How's weather at your place?

Unseasonally cool and drizzly here after 31 °C yesterday. My washing didn't even get dry on the line outside and I can't put it in the tumble-drier because we have no electricity 🙄
If the greenies here have their way, we will be in the same boat, mate!

We have enough high quality black coal, gas, hydro electricity and uranium to power the entire planet here, but none of it is good enough for them! What's really worrying is that governments, both state and federal, go along with this crap.

In South Australia, the government not only decommissioned a perfectly good gas fired power station, they blew it up! Literally, with explosives! Of course, a couple of months later a big storm took out the interstate electricity interconnector, leaving much of South Australia without power for days ...
The government (and greenies) promptly blamed the power companies for their own crass stupidity.

Once Snowy Hydro 2 is up and running in about 2023-4, it will have sufficient storage capacity to keep the lights on for the entire Eastern Seaboard grid (3.8 million premises) for about a week. We will finally have adequate storage for all the useless solar generated in the middle of the day, and the equally useless wind power generated in the middle of the night, when no one wants either.

In Australia, installed solar generating capacity has quadrupled every year for the last 6 years (year on year, i.e. 4^6 = 4096 fold increase over that period), and that wasn't from a low base. Australia is now either first or second in the world for renewable energy generation, but the greenies still aren't happy, and constantly quote 2016 figures to support their case!

For the record, we, personally, have an 8.1 kWh solar plant on our own roof, kindly subsidised 25% each by state (Labor) and federal (Liberal) governments. We paid the other 50%, and 100% of the cost for the electric heat pump pool heater, and also for the electric pool blanket, which both keeps the heat in, cuts evaporation to almost zero, along with dramatically reducing pool chemicals.

Our power bills are less than half what they were, in spite of adding a new 5 kW reverse cycle air conditioner and replacing a 3.5 kW one that was 23 y.o. with a new 5 kW unit ($1,200 state government subsidy).

The payback period for the solar panels is a bit over 2 years in our case.
 
WHOA !! after a day of humid heat and leaden skies, we now have a thunder storm and flash flood of note.
This is a freeze frame of a video I took with my phone - pitch black for 30 seconds and then this happened.
Our power is going off for a four-and-a-half-hour block at 10pm our time, which is not far from now.
Tomorrow is my 65th birthday - this is quite a thunderous welcome, I must say. The kids are in the kitchen
desperately hoping to finish baking a birthday cake before we lose electricity. Sigh. Fun fun fun, isn't it...


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Starting Monday through Wednesday we are in the path of a winter storm. We might get some rain to start it off, which will make a mess when the 6-12 inches of snow falls. High temps are upper 20s to low 30s (F) now but will fall to sub-zero by early next week, says the forecast. I sure hope that much at least is wrong.

There has been a run on groceries already. One store I was at today had completely run out of eggs; fortunately I found some elsewhere and we are set. Being a work-from-homer I will have to work through it as both electricity and internet are decidedly reliable.
 
WHOA !! after a day of humid heat and leaden skies, we now have a thunder storm and flash flood of note.
This is a freeze frame of a video I took with my phone - pitch black for 30 seconds and then this happened.
Our power is going off for a four-and-a-half-hour block at 10pm our time, which is not far from now.
Tomorrow is my 65th birthday - this is quite a thunderous welcome, I must say. The kids are in the kitchen
desperately hoping to finish baking a birthday cake before we lose electricity. Sigh. Fun fun fun, isn't it...


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May you have many more, Irene :) .
Birthdays, that is.

And we hope that this one improves markedly for you.
 
I saw a weather forecast tonight saying we're going to be at 80* on Christmas day. :)

Our gas prices may suck big time but I'll take that over the weather you guys are getting any day of the week.
 
Our weather is well below freezing, damp and basically undrivable with the snow and icy roads, then supposed to warm up over the following days. This means the snow will melt, we'll have horrific slush and local flooding - generally it will be seriously unpleasant.
 
Technically we have two places, till the end of the month, and we're in the more southern one (Oregon coast), where it is just 40s-50s and rainy. The other place, where most of our worldly possessions abide, waiting for us (AKA Seattle) is pretty chilly, even snowy/icy, presently. Post Christmas we'll be heading up there, so we're hoping the coldest of this cold weather is behind us by then.
 
After a frosty weekend it has been mainly grey and wet and daytime temperatures have been around 10C ..... Strange to go from frost straight to double digits.
Looks like we'll have the same weather over Christmas and New Years. Was hoping for some better weather to spend my week off from work and do some hiking/photography.
 
The festive snow from a week or two back has given way to warm, wet weather which is most unseasonal. We're off to northern Germany for Christmas (this evening, strikes permitting) and I gather it's much the same there.

At least I don't need to take my big winter boots with me.

-R
 
I would go out today, but it is currently -4F heading to -8F. The winds are whipping up as well. Just got a new PS5, so will be spending some time getting to know that and staying warm, playing with the dogs inside today.

Perhaps I’ll have a chance to snap something out the window. I’m a maniac and will go outside in almost anything,however not going to chance it nor the dogs in this. I’ll be lucky if I can wrangle them to go outside to handle their business. Lol.

Damn that Siberian air getting into our jet stream!
 
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