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A bunch of scientists wrote an open letter to the German government in the FT this week, urging them to postpone the planned shutdown of 8GW of German nuclear power. German emissions are inevitably rising and CO2 targets being missed as a result of populist pandering to Green policies.

You can bypass the FT paywall by picking the top item off these search results:

https://www.google.com/search?q="Letter%3A+Germany+should+postpone+nuclear+exit+%E2%80%8Ato+help%E2%80%8A+climate"

Leo's sheepish admission that "the wind didn't blow as much as anticipated". You would think that might give pause for thought before you go and put all the rest of your eggs in the renewables basket. However, when the Green's have ruled out all the technologies that WORK, you have to go with what's left, no matter how broken.

https://twitter.com/JRD0000/status/1443700468388175875

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The cost implications are eye-watering. The Irish Academy of Engineers have been pointing this out for a long time, notably in a report at the start of 2020 that went completely ignored. Meanwhile, greenies continue to fantasize about the technology magic bullet of grid scale storage, a nut that will quite likely never be cracked. Forget about batteries. Basic laws of chemistry and thermodynamics dictate they they can play a role in power conditioning and load smoothing, but will never compensate for weeks of slack winds. Same for every other technology from water electrolysis to flywheels to compressed or cryogenic air storage.

Meanwhile the Greens turn their noses up at existing technologies that can solve both medium and long term problems. So, no LNG ("those nasty frackers"), no nukes (much too scary). I don't think they have any concept of the scale of energy use that modern society depends on, and they don't have the wit to understand the limitations of renewables, nor to either propose or understand solutions. That makes them a bunch of very DANGEROUS idiots, because the one thing that definitely COULD kill millions of people is the destruction of our energy infrastructure. I sincerely hope that people are starting to wake up to their lunacy.

Green policies are a total clusterfark. We are now in an extremely dangerous situation. The public has been whipped up into hysterics by media misreporting on climate change. We've had a decade of headlines that focused exclusively on the worst case scenarios from the IPCC AR5 (and now AR6) reports -- scenarios that the IPCC itself have said are implausible. And yet the UN Secretary General himself claimed that billions of people were in imminent danger -- in total contradiction of the latest report on which he was commenting. Millions of people, and especially the young, are utterly convinced that climate change is going to kill them and that bad people in government are making it happen. The bilge that is being promulgated is going to be the undoing of society if nobody calls a halt to the insanity. Fringe groups like Extinction Rebellion are fanning the flames, talking about civilisational collapse and imminent widespread rape and pillage. None of it bears any resemblance whatsoever to the actual science behind the headlines.

With the public thus rattled, the Greens have rammed through a bunch of totally unworkable policies that are destroying our energy infrastructure. Wind and solar are NEVER going to power northern hemisphere industrialised societies. It can't be done. Certainly they can be part of the energy mix, as along as we don't mind paying dearly for them. Global energy consumption is going to double by 2050 even if we don't try to electrify transport and heating. Those two sectors would double consumption again. As pointed out in the Irish media today, fossil fuel consumption will not reduce even if we meet 2030 renewables targets, because we will have added extra loads on the power grid. The same is true generally in the rest of the world. Look at the places where renewables usage is growing -- fossil consumption is not going down, nor will it.

I don't know if people understand our 70% renewables target for 2030. It means that wind will have to generate 95% of our electricity most of the time, to hit a 70% average. When the wind doesn't blow we are almost totally reliant on backups. The implications are massive: a) we need fossil fuel backup for a MUCH higher level of demand that we have today, b) that backup will additionally have to compensate for the planned retirement of coal and oil-fired generating plant, c) the cost of all that additional plant is going to have to be paid for directly by consumers, a piece of unwelcome news that all politicians (not just Greens) are studiously avoiding breaking to the public, d) we'll have to build new transmission infrastructure in addition to new wind farms and gas plants, e) we have to somehow persuade hardnosed investors to build new gas-fired generation without being able to guarantee grid connections or gas supply, f) we will have to guarantee power purchase agreements for that backup power whether it is produced or not -- nobody puts up cash for plant JUST IN CASE it's needed.

Let's hope the rudder doesn't fall off instead. And of course, the next port of call (first gas) is merely for replenishment of supplies. The final destination is still a long way beyond that.

Ryan says we'll need "some" fossil fuels. He neglects to mention that we'll need 100% capacity backup. It's like having a shiny new car that turns out to be so unreliable you have to buy a second car for when the first one doesn't work. But since they both need their own transmission infrastructure it's like having to build another driveway for the second car. Somebody has to pay for all this duplication.

It gets worse. Nobody seems to be talking about the wastage of mined resources for renewables. Wind and solar use more than five times as much copper as fossil fuel plants. For onshore wind it's nearly four tons of copper per installed megawatt, solar is more than five tons, and offshore wind with its extra cabling is almost 10 tons. Wind turbines also need well over half a ton of rare earth elements -- neodymium and praseodymium -- per megawatt.

Prices of these commodities are soaring. What's more, China has a stranglehold on the rare earth supply. The most promising new copper supply belongs to a Russian billionaire, the remote Udokan prospect near Lake Baikal. So we could soon be depending on Russia for both our gas AND our wind turbines.

No problem. Sinn Fein will shake the magic money tree to fund the energy transition. (Plus their own apparent transition from armed Marxists to woke eco warriors).

Fair enough. I see the shares are back in the 1.3's on this lovely Autumn morning. You can hoover them up like Autumn leaves. Buy some CORO while you're at it ... down 94% since Parsons gave them away "free" three years ago.

Business Post: "Ireland will need to rely on emergency generators to plug the power supply gap, regulator warns.The Commission for Regulation of Utilities has set out a range of actions required to ensure the country does not become subject to regular blackouts over the next four years. Daniel Murray reports."x
Would be nice if one of the actions was for Ryan to get his finger out and cut some of the red tape at DCCAE.

With the absolute best possible outcome and a lot of good luck it is going to be years before SOU is worth anything. All of the current news is around Phase 1 which is certainly welcome and saves SOU from going to the wall but is worth precisely zero.

They gave a good vibe on contract completion with ItalFluid and progress toward Phase 1 FID. That is all very welcome. Less convincing was John Argent's talking up of the Moroccan extension of the Algerian Triassic. If you look up scholarly articles on the Algerian TAGI, it suffers many of the the same permeability problems due to cementation as SOU's ill-fated drills in Morocco. Not sure what "learning" from the previous drills Argent was referring to other than that their basin model may not be worth a fiddler's curse when the seismic is incapable of predicting permeability. Even if they find a partner with the money to drill the committed well on Anoual, yet another dry hole would be a serious knock-back. With Phase 1 revenue fully committed to repaying debt, it still all hinges on Phase 2 to eventually provide the revenue stream needed for a proper drilling campaign. All of which means that decent shareholder value is likely still some years off. Still, would have to agree that they are more serious and better focused than the previous clown show.

Jes' sayin' ... that filter button is just a click away. Twenty messages filtered in the last two days is a lot of bilge that didn't have to be read. If people didn't respond to the idiots I suspect they would just go away.

That's exactly what climate change does! It reduces the temperature gradient between the equator and poles, weakening the jet stream and causing it to meander. The looping jet stream then sets up blocking patterns in the Atlantic, allowing continental high pressure to dominate the Atlantic fringe of Europe and preventing maritime low pressure systems from blowing through. However, you don't need climate change to get blocking patterns for days or even weeks at a time. Relying on wind is a bad idea, climate change or not.

Most citizens are in favour of Green emissions targets. They can't join the dots to see where it's leading us, or what it's going to cost them. The gas shortages are being spun as a reason why we should be relying on even more renewables, skipping lightly over the fact that the wind hasn't been meeting needs. Apart from a few blowy days in August, wind power has been running at a small fraction of nameplate capacity for the last two months. Our 4.5 GW of installed capacity has been running at a few hundred megawatts on average, and almost nothing at all for sizeable chunks of time.

"If the current spot market for gas is so high ... then why aren't our Sound Energy booked reserves feflecting it in our SP!"

Because the spot price is for gas being delivered today. SOU isn't delivering any gas today. The current price is understood to reflect shortages due to economies getting back on their feet. Look at the futures price for gas in 2023 (taking care to compare the same months as gas price is seasonal). It's 40% lower than today.

What won't be long? Higher gas prices are not going to drill oil wells on Barryroe. Only $160m of funding will do that. Linn needs to get his "significantly strengthened board" to start pulling their weight. An end of September update would be nice also.

So gas and power are already more expensive than a year ago by a factor of four or five in the UK. They have just lost a gigawatt of interconnector capacity to France until next March due to a fire. Gas supply over the winter is looking extremely tight even if Putin doesn't intentionally mess Europe around. More coal is being brought back online just in time for COP26.

Ireland can expect to be squeezed even harder, relying on the UK for an increasing amount of its gas supply. It has its own power capacity problems. And the 500 MW East-West interconnector won't save us when the wind doesn't blow. The average punter probably thinks it can be turned on like a light switch when we need it. In fact, electricity flows either direction depending on who is willing to pay the most for it. Domestic suppliers in Ireland will have to bid against a power-starved UK, even for Irish wind power. That's how integrated markets work.

Big Wind will be laughing all the way to the bank. When the wind blows they have ready customers at premium prices. When it doesnt, well ... not their problem. And Sleepy Ryan wants to make us a lot more dependent on them over the next few years.

My increasing suspicion is that -- as Graham himself has hinted more than once -- Phase 2 pipeline finance is unlikely to be forthcoming until Phase 1 has demonstrated consisted flow results from its wells. And since we now know that the Afriquia Gaz loan deal won't be closed until end of October, so FID won't be any earlier than near end of year. And SOU has never in its history come in early on a deadline, so when they say 18-24 months to first LNG, it's not less than 24 months. So first LNG is early 2024 at best. I'm going to hazard a guess that a Phase 2 deal does not close until after that with pipeline construction to start later again (and note, I mean *close*, not that there couldn't be any progress between now and then).

"The atmosphere of the meeting was all very positive with the hint that real progress is being made with Phase 2."

I presume people realise it's a CEO's *job* to be positive. Nobody was more positive than Parsons.

"All is dependent on the Gas sales agreement with ONEE and progress is being made in this regard."

That's odd, because Parsons claimed the GSA wasn't as important as other concerns. I think even *he* started being embarrassed by the repetitive RNS's proclaiming progress on the GSA without ever consummating anything. So he eventually said that the GSA wasn't important because they had to get things like funding in place first. Interesting that Graham is now saying it's the other way round.