Reason #3 Why I Love To Blog -- The Road To Australia -- July 11, 2017

Updates

August 13, 2017: how is Australia meeting its crisis?

SA is now being referred to as the world's renewable crash test dummy for good reason. Set aside Saint Elon's battery backup plan for the moment. 

The SA government has now committed to leasing 9 GE TM2500 generators that burn almost 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel per hour. 

Later, 2:28 p.m. Central Time: I wish I had said this. See first comment --

Is there no end to the fake news disseminated by the MSM? It's all distortions and half-truths, with an outright lie thrown in here and there for good measure.

So let's get this straight. The blackouts which have occurred, despite some of the highest electricity prices in the world, are all the fault of those evil fossil fuel producers and their gaming the system.

Banning fracking, $0.60 cent feed-in tariffs for solar, huge up-front subsidies for solar and wind installations, grid problems caused by a surfeit of intermittent wind and solar, none of that had anything to do with causing the problems.

Even after "explaining" this to my wife, she did not want to hear it. She is so anti-Trump, so anti-oil -- don't ask.

Original Post

This is the print edition's headline: "The Energy Shortage No One Saw Coming." LOL

No one saw it coming, but we blogged about it several times quite some time ago. We even had a tag for it: Road_To_Australia. Finally, the WSJ catches up with the story. LOL.

 The story has a different headline/sub-text in the on-line posting: How Energy-Rich Australia Exported Its Way Into an Energy Crisis. The world’s No. 2 seller abroad of liquefied natural gas holds so little in reserve that it can’t keep the lights on in Adelaide—a cautionary tale for the U.S.

Like the cautionary tales that the following countries are providing the US: Germany; France; Great Britain; Saudi Arabia; Japan. The only three countries that seem to be on the same path: the US, China, Russia. And it's very possible, the US could follow Germany, et al.

Ah, yes, a cautionary tale for the US. I'm getting tired of that cliche: "cautionary tales." If I want to read "tales," I will read bedtime stories to Sophia.

From the linked article:

On a sweltering night this February, the world’s No. 2 exporter of liquefied natural gas didn’t have enough energy left to keep its own citizens cool.

A nationwide heat wave in Australia drove temperatures above 105 degrees Fahrenheit around the city of Adelaide on the southern coast. As air-conditioning demand soared, regulators called on Pelican Point, a local gas-fueled power station running at half capacity, to crank up.

It couldn’t. The plant’s operator said it wasn’t able to get enough natural gas quickly to run its turbines fully. At 6:03 p.m., regulators cut power to 90,000 Adelaide homes to prevent a wider blackout.

Resource-rich Australia has an energy crisis, one that offers lessons for America as it prepares to vastly increase natural-gas shipments abroad.

Australia now exports so much liquefied natural gas, or LNG, it may overtake No. 1 exporter Qatar within several years. It exported 62% of its gas production last year, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Yet its policy makers didn’t ensure enough gas would remain at home. As exports increased from new LNG facilities in eastern Australia, some state governments let aging coal plants close and accelerated a push toward renewable energy for environmental concerns. That left the regions more reliant on gas for power, especially when intermittent sources such as wind and solar weren’t sufficient.

I'm too tired to go through the exercise of connecting the dots but regular readers don't need my help.

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For The Granddaughters

One of my favorite filmmakers: D. A Pennebaker. The WSJ piece begins thusly:

D.A. Pennebaker, 91, is a documentary filmmaker whose films include “Don't Look Back,” “Monterey Pop,” “ Ziggy Stardust, ” “The War Room” and, most recently, “Unlocking the Cage.”

He has collaborated with his wife, filmmaker Chris Hegedus, since the 1970s, and received an Oscar in 2012.

I grew up pretty much by myself. My parents separated soon after I was born and moved to separate cities—my father to Chicago, and my mother and me to Quakertown, PA,, where she was from.

Later, when I was 5 and my mother was living in New York, I began shuttling between New York and Chicago. I’d be put on a train with a nametag tied to my coat. For the next day and night I was on my own with a whole train at my mercy. I rarely saw much of my parents at either end. I was cared for by sitters or hurried off to boarding schools.

Very, very interesting. Children are incredibly resilient. So much for "helicopter" mothers and "Asian tigers" or whatever they are called.

"Monterey Pop" remains one of my favorites; "Don't Look Back" is also very, very good.  Prince did humanity a huge disfavor by "never" granting interviews. Ironically, he did himself a huge disfavor; he will fade into the background. The "Mamas and Papas" and "Bob Dylan" will survive because of D. A. Pennebaker.

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Your Iowan Grandmother

I cannot believe how "lucky" we are. We (her six children; and her dozen or so grandchildren) know very, very little about my mother. She spoke very, very little of her years in Iowa where she grew up. Recently we came across 30 letters -- two of them written when she was in high school; 27 of them written when she was in nursing school; and, one from a family friend many years later -- that she has saved in a special ziplock bag with instructions not to destroy them while she was living. There was nothing said about what to do with them after she dies.

I have inventoried the 30 letters, and am in the process of scanning them all. I will be sending a scanned letter to her children one at a time over the next 30 days or so. I will also provide a bit of context in the narrative about each of the letters.

One of the first phrases (?) that jumped out at me in one of her early letters was materia medica, a term I had never heard in my 30+ years of medicine. A google search brought me to this: https://books.google.com/books?id=j08hwj6UUnIC&pg=PR5&lpg=PR5&dq=medica+materia+course+for+nurses&source=bl&ots=Ssjr7qQAsQ&sig=7XQcj0tFlmq0UAlW4XVfdvinsVI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRxMSK6YHVAhUE_IMKHZo3CYAQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&q=medica%20materia%20course%20for%20nurses&f=false.

I now understand why this was so incredibly difficult for her. Our own older daughter is in her fourth year of an advanced nursing degree. Materia medica is now called something else, and is one of the most difficult subjects our daughter has had to endure.

Reading the first few lines from the scanned book at the link above helps me understand why.

It appears that today's "rendition" of materia medica is Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics.