freediver wrote on Mar 9^th, 2026 at 6:00pm:

Coal, oil, gas, wood ARE solar batteries.

Natural solar batteries.

There may be some places where it is feasible. Small, isolated, off the grid, with a low draw, provided they have backup of some kind.

lee wrote on Mar 9^th, 2026 at 6:10pm:




This big a battery.

250/500 MWh.

How do you think Canberra's going to stay off the grid?

The legless green energy transition
Rafe Champion

Think of wind, solar, and batteries as the three legs of a stool supporting the Net Zero transition program.

The Labour governments of Australia, state and federal, are desperately accelerating the progress of these facilities to achieve legislated targets, with an undisclosed amount of money devoted to the Federal Capacity Investment Scheme and $34bn in NSW allocated to a newly created Investment Delivery Authority.

Apparently, nothing has been learned from the failed energy transition in Germany which was dead in the water in 2018 when an official review revealed that the Energiewende was failing on the three sides of the energy policy triangle; affordability, security, and emission-reduction.

Still, the Germans persisted with major offshore wind developments despite the serious wind droughts or dunkelflautes regularly recorded on oil and gas platforms in the North Sea for 60 years. Britain also went for North Sea wind, now both of these once-proud industrial nations are rapidly losing their power-intensive industries to China and the US.

Around the Western world, the Net Zero obsession has consumed trillions of dollars and everywhere the results are the same. Power is more expensive and less secure while catastrophic harm is being inflicted on forests and farmlands, with a looming tsunami of toxic junk when the facilities wear out.

In view of the amount of damage caused by the failing transition, it is surprisingly easy to explain why the three-legged Net Zero ‘stool’ will not stand up. Maybe the Coalition will get around to it sometime…

The solar leg fails every night. Without coal, power in the night will have to come from wind, plus some hydro and biomass, and very expensive gas, and batteries.

The wind fails during severe wind droughts when there is very little wind over the whole of SE Australia for periods up to three days and nights.

You might say, ‘What about battery and pumped hydro storage?’ You have got to be joking!


Look at Snowy 2.0. Malcolm Turnbull’s signature program has blown out from $5 billion to 20 billion (or more) with no end in sight.

As for batteries, Bill Gates is a student of storage technology, and even he blows up when he hears the word batteries because they are several orders of magnitude too small for the assignment.

aquascoot wrote on Mar 10^th, 2026 at 8:48am:


The exact opposite of what you say is occurring, as ever.

The Amazon is seeing an average 2.7 million hectares of forest lost each and every year.

Borneo has experienced 1.3 million hectares.

That's 12% of the world's source of oxygen removed in the past 20 years.

Mother nature is compensating by heating up. This is causing 177–266 Gt (gigatonnes) of polar ice melts in Greenland, with Antarctica losing 57–150 Gt annually.

That's excluding glacial melts all over the world - the Himalayas, the Andes, the Swiss Alps, all of which are starting to collapse, causing landslides, devastation, and in Monsoon season, disasters each and every year.

The melting ice compounds the effect of deforestation, the earth absorbing more solar radiation, causing heat. Plants don't just pop up in Greenland/Antarctica. Rainforests don't just grow back.

Palm oil plantations and grazing land in Borneo and the Amazon don't replace the oxygen created by rainforests.

In the past two decades, the temperature has risen 1.2 degrees. This is only an average. In some regions, it's hitting 40 to 50 degrees, rendering them increasingly uninhabitable. The average global temperature rise will hit 2 degrees in the next five to ten years, no one even contests this.

After that, the tipping point effects really start to kick in, and no one even knows what this will do. Glacial melts in the Himalayas can cause tectonic shifts, leading to earthquakes and tsunamis.

Alpine areas are experiencing landslides each and every year, destroying mountain roads and villages through flooding and rockfalls.

Coastal areas are starting to feel the impact of sea rises. We already have a deal to resettle the citizens of Tuvalu. Australian East Coast beachfront properties can't get insurance. Shanty towns all over Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other coastal areas are being pulled down.

This is happening now. We can't stop the pending consequences of global warming - the temperature rise, melting glaciers, landslides and rising seas. We can stop emitting CO2. It's the easiest fix of all.

And slowly slowly, we're doing it. 72% renewable electricity in South Australia, 100% in the ACT. This shift is no different to the rollout of power lines in the early 20th century - no different to switching from gas to electric lighting in the 19th century. Our rooftops themselves hold immense potential. Community battery schemes in towns like Yackandandah (VIC), Walpole (WA) and various small towns in NSW are getting communities off the grid entirely.

Your solution - fibs - is no longer an option. People aren't buying them anymore. The effects of global warming are too obvious to ignore.

Australians overwhelmingly support the transition to renewable energy. This one issue alone has caused the electoral downfall of Australia's main conservative party. Australians want action. Our sunshine, wealth, our service economy and small population puts us in one of the best positions in the world to do the job.

So, before you move onto your next lie, know this. Making stuff up doesn't work. It doesn't endear you with the people you're virtue signalling to, it just makes you sound (sic) redeculous.

Why must the left lie?

freediver wrote on Mar 9^th, 2026 at 5:29pm:


You & evidence? 

freediver wrote on Mar 9^th, 2026 at 6:00pm:



Cost & area required are the limits.

lee wrote on Mar 9^th, 2026 at 6:26pm:


What have I taken out of context in that example?