*All monetary values in this post are in Australian dollars. Conversion factors relative to the 2016-2017 construction period are 0.75 for US dollars and 0.62 for Euros.
Background:
Coober Pedy, 2016 population 1,762, is an “electricity island” with no grid connections to the rest of Australia. Its ~12 GWh/year electricity consumption (peak load is around 3 MW) has historically been filled by eight diesel units owned and operated by EnGen and aggregating 3.9MW. Figure 1 is a location map and Figure 2 an aerial view of the town, which is renowned as the world capital of opal mining:
Figure 1: Coober Pedy location map
Figure 2: Aerial view of town
In 2013 Engen began to explore the possibility of replacing Coober Pedy’s diesel generation with renewables:
In 2013, EnGen began investigating the potential to integrate renewable energy into the existing power station to reduce diesel consumption in Coober Pedy. EnGen submitted an Expression of Interest to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency’s (“ARENA”) Regional Australia’s Renewables Industry Program (IRAR) in November 2013 which ultimately led to the execution of a Funding Agreement with ARENA in July 2014. Construction of the CPRHP commenced in September 2016 and commercial operations commenced on 1 July 2017.
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We are told that the cost of Li-ion storage batteries is decreasing. Not so with Tesla, which has just increased the price of its 13.5 kWh Powerwall unit plus supporting hardware from $US6,600 ($489/kWh) to $7,800 ($578/kWh). The $100/kWh “holy grail” price considered necessary to support mass deployment of battery storage is obviously still some way off. To follow we have our usual mix – the latest doings of OPEC; natural gas in California; coal in the US, Germany and Finland; nuclear in Japan, Ontario, India, Belgium and Germany; hydro and pot in Canada; 100% renewables in Puerto Rico and Scotland; the Ireland-Wales Greenlink; the UK backs off EVs; car bodies made from carbon fiber batteries and what climate change is going to do to beer.
A number of operating small-scale renewables plants provide advance warning of the potential problems involved in transitioning the world to renewable energy, but only two of them – Gorona del Viento in the Canary Islands (GdV) and King Island, Tasmania (KI) – provide grid data that allow their performance to be checked. In this post I summarize the results of another batch of KI data covering the period from July 15 through September 30, 2018. Over this period KI generated about 60% of its electricity from renewables, effectively the same estimate as I made for October and November 2017 in 
A review of recent public opinion polls reveals that the public, when asked only about climate change, will agree overall that it’s a serious problem that demands action. When asked to rank climate change against other concerns, however, it comes well down the list. The implication is that the public really isn’t worried about climate change. Certainly the high level of public support that would be needed to implement an aggressive and highly disruptive transition to low-carbon energy, such as that called for by the Paris Agreement, does not exist. The climate change lobby is in fact losing the public support battle.
In 3Q 2018 Gorona del Viento (GdV) supplied 74.2 % of El Hierro’s electricity (95.4% in July) and 17.1% of its total energy consumption, up from 64.2% % and 14.8% in 2Q 2018. Since project startup in June 2015 GdV has supplied 46.5% of El Hierro’s electricity and 10.7% of its energy. In 3Q 2018 GdV supplied 100% of El Hierro’s electricity for a total of 45.6 days, with 18 days of continuous 100% generation during a sustained period of high winds from July 15 to August 1. Hydro continued to underperform, contributing only 6.1% of total 3Q generation. According to GdV the plant is now performing at its optimum level but is still not capable of supplying El Hierro with 100% renewable electricity – an admission of failure. Adding solar panels, enlarging the lower reservoir and EV storage are among the options now being considered.
Last week Gov. Jerry Brown signed 
Guest post by Andy Dawson. “Who Killed the Small Modular Reactor Program?” is an abridged version of a 
The California legislature just passed Assembly Bill 100 (AB100), which according to the inset calls for “100% clean energy by 2045”. The brief review presented in this post shows that AB100, which targets electricity, not energy, will cut California’s greenhouse gas emissions by only about 16% even in the unlikely event its target is met. Its main impact will be to add to the regulatory overload from which California’s electricity providers already suffer. The fact that the bill was passed at all indicates that California legislators, as well as being unable to tell the difference between megawatts and megawatt-hours, are also unable to tell the difference between electricity and energy.
Four months have passed since the last update in May 2018 and it is time to take a fresh look at the global oil market, especially in light of the unique OPEC+Russia+others deal 
Growth in Li-ion batteries depends on a number of imponderables, such as how rapidly the world converts to electric vehicles, how quickly battery manufacturing capacity can be ramped up and where the electricity to power millions of EVs will come from. This post ignores these issues, concentrating instead on the question of whether the mining sector can increase production of the metals and minerals needed to support a high-battery-growth scenario without running out of reserves. The data are not good enough to reach a firm conclusion, but the main uncertainty seems to be whether cobalt production from the Congo, which presently supplies over half of global demand, can be relied on. Lithium and cobalt reserves will not be exhausted in the time frame considered (out to 2030) but will be close to it if no additional reserves are discovered. (Inset, lithium mine in Chile).
More than 35,000 homes and 600 businesses in Scotland have installed solar PV panels, but only because of lavish government subsidies. Now that these subsidies are being discontinued the question becomes whether solar PV in Scotland can stand on its own two feet. The data from operating PV arrays presented in this post show that the answer is a resounding “no”. With capacity factors of only 8-9% and seasonal generation ranges exceeding a factor of twelve, Scotland is in fact one of the worst places in Europe for solar, despite what its supporters claim.
Back in December 2013 Scottish and Southern Energy PLC (SSE) was granted planning approval for the 600 MW / 30 GWh pumped hydro storage (PHS) scheme at Coire Glas, northern Scotland. At the time I wrote a post called 
Before 2011 global investment in clean energy (wind, solar, biomass, biofuels etc.) grew rapidly. Then in and around 2011 many governments abandoned renewables subsidies in favor of capacity auctions, and growth in global clean energy investment ceased. Investment in North and South America has not increased since 2007 and in Asia it has not increased since 2015. Clean energy investment in Europe has been declining steadily since 2011, and investment in the UK and Germany is now approaching zero. The current level of investment (~$300 billion a year) is also too low to support a global transition to renewable electricity and to meet global emissions targets. The indications are that it will reach adequate levels only if lavish government subsidies are reinstated. The global renewable electricity transition may fail simply because of a lack of funding.
This week’s lead story features YouTube, which is fighting what it considers to be the misinformation on videos posted by global warming dissenters with fact-checking boxes (inset), with the data sourced from Wikipedia. We continue with Saudi Arabia’s oil production – is it up or down?; the Saudi/Canada standoff; US LNG and Nord Stream 2; coal in Poland and China; nuclear in France and India; the Laos hydro dam collapse; Australia’s national energy guarantee; the hydrogen-to-ammonia “breakthrough”; renewables to power Blockchain; renewables and the UK capacity market; subsidies for UK SMRs; climate change to cause more windless periods and how to save the planet – give up meat.
The IPCC Special Report:
The results of the report are presented in:
Here I address only the first three documents. The Chapters are a little too long for a brief review.
What the press release says
We begin with the more important statements made in the press release, which is what the media will read first and quite possibly all the media will read:
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