisis in WA isn’t caused by windmills or solar panels. It’s all here, it’s failures in gas and coal plants, and bankrupt coal mines. A grid powered by renewables will give us energy that is almost free,…

Something not often mentioned by the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy folk is firstly that we obviously still manage to have water when it isn’t raining. We use storage. But the big sleeper here…

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much…

Being in the middle of the flood activity, I can tell you who’s fixing it. Engineers. I can tell you who isn’t - politicians. We have this bizarre idea that politicians ‘run’ towns, States and countries. They don’t,…

That brutal transition to renewables just got more brutal. And it needs to be, if humanity is to survive. Good on him for putting his money behind this, blasting out the old directors to accelerate the transition.…

Scotland just blew up its last coal-fired power plant. (Check the great video from the World Economic Forum.) It will produce almost 100% of its electricty with renewables by the end of this year. Like I say, this…

Brilliantly simple. We could have been doing this for the past 20 years and energy would be as good as free right now for Australians.…

Look at what BP is doing up north. 26 gigawatts of wind and solar power, for use in Australia and Asia. That's enough to power a third of Australia. Ignore the rubbish in the news, look at what's really happening. And…

COP 27 mostly failed, for the same reason it always fails. The $2.8 billion profit per day fossil fuel industry knee-capped it. The only win was emergency funding for the most vulnerable nations. But nobody committed to…

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next…

So true, nobody cares. But they’re being led to not care. 95% of people just do what everybody else does. We see that at school, and it continues into adult life. If the 5% don’t lead us to fight climate change and…

The fastest way to rein in inflation is to put some sort of price control on gas and electricity. That’s what’s driving much of the inflation. Not peoples’s wages, which haven’t gone up in a decade. The fastest way to…

Before Christmas Australia may cap the price of coal, to keep electricity prices down. Coal and gas companies are making huge windfall profits on the back of exorbitant international prices. This could be very bad news…

Most of what gets into the public domain is hot air, on most topics. The argument over renewables was won a decade ago, by not even having an argument. Just engineering, and economics.

Why Australia should already be by far the richest country in the world per person, but isn't. See that tiny proportion of world oil production that Norway has? It turned that into a sovereign wealth fund worth about $2…

There are only 2 real meaningful ways to lower your power bills. One is to renationalise energy, as a basic of human life. All politicians are too stupid and gutless to do that. The other is generate your own power. Our…

South Australia today. Renewables are providing way above what the State needs, for electricity. 112%. The wholesale price is negative i.e. they’ll pay you to use it.

A less well known way to heat your hot water (up to 30% or more of a household's energy costs) with solar is a hot water PV diverter. These clever devices take any excess solar you may be producing, and feed it to your…

Testing the solar, stories. (I know many already have solar, but others not.) This morning washing machine, dishwasher, reverse cycle heating in the bathroom and jug all on at once. System dealt with it all with ease,…

Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s…

Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s…

Last solar post, just as a comparison. Cloud gone, so system close to full generation. Over 9kW going back to the grid, so could run another 3 houses just off the surplus. (That 1.7 kW still the washing machine and…

Enormous icebergs keep breaking free from the huge Antarctic ice sheet. There are 30 million cubic KILOMETRES of ice in Antarctica. That’s 90% of the world’s surface fresh water. If it all melted, the oceans would rise…

Elon Musk is a wally, but one thing I admire about him is that he actually builds things. Good, innovative things, like the Powerwall 2. And satellite broadband, cars and trucks, rockets, solar roof tiles etc. All…

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best…

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8…

This is such an exciting, revolutionary achievement, and spoiled in Australia by years of spin by politicians in the pockets of energy companies. I don’t think people have really registered yet what it will mean to be…

Power stations in NSW will be replaced by renewable energy zones (REZ). Really worth watching this short vid to see what's planned, and how quickly. For example the Central West-Orana zone will be first, and will be…

On renewable energy zones, here's the Central West-Orana zone. All those coloured dots are projects underway or already there. And in the far bottom-right of picture - Lithgow. An existing power generation hub, one of…

Blocking solar farms because they ruin the view. The view is a landscape cleared and trashed by farming, which these same farmers and local councils have presided over for more than 2 centuries. And we laugh at people…

Putting a large solar system on your house, even including a battery at today’s charges, costs less than buying a small car. How many households now have 4 or 5 cars? What’s the gain, in having those vehicles? How does…

Somebody yesterday said I wasn’t ‘positive’ enough with my FB posts. I talk about the grown up issues of the day, each to their own but I’m not here to curate some magazine-style online personality for myself, or to…

People understand that our climate change policy is purely about keeping the Coalition from breaking. If they take that same perspective to NSW for Covid now, they’ll see the same thing. NSW’s Covid strategy is designed…

Short piece from the Lancet today which every person in NSW could learn something from. Confirming again that when you get a rise in Covid infections, you must smash them immediately. Not ‘live with’ them. And that…

"...as long as the state premiers continue to ignore the idiots in the federal Coalition and the Murdoch media and lock down as needed...It turns out that stopping the disease from spreading is the only thing that…

Some very smart people jumped on the anti-lockdown wagon last year. I thought they might have done a bit of checking and found out there is no such thing as a 'lockdown' in public health, it's a political term invented…

If a person wants to be aggressive, go for it. Whack somebody, swear, throw something - whatever. Don't be passive-aggressive, is there anything more irritating than somebody who internalises their gripes and then gets…

The Sun has 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. It’s not called a solar system for nothing, we’re bit players.

The danger of ideas. Texas just had a massive winter storm, which cut off most essential services, including power. Many died. Some had to sit in their car, the only heater available. Many of them were then hospitalised…

Collective psychology and the Korean War. The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at escape. The Koreans began by observing all prisoners as they arrived. Those who…

Australians have amassed over $200 billion in savings during the pandemic. Global warming gases have plummeted. Crime has collapsed. Cities have their cleanest air in decades. Hundreds of thousands were lifted out of…

Since the beginning of time I think there have been accusations that the stories people read or watch 'influence' them to act in certain ways. It's never turned out to be true. If it were true you could run the world…

"At the heart of this conflict is wages: The RBA wants to get them up, the government does not, because the Coalition holds to the outdated belief that higher wages cost jobs, because profits and investment get…

Couple of times I've tried to talk about gravity here with the example of people using stairs. It takes no more effort to go 'up' stairs than to go 'down' them. You'll use more energy going up, but no more effort in the…

There's a clear community sense that it's been a very bad few years. Long and crippling drought, catastrophic bushfires, pandemic, and now floods. These are easy dots to join, it's all the same cause. Climate change.

What can we do when we're told ecosystems are collapsing? We can become 'environmentalists', but then what does that mean? Wrapping the landscape in cotton wool? That doesn't work. We can try to scientifically 'manage'…

This is Grant King, ex-CEO of Origin Energy. A gas industry executive. Guess which job ScoMo just gave him? Chairman of the Climate Change Authority. Come on Scotty fans, defend this. Find a way, a challenge for you.

Same story, the world over. When indigenous peoples are displaced, they don't say 'hey, that's my piece of harbourside property, I'm negatively gearing it'. They say 'we are the land'. The land is an integrated part of…

The PM refuses to build a national quarantine centre. So virus keeps leaking out of hotels not built for quarantine. Very happy to do it for the past 25 years for refugees, tens of billions on that one, because it wins…

Corruption, plain and simple. The National Archive is having to do fundraising to be able to keep some of our basic historical records, and aged care staff got no pay rise in the latest budget, but these clowns can find…

When South Australia's power went out because a storm trashed transmission lines, dickheads like Canavan blamed it on renewables. Now a coal plant explodes plunging Queensland into blackout, what's to blame? Apparently,…

I love heat pumps, we should all get rid of wood and gas fires and use heat pumps instead. Some of the amazing physics. These two scenes, one obviously looks much 'hotter' than the other. But actually there's about…

Choose your sides people. I watch the UK news every day, today’s bulletin is a story about how 250,000 school children have had to isolate at home because ‘only 9000’ of them were actually infected with Covid. Only! In…

Australians spend more on alcohol than on gas and electricity, or petrol. We spend more on booze than we do on clothes, and almost as much as we spend on health.

The proposed truck driver’s blockade on Tuesday takes populist craziness to a whole new level. If you read these people online, they’re totally unhinged. I think the community anger would be nuclear.

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate,…

This is a growing pattern in Western democracies. Gated communities. Where the well-off shield themselves from crime and poverty. From the rest of society. Billionaires have bought entire islands and built bunkers to…

It is lethal. If you don't know what libertarianism is, worth doing some reading. Many vote for the LNP today because they think they're voting for Liberals and Nationals. They're not, they've long since transformed…

Keith Pitt today repeated the tired old ‘find me a solar panel that works when the sun doesn’t shine’ line. Find me a tap that works when it’s not raining, Keith.

Everything about this plan is laughable. Even the title, 'The Australian Way'. Just another book of meaningless political slogans to get him through the election. The man is vacuous, completely devoid of any vision or…

The fracturing of shared beliefs that has crippled action on both climate change and the pandemic. This *is* at the same time the ‘plurality of belief’ that we say is the strength of our democratic countries. How do you…

This is a wonderful, digitally-interactive article, describing all of the action that has been long underway by industry to change Australia. Really, really worth your time, don’t believe any of the political nonsense…

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US, the most prestigious infectious disease institution in the world. It understands you can’t ‘live with’ Covid. The next steps in our denial of this will be governments: -…

Ethical vegans view life in the same way Right to Lifers do - I’m curious if they see that. Environmental and health-based vegans pay no attention at all to actual landscapes and how they work. These idealised views to…

Penrith hitting 48.9 degrees yesterday made me think yet again - where we need to get to with climate change isn’t everybody who dismisses it suddenly believing it. We need to get to them saying ‘ok, maybe there’s a…

The UK, which has a deeply conservative government, has gone from 75% of its energy coming from coal in 1990, to 2.1% today. That’s TWO-point-one. Those of you who get all excited over nuclear and ‘baseload’ - its use…

Here’s a question for anybody who says solar power is no good as a mass power option, because it only works when the sun shines. Who the hell uses much energy when the sun doesn’t shine? You’re asleep.

You’ll often hear people argue against renewable energy as being unfairly ‘subsidised’ by government, whereas existing energy generation isn’t. This is because the costs of carbon pollution aren’t included in the sums -…

Want action on climate change? Or anything? Turn it into a comparison, a competition.

Thanks to Sarah for these. Humour sometimes gets right to the important point. Also, something for your friends who say “the climate has always changed, nothing new here.” The Earth's oceans absorbed the equivalent of…

We’re living in an aged care facility, run by the residents. All arguments: economic, climate change - whatever - really come back to ‘you young people are soft and spoiled’. This is what ageing societies look and sound…

I reckon you can trace most modern day problems, including climate change, to our inability to recognise the agency of anything that isn’t human. This planet has millions of other ‘agents ’ who could make our lives…

Elaine Ingham, soil scientist. The word soil comes from the Latin word humus, which is also the root of ‘human’. Our agriculture turns soil into lifeless dirt. Some facts about soil: - one handful of good soil contains…

I won’t get in a helicopter. Too many moving parts to go wrong, way too much metal flying around with high energy. Let this be a lesson to us all to keep our private helicopters well maintained.

Astronomical electricity usage in NSW today, maybe unprecedented for a weekend. The same if not worse predicted for tomorrow. Who put their air conditioner on 24 to ease the load? I haven’t seen that AEMO suggestion…

Explain to me, if you're what some call a denier, why you know better than these 11,000 scientists. And why you'd resist even taking precautions against this threat.…

Know those people who say "we've always had droughts and fires, this isn't climate change"? If they can read a graph, these two are worth their time.

I’m not sure I explain why DST bothers me so much, how it connects to other ideas. My objections to travel, or to the idea that we’re not responsible for what our ancestors do, or to cars and maps, or a ‘climate’…

Have you noticed that the knuckle-draggers who oppose climate change action now call it ‘alarmism’? The same people who have spent 20 years brewing fake catastrophes in immigration and terrorism. Once you know your…

Opening up coal seam gas fields won't drive energy prices lower. What it will do is satisfy ongoing lobbying from Santos and other big gas players, who already sell our gas overseas for cheaper than we can buy it here.…

The hay runners show that ‘the bush’ is more about national identity than about farming. Look at the flags. Agriculture is in terminal decline worldwide, mostly because it’s an absolute bloody disaster. Agriculture is…

I saw an article the other day describing mobile phones as the most addictive device ever invented. I don’t think phones are addictive, in any way. Give somebody a phone with a flat battery and they won’t do anything…

These 3 populists all came to power by either creating pretend problems, like terrorists killing us all, or by encouraging us to approach real problems as fictions, as ‘fake news’. Now all 3 of them have real problems…

We’ve spent 50 years flirting with one catastrophic idea: that society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of separate individuals. It explains our massive and ongoing accumulation of debt, the increase in family…

At the lower end of the projections, a quarter of a million Australians may die of coronavirus. Similarly, one projected climate model this week predicts that all of humanity could become extinct by 2050, if projections…

The anti-social forces in our societies are extremely clever at political strategy. No matter what major issue comes along, their think tanks quickly find ways to turn them to their advantage. For example, for over 100…

Latour brilliantly explores connections between Covid-19 and climate change, and how both result from us excluding non-humans from our definitions of society. And what that means about where we go from here.…

This cracked me up (thanks Alex). This is our pause to think time, in lockdown. Why does Covid-19 destroy the economy? Because we're too mobile in how we live. I say what we call the economy is actually our culture of…

My biggest frustration with conservative governments in this crisis has been the continuing insistence on 'balancing' the 'economy' and peoples' health. As if those were two separate things. Like this obsession…

Seeing the same arguments here, that we need to 'balance' the apparently horrendous impact of lockdowns on the economy against public health. As if those economic impacts are just as bad for our health as a pandemic. As…

We should thank Australian universities for this, they assembled over 100 experts from diverse fields to assess where Australia should go from here with Covid-19. You'll see they suggest either elimination (my…

Guess how they introduced this one? A 'balance' of gas versus renewables. There's that balance word again. Works every time. Balance climate change action against the economy. Balance your health against the economy.…

You can see this right now. The same people who won't trust the experts on climate change, because it means interrupting 'the economy', are the same people who trust the experts on Covid-19, when they can make them say…

Do you think we'll ever connect in our minds tens of millions of people wandering the Earth every day looking for somewhere to live, at the same time as tens of millions of others travel the same Earth sightseeing?…

We tend to think freedom is the opposite of slavery. If you actually look at what happened though, in history, that bondage of one person to another didn't lift to give us freedom. We enormously expanded and diversified…

Testify! US companies (many already bankrupt pre-Covid) borrowed over $750 billion extra in the last 3 months, due to government underwriting. This is what fixing the economy means, giving our money to cowboys to pay…

Difficult to share ideas like this in the current environment, both sides jump all over them and use them as weapons. But difficult problems are difficult ideas, and without working hard on the ideas, they don't go…

Very few people died of heart disease before the 20th century. And then quite suddenly, nearly everybody did. See the graph. Medicine has no idea why, it usually says fat and salt are to blame, even though we ate even…

Just one of the modern conservatives worldwide who franchised conservative politics to the financial sector. None of them would know what a political conservative is, historically. These are the people who can twist…

The obvious evidence that conservative politics worldwide was simply bought out by the big end of town, is that these parties have the same 3 policies no matter what crisis or situation is in front of them. Cut taxes,…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

Hmm. If @[100039499001289:2048:Steve] is about, he may have a view. https://newatlas.com/energy/long-range-wireless-power-transmission-new-zealand-emrod/

This is why 'we're following the medical advice' has been political spin all along. When your Chief Medical Officers are employed by your politicians, they're not going to contradict the boss. Kerry Chant saying as much…

Another parasite, preaching no action on climate change or Covid, retreating to the safety of their country estate.…

A lot of virus denialists (perfect term I think, like climate denilaists - people who deny international emergencies right in front of them) hanging their hats on this sort of research. It is interesting research, but…

Victorians when asked whether restrictions should be lifted. Why do the opponents of public health restrictions get any air time at all? Comes down to who owns the channels, obviously. The same platforms that give…

Remember during the big fires, the culture warriors telling us arsonists were to blame, not climate change? Guess how many were found to be caused by arsonists? Zero. Not a single one.

The Economy Crowd. Not only spending their pandemic happily sheltered from the virus while undermining public health action for the rest of us, like demanding borders open to help mates in the tourism and airline…

You run out of words. Scandalous. Corruption. Cronyism. Our Covid recovery commission is stacked with the gas industry. There's a global GLUT of gas. See those pollies in grey suits with solemn faces every day talking…

Amazing what goes on in universities. https://theconversation.com/aussie-invention-could-save-old-coal-stations-by-running-them-on-zero-emissions-lego-blocks-144864?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton

Did you know there's 30 million cubic kilometres of ice at Antarctica? If it all melts, sea levels rise by about 70 metres. All of our coastal cities gone. Lapstone will be the new Double Bay, but with malarial…

Angus Taylor today, talking about energy policy and climate change. "We shouldn't damage our economy to reduce emissions". Sound familiar? Replace 'emissions' with Covid-19 and you have their pandemic strategy too. He…

AEMO's step change to renewables for Australia, 96% by 2042. If you squint hard you can just make out the contribution from gas.

The virus is like an earthquake. A disaster for us only within our built environments. Without those it wouldn’t ever have happened, just as earthquakes are mostly completely harmless, unless you’re inside.

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid…

Solar will be the world's greatest source of energy by 2025. 5 years. The cost of solar has dropped 90% in the past 10 years.

In NAIDOC week, read Gammage’s book to completely change how you think about this whole topic. Aboriginal Australia was nothing like what you might have been taught or imagined. It was a manufactured Garden of Eden, a…

Today Angus Taylor said ‘the only way to slash emissions is to slash economic activity’. Replace ‘emissions’ with ‘Covid’ and you can see how the same strategies are used across both issues. In both cases they say we…

I’m sure that much of what we call mental health problems is really dysfunctional organisations. Ordinary people coming up against impassable roadblocks to doing a basic day’s work set up by dysfunctional institutions.…

The virus deniers remind me of the climate deniers (they’re often the same people). Have a look at the graph, alongside these numbers: - between 1751 and 1987 burning fossil fuels put 737 billion tonnes of CO2 into the…

It took decades for Australian businesses to build profitable trade with 700 million Chinese customers. It took 10 minutes for the Trump-loving buffoons in the federal LNP to bring it all crashing down. One of the…

A NSW Liberal. A champion. Compare and contrast with the knuckle-dragging LNP disgrace in Canberra. Our federal system may save us from climate change just as it did from Covid, by States bypassing the idiots in…

The real reason the feds are so interested in super is in that first line, industry super is set to control half of Australia’s economic output within 5 years. Industry super is the 21st century version of unions in a…

Reality has a sense of humour. Big tough Scotty now destroying the coal industry he loves. I live in a coal town, collateral damage.

In the UK as here there was much theatre early in the pandemic from pollies saying they were ‘following the science’. Conservatives never were, it was spin. They don’t on climate change, why would they on a pandemic?…

Do people even notice that every day of this pandemic, offices have been exempt from most Covid Safe requirements? It’s all been about the economy, not the virus or your health. Will we ever realise the beliefs we have…

Let’s replace the opposition with this crew. (Really, really worth watching.) Oh and if you’re a climate change denier, get your head out of your arse. An iceberg the size of a State is about to collide with an island.…

Maybe this is all part of ScoMo’s cunning plan to phase out coal.

How's this for the 'free market', government interrogation of banks for their market-based decisions? And we think China is 'authoritarian'. All red meat for the lunatic backbench, these decisions are only about…

What if maps are why we can’t make sense of the world? We’re so used to understanding the world using maps like this, which suggest the world is contained inside neat coloured lines. But I’ve noticed that most fighting…

I’m not on either side of the debate about the Gillette ad. I think ‘toxic masculinity’ is an empty idea, and I think men claiming the right to behave like dickheads are just dickheads. Simple as that. A highly specific…

Droughts and flooding rains. Mackellar’s line was a bit of misty-eyed fondness. But ironically, droughts cause flooding rains, and flooding rains cause droughts. Both are symptoms of how the Australian landscape has…

How stupid selling of public assets to foreign profit-taking firms gets rebranded, by the idiots who sold it off, as "Lefties/Greenies against coal". Let's be less dumb. Notice how the more privatised electricity gets,…

Is it society, or nature, when it takes 2.46 terawatt hours of electricity to keep in touch on social media?

Testing the big ScoMo slogan machine. Has anybody actually seen their electricity and gas prices go down?

Yes. This. “We talk as though “traditional masculinity” were the enemy, as though we want men to evolve into something more like women. But that’s wrong. What we need is not faux-women but nobler, more confident men.…

What if our mistake with climate change is to think it’s about climate? We’ve used fossil fuels for several centuries to ‘free’ ourselves from the usual constraints of life - our connections to our landscapes, to our…

‘The private sector is always more efficient.’ A slogan I’ve heard since I was a kid. One of the most powerful fantasies of our time. Exhibit A, electricity. Look at how the roles of people in the electricity industry…

In an election year, it's interesting to again look at the 'coalition'. Have mentioned on here before that I think there's hardly a single point of agreement between the Liberal and National parties. One is a free…

Always follow the money. ‘Self-funded retirees’ is an oxymoron, a huge chunk of their wealth is tax concessions, which we all pay for. The political battle of our times is between the old and young, not Left and Right.…

Green parties have never been very successful in politics. They tend to be fringe parties. My sense of why that is, is that their main historical interest - the ‘environment’ - is impossible to define. How could you…

The face of ‘sovereign borders’. Sovereignty is the issue of our time, it’s the most dangerous and difficult idea in world history. It also explains climate change, you get 2-for-1. But then, most of us don’t study…

It’s difficult to find bigger zealots than some vegan activists, like the ones who put stickers on meat in supermarkets. The cause isn’t even based in reality. Avoiding meat: 1) isn’t better for the environment 2) isn’t…

White meat and red meat, it's only in recent years I learned why there two main types. It's all to do with the fibres, fast-twitch (white) or slow-twitch (red). White meat is muscle used for short (anaerobic) explosive…

All of the retailers charge about the same, about the best this can achieve is a nice chat with some poor call centre person. This pervasive fantasy, that informed customers will drive a supply of cheaper energy with…

Pensioner, living alone, quoted in the news today. “How a person can live on $67 a day, this is supposed to be the land of plenty. Plenty for who? Not for us," he said. "Our generation, we worked hard and all the…

I discovered something a few years ago, and others may have before me. If you have a foam roller like this one (useful in so many ways), place it vertically, down the midline of your back, between you and the back of…

Kids have to learn to balance. Adults think they don’t. But all human activities need balance, and as we do more complex things as we get older, we should be learning new balancing as we do. But we often don’t, we…

All political movements are grounded in promoting particular interests. I think this helps focus what we see in politics, always look to the actual interests involved. The ALP: - is the oldest political party in…

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say…

The Coalition has added more government debt in the past 5 and a half years, than was added by all governments in the 118 years previously, since Federation. Adds some colour to the 'better economic managers' slogan.

Teenagers’ bedrooms are maybe the perfect way to change how we think about climate change. Their habits create their HABITat, a much better word than ‘environment’. Environmental politics never really gets traction I…

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old,…

Do you think anybody sees a protest like this and thinks "well bugger me, I better make coal history"?

Lithgow air quality monitoring stations are now in place. Worth having a look, you can see either end of town has very poor to hazardous air quality (dangerous to health). This was this morning, since this time, the…

Fantastic short animation, even captures the shifts of day and night. Reckon politicians are to blame for global warming? Who do you reckon is in all of those planes? Also a nice way to map wealth in the world.…

We largely banish darkness from our lives today. In a city or even large town you can’t even see the night sky, we’re immersed in light from waking until going to bed. But have a look at this picture. The surface of the…

Personalising feelings - making them 'our' feelings - is I think the source of so much unhappiness and sickness. Like stress, which we often interpret to be a feeling that we 'have'. In fact stress is just your body…

Humans like to see themselves as separate to 'nature'. But have a look at how our societies exactly match what we call the natural world. Patterns. For centuries we had leaders like the Sun King, at the centre of…

3 million people per week worldwide move from the countryside to the city. Countrysides the world over are emptying of people, if not already empty, and drones and other equipment are taking over farming. I see this as…

I guess what makes great artists great is how their works diagnose things. They see into the future. In 1820 Goya saw our world today, where reality has become sport, a fight between opposing sides. Whether we're…

Here's an idea for 'stimulating the economy'. How about diverting the vast rivers of taxpayer dollars flowing to Canberra, to State and local government, where the services people use actually are? At the moment…

The flip side to tax 'relief'. We're absolute dopes not to see this. The more they cut taxes, the more they shift the cost of basic public services back onto us. Anybody noticed the price of education, health,…

I love plastic. The alarmism over it is I think like all alarmism, probably misguided. As the article says, there's not a lot of evidence it does harm, and bacteria are also eating it. Polymers are one of our greatest…

Hospitals are maybe the most damaging invention ever for our health, and it's not the fault of the amazing people who work there. We've let ourselves think of health as the functioning of different bits of us, overseen…

Tesla once said "if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." I think he's right and I'd add to that - resonance.Resonance is the way objects interact, and humans…

Florence Nightingale once said if you want to control infection in a hospital, open the windows. Let fresh air in. Recent research suggests she knew what she was talking about, you get fewer infections in outdoor field…

Aristocrats are mocked for living privileged lives separated from basic reality. But - this is us. Our societies are the rich, privileged people on the planet. It's why social life is freaking us out right now, because…

When Charles Darwin visited Bathurst in 1836, he made this fascinating comment about the Macquarie River: "The Macquarie figures in the map as a respectable river, and it is the largest of those draining this part of…

Just some of the at least 50 known minerals that are actually created by living things. The boundary between living and non-living is one we'll have to think harder about if we're to understand climate change I think.…

This is Herbert Benson, revolutionary American cardiologist who recognises that bodies can’t be understood or healed separately to minds. His patients are trained to activate the relaxation response, their…

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social…

Admirable as Greta's cause is, I still think climate change isn’t a scientific thing. It’s not even about climate. The climate is changing because we lost all meaningful connection to space. We turned it into a map, an…

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, to a sacred place. 2 million people. The Ed Sheehan world tour: 8.5 million people. Rather than see ourselves as 'modern' and secular, wouldn't it be better to understand how our…

3 minutes of fascination. Tracks the birth of cities over 5700 years. (Watch the explosion of cities around 1900 - fuelled by? Fossil fuels.) Notice cities preceded States by a long way, and some say 'sovereign' States…

This is a beautiful bathroom. The fascination with luxury scares me a bit. All civilisations that collapse flirt with luxury towards the end. I think what keeps a society alive is curiosity - questioning things to adapt…

I snapped this in Lidsdale on the weekend. It really resonates with me, because it's an old creek bed. Some of the ancient Greeks divided the world into Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I say we're a civilisation seduced by…

Some numbers on climate change. Between 1751 and 1987 (236 years), humans released about 737 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Between 1987 and 2014 (27 years), humans released about 742 billion tonnes of CO2…

Australia emits between 1-2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which some say is reason to do nothing about it. These same people often think abortion is an emergency. Australia has 0.001% of the world’s…

The Right to Life debates made me think this week. Why isn't extinction of species a Right to Life question? Why isn't climate change the same? We're looking at the death of millions, perhaps even billions, of living…

I think the cause of and biggest obstacle to addressing climate change, is the idea of 'the environment'. I'm still seeing even those who know climate change may kill most of us try to 'save the environment'. Or they…

Humans are driven by comparison and imitation. Notice they added these to energy bills? Research told them to. Just telling people how much they use doesn’t work. Comparing them to their neighbours is dynamite. (This…

Want action on climate change? Get the millions who protested or who are concerned to join a union. If they’re not old enough, get their parents and relatives who are to join. Those who oppose climate change action yawn…

This pair, who promote themselves as the champion of the ordinary person against 'the elites', come from the very top level of elite society. Super-rich and privileged families, and leading parties funded by the top-end…

The insurance industry (if it survives, predictions are it won’t) may convince remaining climate change doubters. Some predictions say the average person may end up with no access to insurance. Look at the natural…

One of the things I think farmers could teach city folk about climate change is that the idea of an 'environment' that we have to 'protect' is a fantasy. Nature, a meaningless term really, makes you work. Climate change…

This little civil engineering cartoon shows multiple amazing things. For decades now the US Army Corps of Engineers have been trying to stop the Mississippi from being captured by the Atchafalaya River, itself a product…

If you drop a slinky spring, it hangs suspended in the air for a moment before falling. 'Defying gravity', the elastic potential energy of the spring acts against the gravitational force downwards. When I say our bodies…

MND is motor neurone disease. A really, really nasty thing (Stephen Hawking was one of the most famous sufferers of it). This bacteria is in all our waterways and dams, and the warming climate is making it much worse.…

If you think it'd be cool to have a crystal ball, I think insurance data might be the best you can do. All the debates over climate change are mostly froth and bubble, serious businesses have already decided it's real.…

The next generation of floating wind turbines capable of operating further from the shore could generate enough energy to meet the world’s total electricity demand 11 times over in 2040, according to International…

Some say people are a mind in a brain in a head, on a body. I see people in a very different way, as a combination of beliefs and desires. What they believe is the more fixed part of them, and what they desire is the…

Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes of the US, has been granted legal rights in the way a person has. You can see the algal blooms that are part of its current problems. This is what climate change really means, I think,…

The science has been in for a while on this one. That energy in - energy out ‘common sense’ idea? Complete bollocks.

Australian scientists have discovered that beneath the sea bed around the world, there may be up to half a million cubic KILOMETRES of fresh water. That’s about 100 times as much groundwater as we’ve extracted since…

Chloroplasts turn sunlight into energy. Chloroplasts were built by bacteria, swapping genes and other bits and pieces. We humans aren’t so clever. In fact we were built by bacteria too, they mastered nanotechnology…

The PM says Australia doesn’t need to do more on climate change because Australia is only 1.3% of world emissions. Australia takes 1.3% of the world’s refugees, and has spent well over $10 billion so far managing…

In Germany the transition away from coal is going much more smoothly, because unions and business there work in partnership, putting the interests of coal workers right in the mix. Here the government just tries to…

Another example of why ideas matter. The ‘environment’ as an idea is the problem, not the answer. This mythical environment is trying to kill us right now, it doesn’t need protecting - it doesn’t exist. Well-meaning…

Lord Haw Haw was a Brit who broadcast propaganda messages for the Nazis. One of the most despised people in British history. I think the loud climate denial voices in our public discussions are worse, climate change may…

Meanwhile in the UK, old people are voting for a ‘Great’ Britain that disappeared years ago, as their last parting gift to the next generation. Wrapped and put under the tree with a climate emergency, and debts that…

I wonder sometimes if the loudest voices on climate denial remember this fact. Having spent a few decades now actively and wilfully spreading misinformation, a time will come when they may be put on trial (literally)…

Always follow the money. ASIC is putting Directors of companies on notice if they fail to act on the risks of climate change. Directors can go to jail if they don’t act on guidelines like this. Nobody outside the shock…

If you don’t think climate change is an emergency, how sure are you? Do you insure your car? Your house? Do you go to the doctor and dentist occasionally? It’s called risk management. Do you think the risk you might be…

Climate change isn’t about whether you believe it’s real, or not. We’re not playing Monopoly. Climate change, like your fitness needing work, or you maybe getting skin cancer, or you being able to afford your mortgage,…

I'm ambivalent about holidays, have never liked the split between work and leisure; both are weird ideas. I prefer the idea of routine, to replace both of them. Habits. Habits save energy, and produce calm. One of the…

Ideas are everything. In the aftermath of the bushfires, the main question that may not get asked is - is the idea of ‘national park’ the main problem? Turning the landscape into a tourist attraction, or preserved…

Of course climate change intensified these bushfires. But there’s a deeper problem I think, as always it comes back to our ideas. Our idea of ‘the bush’ (and thus ‘bushfires’) is the direct cause of this disaster. This…

Farming was supposed to give greater predictability and abundance for humans. It hasn’t worked, because it focused on the farm level, rather than landscape level. We see the result now, farms destroyed by drought and…

The fence might be one of the greatest destroyers of the landscape. Dividing up the landscape into small territories stops it from functioning. Outer boundary fencing in critical areas is still important though. There…

How to be stress-free and anxiety-free in 2018. Something I’ve researched for many years, so in case it’s of any use. (There are other dimensions to it as well.) Nearly all the approaches that work with stress and…

One of the things that isn’t widely known about China is how innovative it is with governance. The outside world thinks of China as a big communist totalitarian State, but within China there’s more experimentation with…

Hmm, I accidentally deleted my earlier post on this. We need not just more trees, but more plants in general. Not only do they protect the soil, they actually generate rain. Some argue that climate change could be…

Some of the work being done with autonomous vehicles in Australia. Notice that part of the new world being developed is not just making vehicles individually autonomous, it’s to network them to each other and connect…

DH Lawrence, who was himself a school teacher, often said that education forced on all people was an evil. To be ‘uneducated’ is not the same thing as not being smart, it just means to not spend a lot of time in schools…

Rather than get rid of Facebook, we should recognise that it’s now a public service, like water or electricity. It should be regulated, as Cook says. That’s how these corporate giants make such enormous sums of money,…

Snarge. The collision between animal mobility - animobility - and the accelerated speeds humans use when they travel. Those accelerated speeds are bought by mining time itself - to get the energy we need for them, we…

Hazard reduction burns. Sorry, yes a pet hate. The ‘hazard’ these burns reduces is mostly the risk of stupidly-positioned homes, in the middle of the bush, burning down if there’s a fire. Property damage. The problem…

The cerebral mystique. There’s a lot of it about. “The more we feel that our brains encapsulate our essence as individuals, and the more we believe that our thoughts and actions simply emanate from the bundle of flesh…

Re-posting this from inside another thread. This, to me, is another big disease of our age. Binary thinking. And as the article says, driven by one thing mostly - anxiety. Anxiety about ambiguity, although I think maybe…

More people than ever that I know are suffering from stress, at times myself included. And many say that our world is a stressful place right now, in general. I wanted to share what were for me some hard-won lessons…

So...the proposed tax cuts seem popular. Because government is unpopular, and the silly myth that tax takes ‘our’ money off us. Around the world there’s been a rush to gut government, often through tax cuts which starve…

I’d be very interested what people think ‘baseload power’ means? It’s a term used lots in debates about energy. (Hint: it doesn’t mean what the people who use it a lot say it means, not even close.)

A neutron star is so dense that a piece of it the size of a grain of sand would weigh 500,000 tonnes. If you dropped a single gummi bear from 1 metre above a neutron star, it would hit the star with the force of 1000…

There are two main stories around climate change. One is that humans have interfered with the Earth’s climate, and the other is that they haven’t. I’d suggest these are actually the same story. Opposites again,…

Gabriel Tarde on life in a big city, another paradox. Rich social environments are environments of intense imitation, not of thought. Facebook is another rich social environment - do we see much thought on it? Or mostly…

James Gibson noticed that the things in our environments have meanings. Normally we say that only humans deal with meaning and purpose. Every object or technology has what he called affordances, ways in which the thing…

This was a superb story, if you’re interested in drought and drought relief, it should be compulsory viewing. Lots of very smart farmers out there, doing incredibly smart things, and using very different ideas about the…

Supply and demand. Hay has gone past $300 a bale, with the current lack of feed for farm animals. People will reflexively say "that's just supply and demand". But what does that mean? Doesn't it just mean people are…

I find this a powerful image. You can tell an awful lot about a society by what they throw away. That idea is actually quite strange - to 'throw away'. Not many cultures in pre-modern times threw things away. This isn't…

As a kid it never made sense what adults saw in politics. But I see it now. Many hate politics, but it’s an amazingly rich teacher about life. Take the current fight between Turnbull and Abbott. We’re all so used to…

Watching Malcolm Turnbull on energy bills. How long will it be until we decide again that essential public services should never be privatised? Not energy, not education, not housing, not superannuation, not roads, not…

Conspiracy theories and urban myths are both fascinating things. David Grimes took a completely different approach to conspiracy theories (which he doesn’t dismiss out of hand), by ignoring the facts involved and…

I find if you ask people how they decide things, they’ll sometimes have a set of rules or a moral code, or often some one-liner like ‘each to their own’. In practice though my guess is people evaluate things in a…

I think it’s tempting to say freedom is the freedom from responsibility. From attachments, ties, obligations. But I reckon that’s another one of life’s paradoxes. The more attached we are, the more obligations we have…

My first degree was in an area which is hardly even mentioned to young students, but is the cutting edge of nearly all science and engineering. Materials engineering. It’s new materials which have been the real driver…

Hilarious, but also a perfect metaphor for climate change. We’re used to talking about ‘the environment’, as if we live ‘in’ the environment. That’s like a clean room, where you don’t really notice the room. But I think…

Climate change is usually seen as a scientific thing. Too much carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. But there’s a different way to see it that some are starting to articulate. It’s a problem of morality. One of my…

The word ‘objective’ has come to mean something true, no matter what anybody thinks about it. But actually the idea of objectivity comes from the law. To be objective means to be able to answer enough *objections* to…

A plug, and background to the climate change debates. James (Jim) Lovelock and Lynn Margulis are arguably the most important scientists since Galileo. Together they formulated the Gaia idea, which some interpret as…

Here’s my vote for why people like Trump and climate change deniers win. It’s a classic example of how the people who want the world to be different see the people they need to convince as simply stupid. How far do you…

Are we really democratic in our hearts? I talk to people about this a lot. I think nearly everybody prefers living in a democracy, but I’m much less sure it’s well understood what that actually means. My experience is…

One of the fascinating things about oxygen I think is that it was a deadly poison to earlier forms of life on Earth. So what we see as vital to keep us alive was also what killed billions of other living things in the…

A theme for me. The big shift that climate change has brought, that I don’t think is well noticed, is that the ideas of nature, and the environment, are doomed. The idea humans live ‘in’ nature, or ‘in’ environments, is…

So...what’s the difference between disagreement, and having actual enemies? One of the things that shocks people I think about terrorism, Trump, Brexit, and climate change, is that there is suddenly no common ground.…

I don't think we're going to fix this until we understand our obsession with travel, which is becoming clearer to me all the time. I say we're a culture who has separated itself off from connection to place. We're…

The people who fund climate denial know climate change is real, and they know we're likely doomed. They've been preparing for this for many years, they funded climate change denial to buy themselves time. It will end up…

Here’s something I learned a few years ago, that changed my life. An experiment anybody can try. Did you know your body is set up so it automatically follows your attention? Your attention leads, your body follows. So…

With Google Trends you can glimpse a nation’s soul. I highly recommend it as a substitute for the news, which is curated pap to try to shape how people feel. Google Trends will tell you what they’re really feeling. Here…

This is my argument against hazard reduction burning. Every year we willingly let ourselves cloak entire communities in toxic smoke, to protect a handful of badly located houses. What’s the greater hazard, losing those…

Bill Shorten's energy announcement today is a slam dunk. He's a skilled operator, mocked continuously but unionists know about politics. We can't get rid of the current LNP idiots fast enough - their entire energy…

Cool image. I was taught about the balance of nature at school. It was only years later that I learned that this picture is a lie. There is no nature, and no balance. And that’s why climate change is so scary, no Mother…

The idea of ‘mental illness’ came from having to deal with conditions that were beyond the limited understanding of medicine. For example the horrendous injuries many men suffered in World War 1, which couldn’t be…

Ever noticed that people can only live 'off the grid', in 'self-sufficient' ways, in societies that have a grid in the first place? They're not self-sufficient at all, they're absolutely reliant upon a strong, stable…

3 out of 4 Australian homes now have air conditioning. With rising electricity prices (some of which is due to the extra demand from air conditioners), these cost a bomb to run and make the climate warmer in the process…

Climate sceptics seem to have very long summer holidays, they go extraordinarily quiet in the hot months.

Hooray! And only one thing missed - that we already have the institutions to do the heavy lifting. They're called unions. They know how to do it, they've done it before. "But it is up to the left to do something with…

Have been waiting to trial this, saw it first in our winter and now the heat is here, time to give it a go. Zero energy air con.…

Last night I sat in front of this ultra cheapo fan, and decided to calculate what it costs to run (slow TV night). The answer? 1 cent per hour. That means I could run it 24 hours per day, for a whole week, for about…

It's always been called a crazy idea, but these are times of possible emergency. It is interesting to wonder how Australia could be changed by trying to create an inland sea again. Pumping sea water to the interior.…

Don't believe for one second the bullshit in the news, or from moron politicians carrying big lumps of coal into parliament, about South Australia's power problems. NSW prices are some of the highest in the world, and…

We may not survive. You may not agree, in which case I'd ask if you're willing to bet the future of all of humanity for the sake of some solar panels and windmills? If you're right, the worst that can happen is that…

Why we'll get action on climate change even if the twits in charge don't want it. Smart people just get on with running the world without them.

Seen the price of sending a package through OzPost lately? Makes your eyes water. And those awful loss-making letters. That's why it was a public service. Ain't the 'efficient' private sector grand, consumers paying…

Best quote on the Sunday penalty rates, from Crikey: "Today the Fair Work Commission, reflecting three years of Coalition government appointments to the industrial relations body, decided that Sunday penalty rates are…

Trump's actual legislative agenda so far, summarised by an American friend. Not much in there for the ordinary downtrodden citizen, he's like Tony Abbott, talks the talk and then walks the jackboot big business and…

Remember this clown, who saved us from that terrible socialist carbon tax and kept our power prices down?

The petrochemical industry are basically self-interested arseholes. And the people smart enough in Canberra to negotiate with them, in the public service, were sacked by idiots who said we had too much bureaucracy.…

Germaine Greer is a vastly under-appreciated Australian. So, maybe a series of quotes. Today...libraries. "A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity." "Libraries are reservoirs…

Generations of Australians were brought up to think 'you can't lose money on housing'. A nuclear-scale reality check may be coming their way.

I'm not completely sure the fact a sequence of numbers would need to pass through zero means the climate would have to do the same. You can get discontinuous jumps in reality. But happy to be proved wrong.

It's strange something as abstract as climate change become such a big political issue. Have often wondered why. It's most likely because there are two main responses to the challenges in the world at the moment, and…

Tony Abbott was a wrecking ball for Australia. Firstly every business that uses energy in the country curses him for wrecking a carbon price, and wants it back (it will come back), and then he smashed the NBN and put us…

This is the true face of the 'culture warriors' who have been spewing their filth into the country for the past 15 or so years. People who talk about the 'Left' and the 'Right' a lot. And who never shut up about the…

This is how the Earth got its tilt. Early in its history something about the size of Mars crashed into us, breaking off a huge amount of rock and rubble. That rubble and gravity together then formed the moon, and the…

Inequality in history has always been 'fixed' by plagues and wars. (Inequality played a big role in creating those plagues and wars at the same time.) Are we smart enough to avoid more wars and plagues (including…

This is really bizarre, it must have implications for other things we do as well. "In short, heroin addicts who can usually tolerate extraordinarily high doses are at risk of overdose if they administer the drug in an…

I worked at ANSTO for a while. It's true that the fear of radiation is way out of proportion with the actual risks. The greatest argument against nuclear power is the enormous cost, not the safety.

The real reason electricity prices are going up? Gas prices are going up, the two are directly linked, because gas turbines are the newest additions to the power generation system. Look at the graph, it's a perfect…

Says it all, hazard reduction burns are about protecting houses, not people. The amount of smoke they produce is incredibly harmful to people, wood smoke is many times more toxic than cigarette smoke, the process is…

The end of the clunkiest, most inefficient and stupid technology - the internal combustion engine - is in sight. Also a huge victory for air quality and sound pollution.…

A perfect description of how everything wrong with politics right now is a problem with US, me and you, not politicians. Turnbull is holding together a fragile coalition in the face of enormous pressure, against a huge…

Huge week for the LNP. I don't think it's noticed much that the Libs and Nats have almost nothing in common. One is a party of the city, the other the bush. One believes in free markets and free trade, the other loves…

This statement is true whether it's private insurance, or private roads, water, schools, banks, electricity etc. "Private insurance, however, is an expensive way to fund health care. When we look at the relationship…

Gabriel Tarde, describing most of our lives in one sentence. Tarde showed that there is almost nothing that isn't explainable by imitation. "...it is for the pleasure of change, of not doing the usual thing, that the…

This winter we shifted our thinking on heating and energy, and it turned out to be a smart move. After previously spending nearly 2 grand for gas heating for a winter with the huge jump in gas prices, this year we…

Russell and Dave About air con and efficiency, which we didn’t get time to finish. The units themselves aren’t breaking any rules of thermodynamics by outputting far more energy than what they consume, because they…

Politics! But hopefully not what you're thinking... There are 2 games in town I think, and mixing them up is what's destroying our societies. There are traditional political parties, like Labor and the LNP here in Oz.…

Bit surprised at the number of people who say they absolutely would refuse to turn their air conditioner up a few degrees in summer, in times of high demand, even if they were paid to do it. It really enrages some…

‘Base load’ is a term people often use in energy debates. They think it means a basic minimum amount of electricity the community needs, night and day. It doesn’t mean that at all. Like most of the energy debate, it’s a…

Brought to you by the same team who promised getting rid of the carbon tax would slash your power bills. They’ve doubled. It’s amazing how these idiots can take any issue and turn it into a political whipping boy.…

The gas 'crisis' is easily solved, and from that electricity prices should come down a lot too (gas is used heavily in electricity generation). Instead we have the idiots going into bat for the big gas companies, who…

So exercise scientists have discovered that sex uses about the same amount of energy as climbing two sets of stairs. The "I'm too tired" argument suddenly looks thin. Now I just have to Google 'sex', it sounds…

I think this metaphorically describes the Queensland election, and most politics in the Western world. The conservative side of politics - the LNP here - is a very shaky coalition of people who are in many ways…

Do you know any grammar Nazis? This was a story about 85,000 cubic metres of American nuclear waste from the 1940s and 1950s, leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Tony is worried about the grammar. Incidentally, aren’t the…

Sometimes it’s the little things. We need to get rid of friction brakes I think, they’re filthy. The air we breathe is chock full of the rubbish these things produce, and it’s seriously bad for us. There are…

Every politician who offers you a tax cut should be told the same thing. I would rather have: - decent and affordable schools - decent and affordable health care - affordable and effective transport options - power that…

A warning about electricity and gas providers. It seems increasingly they don’t even send somebody to read the meter, they’ll use an average or estimated figure instead which can be way off what you’ve actually used. I…

Kiribati straddles both the international date line, and all 4 hemispheres. Meaning it can be two seasons and different days, at the same time. And it's disappearing under water with sea level rise.

Or...reframe the stress so that you feel it as your body giving you more energy to deal with the challenges of the day. Which is what most everyday stress is, so it's not even pretending. That way it's real easy to let…

Anybody else in Lithgow getting the push marketing from Simply Energy lately? The con where they knock on your door and make out as if they're just passing on the good news about a cut to the official electricity rate,…

This is the time of the year energy suppliers tend to raise prices, so they can add another layer of 24-carat gold wire to the networks. I hadn't seen this site before, the government provides a price comparison tool to…

Another guilty secret. I love plastic. Bags, the lot. Fabulously versatile material. Yes it can have environmental effects, but there are ways to make plastic to get around that. And bacteria will eat it all eventually…

This debate will get somewhere when people stop thinking it's actually about the science. It's not, doesn't matter how many graphs and numbers people trot out, you won't change peoples' minds. What needs to be…

The storms and extra rain the world is experiencing more often now are due to the fact the oceans have been absorbing enormous amounts of extra energy for decades now. That energy has to go somewhere. The graph shows…

For so long it seemed logical that big things are complicated, and small things are simple. In living things, organisations, politics - wherever. Bacteria have now taught us we had this completely backwards, the smaller…

More than 700 tonnes of antibiotics are imported into Australia every year. More than half of those antibiotics go into stock feed (column 2), nearly 10% is used by vets (column 3), and about 35% is used in the health…

It's nice that beneath all the gum-flapping hot air of everyday arguments, shit just happens anyway. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/wind-and-solar-are-crushing-fossil-fuels

Yes, always one of the first laws of propaganda - just keep saying things over and over, until people start to believe them. Like "debt and deficit". Or "Nick has a glorious head of hair".…

Some of my friends shared this, saying it proved how silly scientists were for saying the globe is warming. Unfortunately for that little a-ha moment, the ice age scenario has been a core part of global warming theory…

The Great Permian Extinction, when up to 96% of all life on Earth was wiped out. The cause? Most likely accelerated global warming. If you oppose trying to do something about global warming, please be absolutely sure…

Very powerful visual summary of all 2053 (yes, 2053!) nuclear tests that were done between World War 2 until today. Nobody knows how they've affected the health of people globally. They start slowly but watch them…

Two issues being mixed up here? Nobody really owns the land underneath where they live, they just are given that ownership by government (i.e. from the public - it's a common resource). And there have always been…

If you got Ebola, would you go to these men for help? No? Because they don't know anything about it maybe? So why listen to a word they say on climate change, or anything else?

Why corporate lawyers and good journalists are well worth doing your dough on ;) http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/10/sugar-industry-lies-campaign?page=1

You know I reckon the Coalition's NBN is actually better. Or smarter, obviously not as fast in general, but way smarter in the pragmatic sense. And much more likely to get the poor schmucks outside the capitals decent…

Not sure how aware people are of how much money education brings into the country. Second biggest export after coal. Billions a year. The 'ivory tower' thing people say about unis, as if unis are out of touch with the…

To save the time and effort in reading News Limited papers and understanding the new Coalition's media policy. It's all in one tweet from Master Rupert, who's shifted his campaign from the UK to here.…

This is the clown who presided over the biggest spending (and taxing) spree in Australian history. Don't believe the Terrorgraph trying to soften people up for the Coalition having no answers to how to fix a budget, it…

We only seem to 'notice' weather when it's wet or cold. When we get a lot of rain in summer climate change is apparently a joke, but then we get the driest May in over 150 years and the same people don't say boo.

So when Jug Ears parrots on about my electricity bill, beyond my usual first reaction to tell him to fuck off, I remember that in 2008 the average cost was about 15 cents per kWh. Now it's between 25 and 30 cents per…

thinks global warming is mostly the result of the energy they need to run all of the bloody traffic lights in the Blue Mountains.