kgwilson

I wouldn't be a politician for the 4 or 5 hundred grand a year they get. Their lives are not their own and they have little time for their families. Taking the family to a sports event when you are the sports minister is OK with me as she has long periods of time away from them. The trip to the UN was an absolute must as Australia is the first in the world to impose a social media ban for under 16s & she championed it and needed to get this across to other nations who are trying to do the same. To me it promotes Australia as being at the forefront of a caring society not at the bottom of the pit like the US where the only thing that matters is the billionaires getting even richer. At their level of importance and the personal sacrifices they have to make plus having to be places at short notice means flying first class is totally justified and what I expect. Like everyone she made the choice to get in to politics but it is unforgiving and brutal. Put any of the armchair warriors who whinge about everything in their position and the tune will change pretty rapidly

The asbestos rumour is indeed a furphy. Turbine blades are made from fibreglass &/or carbon fibre composites like a lot of other modern and highly technical products including many aircraft. Recycling this is quite difficult but they can be ground in to filler for roads and cement products or repurposed for infrastructure as in bridges etc.. The rest of the turbine is fully recyclable containing mostly metals (steel, aluminium, copper) and concrete which can be crushed into aggregate.

There are plenty of solar farms that co-exist with cropping or grazing. Modern panels are translucent to a degree so some light gets through to the ground. Sheep are ideal for use in what is known as Agrivoltaics as they graze under standard height panels, remove the need for mechanical or chemical vegetation control, provide shelter for sheep, reduce the fire risk and actually improve the pasture as well as providing an additional source of income.

I think what we need in a balance mix of large scale renewables (solar/Wind/pumped hydro) large scale battery storage which includes pumped water, rooftop solar and home batteries, Industry solar & batteries, and neighbourhood batteries for local communities with rooftop solar with no battery. All these are happening to a degree but not fast enough. Government incentives for home batteries is getting a massive response from home owners with rooftop solar & this will inevitably reduce stress on the grid as will neighbourhood batteries & Industry batteries. That is not to say the existing grid is satisfactory, it is not, and growing demand means upgrades and maintenance is even more important. Now there are AI data centres planned that have a huge appetite for energy. There has to be some sort of limitation put on some new large energy consumers or we won't have the capacity in the timeframe it takes for the consumers to come on line. New Coal is simply too expensive and too polluting to even consider, though some idiot politicians think it is still OK. Nuclear is way to expensive to build and takes far too long to be a viable option in the medium 10 to 15 year timeframe, plus we have no experience or expertise. So far at just under 2 weeks since my new solar and battery was installed I have only exported power & used zero grid power even while charging my EV, running A/C & normal household stuff. I also have a fault in one string of panels so they are not producing power at all yet. Total on line is 5.7 kW max of solar.

I had a heat pump in my last house and it was tied in to the solar system so I never paid anything for hot water. My current property has solar hot water with a manual electric switch for the internal resistive element. Since the 4th of august i have switched it on once for about 3 hours when we had a week of cloudy and rainy weather. In Victoria I imagine the elctrice system would need to be on more often.

It is not surprising that the right wing of politics are heading down hill. They keep rabbiting on about how they will make electricity cheaper but have no plans on how this will happen. They keep harping on about "base load" power a term from last century when everything was coal. It is "peak demand" that is the issue now and during heat waves with the huge demand for air conditioning etc brown outs are a reality. These have happened even before there was much renewable energy around. We are awash with energy in the middle of the day now with so much commercial solar and wind and the huge amount of rooftop solar on homes and businesses so storing that energy is just common sense. Many early solar farms are switching off during peak production when the spot price goes negative as they never envisaged they would need to store energy. In NSW home owners are limited to exporting a maximum of 5 kW to help prevent grid overload. So if you are producing more and have no storage the excess is dissipated as heat. Storage is what we need. Batteries are expensive though but fast to deploy. Pumped hydro is a great way to do this as well but costly & time consuming to set up. One part of the puzzle is State & Federal subsidised batteries for home owners. My installer said to me that up until June it was all new rooftop solar. From July on it has been all new batteries, most on properties that already have large solar systems & some like me installing both. These do not need any new infrastructure at all and reduce the load on existing poles & wires so the subsidies are paying for them selves.

I have had my new solar system & battery now for 1 week. So far I have not imported any energy & have exported about 75kWh. I have charged my EV twice, charged my ride on mower twice, run the air conditioning for several hours on 5 out of 7 days, run a freezer & large fridge/freezer & used electricity on other household things as normal like cooking, washing, dishwasher, TV, lights, computers etc. The battery has never got down to below 40% before it starts recharging in the morning. I have 5.8 kW of solar panels with 3.0 kW yet to come on line. The battery is 18.64 kWh & is expandable up to 41.76 kWh. We have had mostly sunny or partly cloudy days with one mostly overcast. Cost $11,650.00 which will take about 6 years to pay back. The feed in tariff is poor at 2.8c/kWh so my only cost will be the exorbitant supply charge of nearly $2.00 a day offset a bit by the feed in tariff.. My long term goal is to go off grid but I will probably need to add a couple of extra 4.66 kWh modules to the battery. Time will tell. There are plenty of people like me doing the same especially those living on acreage or in country areas prone to power cuts and a lot more adding batteries but not intending to leave the grid. This just one part of our clean energy future.

"Kill them all" apparently what Hegseth said after they shot up a boat of suspected drug smugglers & found 2 survivors clinging to the upended boat & they did.Under international law Hegseth is guilty of War Crimes.

They also produce better electric cars than the US industry apart from Tesla, though they have overtaken Tesla as the top manufacturer now.

85-90% of EV owners charge at home, usually when the electricity tariff is off peak, from their own solar, during free zero tariff times or all 3. Battery swap may be useful for only a small percentage of owners & possibly hire companies as renters are often going long distances. It wouldn't suit me at all. I charge from my solar and also get 3 hours of free electricity each day (11.00am- 2.00pm) plus only 8c/kWh from midnight to 6am. When I do go on a trip the cars range is longer than my bladder so 20 minutes at a fast charger will get the battery back to 80% & that is barely enough time for a coffee and ablution break. Lots of hotels & motels now have destination chargers. These are slow AC 7kW chargers but you just plug in and unplug in the morning with a full charge. I also note the government is considering legislating free power for everyone in the middle of the day. There is now so much solar & wind power that they are turning the systems off as the price goes negative so they have to pay to get rid of their energy. Of course the real solution is to install battery storage & use that when demand & spot price is high. I am installing a battery with a new solar system at the property I have just moved in to. In theory I will be able to go off grid but I will see how it goes through all different conditions first.

He was a B grade actor at his best, but he had a good sense of humour & cracked quite a few good jokes. May of these are on Youtube.

There are heaps of Electric Bike manufacturers including all the major brands and many startups. As you would expect they have electrifying performance with huge torque from zero rpm and some have pretty decent range not far behind ICE powered bikes but it is the recharging time that is the issue. Now that there are megawatt chargers and new EV batteries that can add 500km of range in 5 minutes that will eventually be able to be scaled for bikes as well.

We may currently be reliant on fossil fuel oils but synthetic oils we now produce from various plants etc are far superior and we are also able to produce bio-fuels which are far less polluting than what we are digging up.

Kamala Harris is intelligent and articulate & would make a fine President. Unlike the uncouth, uneducated, obscene orange excuse for a man they have now. Part of the problem is that the christian fundamentalist religious nut jobs are still living in the 18th century and even a lot of reasonable modern christians still think a womans place is in the home. I don't think the US is yet ready for a female president as they are so morally backward but think the opposite.

Trump says it is all a hoax, so given that he lied more that 35,000 times during his first Presidency and that the fossil fuel industry was one of his major backers (Big Oil gave him $445 million alone) during the election campaign for his current presidency, he must be right. Yeah right.