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Hmm.. can't recall ever being offered free electricity when fossil was the major player in town. So much for the cost argument: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australia-offer-three-hours-free-solar-per-day-millions-2025-11-04/

Depends on HOW inspired it IS. It is also said.. Better to remain silent and people wonder how clever you are than Open your Mouth and PROVE that your are NOT to ALL & sundry. Nev

I believe the Spanish incident was Poor management To get someone to quote you Must state what you will Pay? Kw/hr and make guaranteed Use. etc Standby has no real limit to cost per unit. New Coal was recently ruled out by everybody with an interest in things Like Tomago Aluminium smelter which Last time I checked was 16% of NSW's electricity. State Gov's have in the Past made Power available to Aluminium Suppliers below COST. While I consider Aluminium, Magnesium, steel and copper essential for Australia to Produce I doubt the Masses are Keen on paying for it. Any new source of Power to be brought on line MUST be SYNCHED with the Rest of the Network and use balanced with supply, always. Having Vast distances to connect commits us to a lot of wires regardless of the Sources, and there is a call for duplication for safety of supply. Some remote areas could not pay the real cost of getting Power to their Location. Black Lung disease is still occurring in the Hunter Valley and Mine dust descends On Newcastle when the Wind Blows from the wrong Place. The WHOLE place is undermined as well making subsidence a common occurrence. Nev

The Senate has waved it through. Didn't even debate it.

Please supply me with a link to the relative costs. No politician is being straight forward with it. Intermittents are the cheapest form of electricity if you forget about the extra transmission, battery's, artificial inertia and the considerable amount of underutilized gas backup. Being Aircraft type dudes on this site we realize underutiliseded plant is expensive, still need to do a hundred hourly every year weather you do 98 or 2 hours. Having a lot of inertia on the grid also reacts relatively quickly, has for a hundred years. Synchronous plants give a nice consistant sine wave. Inverters work by very fast switching and produce a steeped sinewave by switching on and of quickly. This is filtered to give a smooth wave form. Ask Spain what happens when an inverter starts acting up with little inertia on the grid.

It never ceases to amaze me that tourists get within a metre of huge cliffs without anything to stop them being blown off the edge - yet if you worked anywhere within 20 metres of that drop, Worksafe would make you wear a hardhat, safety specs, a safety harness, and they'd also require another person to be on standby watching for you potentially making a mistake. I can recall a woman falling off the edge at one of the clifftop whale-watching areas along the Bight in Western S.A. and Eastern W.A. in recent years. Those Bight cliff edges are particularly dangerous, and only a few spots have railings. A gust of wind can come out of nowhere, and send you straight over the edge.

This is as close as I dare get to the cliff edge.

It's all been/being sanitized. Set up so the House will release, but block in the Senate. EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW: the Epstein files after Trump’s sudden call to release them

I remember at a Restaurant, the Waiter said "Walk this way". I doubt I could have without a Lot of Practice. Nev

"Lookout" Nev

"whether". The relative costs are available. NEW coal is very high. Private Investment won't touch it. Carbon Capture and storage is not a goer either. Gas Maybe. IF anyone Mentions BASELOAD they are Bull$#!tting. What we need is rapid adaption to changing demand. Batteries are near Instant response. . Nev

Should make it easy to find him. Just look for a five letter black line.

Its still up in the air weather renewables are cheaper. We need to remember no one anywhere in the world has got close to net 0 using weather dependent intermittent generation. Look at Germany and they get some clean energy from there neighbors. Any one that has got close has either nuclear (France, Sweden Ontario), large amounts of Hydro(Norway, Quebec, Albania) or geothermal(Iceland.) Australia has no nuclear, maybe some hard to access geothermal and hardly any hydro. We have around 7% traditional hydro and are very unlikely to get much more. All the hydrogen plants that have started have gone belly up at I don't know what cost to the government. I have aske a sitting member in the government about this in SA but he isn't getting back to me. May have to send another reminder today. Hydrogen is mentioned in either gencost or the ISP as part of the big plan. I don't know how much of the coalitions policy is gaslighting but I think ditching net 0 by 2050 but keeping in with Paris is a good thing. Hopefully we get the gas price sorted out and we can actually start making things again here. Jobs for our kids, better environmental and workplace laws the some other countries and will save burning bunker oil in big ships sending stuff overseas and back again. This last one really makes the government look stupid. This whole CO2 thing is a global problem. Again, look at electrictymaps. France | App | Electricity Maps France exporting about 13GW of power at the moment. In the UK , a country that is trying to do a similar thing to Australia except they have interconnectors with other countrys, is burning about 20, 000 tonnes of woodchips a day, a lot of which they inport from America to say they are using clean energy. Wood has similar emissions to coal but at least with coal you aren't burning bunker oil in ships to bring it to your country (in the UK). Google Drax power plant. They have also canned looking for gas in the North Sea and instead are going to import from Norway. It is all smoke and mirrors. I don't what the CIS is going to cost us.(capacity investment scheme) If intermittents are so cheap, why all the schemes ect.

Just having a leisurely stroll up a mountain.

The Nat tail is definitely wagging the dog there. i actually have some sympathy for Sussssan. She's trying to be a consultative leader as opposed to the jackbooted "my way or the highway" Dutton. Unfortunately most of the moderate Libs lost their seats in the last election, leaving the conservatives in majority. So when she's consulting, the conservatives get their way, many of whom seem to be more closely aligned to the mad Nats than their own party. So she's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. The Libs seem to have forgotten that they lost lots of city seats to the teal independents precisely because of their stance on climate change. So how the hell do they think that taking an even stupider stance will win those seats back? Without those seats, they cannot get the numbers to form government. On the other side, if they split from the mad Nats then they also don't have the numbers. All the dithering about "we don't want net zero but we still want to stay in the Paris agreement" and "we're all about lowering power prices but we have no plans of how to, and we're going to do it with coal and gas even though renewables are cheaper" are not going to wash with the public. Looks like they've decided they want to be in opposition for the foreseeable future.

At least Hitler admitted that he had served a prison term.

BREAKING: Speaker Mike Johnson reveals the REAL reason why Trump suddenly "supports" the release of the Epstein files — and it's as sinister as we suspected. They really don't want us to see what's in those files... "So what am I to do in a situation like this? I call my counterpart in the Senate, Leader Thune and I talked through this with him and shared our deep concerns and of course they share those concerns as well," Johnson said at a press conference. "And so I'm very confident that when this moves forward in the process if and when it is processed in the Senate — which there is no certainty that that will be — that they will take the time methodically to do what we have not been allowed to do in the House," said Johnson. "To amend this discharge petition and to make sure that these protections are there. The authors of the discharge did not allow us to do that here, that's the rules here but in the Senate they can correct it." Translation: Republicans are going to bury this bill in the Senate. Yesterday, Trump surprised many Americans by stating that he would sign the bill to release the Epstein files if it hits his desk. Now we know why. He doesn't expect it to ever reach him. Johnson claims to be worried that an immediate release of the files will endanger the privacy and wellbeing of Epstein's victims. It's a shamelessly self-serving lie because many of the victims have long supported the release and have even held multiple press conferences demanding it. During the presser, one reporter even pointed out to Johnson that the bill specifically states that "the Attorney General may withhold or redact portions related to child sex abuse materials" or anything that jeopardizes federal investigations. Johnson responded by insisting that such protections are not actually in the bill. This man is far too comfortable lying through his teeth. He clearly thinks that his constituents will never hold him accountable. The simple, obvious truth here is that Johnson cares nothing for the victims. He's worried about protecting the leader of his political movement. If Trump goes down as a child predator, every prominent Republican who enabled him will be caught in the political blast radius. Now that the plan is clear, the American public must speak out even more forcefully for transparency. Trump and Johnson were unable to kill the bill in the House because of the bipartisan demand from both the Democratic and Republican bases for the release. In the Senate, with its thinner margins, Republicans may have an easier time blocking the bill. In the same press conference, Johnson doubled down on his transparently false complaints— "Guys we're not making this up," he insisted. "And you can take it to your council at your outlets' offices and have them review it and they'll tell you the same thing. This should have been done in a much more careful matter and it was not." "And I'm going to point out again when the authors were asked to fix it they said they weren't interested in doing that," said Johnson. "Why? Because this is a raw and obvious political exercise. Again, I'm just going to leave it with this question, you should go ask them all. If you were so concerned about the Epstein files and protecting the victims, why didn't you do a darn thing about it for the first years of the Biden administration? All this stuff was sitting in a warehouse and nobody said a word about it, they didn't care. Now, they're doing it. We all know why. Because they're trying to attack President Trump." The bad faith on display here is staggering, even for a fake "Christian" like Johnson. The reason that the files weren't released during the Biden years was because doing so could have jeopardized the ongoing prosecution against Epstein's right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell. Now that she's been convicted and the appeals process exhausted, there is no downside to releasing the files.

Trump has used privacy laws to have his name reducted from the Epstein files that are going to be released. Up until his election as President for teh first time, Trump was a private citizen, according to Privacy laws. So, to protect the privacy of a private citizen, the FBI has applied the thick black pen wherever Trump's name appears in those files.

Are you sure: But, yeah, luv the bike so far...

I think Jerry's in lerv. I haven't seen him this chatty for .... ever. Judging by the readability of recent posts, the bike is good for his alertness (keyboard accuracy is up) too.

Looks like they are all united.. like they were last time:

Day 2 of ownership and I took the bike this morning to the shop - in 2 degrees grey muck with a little drizzle thrown in for fun. First of all, F! it is a heavy bike with a dry weight of 251kgs. We have a stone parking area of the driveway and I had to drag the bugger back with a bit of resistance before I could get onto it and go. Around a tight curve then down the steep bitumen driveway, holding it in first and using the brakes to stop it rolling away. A tight left onto the road, a shallow left, followed by another tight left and up a country lane, where it is quite hilly and s biy of debris around: The top red line is quite hilly, with an especially steep and narrow road deading south into Milverton. Past Milverton, it is more undulating, but narrow and some quite heavy traffic, wtill with a lot of muck on the road and it was getting wet. Also, as I reached Wellington (Tonedale is a suburb of Wellington), my hands were noticeably cold. For the lower red line, a van had to be patient behind me as I was not taking it too fast. I am still getting used to the lump of metal at the moment. But, into Wellington, I was able to filter past stopped cars and the van was eventually left well behind. Foolsihly, I said to my partner to head off ahead of me as I will catch her in no time. Famous last words as she had been waiting for a "few minutes" for me to arrive. Looking at the bottom right of the map, the red dot marks the location - Foxmoor Business Park. Coming south along the road, you had to drive to the round about at thejunction of the M5, and dow a yewie back as no right turn is allowed from that road. When I dropped the bike off the mechanic was working on a pristine Harley of some sortwith a fantastic side car. Ithad a blue andwhite colour scheme and looked the bees knees. Anyway, I received a call - I was a day early for the MOT renewal - it is due on the 18th Decemeber, but can only be renewed within the month it expires, which starts on the 19th of December. Apparently, it sailed through with no problems. It had a full service and a check over, and all is OK. That was a relief. Heated grips and storm guards are fitted. It is tucked away nicely in the shop, which is great, as it is chucking it down today. I may well park it in the coach house overnight, a dilapidated garage on site that is still largely watertight. It is also at the bottom of the driveway so not such a pain to get out. In addition, there is a slight downslop to the garage, so I can "back it" into the garage ready to be ridden out immediately. Problem is, it is a 50m walk or so to the top of the drive, which will be a pain in the wet and lugging luggage up. That reminds me - fitting the top box tomorrow.