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By Jo Nova
Renewables are so over
Just like that — the renewables bubble went phht.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Even worse — they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say they want energy that’s not dependent on “the weather, the season, or the geographical location”.
There’s no “Sorry we got it wrong”. There’s no apology for hectoring us, censoring us, or wasting billions of dollars. It’s just Mr Don’t-Look-Over-Here telling us what most engineers knew for 30 years. This is the billionaire club asking the taxpayers to build them more nuclear plants.
Signatories include Siemens Energy, which suffered a 36% share price fall 18 months ago when it admitted it was losing billions trying to maintain wind turbines.
It’s the perfect storm. Just as renewable investments wallow in their failures, the AI race is on,which needs monster data. As we saw in Texas the new grid entrants are asking for a whole gigawatt of capacity each, and peak demand is expected to rise by 75% in the next five years.
Less than a year ago Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” but now it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
And of course, Donald Trump is in the White House, so the subsidies are gone and the mood has changed. Indeed, it’s almost like the Tech Giants are afraid to mention “climate change” too much lest it annoy the new President, or remind all their shareholders how much money they wasted.
Other governments need to adjust their policies accordingly.
The old Google:
h/t Reader
Click to see the signatories or read the Large Energy Users Pledge:
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10 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
10 out of 10 based on 9 ratings
By Jo Nova
Shamen and fortune-tellers are back preying on suggestible minds
A new “study” warns us that the most populated cities on Earth have a distinct trend towards, wait for it, wetter or drier weather. Somehow, 95 of the 100 biggest cities do not have the exact same amount of rain that they had 40 years ago. (The horror). And this is “weird” they say, as if shifting patterns of rain have not been normal for the last four billion years.
The new term this week in Climate Bingo is “Climate Whiplash” — which means a city that has had more droughts and floods lately. It’s just another sort of Global Weirding which was predicted by exactly no models anywhere until after it happened, and sometimes not even then.
The trick here is to study some random permutation in an obscure weather metric over an absurdly short time frame — like for example the moisture surplus/deficit difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration, and voila, we find a “40 year trend”. Given that the Pacific ocean oscillates on 20 – 30 year cycle, and the Atlantic on a 60 to 80 year one, the world will never run out of 40 year meaningless trends in watery parameters.
Thus paid Blob scientists have come up with another scary headline to justify their grant, and trick a few teenage girls into voting for Big Green Governments that will give more money to Blob Scientists.
The Guardian, as always parrots the Blob nonsense without so much as 2 seconds of googling “Drought cycles of China” where they could have found out that droughts were worse in the 1960s and 70s just before this study started.
Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped
Damian Carrington (Chief of Environmental Propaganda) The Guardian
Wed 12 Mar 2025 11.01 AEDT
Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.
Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.
The shamen and fortune tellers are notorious for ambiguous projections, and it’s right there in the press release. Climate change can look like any change at all, and any change could be climate change:
Professor Katerina Michaelides, Lead Scientist from University of Bristol, said: “The findings from our study illustrate just how differently and dramatically climate change is expressing around the globe – there is no one-size-fits-all.”
Everything is changing and none of it’s predictable. These forecasts come with excuses built in:
“Our study shows that climate change is dramatically different around the world,” said Prof Katerina Michaelides, at the University of Bristol, UK. Her co-author, Prof Michael Singer at Cardiff University, described the pattern as “global weirding”. “Most places we looked at are changing in some way, but in ways that are not always predictable,” Singer said.
All told, 17 cities are apparently suffering Climate Whiplash, though they were not important enough to list in the Guardian or the press release. Possibly because the full list included Canberra, Chicago, and Melbourne, where millions of Guardian readers live — who might realize they are not being whipped.
The eye candy graph definitely looks jagged and scary:
But in the long run, these are bumps of nothing. For example, here’s the last 700 years of recharge rates in one part of China where rain has come and gone. Curiously, there are 200 year long cycles in groundwater recharge rates in China that seem to vary with cycles on the Sun.
 R.K. Tiwari1,* and Rekapalli Rajesh2 (2014) Imprint of long-term solar signal in groundwater recharge fluctuation rates from North West China. Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060204
Warn the children that the Global Weirding lot are just government marketers wearing labcoats. They fish for random 40 year fluctuations that no one predicted. It ain’t science.
POST NOTE: See this is the tragedy of one-sided government funded science. The people writing these junk studies up probably think they are doing a decent job, they just don’t realize how vacuous this is because there is never any criticism of green-promo-science. They’ve never attended a conference where someone talked about long term drought cycles, they don’t know there are 10,000 proxies that show continuous variation in every climate parameter. If they had been reeled back in a few times as honours students they wouldn’t grow up to be scientists making these baby mistakes.
REFERENCE
Water and climate: Rising risks for urban populations, Cardiff University, 12 March 2025 in Climate change, published by WaterAid.
10 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
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9.2 out of 10 based on 12 ratings
 By Jo Nova
Who knew? Penguins are not only a “sentinel species” warning us about climate change in Antarctica but “Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature“. More warming equals more penguins.
So just as we can use trees as thermometers, we can use penguins as thermometers. And when we do, we find that there was a veritable boom in penguins in the Ross Sea 1,000 years ago.
It’s all there in the peer reviewed Zheng paper, 2023 — thanks to NoTricksZone and KlimaNachrichten for finding the paper.
As one of the most important ‘sentinel species’ in the Antarctic ecosystem, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is widely distributed in the Ross Sea region and its population is extremely sensitive to climate change (Ainley, 2002; Ainley et al., 2010). Since the International Geophysical Year in 1957, researchers have conducted extensive field investigations on climate change (including temperature, SST, sea ice, and polynyas) and Adélie penguin populations in Antarctica.
Modern monitoring data also show that Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature…
After comparing with historical records of penguin populations at Cape Bird, Dunlop Island, and Cape Adare, all were found to have a common increase during the 750-1350 AD period in the Ross Sea.
So at the same time the Vikings were getting into the spirit of Greenland, the penguins were having some parties of their own on the far side of the Earth. And even though climate experts have told us a million times that the Medieval Warm Period was just a localized phenomenon in Europe, it was also warm in Antarctica, and most other places, and no one seems to be able to find the part of the planet that was colder which would bring that average back to normal.
As it happens, another study last year showed Elephant seals and penguins lived on the Ross Sea for thousands of years until the horrible cold of the Little Ice Age wiped out them out. Seriously, researchers refer to the era three or four thousand years ago as “The Penguin Optimum”. So this is yet another study using different markers but reinforcing the same finding. (That one used diatoms, this one looked at a footprint of elements in penguin guano — P, Cu, Zn, Sr, Cd, Ca, and As.)
The climate experts also told us a million times that global warming would wipe out the penguins, but instead it turns out, global cooling does.
In the full figure we can see a whole stack of climate variables that all rise and fall in cycles that bear no resemblance to changes of CO2:
Keep reading →
9.8 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
9.2 out of 10 based on 10 ratings
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8.7 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
Nishant Gupta set up a green energy hedge fund last year managing about $100m in assets, but he probably wishes he hadn’t.
His words are about as blunt as any hedge fund owner could possibly get.
Bloomberg
“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.
Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.
Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.
So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.
Gupta now says that ““The fundamentals are very poor”. Which is true if you were fundamentally betting on government handouts. The truth is the electrical fundamentals of Green investment were always awful, as were the “carbon” fundamentals. Investors should have got better advice from friends who were engineers who saw that unreliable renewables were an expensive fantasy that were doomed years ago.
He still claims there is some long term need for a clean energy transition, but his big plan is to find the “corners” of the market where he can identify “supply-chain bottlenecks as core investment opportunities”. Apparently that means he’s moved into companies that make compressors, vacuum systems and switches and fuses. Which sounds a lot like a man who’s stepped right out of the clean energy space.
The fall for clean energy shares started at the end of September last year, presumably as it dawned on green investors that Kamala was not going to win and keep the subsidies rolling.
The great unravelling of the Green delusion continues. Amazing that there is still 80% of the clean energy sector value left on the chopping block.
h/t Reader
Image by Eynoxart from Pixabay
10 out of 10 based on 120 ratings
8.8 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
The insatiable hunger for electricity
The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did ask for “the equivalent” of 30 new nuclear plants. But it will be big and fast.
Texas has 31 million people. Australia has 26 million (plus a million foreign uni students). We’re performing a national pantomime over whether it’s realistic to build a few nuclear plants and a couple of SMR’s, as if we’re plotting to build the first colony on Venus. Meanwhile Texas is leading the revolution.
Financial Post
“We’ve never existed in a place where large industrial loads can really impact the reliability of the grid, and now we are stepping into that world.”
[Bloomberg]— Demand on the Texas power grid is expected to expand so immensely that it would take the equivalent of adding 30 nuclear plants’ worth of electricity by 2030 to meet the needs.
That’s according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid. The forecast is based on the addition of new data centers needed to power artificial intelligence. And it’s raising concerns about whether infrastructure in the state will be able to expand fast enough — and at what cost.
ZeroHedge
Individual projects are already starting to request 1 gigawatt of power and they pose new risks to maintaining a stable grid, said Agee Springer, Ercot’s senior manager of grid interconnections. A gigawatt is typically enough to power 250,000 homes in Texas.
Ercot said it’s gotten requests equal to 99 gigawatts for new connections to the grid from big power users, including data centers, bitcoin miners and hydrogen producers, according to an internal grid presentation Thursday. That’s up from 40.8 gigawatts last March.
There’s a big question as to whether infrastructure can be built fast enough because of supply chain issues, resulting in long wait times for things like big turbines to produce electricity and other key equipment such as transformers. Another critical issues is who is going to pay for all of this build out.
One company is already planning to build 30 micronuclear plants. Another wants to develop molten salt reactors.
None of the AI teams are begging for wind or solar power. If Australia were to build new coal plants, or new nuclear plants with spare capacity, Big AI would be here in a flash. The La Trobe Valley could become a world leading AI centre if the government was willing to keep using the 300 years of cheap brown coal there. At 3 cents a kilowatt hour wholesale, it’s still the cheapest electricity on the planet.
Do we want to be the coal and iron mine at the edge of the world, or would we like to ride the revolution?
10 out of 10 based on 112 ratings
9.5 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
Cyclone Alfred headed straight for Brisbane
It’s not often a cyclone heads straight for a big population center in Australia, and the media is running minute by minute updates:
It’s a slow moving category 2 storm, that won’t set any wind speed records, but will cross paths with 3 or 4 million people. Current wind speeds at 20 locations are available here. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain for too long. The latest BOM report says sustained winds are 95km / hour with gusts to 130 km/hr. (Roughly 60 to 80 mph).
 http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml If “Climate Change” has any effect on Australian cyclones, it’s to reduce them:
With the usual logic and reason of top climate experts, this suggests that car engines, burgers, cows and coal can prevent cyclones. Anyone driving an EV, or eating vegeburgers clearly doesn’t care about koalas (or delicate solar panels):
These were Australian cyclone tracks 51 years ago, before mankind emitted 75% of all emissions of CO2 ––
Two cyclones went past Brisbane.
Back in days when humankind had barely started jumping on planes for hot weekends and footy finals, cyclones even threatened New Zealand.
Best wishes for readers and their homes in the path. Thank you to everyone who uses petrol, diesel, coal, and beef. We appreciate your sacrifice.
9.9 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
By Jo Nova
Without forced theft from the poor, Sunnova (and others in the solar industry) might disappear
Bloomberg writers call it “chaos” and Barrons blames Trump for “uncertainty”, but the truth is the value of solar was always a false bubble held up by forced payments, fantasy, or vicarious political whimsy that spread the costs onto other people. Trump has merely restored the certainty of real value in the free market. He hasn’t banned a single person from buying solar panels, it’s just that not many people want to spend their money on glass panels that make green expensive electrons. They don’t want to spend money on “cheap electricity” that only comes at lunchtime either.
The 70% fall in the stock price is just the last few days since Sunnova officially warned it might not be a “going concern”. The longer term figures are much worse.
On November 4th, when some investors though the word-salad-woman might win, the share price briefly spiked to $7. Right now it is 58 cents, meaning it has lost 92 percent of its value since Trump won the election. The entire $12 mini-boom peak in September last year, arguably, was a bet that Kamala-grift would be worth something.
Sunnova has $3 billion in assets (allegedly), and employs 1,200 people according to Wiki. (Or it did).
The news reporting is full of delusional excuses
Bloomberg
Sunnova Energy International Inc. shares plunged 71% as the company warned there’s substantial doubt it will remain in business. That came less than a week after First Solar Inc., the biggest US solar manufacturer, said it was seeing increasing customer delays. And it was also on the heels of Sunrun Inc., the biggest US residential solar company, saying it expects installation volumes to be flat this year.
The US solar industry is in the midst of the biggest reckoning it’s faced since going mainstream more than a decade ago.
Solar had been viewed as a crucial answer for dealing with rising electric demand while capping global emissions…
Analysts have been lowering their home solar installation projections in 2025 after installs fell by nearly 20% in 2024. And meanwhile, the Trump administration and Congress are considering moving to cut the tax credits that Sunnova and others have counted on to generate cash. That’s on top of a federal freeze of loans and grants that were aided by Biden’s signature climate law.
It’s all the fault of the “uncertain regulatory policies” — even though Trump is dead set certain he will not subsidize these things.
What they mean to say is Donald Trump has turned off the tap, and the solar panels weren’t worth buying if other people didn’t pay:
Barrons
The rooftop solar industry has struggled lately, because fewer people are installing solar panels due to high interest rates and unfavorable or uncertain regulatory policies. As of December, energy-data firm Wood Mackenzie said 2024 U.S. installations were on track to fall 26% from the year before. The Trump administration’s policies have only added more uncertainty.
“The overall environment is terrible,” said Sunnova CEO John Berger on a conference call with analysts. “I mean, it’s the political environment, the capital markets—look at the equity trading off. And so, that just gets everybody in a very bad mood, candidly.”
Yahoo Finance blames high interest rates as if the long artificially low interest rates, set by a government appointed politburo-style-committee, weren’t just another sort of subsidy.
Much of the industry’s turbulence can be traced to high interest rates and uncertainty about the future of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Solar installers have benefited in the past from low interest rates, which make solar loans and leasing attractive to consumers. By spreading the cost of rooftop solar over many years, consumers don’t have to pay up front and often save relative to their monthly utility bills. But as rates have risen, it can take longer for consumers to benefit financially.
On the policy front, the Inflation Reduction Act extended tax credits that were set to expire at the end of last year. The new credits run through 2032, though the Trump administration has vowed to unravel the law.
It’s one of the best kept secrets of modern civilization, that low interest rates steal from long term savers and subsidize speculators and borrowers (rich people). The central bankers force institutions to charge low rates, lots of people borrow money, which increases the money supply hunting for things in the same limited pool of goods. In turn, that creates inflation and steals the purchasing power from every dollar — from children and grandparents alike.
Bloomberg writers think Trump creates chaos, but the truth is that the whole fake market in solar has been one gigantic bubble. At one point in early 2021, Sunnova shares were selling for $53.
REFERENCE
Sunnova Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Results
Photo: Tadeáš Bednarz
10 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
9.2 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
9.2 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
 By Jo Nova
There’s nothing like a few belligerent trade spats, and miscreant dragged anchors to ruin a brand’s reputation
After six separate incidents of underwater cables being sabotaged in the Baltic Sea, the German Defense Ministry is wondering if it is wise to buy Chinese wind turbines with all their electronic parts. A new report commissioned for the department not only suggests the government should restrict new turbines, it advises them to call a halt to an existing project.
Hypothetically, China might remotely shut down wind turbines at a key moment, creating crazy price spikes, and industrial havoc (although wind turbines seem quite good at that on their own). But seriously, if wind turbines got a bit more random, or a bit less efficient, would anyone know for sure? And if a market player had that information in advance, they could make out like a bandit — bidding at the right moment, and collecting on all the price spikes. It would be just another way to bleed a country, raise electricity prices, and reduce it’s competitiveness. (But good for business back home, eh? )
Oddly, the Defense analysts seem to worry more that China might delay projects on purpose, which sounds like an act of kindness to me. But if the electricity managers had already blown up the coal plants, then it might leave a vulnerable gigawatt gap.
Some thing has to charge the big batteries and pumped hydro, after all or they won’t be there for the dinner time peak. Likewise with the EVs.
But they were also concerned China could harvest data from hundreds of radars, and be able to spy on military training sites.
Part of the danger also comes from the access that manufacturers get to turbines, according to the study. Beijing’s suppliers would have access to computer programs that control active turbines and collect data from hundreds of radars built into farms, it states — a significant issue given that wind produced a third of Germany’s electricity last year and a fifth of the EU’s power.
In sum, the report argues, that would hand China “considerable blackmail potential in the future.”
The report warns that the “first time use of Chinese wind turbines must be prevented” on “public safety” grounds, since it risks creating a reliance on Beijing’s expertise and giving it access to “essential elements of German critical infrastructure” near militarily relevant training areas.
The Defence team also suspect the Chinese projects are being subsidized by China to beat out European competitors. It’s almost a case of China-would-be-crazy if they weren’t. The more renewables they supply, the more incapacitated and deindustrialized Europe gets, and the easier it is for the rest of China’s factories to drive competitors out of business.
Think of renewables as loss-leaders for a whole civilization.
10 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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