The climate change debate continues.

[facthunter]

Latitude 40 South is a strong wind area but it's predominately  from a westerly direction. Wellington is 41 degrees south so that fits, though the effect moves with the thermal equator. Nev

Edited September 9, 2022 by facthunter

[spacesailor]

Latitude 40 !?.

BUT

It is the ' sutherlies ' that hammer Wellington.

They come straight up from the ' Antarctic ' , so cold it,s said they are lazy winds ! .

The don,t go around you , but go straight through you .

Chilled to the ( back ) bone .

spacesailor

[kgwilson]

The coastline is pretty spectacular. One trip back from Christchurch about 40 years ago was not one I would like to repeat. A mate (who owned an aircraft maintenance business and I had flown from Hamilton down to Dunedin to deliver a 172 that had been fully repaired after a crash. He flew the ex crasher & I the business 172. We then returned that day to Christchurch where we stayed for a couple of days & attended a pretty wild 21st birthday party. We left to go home & got about 80NM up the coast & turned around & went back to Christchurch as the marginal weather turned to custard.

 

The next day it was better but not much. We called Wellington not far from Blenheim & requested radar coverage across the strait & they obliged. We could see the odd squall ahead & tried to avoid them but ended up getting hammered in one. I could not see a thing for a short while as the rain was so intense. Finally we got to the bottom of the North Island & headed up the West coast lower than the hills to the East which was where the wind was now coming from because the ceiling had got quite low. About half way to Mana Island just off the coast from Titahi Bay we hit some of the worst turbulence in my flying career. I thought I had my seat belt fairly tight (they are only lap & sash) but my head hit the roof. I think my comment was something like faaaaaarrrrkkk. The noises from the airframe were indescribable. BUT once past Porirua & Pukerua Bay, Paekakareki  where I'd flown Hang Gliders a few years before it was perfect.

[facthunter]

Winds will go around mountains rather than go over them if it's possible.. (Single peaks) and that will increase the velocity locally.  Nev

[pmccarthy]

Winds will go around mountains rather than go over them
so do I.

[old man emu]

I was wondering if anyone has looked at a correlation between the cycle of Solar Flares and the 11 cycle of the Pacific South Equatorial Current on the frequency of flood years on Australia's east coast? The Murrumbidgee has risen above 7 metres (23 ft) at Gundagai nine times between 1852 and 2010, an average of just under once every eleven years.

 

[red750]

I lived in Sydney from 1972 to 1978, and travelled home to Melbourne a couple of times a year. I remember the 1974 flood at Gundagai. The Hume Highway used to travel through the town and over the Middleton Bridge. This photo from Google Maps shows the river from the bridge today. During that flood the water was lapping the bottom of the planks, and traffic was limited to one way at a time, with no more than two cars or one truck on the bridge at any one time. Along the highway near Jugiong, debris was caught in the fencing along the highway, and there was a high water mark on the service station wall a metre above ground level.

 

[Old Koreelah]

2 hours ago, old man emu said:

I was wondering if anyone has looked at a correlation between the cycle of Solar Flares and the 11 cycle of the Pacific South Equatorial Current on the frequency of flood years on Australia's east coast? The Murrumbidgee has risen above 7 metres (23 ft) at Gundagai nine times between 1852 and 2010, an average of just under once every eleven years.

 

Lennox Walker’s Crohamhurst Observatory was followed avidly by lots of rural folk. Was he studying Solar Cycles?

[old man emu]

From 1887 there have been four long range weather forecasters of great accuracy in Queensland

Clement Wragge 1852 – 1922

Inigo Jones 1874 – 1954

Lennox Walker 1925 – 2000

Hayden Walker 

 

Without my regurgitating their story, read it yourself here:  https://www.haydenwalkersweather.com.au/about

 

Sunspot activity did form part of their thesis on weather. They also kept weather records over that 130-odd year period. No doubt the predictions of teh current incumbent, Hayden Walker, are enhanced by the added knowledge from ocean current studies and studies of solar activity by NASA.

 

 

The Sun appears to have a cycle of about 11 years during which it waxes and wanes. Its activity is measured by the number of sunspots on its surface, which have been counted each day since 1755. During that 11-or-so years there’s a “solar minimum” (when there are the fewest sunspots) and a “solar maximum” (when there are the most sunspots). We’re now in Solar Cycle 25, which began in December 2019. Solar maximum is predicted to occur midway through Solar Cycle 25, so between November 2024 and March 2026—and most likely July 2025. Solar events will continue to increase as we near solar maximum in 2025, and our lives and technology on Earth will be impacted.

 

 

 

 

[red750]

Labor, no doubt under pressure from the Greens, have forced AGL to bring the closure of Loy Yang Powerstation forward a decade, without provision for replacing the energy supply. Regional areas to be lumbered with the solar and wind farms.

[facthunter]

I'm not so sure about that. They may have just added up the commercial risks. Nev

[Marty_d]

7 hours ago, red750 said:

Labor, no doubt under pressure from the Greens, have forced AGL to bring the closure of Loy Yang Powerstation forward a decade, without provision for replacing the energy supply. Regional areas to be lumbered with the solar and wind farms.

That's an interesting skew of the facts.  AGL chose to close it early.  And the closing date's still 13 years in the future so I'm not sure why the panic.

[facthunter]

IF the idea was from the government, the power company would have extracted some payment. Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

Click on the 5 year graph of this: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal. OK

 

Let me see.. Renewables are the way the market wants to go. Coal is becoming expensive. La Trobe valley coal I recollect is brown, which means a decent amount of other toxins and I recall water.  https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2014/08/28/five-reasons-expanding-brown-coal-mines-might-problem/

 

AGL or Origin or whoever it is has to think of the future. Renewable energy technology just gets better, while coal burning technology, even with the scrubbers, has reached the top of its game, and it ain't that great a performance. There is also the reputational risk to think of.

 

Towns in Aus are going 100% renewable, too (forgetting the megabatteries). I can't recall the town in Vic that has just done it, but it has been done before: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/06/18/australian-town-powered-100-by-solar-pv-and-battery/.  If I were a fossil fuel energy company exec, I would be looking at the rather large graffiti style writing on the wall and planning to transition, otherwise the company I am responsible for may well go the way of Kodak - remember them? Apparently digital photography would never catch on.

 

And regardless of the climate debate, why would anyone want to keep dirty, polluting, and ultimately killing power stations going when they can have cheaper, cleaner, and safer alternatives that are also reliable (although, I will accept that the places that mine rare earth metals need to up their game with respect to toxicity and safety - but we have rare earth metals in Aus and have a much higher standard of health and safety).

 

 

----

Edited October 2, 2022 by Jerry_Atrick

[facthunter]

Yallourne is BROWN coal too. The worst from a pollution aspect. Nev

[Yenn]

I think the reason that power station owners are shutting down is not the same reason Kodak failed. I was a keen photographer way back when Kodak was in its heyday and they started producing rubbish. One example was a colour print from slide system. It required you to buy the equipment and all materials from Kodak. Only a few months after introducing it, they took it of the market, resulting in photographers having a useless piece of processing equipment with no paper or chemicals to use it. The power stations are wanting to reduce costs and cutting down on maintenance, which is bringing their end of life forward. Callide power station had a generator break apart, leaving a big piece of machinery in the roof and that generator has been off line for over a year.

[octave]

Mispost

Edited October 3, 2022 by octave

[octave]

 
I think it is accepted that Kodak failed because although it invented digital cameras it stuck with its old model of making money on consumables such as film and paper etc.

 

Edited October 3, 2022 by octave

[pmccarthy]

A company that has received billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers is cutting down environmentally-important forests, a BBC Panorama investigation has found.

Drax runs Britain's biggest power station, which burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets - which is classed as renewable energy.

The BBC has discovered some of the wood comes from primary forests in Canada. 

The company says it only uses sawdust and waste wood.

Panorama analysed satellite images, traced logging licences and used drone filming to prove its findings. Reporter Joe Crowley also followed a truck from a Drax mill to verify it was picking up whole logs from an area of precious forest. 

Ecologist Michelle Connolly told Panorama the company was destroying forests that had taken thousands of years to develop.

 

"It's really a shame that British taxpayers are funding this destruction with their money. Logging natural forests and converting them into pellets to be burned for electricity, that is absolutely insane," she said.

[old man emu]

It is ironic that what is touted as the saviour of the atmospheric environment - solar power generation - is now becoming a NIMBY proposition.  It might seem OK to say that Australia has hundreds of square kilometres on which to erect solar panel arrays, but once constructed, those arrays are a blight to the visible landscape and remove agricultural land from production.

 

An example is the proposed solar panel farm on the approach to Mudgee from Sydney. After driving for about an hour through hilly, boring sandstone country, you start to come down onto a widening valley where grape vines crowd the slopes and closer to Mudgee the valley floor widens for grazing and crop[ production. However, the proposal wold have hectares of this valley flor covered with solar panels, to be hidden from the view of passing tourists and indulgent winos by high banks of earth.

https://9now.nine.com.au/a-current-affair/mudgee-nsw-community-divided-solar-farm-proposal/54d519b0-1721-4635-b3ad-e7cfb7870ee2

 

[onetrack]

Yes, it's just simply wrong to install huge areas of solar panels on good quality, high-value, highly productive farmland. Solar panels can go anywhere, and low-value terrain has to be the primary installation area for big areas of commercial solar panels.

We have already lost enough top quality, highly productive farmland, to residential development and urban expansion, besides reducing these areas even more, by covering them with solar panels.

[facthunter]

I'm sure it could be arranged to carry out farming under the panels. Any thing that doesn't need direct sunlight..  Nev

[Marty_d]

If they were spaced properly, you would still get strips of sunlight and enough reflected light to grow grass between them.  Then the livestock would have grazing and also shelter under the panels.

[onetrack]

Yes, it's already being trialled, and it even has a name - Agrovoltaics. But, typically, little is being planned here to carry out agrovoltaics, it's always America, and even Africa, that leads the way in trials.

 

There's an article below, where one mixed farming operator in NSW was doing a small "grazing under panels" trial, but it was simply limited to letting sheep graze under panels, so it's already relatively low-value farmland, anyway.

 

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/09/30/agrivoltaic-solar-farms-feature/#

 

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/solar-energy-security-farm-africa/#:~:text=Combining solar energy and agriculture&text=This allows crops to be,incomes in disadvantaged rural areas.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-08-25/parkes-solar-panel-sheep-trial-early-positive-results/12581756

 

[willedoo]

4 hours ago, facthunter said:

I'm sure it could be arranged to carry out farming under the panels. Any thing that doesn't need direct sunlight..  Nev

Worm farms.