By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Thus William Blake, in the coda of the mystical poem that the nation belts out at full if not always tuneful volume on the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall every summer.
England’s g. and p. l. is not what it was when Blake wrote about it. The place is being expensively carpeted with ugly, medieval, lo-tech wind farms.
The governing class still likes windmills. It is making a fortune out of them, at everyone else’s expense.
The Left support windmills because the developers quietly give their parties – “Labor”, the “Liberal” “Democrats”, and the “Greens”, in order of Leftness – huge kickbacks from the massive State subsidies they get.
The center-Left “Conservatives” like them because, like “Dave” Cameron’s pa-in-law, the wind farms are profitably built on their vast estates.
The unspeakable “Tim” Yeo, “Conservative” chairman of the Commons Environment Committee, who came off very much second-best in a tussle with Professor Dick Lindzen at a recent hearing, makes around $150,000 a year (in addition to his fat Parliamentary salary and allowances of $1 million a year) from various soi-disant “renewable” energy boondoggles subsidized by taxpayers.
Yeo’s committee has acted disgracefully, suppressing or sneering at any testimony (such as that from Professor Lindzen) that threatens’ its members’ personal fortunes and the immense donations to their parties from people whom their insane climate policies have made into multi-millionaires.
Johnny Taxpayer, who pays £30 billion a year for the mad climate policies that represent the biggest transfer of power and wealth in human history from the little guy to the fat cat, is heartily sick of wind farms.
Half of all zoning consents applied for by greedy developers supported by members of parliament whose parties hope to profiteer from wind farms are now being turned down, even though the government desperately wants local authorities to grant them because the Brussels junta, whom we do not elect, requires us to generate a fifth of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020.
The proposal that bids fair to bring the entire tottering house of cards crashing down is just about to be submitted for zoning consent.
Britain’s most important coastline – the Jurassic world-heritage coast in Dorset – is about to be ruined irretrievably by the Navitus Bay Wind Array, 194 wind turbines almost 600 feet high, covering six square miles, less than 9 miles out to sea.
The swept area of each turbine is 200,000 square feet. Yet the mean output of 4000 acres of vast 5 MW wind turbines, even at the absurdly optimistic 35% capacity factor claimed by the developers, will be just 339.5 MW. A single modern 4 GW coal-fired power station produces ten times as much output.
Figure 2a. The Navitus array, seen from Durlston Head lighthouse on the Jurassic Coast, will span almost 45 degrees of arc (nearly the entire field of view here).
Figure 3. The sheer size of the proposed Navitus Bay Wind Array wind farm is disproportionate to and intrusive upon the fragile and important landscape of the area. The illustration, kindly supplied by the Poole and Christchurch Bays Association, shows the scale of a 5 MW and a 7 MW turbine set against the Needles Light, one of Britain’s most-loved landmarks (they will not, of course, be this close to the coast). The array of 194 turbines each 581 feet high and sweeping an area of 200,000 square feet will be within 11 miles of the Needles. The UK Government’s minimum offshore distance for wind farms is 12 miles. The wind farms will tower over the neighboring cliffs.
The pathetic 339.5 MW output of this monstrous boondoggle is less than 0.8% of the 43.2 GW mean total UK load. Electricity accounts for 33% of UK CO2 emissions, which, at 142.6 MtC (522 Mt CO2) in 2008, represented 1.72% of global CO2 emissions.
Therefore, Navitus Bay will abate 0.0045% of global CO2 emissions. The annual subsidy for 339.5 MW over 8766 hours, at 1.8 times the Renewable Obligation Certificate price of $82.80 (£46), will be $444 million, or $2.22 bn over five years. The subsidy regime is too uncertain for reliable costing thereafter.
The subsidy is part-paid-for by a Climate Change Levy of about $0.09 kWh–1 on non-exempt consumers of electricity, and a Carbon Price Floor. These two levies brought in about £700 million ($1.2 bn) in 2013. The 2.975 TWh projected to be generated annually by Navitus Bay is equivalent to 7.235% of the 41.132 TWh generated from the renewables subsidized by the levies.
Accordingly, some $87 million of the annual cost of the levies would be attributable to the Navitus Bay project and, as a market distortion intended to favor renewables at the expense of fossil-fueled generation, is properly treated as additional to the subsidy, so that the five-year gross cost of the project is $22.65 billion, and that is before taking account of the cost of interconnection to the national power grid.
Armed with this information, we can determine whether Navitus Bay will make a useful contribution to cutting global CO2 emissions.
Navitus Bay is to come onstream by 2021. We shall study the first five years of the project, from 2021-2025. Beyond that period, the subsidy regime is uncertain.
CO2 concentration, on business as usual, will increase by 11 pmv from from 412 to 423 ppmv over the five years. Of this 11 ppmv, the 0.0045% abated by Navitus Bay represents 0.0005 ppmv.
The global CO2 forcing abated by Navitus Bay over the period, using the CO2 forcing equation, is 5.25 ln(423/422.9995), or 0.000006 W m–2.
The fraction of global warming abated is 0.000006 W m–2 multiplied by the five-year Planck sensitivity parameter 0.323 K W–1 m2, or 0.000002 Cº. That is approximately 2 millionths of a degree.
The unit mitigation cost, which is the cost of mitigating 1 Cº of global warming by measures of equivalent unit cost worldwide, is the five-year subsidy of £2.65 bn divided by the 0.000002 Cº global warming abated by Navitus Bay over the five-year period, or a mere $1.3 quadrillion.
The global total mitigation cost, which is the cost of mitigating the 0.08 Cº global warming that IPCC (2013) projects will occur over the five year period of study, is 0.08 Cº mutiplied by the unit mitigation cost of £1.3 quadrillion. That gives $109 trillion, which is $15,560 per head of global population or, as a percentage of projected global GDP of $436 trillion, 25%.
The benefit-cost ratio, assuming that adapting to 1 Cº unmitigated global warming over the 21st century would cost 1% of GDP, broadly consistent with Stern (2006) and IPCC (2013) on the assumption that little warming occurs, is 25.
It is 25 times costlier to address global warming with mitigation projects such as Navitus Bay than to allow the projected global warming to occur and meet the costs and damages of adapting to its consequences.
The “Greens” in the Bournemouth area, which will have its tourism industry wrecked by the medieval mechanical triffids visible in the bay less than 12 miles away, are of course backing this environment-destroying project because they, too, benefit from generous handouts from “renewable”-energy corporations.
Never mind the national finances. Never mind the taxpayers’ finances. Never mind the immense environmental damage the wind array will cause. Never mind the world heritage status of the Jurassic coast. Never mind the birds that will be killed. The Greens will profit, and – communists though they be – they are now the most rapacious capitalists on the planet, when it comes to their own bank balances.
Their argument in favor of this nonsensical scheme, which will be visible from the three major centers of Poole, Bournemouth, and Christchurch, as well as from the Needles, one of Britain’s best-loved landmarks and a haven for sailors, and from Durlston Head on the Jurassic Coast itself, is that almost 1.3 million tons of CO2 a year will not be emitted thanks to the turbines.
The calculations we did earlier, showing that it would be 25 times costlier to make global warming go away with offshore wind farms than to let the warming happen and adapt to it, were done on so generous a basis that we assumed it was true.
But it wasn’t true. The problem is that the wind, even offshore, is so fickle that the array will only generate electricity a third of the time. So just as much fossil-fueled capacity as before has to be kept onstream and spinning in case the wind drops. But instead of spinning at full and efficient capacity, it is kept spinning in a fashion so inefficient that there is no CO2 saving from the average wind farm at all.
On this true basis, it is infinitely costlier to make global warming go away with wind farms than to let it happen, because wind farms actually add to CO2 emissions when all is said and done.
The developers’ claims, parroted by the Greens, about the amount of CO2 emissions that the wind farm will “save” are entirely without foundation, as are their claims that the wind farm will help to meet the UK’s CO2 emissions targets laid down by our unelected masters in Brussels. The array, like all wind farms, will actually increase our CO2 emissions.
But it’s going to create jobs, right? The developers’ website proudly says there will be – wait for it – 140 permanent jobs keeping the turbines running. At a project subsidy of $0.53 bn a year, that works out at getting on for $4 million per job, per year.
The developers also claim the project will increase the UK’s “energy security”. Er, no, it won’t. There will be many tons of extremely scarce and expensive neodymium in each windmill, and that comes almost entirely from China, at enormous environmental cost in the shape of acid pollution of the water table for thousands of square miles via the process to leach the neodymium out from the ore. Not that you’ll hear much from the Greens about that. Wonder why not.
And how is the Royal Navy, with more admirals than rubber ducks, going to defend these and other offshore wind farms against sabotage? Security? Schmecurity.
Finally, the developers claim – and this is heroically insane – that the project will “stabilize electricity prices for the future”. Try telling that to the average energy user, who is paying at least twice what he was paying for electricity just a few years ago. A substantial fraction of the increase is attributable to subsidies for wind farms.
You would be forgiven for thinking that this proposal, like the regime of subsidy that has attracted it, is bonkers. So it is – and that is how it is going to be stopped.
Zoning consents for large projects like Navitus Bay have been taken out of the hands of local authorities. Too many of them, elected by the voters who might have to live next to these monstrous arrays, were saying No when Ministers and civil servants could only profiteer if they said Yes.
So Ministers now decide the bigger proposals themselves – or, at least, a vast bureaucracy decides on Ministers’ behalf. However, it is a Ministerial decision, and it is accordingly subject to judicial review in the Administrative Court in London.
The law is clear. If a decision is irrational, it is unlawful. Ministers are given very wide discretion, but, if a Minister takes a decision which, coldly dissected by a court, makes no sense whatsoever because no reasonable or sane Minister could possibly have taken it, the court is obliged to set that decision aside.
Watch this space. Navitus Bay could well prove to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Show Fig. 1 to a court and it will start to question very carefully everything said by the developers, the Greens, and the government. And, as with the case against Al Gore’s movie in 2007, once the court starts to ask questions there is nowhere for the Forces of Darkness to hide.
Some 50 residents’ associations have already banded together to fight this poisonous scheme. Let us hope they fight it all the way, and let us hope they win. Otherwise, we shall all be singing a new version of Jerusalem:
… till Socialism’s builded here
In England’s Green, unpleasant land.
Figure 6. Views of the Jurassic World Heritage Coast, as it is for now. Enjoy it while you can.
Figure 7. The last Great Bustard in the Spanish province of Cadiz, killed by a wind farm.
The most damning number here is the output, the fact that a single modern 4 GW coal-fired plant produces TEN TIMES as much electricity, and on a consistent basis, as these towering inefficient monstrosities. As one who loves the irreplaceable Dorset coast, and its staggering windswept beauty, ach. This is almost evil. Good work, Lord Monckton.
Well done Lord Monckton. Maybe when they break down people will realise what a waste of money they are, but farmers in Australia are paid 15,000 dollars a year to rent the land from them. Some say, No way. Others, why not.
I couldn’t agree with Christopher!
A masterpiece, M’Lord! Many, many thanks!
Excellent Lord Monkton. Perhaps you could have mentioned the role of the supplier. GE?
” … global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise, putting the world on track for overshooting the 2ºC “safe” target and ending up in a 4ºC world.”
http://www.gecitizenship.com/blog/2013/01/the-great-climate-disconnect/
I didn’t see any mention of Hiroshima Bombs in there. How can you possibly hope to gain any traction without that??
Is /sarc really necessary?
Jurassic heritage coast : FWIW …. Looks like 2 of the 3 picture are actually Cretaceous chalk outcrops (which does outcrop within the Jurassic heritage coast … even though it is younger strata)
Speaking of Blake, how about the boffo finish of “Auguries of Innocence”?
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
CACA advocates want to keep those poor souls born into night in the dark & freezing.
I take it that there is many scholars and others never taking themselves time to have seen Time Team on TV. Thus they aren’t aware that this isn’t a modern phenomena but been going at least the last 2000 years. Phenomena is called wind- and wave erosion and that’s the way erosion “work” on grounds such as it is in described area.
If they put a screen made of something like chicken wire around the wind turbines to protect birds, would it have too much of a negative impact on efficiency?
Best scheme yet for robbing the many to enrich the well connected few.
CAGW is an intelligence test.
The modern version of the Tower of Babel. A good friend of mine says that steel cutters will have jobs for decades dismantling those things for scrap.
Thank you. I hope that sanity prevails.
Louis,they are already inefficient,so talking about efficiency with windmills is wrong. They would become more inefficient.
Its worth reading the whole article. For once BJORN LOMBORG is talking sense, and is in step with Lord Monkton
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/renewables-pave-path-to-poverty/story-fni1hfs5-1226898730123#
“because the Brussels junta, whom we do not elect, requires us to generate a fifth of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020.”
Beat them with an end run. Have thorium declared renewable. It is every bit as renewable as the rare earth elements and steel required for wind turbines. 🙂
Pamela Gray says:
April 28, 2014 at 8:01 pm
I live in the midst of the largest wind farm area on earth, as you live near it. Just last night I asked kith & kin (one of each) what the deal was for dismantling the many Chinese-made windmills on their land. The roads & concrete pads apparently are their worry. During construction a new city sprang up overnight near the breaks on the plateau above the Walla Walla Valley, in the Vansickle Hills where my sheep-herding Scottish immigrant great-grandfather & Scots-Irish Tennessee great-grandmother, dispossessed by the Civil War, kept a line shack, 1870 to 1930. The sheep ate down the native bunchgrass, which made busting the sod to plant wheat easier. The insect pest-eating bird & bat-massacring blades of death will themselves go down to dusty death when & if Congress ever wises up & stops the subsidies. Even those who have so richly benefited from this insanity know it’s a scam.
The case for never building theses monstrosities is overwhelming. However, pointing out the economic and financial stupidity is only part of it; and on its own is unlikely to stop them.
The better (but harder way) is to find the corruption; name the names. Find the brown paper bags stuffed with Euros. Find the bank accounts. Find the sexual blackmail. Find the emails and the phone calls. Do what the ICAC is doing to the corrupt politicians and developers in NSW. Put them in gaol.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2014/s3993759.htm
And if they have the UK equivalent stitched up with their comrades?
Well then, go around it. DIY. If ever a hacker were needed, it is now. If ever a citizen controlled anti-corruption fund were needed, it is now. If ever a strong alliance of all those wanting to stop this corrupt behaviour is needed, it is now. If ever an insider (or two) were needed, it is now.
Knock Navitus over and all the rest will be easy.
If Man-Made CO2 is a problem:
“All the solar panels and wind turbines in the world (at a taxpayer cost of $60 billion annually) have cut less CO2 emissions than US fracking.”
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/index.html#/v/3481291294001
I am yet to be convinced by the evidence that Man-Made CO2 does much of anything measurable other than greening the earth. So-called damage from CO2 has yet to be demonstrated; it is 100% speculation.
Wind farms however, are greatly damaging. They waste public resources that could be better directed. They are a comparatively unreliable source of electricity. They are in danger of being destroyed by the elements and as such are a safety hazard. They are hazardous to maintain. They are a landscape blight and kill great numbers of wildlife – birds and bats in particular. That venal, mendacious individuals in positions of power take advantage of us is a galling injustice. They are our Easter Island Moas. Bizarre monuments to our blind, primitive, fears of the future. Utter folly.
Some future day, we humans will look back on the rusted out wreckage of these windmill monstrosities and wonder how we could have gone so far astray from the path of gentle reason.
The twelve mile suggested distance from shore sounds to be a ‘curvature or the Earth’ distance to the horizon. Someone believed, perhaps falsely, that the turbines would be over the horizon?
Given the sheer height of the death blade farms they will be quite visible. The entire death blade farm will likely be visible; especially from the tops of those cliffs.
Then there is how sound waves happily bounce their way through the atmosphere; somehow I doubt the ocean dissipates sound. Perhaps visitors to the coast will be able to hear the echo bouncing back from the cliffs?
Great article Lord Monckton!
Sceptical Sam says:
April 28, 2014 at 8:23 pm
Follow the money in the US, too. The companies cashing in on windmill subsidies hire family members of politically well connected figures, besides giving generously to campaign coffers, on which their rate of return is astronomical, thanks to taxpayers.
Does anyone know the embodied energy (used in manufacture and construction) of these things?
Lord Monckton,
. . . what a time for a ‘Guy Fawkes type’ to go after those clowns ( . . whether they be any one in Parliament, or the ‘Greens’ or ANYONE who would support this garbage) ; or even the beginnings of the construction itself of these monstrosities if they were to begin . . .
( . .OH, not that I am trying to make it sound like I would support what I just wrote . . . just idle thoughts that run through my head when I read about things like this . . 🙂 🙂 )
I have been to Somerset and Dorset several years ago (when working with Westland in Yeovil); I went sight seeing down to the coast and that area, and saw how beautiful it is.
It would be a TRAVESTY for this project to continue. I hope the fight continues to stop this waste of money and destruction of that beautiful and scenic coastline, and the views out over the ocean.
CHEERS, from Arizona.
Sorry, Mr. Monckton… They can be ugly. They can be Medieval. But they can’t be both.
Lord M,
You may recall that I tried to give you a $50,000,000 Zimbabwe bank note at the Heartland conference, but you one-upped me by pulling out your $100 million Zim note.
You trumped me! ☺
No doubt that is how you get a leg up on all the alarmists here.
Good article as usual, BTW…
“If they put a screen made of something like chicken wire around the wind turbines to protect birds, would it have too much of a negative impact on efficiency?”
There is a counterintuitive property of pumps, and a windmill is essentially a reverse pump, that they have uber powers on one side and are hopelessly wimpy on the other. I first learned this in my garden sprayer, a silly thing you pump up to spray roundup or stain etc. Being an irascible guy I get really annoyed when the inevitable ubiquitous floss clogs up the tip. I tried enclosing the dip tube in a screen to prevent this. the damned thing would not spray at all until I removed it…
28 April: NRDC: Peter Lehner’s Blog: Why Do We Need to Curb Climate Change? Watch This Video
What does climate change look like? Everyone has a different answer. To a Texas rancher, it’s the drought that’s starving his cattle. To a worried mother in New York City, it’s the stultifying heat wave that’s setting off her child’s asthma. To an Iowa farmer, it’s hundreds of acres of unplanted fields, either withered by drought or flooded by heavy rains. To a New Jersey homeowner, it’s the storm that has destroyed her seaside community.
VIDEO: THIS IS WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE LOOKS LIKE 3.0
Every year since 2010, NRDC has encapsulated the year’s climate change impacts into a 2-minute video. Every year, this task becomes more challenging, as more communities in America and worldwide feel the devastating impacts of climate change. This past year was no exception…
Speak out and demand strong limits on carbon pollution from power plants. (LINKS TO NRDC LETTER TO SEND TO EPA)
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/plehner/why_do_we_need_to_curb_climate.html
The disappearing coast – remember Dunwich, Old Kilnsea and Eccles (him?) and the Isle of Goodwin. English towns and countryside swollen beneath the sea.
25 April: Reuters: UN’s carbon role questioned as $200 mln cash pile sits idle
By Susanna Twidale and Ben Garside
The U.N. body tasked with channelling hundreds of billions of dollars to cutting emissions is under growing scrutiny as its once booming investment programme dries up, leaving most of its funds unspent while other climate initiatives are short of cash…
From 2003, developers flocked to register projects such as destroying heat-trapping waste gases at Chinese chemical plants or installing hydroelectric power stations in Brazil, and made huge profits by selling the resulting carbon credits for up to 22 euros ($30.40) a tonne in 2008.
But interest has waned while countries wrangled over setting new emission goals under the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), hammering credit prices down to unprofitable levels below 0.20 euros…
But with such a bleak outlook, some observers are calling on the CDM to drastically scale back its Bonn-based operations and want much of its near-$200 million of cash pile spent elsewhere.
“Having staff sit in Bonn and slowly draw down the surplus in salary is not a good use of these human and financial resources,” said Anne Arquit Niederberger, a consultant who has worked on CDM projects and was a Swiss negotiator at U.N. climate talks when the mechanism was drawn up in the 1990s…
***Its accounts show almost half of the current annual budget of $32.9 million is to pay staff, which still number around 150 despite a massive drop-off in new projects seeking registration…
U.N. data shows just 3 projects a month were registered on average this year, against 268 a month at the peak of activity in 2012. This means a staff of 10-20 people would be sufficient, said Axel Michaelowa, a University of Zurich climate policy academic and founding partner of consultancy Perspectives.
Michaelowa, who was seconded to the CDM during its busier periods, said surplus cash could be used to prop up the market by buying credits or develop new carbon market mechanisms earmarked to feature in a new climate deal
A CDM spokesman said the board had no current plans to cut employees but was conducting regular reviews of its operations.
The board is also trying to drum up demand for the credits by promoting them for uses other than meeting Kyoto targets…
While the CDM has enough money to see it through several years, a separate Kyoto Protocol programme, the Adaptation Fund, is struggling to fulfil its aims of helping the world’s poorest nations cope with the effects of climate change.
Governments agreed to help finance the fund with a 2 percent levy on CDM credits issued for projects such as building sea defences or developing drought resistant farming techniques.
But the plummeting value of the credits has hit the Fund’s coffers, with projects only getting the go-ahead last year after several west European nations donated 54 million euros…
Developed countries have agreed to mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020 to poorer nations, but the Green Climate Fund launched to help meet that goal had received donations of just $34 million by the end of 2013.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/25/un-carbon-idUKL6N0NH2FX20140425
29 April: Bloomberg: Eric Roston: They’re Not Sure What ‘Climate Finance’ Is But Say We Need a Ton of it
***The primitive state of climate finance — call it cli-fi (not to be confused with ‘climate fiction’)*** — is the focus of the very last chapter of the most recent 1,000-plus-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which came out this month…
The best estimate is that on average more than $360 billion a year qualifies as cli-fi, most of that going toward renewable power. It’s hard to say what the target number should be, or if we need one. Business-focused environmentalists are asking for a “clean trillion,” almost a tripling of the IPCC estimate.
Complicating assessments of how climate finance is doing is a lack of agreement about what it is. “Knowledge gaps are substantial” in research and “there are no agreed definitions for climate investment and climate finance,” the IPCC writes…
Huge potential lies in state and local bonds, which have financed public infrastructure for a century of roads, bridges and hospitals for a century, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. “Green bonds” would extend public financing to renewable energy projects, which today “rely upon an old fashioned and anachronistic form of financing that is different than how other parts of the economy are financed,” Richard Kauffman, New York State’s top energy advisor, has written.
Climate scientists have spent a generation tracking the flow of carbon, water and the other necessities of life all through the biosphere. The IPCC’s authors — as a proxy for the research community — are just starting to “follow the money” as it sloshes around, too.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-28/they-re-not-sure-what-climate-finance-is-but-say-we-need-a-ton-of-it.html
Don’t be coy; please tell us why you cannot agree. Or did you inadvertantly omit a couple of words?
why worry about costs and efficiency when its the right thing to do?
I generally agree with the theme of the post except for this peripheral comment: “There will be many tons of extremely scarce and expensive neodymium …
This “many tons” aspect is likely wrong but if you choose to include it you might check the specifications, because
Neodymium is commonly used as part of a Neodymium-Iron-Boron alloy (Nd2Fe14B) which, thanks to its tetragonal crystal structure, is used to make the most powerful magnets in the world.
http://min-eng.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-real-cost-of-using-neodymium-in.html
It appears that less than 1/7 of the density of these magnets is provided by the Neodymium and large turbines contain about 2 tons of the alloy. Obviously this is not an area of expertize for me – so can someone confirm?
The point is that if the theme of the essay is correct – don’t exaggerate on a peripheral item that can be checked.
For eIght years, five months and six days, the PME on my desk is still rocking back and forth all on its own. No batteries. No fuel. No emissions. Just keeps going. About the size of a shoebox, I made it out of Lego to see if my theory of perpetual motion would work. And it has. You don’t need to wind it up, just apply a little drop of WD40 to the tiny cogs now and then. It just keeps going and going and going. Sadly, despite repeated requests for $0.53 bn funding, nobody wants to buy my invention – because they’ve already spent their $0.53 bn (that they had) on worse-than-useless wind turbines.
Thank you Lord Monkton. Brilliant as ever.
Dr C says:
April 28, 2014 at 9:07 pm
Sorry, Mr. Monckton… They can be ugly. They can be Medieval. But they can’t be both.
Mr . C:
You are wrong..
They are are ugly ( not “can be ugly”, just try and imagine just one across the street from your house at 3 AM when finally the wind blows.
They are also medieval ( Windmills have been around for even longer than most people realize.
And the third ? The windmills built all over the place those days were way more effective. They did a lot more than create ” Green Energy”. They pumped water , they ground grains and so made bread. And they actually even created energy (as we know it today) if you count in the work load that was eased by them, even being used as hauling materials..
redress at 8:14 provides a link to an essay in “theaustralian” but the link has problems. Going directly to the paper’s web site and hunting can get you to a place where you get 2 paragraphs and a request to Log In or subscribe. There are other similar things available – search.
Satanic mills indeed!
I, like many, learned my geology on the Jurassic Coast. One academic used to award a bottle of red wine to the first student to identify the natural oil seep that occurs near there. Good times.
I wonder if life will still be worth living if the Eco-fascists are allowed to have their way like this. It makes me sad.
This is flat in the middle of a major shipping channel!
all tax is a stupidity tax that only those without accountants pay.
I have no problem with any kind of windmill but the policies have always chosen the worst outcome for the tax payer [offshore wind] while the equestrian class pocket the money on land already subsidised by 4 billion a year. UK Land prices are going up faster than property prices in central london? Why? Because its a nice earner because of the subsidy it attracts. If you have £12000 you lose the state benefits if you have 12000 acres you get them which is a perverse joke that Dickens would have written about.
As to who owns britain then its still the inner empire of role gamers http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328270/A-Britain-STILL-belongs-aristocracy.html
to be a monarch you have to adopt a narrative that makes others common which is a belittling apartheid style language designed to humiliate and ‘keep people in their place’ which is so embeded in uk society that even our elected representatives are called ‘commoners’ who go to a ‘House of Commons’. My main objection to those who role game and pretend they are royal is the divisive impact their apartheid narrative has on society and they way that narrative is used to transfer wealth from the many to the few.
Slight correction. The good lord says “the Brussels junta, whom we do not elect, requires us to generate a fifth of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020”. In fact our useless ex-PM Tony Blair signed up to an EU target of 15% of our energy from renewables by 2020 (he was expected by his advisers to sign for 15% of our electricity from renewables by 2020, but like most politicians, he doesn’t know the difference between energy and electricity). Because we can’t get much heat or transport fuel from renewables, in order to meet the 15% target, the Government decided we needed to get about 35% of our electricity from renewables. Idiots all of them.
Anyway, we fought off the even bigger and more useless proposed wind farm off the north Devon coast (the so-called Atlantic Array) and we’ll do the same to the proposed Navitus Bay Wind ‘Park’ off the Dorset coast. We won’t let the bar stewards get us down.
“Britain’s most important coastline – the Jurassic world-heritage coast in Dorset – is about to be ruined irretrievably by the Navitus Bay Wind Array”
“irretrievably” – think not, Sir Christopher. Fits in well with the emotive language though.
Now we wouldn’t want to see the Market distorted by subsidies would we?
“The OECD estimates that the UK fossil fuel industry received £4.3 billion of support from government tax breaks and assistance toward infrastructure development in 2011.”
I imagine you would think it ‘prudent’ all these resources thrown into preparing for the next ice age?
“We are indeed overdue for another Ice Age, though we cannot stay when or even whether it will occur because we do not know exactly what triggers Ice Ages. However, according to the ice-core records the transition is more likely than not to be abrupt. At present we are entirely unprepared, which seems imprudent.”
“And all the steps we are taking to try to make global warming go away are exactly the wrong steps to be taking as we prepare for the next Ice Age.”
“billions will die, for we are entirely unprepared.”
Of course, you can make a retraction – we’re generous like that here in the Village
redress –
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THE BJORN LOMBORG PIECE – THE LINK IS WORKING FOR ME.
this is the kind of hypocrisy that will destroy the CAGW myth:
Lomborg: Yet funding new coal-fired power plants in both countries (Pakistan & South Africa) has been widely opposed by well-meaning Westerners and governments…
In the next two years, Germany will build 10 coal-fired power plants…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/renewables-pave-path-to-poverty/story-fni1hfs5-1226898730123#
‘Yet the mean output of 4000 acres of vast 5 MW wind turbines, even at the absurdly optimistic 35% capacity factor claimed by the developers, will be just 339.5 MW …’
===================================
It would make more sense to issue each of the 20 million or so households in Britain one of these http://windstreampower.com/.
It would keep the nation fit, pensioners warm, and help to fight climate change™ while being heaps of fun for the all the family.
On the other hand, for the civil service one could be installed under every desk with a mandated daily output specified, the current value of any shortfalls deducted from the idler’s pension.
I watched that committee hearing; I was amazed, as a non-Brit, by Yeo’s disrespectful demeanour towards an invited guest of Professor Lindzen’s standing.
O/T I know but can anyone help me out with a quote from WG1 here. I may be wrong but I was quite sure that it didn’t say this, or anything even vaguely resembling it.
http://hot-topic.co.nz/lip-service-its-all-climate-action-ever-gets-from-key-co/#comment-42371
Jeff L:
The mis-named ‘Jurassic Coast’ is one of the greatest wonders in the world, but your post says you do not know why.
At April 28, 2014 at 7:46 pm you write
The ‘Jurassic Coast’ stretches from Exmouth in the West to The Needles in the East. And its geology changes from Devonian in the West to Cretaceous in the East.
The land was created in layers )i.e. strata) which formed on top of each other as time passed. Then in Southern England the land tilted-over such that the layers which had formed as layers on top of each other became layers beside each other. After that the English Channel cut through the land so the resulting cliffs formed to expose the individual strata.
The result is the ‘Jurassic Coast’ which is like a text-book diagram of geological strata over time but consists of real strata.
So, the history of the planet rolls past as one travels along the ‘Jurassic Coast’ in a boat. And the ‘Jurassic Coast’ provides a wealth of fossils from the Devonian to the Cretaceous periods.
The White Cliffs of Dover are white (not green) because the sea erodes the land. Each storm exposes new cliff surface, and the resulting land fall provides fossil-rich material at the base of the cliff. Anybody who knows how to look can find fossils along the ‘Jurassic Coast’ especially after a storm, and fossil-hunting is a good day out for all the family: I like ammonites so my fire-place is decorated with some that I have collected.
Richard
The issue of judicial review is more complicated in the UK than the article suggests. To be reviewable, a decision has to be ‘Wednesbury unreasonable’. You can look up the Wednesbury case. A quick summary would be that the decision, to be reviewable, has to be so unreasonable that no rational public authority would have made it. That is a very, very high standard indeed.
There’s no doubt in most of our minds that UK energy policy is idiotic, and probably that much of its motivation is the profit of the alternative energy lobby and industry. However, to prove to the satisfaction that no rational public authority would have endorsed this particular scheme? Its going to be a very tough one. And a very expensive one.
The monetary amounts here that may be lost a la Germanys unfolding Green electricity disaster are indeed staggering and eventually the piper must be paid.
The likely outcome?
Deep economic decline over many decades destined to touch all sectors. One imagines this will be deemed intolerable and so there is reason to fear the cure.
UK energy policy is stupid beyond belief (google Drax wood chippings )
It is also highly expensive and reliant on ancient technologies that don’t work (wind) or modern ones (solar) that are inappropriate to our latitude.
As far as wind goes there are many of the great and the good making a lot of money from the generous subsidies. This needs to be better exposed in the UK MSM.
The Jurassic coast is extremely beautiful. It lies adjacent to some of the wealthiest and best poliotically connected towns in the UK. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
Of course, the most obvious solution to our energy needs (apart from ones such as coal or nuclear) is waves/tidal. Britain is an island with nowhere more than 70 miles from the coast.
tonyb
On the North Norfolk coast is the Sheringham Shoal. Just as much of an eyesore, and emotionally a barrier to what was a clear run from the coast to the North pole. I think we can expect many more of these before they’re finally declared useless, but at least in UK now we’re unlikely to have many more land-based windfarms inflicted on us.
michel:
You provide good, useful and important information in your post at April 29, 2014 at 12:00 am which says
Your point about cost is the main reason why there has been no attempt to fight the legal case to date. The government and the troughers have effectively unlimited funds but opponents of windfarms don’t. The matter needs to go to the High Court because a Planning review does not have authority to consider matters except the specific Planning Application.
Furthermore, providers of ‘conventional’ electricity have no reason to oppose windfarms because large use of windfarms increases (yes, INCREASES) the need for “conventional” electricity supplies. And this increase to need for “conventional” electricity supplies is one of the reasons why building windfarms could be shown to be ‘Wednesbury unreasonable’ if the matter were be tested in the High Court.
More information and detail of why there is a case for windfarms being ‘Wednesbury unreasonable’ is here.
Richard
Whether windmills are ugly on the one hand or just take getting used to on the other is a matter of taste, I suppose. If they were indeed pulling their own weight, I might be persuaded to take the latter view.
But knowing that deprived of subsidies and therefore maintenance they would rapidly become useless hulks is what in my mind places them below the “satanic mills” category. At least the latter can sometimes be reclaimed as office buildings or even condos.
milodonharlani says:
April 28, 2014 at 7:52 pm
There was a song to that effect once. And still.
http://youtu.be/LHsN81A3cHI
The 12 miles was chosen as this is the limit of UK territorial waters. So it’s as far as we can go without entering international waters.
Destruction of a great sailing area as well.
My Lord, you missed out a cost.
Presumably someone will have to pay the costs of a powerful (80 tons bollard pull?) tug on permanent standby at the entrance to The Solent.
Well, a large container ship broke down, and eventually went aground, fairly close by not long ago.
I don’t think one of those adrift inside the “array” would be very welcome.
There is no significant CO2-AGW, as is being shown experimentally and theoretically. In reality we are heading into a new Little Ice Age. One of the features of such periods is a rise in stormy weather as temperature gradients over the globe increase. This wind farm will have to face much higher stresses than it is being designed for.
On the political front, the UK public is just starting to realise that politicians pushing fake IPCC ‘science’ and windmills, in return for the promise that they and their families will become part of the rich elite whose aim for 25 years or so has been to cull half the UK population, are utterly corrupt. Once major power cuts start, about 2017-2018, the people will rise in rebellion but it will be too late because the inner cities will be dying and the paramilitaries will have established the cordons.
The US is ahead of the UK in this regard; Obama’s paramilitaries have been trained and armed.
It’s the old story about Britain’s decline: there is insufficient punishment for small-minded nasty individuals accumulating wealth at the expense of the nation’s economy.
The lesson children need to learn in British schools is simple: assume that the worst solution for the country will be implemented, as it will benefit the nastiest, who always retain power in this country. Never assume that appealing to decency will win the day: it won’t. Never assume that the lessons you are given about ethics, morals or behaviour relate to real life. They relate to utopia. Always assume that the aim of the few is to destroy the heart, soul and happiness of the majority for no better reason than that they are money-grabbing, self-serving sadists.
I wonder what the nation’s psychologists would find happened to childhood depression if you taught them that eh??
Going skyrocketing or going down due to having no illusions to harbour any more??
This morning as I write the total electricity being generated in the UK by all 5000 on-shore and off-shore wind turbines is 0.1 GW! Wind is meeting 0.2% of demand on the Grid giving a load capacity of 1%. We could generate the same amount of electricity if each one of us peddled on cycling machines for 30 minutes per day, and it would save the NHS a fortune ! Perhaps this is what Ed Milliband meant when he promised to create a million new green jobs!
See Live updates of UK power generation here
I also think off-shore wind farms have a far worse visual impact on our small island than on-shore wind farms. Great Yarmouth beach has been ruined. and so has Clacton. There were plans for a western array off Lundy Island which would have totally ruined the beautiful north Devon coast line, which luckily protesters managed to stop. Why do we never learn the lesson of the sixties when town planners ripped out the historic centres of our cities to build the rusting concrete housing and shopping centres we now have to pull down? I fear that in 30 years time we will be left with another set of rusting “Easter Island” type relics sealed to the sea bed which will cost tax payers vast amounts of money to remove. That is if we have any productive economy by then !
A shameless plug for an Ozzie site (from an Ozzie) dedicated to wind mills, especially if you live in Australia (also contains many over-seas wind mill links);
http://stopthesethings.com/
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this site, only wishing for it to have a wider audience.
When this windfarm insanity comes to end will the concrete foundations be our new Easter island like monoliths, maybe modern Stonehenges?
As ever, I am most grateful to the commenters here, nearly all of whom support my contention that neither this nor any wind farm should get any subsidy. Trolls are mostly staying away so far.
Michel says judicial review will be difficult. However, I have plenty of experience of judicial review. It was I who wrote the legal opinion that saved the West Highland sleeper train when Queen’s Counsel from both sides of the Border said nothing could be done to save it. I came within an ace of keeping Britain out of the Maastricht Treaty, also by judicial review, and the Crown had to pay its own costs. And it was I who recommended judicial review in the Al Gore case in 2007 and drafted the 80 pages of scientific testimony. We won.
As Richard Courtney has pointed out, if the effect of wind farms is at best to reduce CO2 emissions by only a small fraction of the amount claimed by the developers and at worst to add so much additional CO2 via the spinning reserve that in net terms more CO2 is emitted than if there had been no windmills, then the policy is one that no reasonable minister could adopt. And, given that the cost of making global warming go away via windmills, even if the amount of CO2 reduction claimed by the developers were achieved, is 25 times the cost of letting global warming happen and simply adapting to its consequences, and the cost of electricity from wind farms is many times that of fossil-fueled electricit, the policy is not merely unreasonable but irrational.
The Wednesbury case does not set a precedent that one must prove irrationality – only that one must prove unreasonableness. If we can prove irrationality, then unreasonableness is proven a fortiori and we win the case.
Nor is it expensive if one does most of the work oneself. In the unlikely event that insufficient funds to pay lawyers are available, it is possible to argue before the Administrative Court in person, and, though sneering court officials put many obstacles in the way of such appearances, the judges are very helpful and will hear the case. Already, opponents of this gruesome proposal are beginning to prepare their case. They will, of course, try every other avenue first. They will submit thousands of individual objections. They will appear at public meetings. They will write reports for the planning inspectors. They will attend hearings by the inspectors and speak at them. They will write to Ministers. Members of Parliament and local councillors are already speaking out openly against this proposal. Everything that can be tried will be tried. But if all else fails, and if I read the mood of the campaigners correctly, this proposal will end up in the Administrative Court.
And what if the opponents of wind farms win. If they deploy the Courtney argument – that one ends up emitting either more CO2 or hardly any less CO2 with windmills than without – and if they win on that ground, then all future subsidies to wind farms in Britain would become unlawful overnight. Navitus Bay is the ideal project to fight, because it fails every environmental test of acceptability, and – unlike most wind farms – will have a disastrously adverse effect on several major centers of population. This one will be well worth watching.
Monckton of Brenchley: “But instead of spinning at full and efficient capacity, it is kept spinning in a fashion so inefficient that there is no CO2 saving from the average wind farm at all.”
Although it is well known (or I think it is) that so running fossil-fuel plants as to back up (unreliable) wind turbines makes them generate more emissions per kilowatt-hour than running them in a base-load mode would, I had not heard of installations where the problem was so bad as completely to eliminate the turbines’ emissions benefit. Does anyone have citations for that proposition?
Clive Best @ 1:09am, April 29.
There is a similar web-site here, which also has graphs for current demand;
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Excellent article Christopher.
Unfortunately our seascape overlooking the Irish sea from the North Wales coast, along to the Great Orme at Llandudno is already despoiled with wind turbines, with more to come.
Eventuality the politicians will pay the full price for this mindless vandalism, with the first instalment in Ma,y with the destruction of the Con and Lib vote at the European elections by UKIP.
Unfortunately the rump left (25%) in the UK, like I guess the USA, is in thrall to big state non solutions to non problems. The EUSSR is their dream world.
@Joe Born: the argument about fossil fuelled plant backing up windmills needs to be understood in very stark terms. Think of a synchronous Power Grid as a Nation’s blood supply. When just the heart is involved (the old central power stations), the system works because Grid Engineers have developed tricks over many decades to anticipate load change and there is intrinsic energy storage.
However, windmills are parasitic. Attached to the ‘skin’ at many places far from the ‘heart’, they speed up and slow down at a tremendous rate and the grid falters many times. Recently, 20% of the population of Scotland were without power for 3 hours because one half cycle of the system failed, and it tripped out. Germany has over 1000 such incidents a year and their Vice-Chancellor stated recently the game has ended; their Grid can take no more: http://notrickszone.com/2014/04/27/angela-merkels-vice-chancellor-stuns-declares-germanys-energiewende-to-be-on-the-verge-of-failure/
The UK’s politicians, led by the idiot Davey who heads up the ‘Department of Energy and Climate Change’ are trying a finesse, using banks of diesel generators in disused quarries. These have c. 25% thermodynamic efficiency and kick in to cover low wind periods. At this moment, Britain’s windmills are producing next to zero power. We are importing nearly 10% of demand.
The diesel units, hidden from Public View, make the windmill tranche use more fossil fuel and produce more CO2 emissions than the old coal fired power stations. The windmill game is all about shifting control of power prices to the fascistic elite, nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
richardscourtney: “A wind turbine designed to collect energy from tropical storms would rarely operate, and a wind turbine designed to collect energy efficiently from ordinary winds would be damaged if it tried to operate in a tropical storm.” (From the cited reprint.)
Although I’ve heard that’s true, I haven’t understood why. I assume they feather the blades in high winds. Can’t a small pitch change from that position enable the turbine to operate without damage at high winds? I know the answer’s no, but, again, I don’t know why.
AlecM
Thanks for the response, but I had actually known the problem in qualitative terms already. What I’m actually looking for is something more quantitative–which I’m hoping to have found once I’ve finished Mr. Courtney’s presentation.
Joe Borns:
At April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am, and in response to a point I made above which was cited by Monckton of Brenchley, you ask
The magnitude of the problem is stated by David Tolley in my paper and I again link it <here.
It says there
blockquote>David Tolley (Head of Networks and Ancillary Services, Innogy (a subsidiary of the German energy consortium RWE) has said of windfarms in the UK, “When [thermal] plant is de-loaded to balance the system, it results in a significant proportion of deloaded plant which operates relatively inefficiently.
…
Coal plant will be part-loaded such that the loss of a generating unit can swiftly be replaced by bringing other units on to full load. In addition to increased costs of holding reserve in this manner, it has been estimated that the entire benefit of reduced emissions from the renewables programme has been negated by the increased emissions from part-loaded plant under NETA.”
(NETA is the New Electricity Trading Arrangements, the UK’s deregulated power market.)
Although (as the reference states) Tolley publicly said this in 2003 there has been no refutation of it for then or for any time since.
Richard
@Joe Born: here is the quantification. Coal and nuclear plants can idle at 20% of full output and ramp up in ~ 60 minutes to cover falling wind speeds with relatively little effect on fuel consumption, in the case of non-supercritical coal a reduction of thermodynamic efficiency from 38% to say 33%.
CCGTs and supercritical coal are very different. CCGT maximum thermodynamic efficiency is c. 60%. Reduce output to 60% and efficiency falls to 50%. Go below that and the steam cycle fails, reducing efficiency to <40%. You don't touch supercritical coal unless you want to wreck the plant by thermal fatigue. If you want to idle CCGT at say 20% output, you have to waste gas heating the steam boilers to avoid thermal fatigue and thermodynamic efficiency falls to c. 30%.
The way out for the dishonest UK politicians was to use diesel plant, cheap and nasty with quick turn on. The decision to do this was taken first in 2007 for planning, then 2012 in earnest. Davey was told by his Chief Scientist that this could save no CO2 emissions but still went ahead. The Chief Scientist is leaving before this ordure hits the very public fan.
The effect of the reduction of thermal plant efficiency is to make windmills save a third of the CO2 emissions up to 10% 'penetration'. Above 10% and there is no saving but you have to dump the peaks offshore at zero cost. Insist on increasing penetration and you increase CO2 emissions in a non hydro grid, in the UK it's diesel plant which does it. Use coal and the penalty is worse. Pump storage is a way out but it is hideously expensive.
richardscourtney:
Thanks for your response, which I saw just after I read your paper’s Table 2 on page 11 and thereby found the information I was looking for.
Thanks again.
Joe Born:
At April 29, 2014 at 1:43 am you ask me
It is because the energy in wind is proportional to the cube of the wind speed and the blade tips must not move faster than the speed of sound.
The “cube power issue” is explained mathematically early in the lecture.
The additional energy of high-speed-gusts is immense so rapid acceleration of the turbine occurs for gusts, and it is unmanageable at high wind speeds.
A wind turbine vibrates to destroy itself if its blades’ tip speed goes supersonic.
As the lecture explains, a turbine is progressively feathered as wind speed increases. This ensures that excessively high blade tip speeds will not occur, and it stops the turbine from operating at high wind speeds.
Richard
AlecM:
Thanks for the information. Although I worked extensively with a supplier of coal-fired and nuclear steam-supply systems back in the ’70s, I had forgotten (to the extent I ever knew) the differences among the various types’ efficiencies and spin-up times.
None of what we do or say will make any difference at all unless we eject this etonian mess along with the dickhead who persistently points his finger at everyone.
All this BS and the arctic and antarctic ice areas are expanding ?????? http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
AlecM:
Thankyou for your excellent posts in this thread.
I write to draw attention to your posts in hope that people will study your posts whether or not they like ‘technical’ posts.
Richard
I am building a presentation on turbines in france and need to find as much data as possible. If you can help please post here.
Your Lordship,
May I suggest updating Blake’s words to reflect 21st century reality:
I think it unfortunately has to be said but however correct Christophers arguments maybe – as one of the prominent spokespersons for those of us who agree that the science doesn’t match up with the predictions of damaging man-made climate change he is far from ideal – its too easy to make him a figure of fun – a caricature of an upper class Englishman of a bygone era.
Unfortunately people don’t see beyond this and the message is lost and in some ways it pushes the message out further into that of the loony denialist.
I think that although the science has to remain fundamental to the argument a little dumbing down at times wouldn’t hurt – some of the science is almost unpenetrable at times.
I have noticed more and more name-calling on this site too – which doesn’t appear useful.
It seems clear that the strongest evidence is simply that the earth has not warmed as CO2 has continued to rise – thats seems as much as needs to be heard to convince people but that message has not really got through – most people look at me as though I’m joking or making it up when I tell them that.
We could learn a lot from those who use photo’s of polar bears marooned on tiny ice flows and the slick-talking messengers of doom.
The site can remain largely for the pure scientists and those of us who appreciate their efforts but unfortunately the war is being lost, maybe the public aren’t so interested but the policy makers from the local councils upwards are still spending billions on limiting carbon emissions and the world economy is being manipulated by vested interests trying to shape it using climate fear as a tool.
Alec M
Great stuff but I missed any detail on nuclear baseload of which we have a lot in france. Any info ?
Christopher
A great blog for provoking useful info. Thanks.
The best way to mitigate the effects of these monstrosities would be a few sticks of dynamite!
I have read somewhere (can’t quote the source from memory) that off-shore wind-farm proprietors will appropriate powers to exclude fishermen from the area of the farm. That will damage the fishermen’s livelihoods and increase the cost of fish to the folks who would have been their customers. I think this aspect needs more publicity.
Somewhat off-topic but worthy of thought: I believe the introduction of so-called ‘smart meters’ will cost the consuming public dearly (think of their costs of manufacture, installation and of the required support staff). But here’s a point – having grown up in the era of the CEGB, which had a strong ethic of continuity of electricity supply, I object to the prospect that some distant stranger should have the ability to switch off my household appliances to reduce load!
richardscourtney: Although I had understood all the stuff about power vs. wind speed, you’re saying that it’s gusts that are the problem. I.e., a high dynamic range could be achieved through pitch variation if wind velocity changed gradually, but winds are so gusty that to avoid damage in a high-velocity regime a turbine designed to take advantage of low velocities would require a faster response of pitch to wind speed than is practical. Is that it?
Monckton’s report will be ignored comprehensively by the msm, foremost, of course, by the hateful BBC who have ‘disappeared’ the good Lord completely from their world-view; these cowards, these intellectual frauds and CAGW zealots, are simply too terrified of reports like the above: the facts, explained clearly for all to understand.
That’s the kind of thing that makes the BBC very nervous – and you have to be very careful when you rattle the cage of such types. Thanks for the report, Christopher. I just wish it could be disseminated into every university, every school, everywhere as a counter to the endless ‘sustainability agenda’ we are force fed so relentlessly by our government and media.
Mr Stealey recalls the Heartland Conference at which he produced a $50 million Zimbabwean banknote and I trumped him with a $100 million note. Well, if the economic idiocies of which wind farms are the hideous embodiment continue, I shall soon be able to choose between buying a loaf of bread and giving him a £100 million sterling note.
Mr Born asks for evidence that power grids with spinning reserve to back up wind farms emit more CO2 than without wind farms. He might begin with the excellent report by Professor Gordon Hughes for the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2011.
The semi-furtively hemionymous “pat” blames various recent droughts and other bad weather on global warming. First, the one thing we know for certain did not cause any recent extreme weather is global warming, because there has not been any global warming recently. Secondly, since wind farms increase overall CO2 emissions they are making the alleged “climate crisis” worse, not better. Is that really what “pat” wants?
I shall be happy to offer $0.53 to GeeJam for the blueprints to his desktop perpetual-motion engine. I shall offer him another $0.47 if he can spot the crafty method that seems to keep Aldo’s Wheel turning and fooled some of the world’s smartest physicists. Payment in Zimbab dollars. When I was a kid I once startled my mother by making a replica of the Grimthorpe double three-legged gravity remontoire escapement out of bits of wood and phosphor-bronze wire. I hung on it my bedroom wall and powered it with a bottle of beer. It would run for minutes at a time (or until I became thirsty).
I have much sympathy for Dr C’s opinion that whatever was medieval could not at the same time be ugly: but, as a Classicist, I prefer the neo-Greek to the Gothic, though my lovely wife, busily restoring a cottage, has just asked me to draw up a note for the builders on how to draw a Gothic arch accurately. I have given her a diagram showing how to construct the quinto acuto used by Brunelleschi when he designed the dome of Florence cathedral in his capacity as capo maestro of the works. And I have generalized the result so that a Gothic arch of any desired span-to-apical-height ratio can be constructed in moments.
Robert of Ottawa points out that the Navitus wind farm is slap bang in the middle of a major shipping lane – the approach to Poole Harbor. It is also in some of the best sailing waters in the world. The developers’ current proposal – which seems mad because it is – is to allow everyone to sail straight through the middle of the array if they feel like it. As OldSeaDog says, there have already been one or two expensive prangs in the area. One foresees trouble if this dismal project succeeds.
Phillip Bratby rightly corrects me on the niceties of the EU’s daft “renewables obligation”, and Mr Hultqvist also corrects me by pointing out that there are many tons of neodymium alloy, rather than neodymium simpliciter, in the nacelle of a 5 MW wind turbine.
Mr Born asks why a turbine with featherable blades cannot operate in high winds, when the formula for power from a stream-flow dictates that they will be at their most efficient. The answer lies in the immense asymmetrical loadings imposed on the hub by rotor tips many hundreds of feet apart in a laminar airflow with much faster winds higher than lower. Ceramic bearings help, but are not a complete solution. There is also the danger of blades snapping off altogether.
Well done again, Lord Monckton.
They’ve all gone completely nuts, plain stark raving bonkers over these landscape wrecking novelty toys of power production which will in ten years be rusting hulks ready for demolition. Meanwhile wildlife, bird and bats are slaughtered, and the numbers alone tell us that there is no possible good to come of it all.
Good luck with this Christopher Monkton, if you decide to act against it in any way. As I write, I can see The Needles to the left, Old Harry Rocks to the right, and spent yesterday on top of Gad Cliff, gazing down at Brandy Bay, and marvelling at the twisted rock strata from the Jurassic and Cretaceous.
It’s a stunning unspoilt coastline, which gives great pleasure to everyone who visits. It’s difficult to imagine such a mindless project as Navitus Bay being conceived by anyone with a care for the environment.
@Joe Born @AlecM
There is a PhD thesis which shows that if wind power reaches more than 20% capacity of the Grid the inefficiency losses due to fossil fuel balancing outweigh any benefits. In other words a fossil fuel only grid would not only cost less but also emit less CO2.
The doctoral thesis is by Eleanor Denny of Trinity College
http://erc.ucd.ie/files/theses/Eleanor%20Denny%20-%20A%20Cost-Benefit%20Analysis%20of%20Wind%20Power.pdf
Beyond 20%, attaching more wind power produces NEGATIVE benefits. It actually costs you more in wasted fuel on the rest of the system than the fuel saving the wind farms are producing. In other words, if you turned off the wind farm you would be generating the same amount of energy on the grid using less fuel overall for less cost.
The 20% figure is shown by worked examples on the Irish Grid. The paper shows that with theoretical ideal best assumptions (not achievable in practice) you may be able to connect 30% wind to a grid, and with worst assumptions 5% before the cost benefit goes negative.
@stephen richards: nuclear reactors are simple machines. So long as the thermal creep limits aren’t exceeded, they can be idled, like non-supercritical coal, at 20% demand.
The Canadians do this with their CANDU reactors.
In the UK our nuclear power is always on and is never idled, and I think the same is true in France. Basically the electricity is free at night and could for example be used to charge electric cars over night. In Belgium all motorways have lighting along their full length because nuclear power produces free electricity at night.
Monckton of Brenchley: Thank you for the pointer to the Hughes paper. I also found Mr. Courtney’s paper helpful.
How to defeat UK windfarm applications>
Here is an example of why a windfarm was refused planning permission. Put your own details between the square brackets. For offshore windfarms, substitute “seascape” for “landscape.”
****
RECOMMENDATION – REFUSAL
REASONS
1 The development, if approved would be contrary to Policy UT6 ‘Wind Energy’ of the [Council area] Development Plan:-
UT6 – WIND ENERGY
“IT IS THE POLICY OF [Area] COUNTY COUNCIL THAT PROPOSALS FOR WIND TURBINES, WIND FARMS OR GROUPS OF WIND TURBINES WILL BE PERMITTED PROVIDED THAT THE FOLLOWING CRITERIA ARE MET IN FULL:
(i) PROPOSALS EITHER INDIVIDUALLY OR CUMULATIVELY WOULD NOT CAUSE DEMONSTRABLE HARM BY VIRTUE OF HAVING A SIGNIFICANT ADVERSE IMPACT ON THE QUALITY OF THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT, OR TO SITES OF NATURE CONSERVATION, HISTORICAL OR ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE, AGRICULTURAL VALUE, AREAS DESIGNATED FOR THEIR LANDSCAPE VALUE, OR TO SPECIES OF NATURE CONSERVATION AND ECOLOGICAL VALUE;
(ii) THE SITING, DESIGN, LAYOUT AND MATERIALS USED SHOULD BE SYMPATHETIC TO THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LAND-FORM, CONTOURS AND EXISTING FEATURES OF THE LANDSCAPE;
(iii) PROPOSALS DO NOT GIVE RISE TO PROBLEMS OF HIGHWAY SAFETY OR PLACE UNACCEPTABLE DEMANDS ON THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC SERVICES;
(iv) ANCILLARY WORKS, BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURES ARE KEPT TO A MINIMUM AND SITED UNOBTRUSIVELY WITHIN THE LANDSCAPE;
(v) PROPOSALS SHOULD NOT LEAD TO A SIGNIFICANT ADVERSE INCREASE IN RISK OR NUISANCE TO, AND IMPACTS ON THE AMENITIES OF, NEARBY RESIDENTS OR OTHER MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC ARISING FROM WIND TURBINE OPERATION, SHADOW, FLICKER, SAFETY RISK, RADIO OR TELECOMMUNICATIONS INTERFERENCE;
(vi) NO TURBINE SHOULD CAUSE DEMONSTRABLE HARM TO THE AMENITY OF ANY RESIDENTS;
(vii) NEW CONNECTIONS TO THE LOCAL ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION NETWORK SHOULD ACCORD WITH POLICY UT2.”
In that the proposed development would have a significant adverse effect on the landscape on and around the proposed site, including part of the [Area Valley Special Landscape Area, or wherever], leading in particular to a cluttered appearance which would over-dominate the [hill known as [name] or whatever other area it will spoil].
2 The anticipated major wind farm development in the [name Forest Area/other area would be readily visible from the [place] area and the cumulative impact of these two developments on landscape is considered undesirable.
****
TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING ACT 1990 (AS AMENDED)
REFUSAL OF PLANNING PERMISSION
Download this document and insert your local council’s details between the boxed brackets
http://sharesend.com/oxmhj0jw
How to defeat UK windfarm applications
Here is an example of why a windfarm was refused planning permission. Put your own details between the square brackets. For offshore windfarms, substitute “seascape” for “landscape.”
RECOMMENDATION – REFUSAL
REASONS
1 The development, if approved would be contrary to Policy UT6 ‘Wind Energy’ of the [Council area] Development Plan:-
UT6 – WIND ENERGY
‘IT IS THE POLICY OF [Area] COUNTY COUNCIL THAT PROPOSALS FOR WIND TURBINES, WIND FARMS OR GROUPS OF WIND TURBINES WILL BE PERMITTED PROVIDED THAT THE FOLLOWING CRITERIA ARE MET IN FULL:
(i) PROPOSALS EITHER INDIVIDUALLY OR CUMULATIVELY WOULD NOT CAUSE DEMONSTRABLE HARM BY VIRTUE OF HAVING A SIGNIFICANT ADVERSE IMPACT ON THE QUALITY OF THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT, OR TO SITES OF NATURE CONSERVATION, HISTORICAL OR ARCHAEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE, AGRICULTURAL VALUE, AREAS DESIGNATED FOR THEIR LANDSCAPE VALUE, OR TO SPECIES OF NATURE CONSERVATION AND ECOLOGICAL VALUE;
(ii) THE SITING, DESIGN, LAYOUT AND MATERIALS USED SHOULD BE SYMPATHETIC TO THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LAND-FORM, CONTOURS AND EXISTING FEATURES OF THE LANDSCAPE;
(iii) PROPOSALS DO NOT GIVE RISE TO PROBLEMS OF HIGHWAY SAFETY OR PLACE UNACCEPTABLE DEMANDS ON THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC SERVICES;
(iv) ANCILLARY WORKS, BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURES ARE KEPT TO A MINIMUM AND SITED UNOBTRUSIVELY WITHIN THE LANDSCAPE;
(v) PROPOSALS SHOULD NOT LEAD TO A SIGNIFICANT ADVERSE INCREASE IN RISK OR NUISANCE TO, AND IMPACTS ON THE AMENITIES OF, NEARBY RESIDENTS OR OTHER MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC ARISING FROM WIND TURBINE OPERATION, SHADOW, FLICKER, SAFETY RISK, RADIO OR TELECOMMUNICATIONS INTERFERENCE;
(vi) NO TURBINE SHOULD CAUSE DEMONSTRABLE HARM TO THE AMENITY OF ANY RESIDENTS;
(vii) NEW CONNECTIONS TO THE LOCAL ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION NETWORK SHOULD ACCORD WITH POLICY UT2.’
In that the proposed development would have a significant adverse effect on the landscape on and around the proposed site, including part of the [Area Valley Special Landscape Area, or wherever], leading in particular to a cluttered appearance which would over-dominate the [hill known as [name] or whatever other area it will spoil].
2 The anticipated major wind farm development in the [name Forest Area/other area would be readily visible from the [place] area and the cumulative impact of these two developments on landscape is considered undesirable.
****
TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING ACT 1990 (AS AMENDED)
REFUSAL OF PLANNING PERMISSION
Download this document and insert your local council’s details between the boxed brackets
http://sharesend.com/oxmhj0jw
The seabed belongs to the Crown Estates, from which the Queen draws a proportion of the profits as her income, so be aware of whom you are up against.
This report, whilst very good, is based on a theory yet to be validated. The fact that it violates the laws of thermodynamics seems not to worry anybody in government. All wind generation schemes are useless scams.
Joe Born:
At April 29, 2014 at 2:44 am you ask me
No, that is not what I said at April 29, 2014 at 2:21 am. Perhaps I lacked sufficient clarity.
I wrote
Simply, as wind speed increases the feathering is increased until – when the blades are completely feathered – the turbine stops operating. That would be true whether or not gusts exist.
However, as I explained, the ‘cube power issue‘ combines with gusts to require that the amount of feathering needs a large ‘safety margin’ when wind speed is high.
The turbine can be destroyed if blade tip speed is excessive for only a few moments. The turbines are big and their blade tips move fast. If the tip speed reaches supersonic levels the destruction is effectively instantaneous.
This could be overcome for operation in tropical storms by designing for the operational range of wind speeds to be higher. In that case, the lowest operating wind speed would be higher than normal wind speeds so the turbine would rarely operate.
And there is little energy in wind with low speed because of the ‘cube power issue’.
Hence,
I hope that is now clear.
Richard
An excellent thread from which I have learned a good deal.
clivebest:
Thankyou for the additional information you link in your post at April 29, 2014 at 2:58 am.
This is yet more confirmation obtained from real-world data that more than 20% wind power increases emissions from power generation.
And, as AlecM explains at April 29, 2014 at 2:07 am, the UK is already building additional power stations – which are inefficient and expensive – solely for the purpose of keeping the windfarms going.
This needs much publicity which it is not getting.
Richard
Has any work been done to calculate how many sea birds will be killed annually by this array? If it is anything like the studies in the US ( est 2,000,000 birds & bats killed annually by the existing set of wind farms), it would be another factor to add to the evaluation process.
The ineptitude boggles the mind.
Zero material impact on ‘carbon’ emissions.
Zero material impact on reducing global temperatures, either today or in the future.
Zero material impact on existing ‘baseload’ energy demands, which must continue.
Instead they DO ensure rocketing fuel bills, ruined views, a distorted marketplace, locked-in costs for decades and the sure-fire future humiliation of this absurd, ‘carbon’-obsessed generation. It’s all just completely beyond any definition of reasonable comprehension.
Thank you Lord Monckton, a most interesting piece again. I did also appreciate the commenter’s discussing the UK grid mangling that goes on. Thats apart from the DECC type mangling of the country and abuse of diesel generators. I remember the use of Diesel Generators in the Middle East for new housing (way back). That was those with the intensely glowing exhaust manifiolds and sudden seizures. For as usual nobody gets it right….it was the money. Its now most definitely the money with added massive lack of brainware.
So really I need another scrapyard ready and waiting in Dorset. I mentioned to the guys driving around locally (any old iron) that they may need a marine department fairly shortly?
Cheshirered has summed it up nicely. The points he makes are the arguments central to the case demonstrating the irrationality of the UK Government’s approach. No one has made a systematic attempt to challenge the “renewables” policy in the courts before. The Navitus Bay proposal, however, is so entirely without merit that it will make an excellent choice if ministers are foolish enough to permit it.
Stephen Richards @ 2:34am & 2:36am
I am building a presentation on turbines in france and need to find as much data as possible. If you can help please post here.
Great stuff but I missed any detail on nuclear baseload of which we have a lot in france. Any info?
Maybe this can help you; http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/ …in ‘near as we speak’ terms, nuke & hydro are supplying 90+% of France’s power (53.12GW), wind on the other hand is producing 1.3% or 0.76GW.
For a time earlier today all of the UK’s subsidy farms were generating just 63 MW.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
I hope the Navitus Bay monstrosity can be stopped.
This is one reason why I no longer vote Conservative.
Chris
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Once we finally admit how stupid this is, who will clean up the mess?
BruceC says:
April 29, 2014 at 4:37 am
Stephen Richards @ 2:34am & 2:36am
I’ve been following this site for sometime and get all the same information, averaged over the period of the bill, from my EDF electricity bill. On average French nuclear supplies 82.5% of electricity in france but also supplies ALL other neighbouring countries inc. the UK.
Our socialist government wants to cut nuclear in half by 2025 which will be curtains for the UK and Spain but the germans are building dirty coal stations as fast as they can.
Chris Wright says:
April 29, 2014 at 4:56 am
VOTE UKIP. It is your only chance for change. Don’t worry about the news media comments on their ‘loonies’ all UK parties have their fair share of loonies.
This wind farm “IF” built.
Will be know as The Cameron Folly.
It will be like ten pin bowling for ships in a storm.
Who builds a reef in a shipping channel?
Some prat!
On April 29, 2014 at 3:14 am, Flydlbee said:
The seabed belongs to the Crown Estates, from which the Queen draws a proportion of the profits as her income, so be aware of whom you are up against.
I don’t understand your post – are you saying the fishermen weren’t entitled to be there in the first place?
richardscourtney: “I hope that is now clear.”
Well, not really. To me it seems that you said no to what I said but then repeated that very thing in different words. Be that as it may, I’m now realizing that the real answer involves issues of blade width and profile that I’ve never really dealt with before, so I shouldn’t have asked the question, because this isn’t a particularly good venue for straightening that kind of thing out.
But thanks for trying anyway. Your paper is quite helpful in other ways.
To write of conventional power stations having to occasionally ‘back up’ the wind turbines implies that the wind turbines usually front up. They do not. And they never will or could supply either the base load major part of supply, or the rapid response additional, and dependable, supply that consumers at times require. They are legally privileged offspring of our rulers who must be permitted to take center stage to perform their ugly and embarrassing party piece as and when they feel up to it.
It’s time for some turbine manufacturer to design a city size and/or home size, natural gas fired turbine generator.
@steven richards:
Try http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
“fhhaynie says:
April 29, 2014 at 5:44 am
It’s time for some turbine manufacturer to design a city size and/or home size, natural gas fired turbine generator.”
I’d go for a “micro-reactor” or whatever. Self-contained, clean (waiting on tech here, I know), and generating enough power (and reserve) for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, etc. With the gas prices here in Germany (and the uncertainty of supply right now) natural gas-powered generators wouldn’t break even financially…
“Dudley Horscroft says:
April 28, 2014 at 9:50 pm
The disappearing coast – remember Dunwich, Old Kilnsea and Eccles (him?) and the Isle of Goodwin. English towns and countryside swollen beneath the sea.”
I thought Eccles had been “struck down by a batter pudding”…:)
Pity we don’t have the “Goon Show” anymore….all that’s left are goons siphoning up money from these cronyistic subsidies….
I imagine the lyrics “There’ll be Windmills over the white cliffs of Dover”… would be music to their ears…might need something that shocking to make people see what’s going to happen if this doesn’t stop soon…
clivebest: Thanks for the link. I haven’t teased apart its results yet, since the author makes a lot of assumptions regarding replacement of the fossil-fuel-plant mix, but it’s certainly a good data point.
Good Lord!
I hope you’re right about the politics of this, but you’re wrong about the 2 millionth of a degree. Coun t CO2 produced by the standby power needed to make sure the air conditioners don’t stop when the wind does, and the project is roughly at breakeven on CO2 productions vs continuous operation for a modern coal plant. A fission plant would, of course, be much clearner..
Worse, everyone forgets that transmission loses express as heat. Generate 10MW at source in one hour on/off cycles, and fifty miles down cable you get an average of 9MW delivered – and a cylinder of warm air enroute. If I guess the parameters at about 23% production (i.e. the generators run within power production range 23% of the time) in six hour increments and they use 24,000 volt transmission lines, I make break even (using the absurdly high ipcc CO2 multiplier) on CO2 vs electrial heating at somewhere in the 80 – 100 mile range.
Maybe the Good Lord should have used Wells Cathedral some 45 miles to the west of Salisbury Cathedral in his illustrations as this happed today:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-27203276
– – – – – – – – –
Christopher Monckton,
Your economic argument is reasonable.
Your political argument is reasonable.
Your legal argument is reasonable.
Your technical argument is reasonable.
Your scientific argument is reasonable.
Your logical argument is reasonable.
Your philosophical argument is reasonable.
Your ethical argument is reasonable, but should be emphasized a little more in the mix of all of your other above reasonable arguments. People respond deeply to clearly stated and concise moral stands. The success of individualism needs more moral emphasis in its support.
John
The title of the post being Gone With The Wind, it is of interest to see real data as the wind comes and goes. Along the Columbia River in western North America the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) balances the Load (red line in the link) with Hydro (blue) and the wind (green). BPA is a net exporter so Hydro appears high than the regional Load seems to demand. This region has just experienced 3 atmospheric energy passages (wind) with the last one having ceased by early this morning (Apr 29).
The chart shows the result:
http://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
Read the list below the chart for perspective on how the Thermal (brown line) power is generated.
Mr Murphy says I’m wrong about the Navitus project preventing 2 millionths of a Celsius degree of global warming, on the ground that spinning reserve and transmission losses would cancel it. He should read the head posting with more care. I worked the math on the assumption that the claimed CO2 savings would occur, but later pointed that because of spinning reserve more CO2 would be emitted with than without the wind farm it was an infinitely costly way to make global warming go away.
Bearing in mind the area concerned is very big for sailing two questions come to mind;
Firstly, will there need to be large exclusion zones around these large pylons?
Secondly, will the turbine ‘steal’ wind from the yachts?
Tonyb
{all bold emphasis mine – JW}
– – – – – – – – – – –
Christopher Monckton,
A theme of the 1939 movie ‘Gone With The Wind’ does indeed apply to the situation faced by England in the struggle against the Navitus Bay Wind Array.
When England stands up against the enslaving CAGW culture to assert its protection of liberty, it bodes well for England.
For emphasis, I have paraphrased the most famous lines from the movie ‘Gone With The Wind’. They are enlightening:
John
“…The law is clear. If a decision is irrational, it is unlawful. .. the court is obliged to set that decision aside.
… Show Fig. 1 to a court and it will start to question very carefully everything said by the developers, the Greens, and the government….
Some 50 residents’ associations have already banded together to fight this poisonous scheme. Let us hope they fight it all the way, and let us hope they win. ”
While sharing your hope, I feel it’s a very faint one. Here in Canada, where legal tradition is based on the same common law as in the UK, and British case law is often cited in court rulings, the highest court has often refused to even review patently irrational decisions and laws. And when it has deigned to scrutinize such, has generally endorsed them.
And how could one expect it to be otherwise? Do judges not share the interests and ideology of the dominant corporate and political classes?
Perhaps if one could identify the lifeboats these profiteers are planning to board once the U.K. has been thoroughly plundered, the courts, police, and military (or at least their lower echelons) could be persuaded to take action. But I imagine such a research project could be perilous for the researcher.
” Jeff says:
April 29, 2014 at 6:13 am
…
I’d go for a “micro-reactor” or whatever. Self-contained, clean (waiting on tech here, I know), and generating enough power (and reserve) for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, etc.”
Don’t forget recharging your hybrid motor vehicle..(make mine a biodiesel hybrid). OTOH, can you imagine calling customer support, and trying to claw your way up to the next support level from the CSR on the other end somewhere in SE Asia while wondering whether your reactor is about to explode?
Lord Monckton could you start a petition on the Direct Gov website stating that as windfarms become defunct they must be returned to their original state by the builders and landowners.at their cost.You would know best how to word it.
See the applications drop after that lol.
Help please !
I used Lord Monktons numbers to attempt to work out how long global warming or co2 increase would be delayed on a business as usual basis.
Using the figures for global temperature reduction projected to the year 2100 and assuming a temperature rise of 2 degrees C by the year 2100, I concluded that the Navitus Bay wind turbine array would delay global warming by 22 minutes.
Using the figurs for co2 I concluded that the Navitus Bay farce wold delay the increase in global co2 by 39 hours.
So it looks like I got my mathematics wrong in at least one and more probaby both cases. But if I am in the ball park with either number, then the whole Navitus boondoggle is a sickening and pointless farce.
Perhaps Lorrd Monkton would be gracious enough to assist ?
Or someone else might like to have a crack at the number crunching.
Also when calculating co2 / energy saved by using turbines we should not forget the costs involved in mining, processing, manufacturing, transporting, erecting and maintaining our modern equivalent of the Easter Island statues which I read somewhere was as much co2 / energy as the monstrosities purportedly save. So the net effect of the above primary stage costs combined with the secondary stage costs of backup energy generation is that far from saving co2 / energy, wind turbines innstead actually increase co2 by the same amount as they are meant to save. And finally there are the third stage costs of dismantling etc.
Our politicians have failed to exercise due diligence in assessing the whole life energy and co2 costs of these monstrosities along with failing to make a proper assesment of the impact on jobs and industrial competitiveness.
http://publiclawforeveryone.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/the-super-wednesbury-principle-is-alive-and-well-r-rotherham-mbc-v-secretary-of-state-for-business-innovation-skills-2014-ewhc-232-admin/
See the links also. I don’t think a judge is going to overrule this one.
@Village Idiot
> Now we wouldn’t want to see the Market distorted by subsidies would we?
“The OECD estimates that the UK fossil fuel industry received £4.3 billion of support from government tax breaks and assistance toward infrastructure development in 2011.”
Right, but have you seen the taxes on fuel at the pump? The governments suck in MANY more billions then what they hand out here.
I sincerely doubt there going to be some big “downstream” tax on some high priced wind electricity which is already over priced in the first place and the RESULT of tax money!
Of course the government gives “some development” taxes and breaks to oil and fossil based industry since that is ONE OF THEIR LARGEST sources of taxes! And such projects tend to create a lot of high paying jobs also.
Wind farms generate no such wealth or tax revenues for the governments. However such wind farms certainly fills the pockets of those receiving subsidies from the government. So fossil fuel not only supplies the “energy” for rail transportation, food growing, heating of schools and hospitals and not to mention the ability to power good jobs in the industrial sector.
So yes there is some tax breaks and subsides that go to carbon based sources of energy. However the benefits of using such fuels far outweighs those subsides and the government then turns around and receives BILLIONS of taxes on those fuels.
The oil based industries are among the most heavily taxed and provide the largest sources of taxed products to the governments.
So if you think people here see some kind of hypocrisy that the carbon based fuel industry receives some subsides from the government it is LAUGHABLE that you FAIL to point out the huge positive net taxes that such fuels provide to the government. They are MASSIVE amounts.
Wind farms are the result of taxes – the oil industry is not and carbon based sources of energy are a major source of tax revenue for most governments. In fact the carbon tax and trading is an attempt to further tax people on the energy that they use which has ALREADY been taxed!!
This whole CAGW scam has been and is about taxing you. Governments knew that if you tossed in carbon trading carrot to the financial sector then they would support governments to “get in” on the trillions of dollars bonanza that would result in forced carbon trading. The end result was governments and the financial sectors sucking more money out of you’re already beaten up and overtaxed wallet.
The tax breaks and incentives to carbon based energy does not distort the market and at worst such moneys results in a HUGE cash cow of tax revenues for the government – something wind farms do not.
As an American who has traveled extensively in England, I am dismayed at the prospect of some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes being defaced by wind turbines. I am not familiar with the Dorset coast, but I do know well the Hole of Horcum, Fylingdales Moor and Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire. I know well the Salisbury Plain and Old Sarum. I know well the Isle of Ely, and the magnificent cathedral there, and the magnificent cathedral at Lincoln, as seen from the famous viewpoint in the Castle. I know well the Slaughters and the Wallops. How dare these swine desecrate these places with their feckless contraptions.
These monstrosities must everywhere be uprooted and removed at the expense of the criminals responsible for foisting them upon the world.
Michel, who seems determined to discourage judicial review (which in any event does not arise until all other remedies are exhausted), cites the Rotherham case, but without saying what conceivable relevance it could have to the Navitus case. The two self-evident grounds on which judicial review might lie are 1) the British Government’s failure to adhere to the Aarhus Convention, which mandates public as well as parliamentary consultation on the underlying policy principles (a consultation which did not take place before the principles were set in stone), and 2) failure to comply with the Government’s own declared policy principles – a failure that is so abject and so obvious, when properly quantified, that it is not merely unreasonable but irrational. The question of proportionality, in issue in the MBC case, is not central to the Navitus case.
The opponents of the Navitus project, who are delighted that the head posting has appeared, are determined to ensure that every possible step is taken to oppose the project. The will oppose it in the Administrative Court if they have to, but they will give the developers and the government a fair chance to put matters to rights before they do.
@ Lord Monckton, who states in the post above:
“The problem is that the wind, even offshore, is so fickle that the array will only generate electricity a third of the time. So just as much fossil-fueled capacity as before has to be kept onstream and spinning in case the wind drops. But instead of spinning at full and efficient capacity, it is kept spinning in a fashion so inefficient that there is no CO2 saving from the average wind farm at all.”
The first sentence is true. Wind does blow intermittently, and windturbines produce power only when the wind blows. From there, however, the Lord is on thin ice. Or, perhaps, no ice at all.
There is, indeed, CO2 savings from wind farms, but I do not ask the Lord to take my word for it, as good as that word is coming from an experienced, degreed engineer. Instead, the Lord can look to his own countrymen from Imperial College London, in their 8 October, 2012 paper, linked below.
The title is “Supplementary evidence to the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee on the economics of wind energy”. In the paper, the position taken by Professor Gordon Hughes is soundly refuted.
The quick summary is:
One can, indeed, increase CO2 emissions from operating a power grid that has wind energy as part of the mix, if one were to eliminate base-load power and replace that with open-cycle gas turbines, OCGT, to quickly respond as the wind changes. However, (my words, not the authors’), no one is that stupid. At least, one hopes that power planners and grid operators are not that stupid. Wind turbines would be far more economically backed up by load-following gas-fired plants, which do in fact produce less CO2 emissions as their loads are reduced. In fact, that is exactly what experience in the US has shown: wind turbines are causing load-following gas-fired plants to reduce output, and energy-hogging OCGT are not used except in their traditional role as peak power for very high grid load conditions.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/517/m57a.pdf
I have yet to meet,or read anything which would tell me any of the members of UKIP were as bad as the present Pollies that the UK have.The polls say that Labour is the likely to win the next election.
Why would anyone vote for them?
Ed the Red got you into this mess in the first place.
Roger Sowell:
re your post at April 29, 2014 at 5:16 pm .
The several studies from real-world data reported in this thread show that subsidy farms do NOT reduce CO2 emissions from power generation in the UK. Indeed, the government is now commissioning additional thermal CO2-producing power stations which are needed to enable the subsidy farms to operate.
A self-serving paper from an academic institution does not alter the fact that subsidy farms provide neglible CO2 reduction.
Richard
Ooops! Not neglible but negligible. Sorry. Richard.
Roger Sowell:
Following my answer to your specific assertion, I now write to summarise the issues.
Windfarms only exist to farm subsidies:
they are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird-swatters,
they increase emissions from power generation,
they increase costs of power generation
they only provide electricity when the wind is strong enough but not too strong,
and they provide no electricity of use to a grid supply system at any time,
but they increase deterioration of conventional power stations supplying the grid.
Richard
Dear Lord Monckton
Thank you for this excellent essay, ….. but you have made an unfortunate but important error!
The Navitus Wind farm will not be spread over six square miles but sixty square miles.
Other considerations include the fact that radar will not work properly in a wind farm, with the risks to shipping should there be a problem, and will also apparently cause what is called a Radar Void over the Southerly approach to Bournemouth Airport, requiring any aircraft approaching from that direction to have an active transponder fitted, which most small aircraft do not have.
The Condor ferry on one of its regular trips to the Channel Islands, maybe with 500 people on board, maybe on fire after colliding with one of these massive structures in poor visibility, might not be able to be located by radar, rescue helicopters can’t operate obviously, so this is a major risk. We have to remember that the Canberra cruise liner drifted right through the area of the wind farm some years ago and was only stopped close to shore. Several hundred oil tankers use the main shipping channel a few miles South, and it would only take one, with a steering or engine problem, now able to drift through an empty unobstructed area, striking a turbine foundation, to cause a Torrey Canyon disaster for the whole of the Dorset Coast.
I have been amazed at the cavalier way in which Navitus have misrepresented the whole project. Their visuals which not only were completely unrealistic, referring to very much smaller turbines than those intended now to be used, and from which they did some Public surveys, still using those results; their refusal to mail drop the local population to inform us that this was planned, as they originally promised, so that the project has become a great shock at the last minute for most people. They originally tried to fool us with childish videos including that of a yacht approaching some large telegraph poles. They put these on their website and Youtube. When I placed a comment on Youtube that these were completely misleading, they removed all the videos! That is their way of doing business. Try to fool us, and withdraw only when found out.
I have spoken to the Advertising Standards Authority and they said that should sufficient information be available they would look at it with regard to possible misrepresentation in order to obtain funds from the Public purse, so maybe someone like yourself would be the right person to pursue that option.The funds in question being estimated to be in the region of £7-9 Billion from taxes and green utility bill additions to pay vast subsidies to EDF a majority French Govt owned utility. Ironically they were taken to court in the last few months in France, and the French Govt supported the decision to refuse to place a much smaller wind farm adjacent to Mount St Michel, a UNESCO Heritage Coastal site just like our only UK awarded UNESCO Heritage Coastal site at the closest point to Navitus, as it was decided that it was not a suitable place for a wind farm and would damage tourism. However they are happy to destroy our economy and tourism and local beauty.
Navitus, in the depths of one of their documents state that there will be a reduction in visitors to the area of 32% should the wind farm go ahead. Bournemouth, which depends on tourism, was awarded the Gold Medal by the Tourism Industry in Novemeber 2013 for the best resort in the UK. Bournemouth alone gets 6 million visitors a year, a reduction of 1.8 million a year would destroy the local economy.
Following months of fruitless and contradictory correspondence, I had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act to try to get information from the Crown Estates who stand to gain £millions in fees if this crazy project goes ahead, concerning the reasons why this area was chosen, and try to see any surveys etc. It is impossible to find out. I was inundated with mountains of irrelevant and contradictory information.
Thank you for your help in this matter your support is much appreciated
I was in the south of France talking to a guy who captained a Gin palace. Next to his boat was one up for sale that had not been used for over a year. The Captain told me that he hoped the new buyer was properly informed on the state of the boat as even moored up the ongoing maintenance costs were incredible and he didn’t think the boat had been touched in that time.
So these wind turbines must take a hell of a beating out at sea. How often do they need servicing.
“Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.”
What is “Jerusalem”, and why should we want to build it here?
“Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,”
Is Jerusalem to be built by killing people?
To FJB,
Obtaining money by deception is fraud. This is not a matter for the Advertising Standards Authority, but for the Serious Fraud Office.
Village Idiot is using the usual leftie trick of trying to make a subsidy sound like some form of giveaway when in fact it is a reduction in the amount of tax snatched in the first place. Would VI consider the UK tax free income allowance a subsidy? It’s the same thing since the government kindly allows you to keep more of your own money. This trick has been used by the Marxist Greens to try to claim that taxpayers fund oil companies as much as they do windmill owners but it is a lie.
@ richardscourtney who says:
“The several studies from real-world data reported in this thread show that subsidy farms do NOT reduce CO2 emissions from power generation in the UK. Indeed, the government is now commissioning additional thermal CO2-producing power stations which are needed to enable the subsidy farms to operate.
A self-serving paper from an academic institution does not alter the fact that subsidy farms provide neglible CO2 reduction.”
If UK is truly doing as you allege, then you all deserve pity. If your grid planners and operators are truly that stupid, then there is not much I can do. Stupid is as stupid does.
I can point out, though, that Drs. Gross, Heptonstall, Green and Staffell pointed out a much better way. Your sneering put-down of them because they are academics tells us volumes about you.
I would also point out one of many real-world examples of wind energy NOT increasing electric power prices, and that is our US state of Iowa. Funny thing, that!
I shall respond a bit later to your several false statements in a different comment. As usual, you have no clue about wind energy and its operation nor its effects on a grid.
Here’s a clue for those who design and run a grid: “Don’t Get Stuck on Stupid”.
What amazes me ( but I guess ought not anymore give the univeral nature of selfish nimbyism) is the tendency for huge outcry against anything which might have an impact in the “outcryer’s” own back yard but the steadfast ingoring of the impact of our lifestyle on the rest of the world.
Lets apply some simple tests …So :
You prefer Coal over windfarms … OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village?
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking undeneath in your village.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home….
You get the idea …….
If we want to use energy then we must all surely accept that this needs to be produced somewhere and that we cannot simply push it out of sight to be made “over there” in someone else’s backyard.
There are probably no easy and universally popular solutions …So lets open our minds and start realising that we may all have to take a little inconvenience in order to maintain our lifestyles.
Government subsidies and financial incentives are nothing new and without them we might never have solved such basic problems as Longitude, However in that case it only took the loss of 4 ships and 1500 sailors lives to get some action and I am sure some saw it as a total waste of money to invest in the new technology.
Can we really stand by and consistently object to renewable energy, no matter how currently inefficeient, simply because we don’t want it in our back yard and would rather import gas from Russia , Oil from Saudi Arabia or use Electricity from European owned Nuclear power stations.
Long term maybe we can harness Solar farms in the Sahara but even then there will be objectors ….
Time to grow up …..
Trevor,
Your point is well taken but it is all a question of scale.
The new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will cover an area of about half a square kilometer and generate a continuous output of 3GW electrical power.
To generate an average output of 3GW from intermittent wind energy would require wind turbines covering an area of nearly 2000 square kilometers. That is a larger area than the whole of Surrey.
Furthermore the cost of installing such a large number of turbines is larger than building a nuclear plant. This is mainly because a wind turbine only lasts a maximum of 20 years before it need to be replaced, whereas the lifetime of a nuclear plant is 60 years. The operational costs are about the same.
So one new nuclear plant at say Dungeness could replace all of Navitus, the London Array, and the East coast off-shore wind farms. It would also remove fossil fuel stations whereas wind farms cannot replace a single fossil fuel plant, because regularly there is no wind across the whole UK. Yesterday for example, the total output from all 5000 UK wind turbines was just 100MW (0.1GW) !
Flydlbee says:
April 29, 2014 at 3:14 am
The seabed belongs to the Crown Estates, from which the Queen draws a proportion of the profits as her income, so be aware of whom you are up against.
Beyond the 12 mile limit the seabed does not belong to the Crown Estates. In addition the proceeds from the Crown Estates go to the Treasury not the monarch.
What amazes me ( but I guess ought not anymore give the univeral nature of selfish nimbyism) is the tendency for huge outcry against anything which might have an impact in the “outcryer’s” own back yard but the steadfast ingoring of the impact of our lifestyle on the rest of the world.
Lets apply some simple tests …So :
You prefer Coal over windfarms … OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village?
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking underneath your village.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home….
You get the idea …….
If we want to use energy then we must all surely accept that this needs to be produced somewhere and that we cannot simply push it out of sight to be made “over there” in someone else’s backyard.
There are probably no easy and universally popular solutions …So lets open our minds and start realising that we may all have to take a little inconvenience in order to maintain our lifestyles.
Government subsidies and financial incentives are nothing new and without them we might never have solved such basic problems as Longitude. However in that case it only took the loss of 4 ships and 1500 sailors lives to get some action and I am sure some at the time saw it as a total waste of Governement money to invest in the new technology.
Can we really stand by and consistently object to renewable energy, no matter how currently inefficeient, simply because we don’t want it in our back yard and would rather import gas from Russia , Oil from Saudi Arabia or use Electricity from European owned Nuclear power stations.
Time to grow up and accept our actions have consequences which have to learn to live with …..
Opportunities foregone that may be considered in the economic viability of implementing the Navitus Bay Wind Array project:
a) is the maintenance of the array an order of magnitude or more higher than other power generating solutions? Seem that it is likely and this is a major cost and a major cause of additional CO2 creation (in performing the maintenance) that should be emphasized by the group opposing the project.
b) is the avoidance cost ( the cost for other business activities to stay out of the exclusion zone around the array) calculated into the cost of the array and as well as the extra CO2 used to avoid the array? This is likely to be a major argument of local groups of businesses using the area around the array.
c) is the security apparatus (helicopters, boats and intensive underwater surveillance devices) and security manpower for the array an order of magnitude or more higher than other power generating solutions? That is likely a major cost of the array as well as additional CO2 generated, it should be emphasized.
c) is the loss of tourism business in the local community calculable in order of magnitude terms? It should be pursued as an argument for compensation, such compensation to local business needs to be included in the cost of the array.
d) is the loss / degradation of cultural heritage (Jurassic Coast) calculated as a cost of the array? It is perhaps the most important point, n’est ce pas? It is a strong position that the cost to the world of the heritage lost/ degraded is invaluably too high to accept. This is the ‘build your array some other damn place’ argument.
e) is the rescue effort for unavoidable injured wildlife calculated as a cost of the array? This line of though argues that you can’t just let injured wildlife just die there without rescuing it and medical aid to bring it back to health. This cost economically can be combined with the moral message, This is a strongly populist line of thought.
Enough for now, but there should be some more ‘opportunities foregone’ points that the opponents of the array can consider.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I do not endorse broader intellectual implications of the things I just wrote, This is just operational tactics, not in any way is it intellectual support of any kind of ‘anti-technology’ or ‘anti-progress’ ideology.
John
John Whitman says:
April 30, 2014 at 7:38 am
Somebody needs to get hold of the Safety Case(s). And the In Service Maintenance & Repair Schedule(s). Thats apart from anything to do with Installation documentation. Then of course there is the Disposal Case – sooner the better or not installed at all really.
Trevor says: @ April 30, 2014 at 7:11 am
Lets apply some simple tests …So :
You prefer Coal over windfarms … OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village?
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking undeneath in your village.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home….
You get the idea …….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Lets see:
OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village? – With happiness because it provides several friends with jobs. Actually there is a mine site about 4 miles away from me.
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking undeneath in your village. – With absolute GLEE! I am talking to a long time friend who is willing to vet proposals to do fracking ON MY FARM. I have 2 wells providing my water by the way and enough geology courses to realize the anti-fracking hysteria is a real crock. The first patent in USA for fracking was awarded to Civil War veteran Col. Edward A.L. Roberts. Roberts was awarded U.S. Patent (No. 59,936) in November 1866.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home…. When I stand up and look out the window I see a nuclear power plant. Cross country it is less then 10 miles away. By road about 14 miles. My husband is a physicist and a good friend is a Nuclear physicist (PhD) who ran experiments at the Nevada test. I know several people with nuclear power expertise. Again knowledge trumps fear.
I am not a hypocrite like the late Ed Kennedy nor are most people at this website. So go peddle your insults elsewhere.
Roger Sowell:
It is physically impossible for the subsidy farms to produce economically competitive power to that from fossil fuels or nuclear power.
This is because all energy is free (it was all created at the Big Bang) but collecting and concentrating energy to enable it to do useful work is costly. Fortunately, nature has concentrated solar energy collected over geological ages by photosynthesis, and has stored it in dried compressed forms called fossil fuels. So, when the steam engine enabled use of the high energy density in fossil fuels to provide power, then wind power, solar power and muscles (of slaves and animals) were displaced because they have such low energy densities that they cannot compete.
But in your completely misleading post at April 30, 2014 at 7:04 am you write
Costs consist of prices AND SUBSIDIES.
People have to pay the total cost and not only the prices. Funny thing, that!
Richard
Trevor and solentsnowgoose:
In the words of Trevor, you each need to “grow up”.
The issues over windfarms have nothing to do with ‘nimbyism’.
The objections to the subsidy farms are objections to corruption which harms people and the environment.
The problems of windfarms are explained here.
Richard
Christopher Monckton,
I would recommend digging up two case studies, selected as the most relevant to circumstances of Navitus Bay Wind Array project. Find one case study of an effort that successfully blocked a wind array. Find another case study of an effort that failed to block a wind array. Best, as a priority, that both case studies are of wind arrays projects in Great Britain.
They could be useful for developing the strategy of the team opposing the Navitus Bay Wind Array project.
John
richard says:
April 30, 2014 at 4:43 am
… So these wind turbines must take a hell of a beating out at sea. How often do they need servicing.”
Good point that I doubt most of the, erm, wind farmers (aka subsidy recipients) think of.
The Golden Gate Bridge has a crew that is continuously painting the bridge…as soon as they get done, they go back and start again. The salt air and other environmental issues (perpetual fog, etc.) are stressors that can only be mitigated by continual inspection and maintenance.
(Have to say, now that I’m over the pond, I REALLY miss the sight of that bridge, props to all the maintenance folks!)…
One can only wonder at how much maintenance will have to be done to these sea-based turbines (windmills, what-have-you) to keep them from rusting out and toppling over (I wish, I wish)….
The thought of shipping or sailing between these is simply horrifying….
Respect where Respect is Due
Full respect to the reply by Gail Combs above …. If everyone took such an open view about what they were prepared to accept in their locality then I would be much more convinced by the arguments against Navitus Bay
Would those living on the coast near the proposed Navitus bay scheme respond so positively to alternative sources of energy in the Poole Bay area in order to keep their lights on. It would be interesting to see the local reaction to a proposed extension to the local Wytch Farm oil field.
I am sure there are many problems with the existing generation of windfarm technology, Just as there has been with many emerging technologies over the years. Edison got it wrong and few remember that it was Tesla who gave us practical electrical power.
Sure someone will make money out of windfarms , just as they will from Coal or Nuclear
All arguments that there may be better ways to stimulate the development of clean / renewable power are certainly worth considering.
However we should not conflate the technical and value issues with objections which are largely based on not wanting any new source of power in our backyards typified by the reactions we have seen to Fracking and Nuclear power in the UK .
I speak as one who , started their career in a coal power station, live near a refinery and who sails regularly in the area of the propsed windfarm.
Yes it will be inconvenient and will change the skyline but personally I would rather dodge the windfarm as I sail back from France than live near a coal or nuclear power station.
Surely we need to focus on PROPOSING ALTERNATIVES not on simply BLOCKING proposals
“Trevor says:
April 30, 2014 at 3:25 pm”
Have you ever lived near a “windfarm”? Have you ever heard the “whoom, whoom, whoom” late
at night, after a long day, when you’re trying to get some sleep before getting up at 5AM to face the
morning commute to Silicon Valley 50 miles away? Or have you put up with the cyclical shadows that beat over your house minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, and so on, ad infinitum….and though I’m no tree-hugger, what of all the rare (and not rare) bird, raptors, eagles, etc. that have been macerated by these windmills (turbines, what-have you)….they’re not coming back – and in California, we’ve spent DECADES (and a lot of time, trouble, and money) trying to recover the previously decimated populations of these only to the the federal government give
carte blanche to the windfarms to chop away at will….
It’s not pleasant.
It’s not worth it. And, It’s not healthy….
Sorry,
I don’t subscribe to the theory of “no nukes is good nukes”.
Let’s get them working, and safe (e.g., don’t build on faultlines, etc.; don’t use ancient technology as in gen1 equipment, etc.).
not only to the the federal government , rather only to have the federal government…
someday there will be spell checking, nay, intent-checking keyboards…sigh….
@ Jeff on April 30, 2014 at 3:05 pm
“One can only wonder at how much maintenance will have to be done to these sea-based turbines (windmills, what-have-you) to keep them from rusting out and toppling over (I wish, I wish)….”
Great point… perhaps the offshore wind-turbine advocates have not thought of that! Still, I wonder…. just how DID all those thousands and thousands of lighthouses survive in the harsh sea environment for the expected 20 to 30 year life? Oh wait…they existed just fine for hundreds of years!
And, I recall that ALL of the thousands and thousands of offshore oil platforms (and natural gas production platforms) also rusted away to nothingness in just 20 or so years… Oh wait… they do just fine for 40 to 50 years too! Then they must be dismantled because they refused to rust away.
Silly wind-turbine people, thinking they can also build a single tower anchored in the seabed that extends a few feet up into the sky. There is no modern technology that can possibly cope with all that wind, and sea spray, and salt, and water, and sun. Nope, it’s all just a pipe dream.
Seriously? Are any of you contrarians engineers? Do you know any engineers? Have you ever flown over the Gulf of Mexico in daytime and looked out the window at all the oil platforms?
This is not nuclear fusion technology here, always 50 to 100 years in the future. This is proven, demonstrated, mature offshore marine technology.
Please, if you are going to make arguments, make ones that pass the laugh test!
To all, the economics of wind energy are so horrific, they made the news yet again today, here in the States. From the Chicago Tribune today:
“The largest owner of nuclear power in the nation, Exelon has been leaning more heavily on its regulated utilities in recent years. With depressed power prices and increasing competition from wind and natural gas, the company’s nuclear plants haven’t been rolling in the profits they once did for Exelon and the company has threatened [nuclear] plant closures if conditions don’t improve.” [Emphasis added]
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-exelon-pepco-20140430,0,201347.story
One just has to wonder, if wind energy is really so outrageously expensive, just how is it not only competing with, but putting nuclear power plants out of business? Hmmmm…. I think maybe wind energy is truly not quite as expensive as some are painting it to be. For Richard the Unconvinced, above, the wind energy subsidy is only 2.2 cents per kWh produced in the States. Nothing for capital costs, only for production costs.
see Nuclear Power Plants Cannot Compete at
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-one.html
When the Russians try to invade maybe they’ll get hung up on these arrays. Could always convert them to platforms for firing munitions.
Trevor….one little difference ,conventional power is a nessasary evil. We cannot live without them.
Wind is completely useless.
“Roger Sowell says:
April 30, 2014 at 5:52 pm”
Yes, I have studied engineering, I have lived near some wonderful engineering marvels in salt-air environments (Golden Gate and Oakland-SF Bridges, MANY structures near the sea), and had a number of materials science courses as part of my education.
I am also not conned by sarcasm, or arguments based on, shall we say, monetary motivation.
Those lighthouses of which you speak are not made of metal, nor are your beloved turbines
mounted on masonry (concrete, what-have-you) platforms. The sound effects, the maritime navigaional dangers, and the bird-chopping mechanical macerations of the rotors remain, regardless of the puported benefits of “green energy”. The only green that really exists in
that environment is that of the money flowing from the taxpayers to the mandarin coeterie
absorbing the subsidies proffered by the EU elite and their ilk.
As I’ve said a number of times on this and other fora, I lived for a number of years near these
mechanical monstrosities, and also seen how “robust” they weren’t. Have a look at the
Altamont wind farm if you don’t believe me (btw, the worst is hidden far away from I-580).
I suspect the Tehachapi array is in a similar state of disrepair.
Metal fatigue is not always externally obvious – however one small crack and away it goes.
I went over the Silver Bridge in West Virginia a week or so before it collapsed…looked just fine.
Tell that to the people who died when the link pin failed…
Trevor:
Your untrue propaganda is becoming tiresome.
At April 30, 2014 at 9:47 am I wrote
Subsequently, at April 30, 2014 at 3:25 pm, you have written
If you had read the link you would have seen the item is titled
“A suggestion for meeting the UK Government’s renewable energy target because the adopted use of windfarms cannot meet it”.
It explains why windfarms don’t provide any useful electricity to the grid and it assesses all possible alternatives.
Your untrue propaganda supporting the subsidy farms ignores reality.
Richard
Roger Sowell:
I see that at April 30, 2014 at 6:03 pm you have again asserted your falsehood that prices of windpower indicate the financial cost of electricity from the subsidy farms.
I again point out that you know your assertion is a falsehood.
As I said to you at April 30, 2014 at 9:36 am in rebuttal of your having presented that untruth earlier in this thread
You could provide sound arguments in support of the subsidy farms if you had any sound arguments. But you provide no sound arguments and present blatant falsehoods.
Richard
In response to comments above :
I personally hold no bias towards Windfarms in preference to any other source of power and would be more than happy to see lower cost / less visual impact proposed / implemented.
Hence a well reasoned argument which proposes alternatives is welcome and as a society we need to try to divert our mutual resources toward proving the viability of such systems. eg the tidal lagoons proposed in Richard’s paper
However my concern remains that if there was a proposal to install wave power, a tidal lagoon or a new nuclear station in the UK there would be a whole raft of objectors intent on ensuring that such a scheme was not installed anywhere near them.
My point is that the energy that we use requires some installation / infrastructure and has some impact on people / wildlife / environment and we need to learn to live with this inconvenient fact.
The argument could be made that the closer we install such systems to where we all live the more chance there is that we will consider the impact and support the development ( eg via subsidy) of measures to minimise this rather than simply trying to “export” the problem to the next villiage/ county/ country in the hope that somewhere else is less good at blocking it than we are.
I fully appreciate the idea of a well developed Nuclear technology in suitable remote places BUT even then there are many who live on the South coast of UK who express fears about the French Nuclear installation on the Cherbourg peninsular and would object on a matter of principle if the same installation were proposed in say Dorset. So even at Dungeness we can expect a whole raft of protestors intent on making it “go away”. Much of the arguments would be well reasoned concerns about safety and long term cost but underneath there would be the issue that the same objections would not be raised if the installation were elsewhere.
With regard to the specific comment about living near a Wind farm I am sure that this is disturbing and not ideal but then so is living within earshot of a large refinery which delivers the fuel for our cars or a major port which exports our products and delivers our imported goods.. these are facts of life.
All I promote is that in reviewing various alternatives we try to avoid objecting to new forms of power generation simply because we don’t want them in our backyards.
To misquote: “everywhere is somewhere to somebody”
Again perhaps a simple test could apply ….
If we want to object to any technology in our locality then as a quid pro quo we should be obliged to say which alternative technology we would accept in the same area.
At least this way we focus on the real argument about the benefits / risks for society as a whole and not on the Nimbyism which I fear is still hidden behind many objections.
@ richardscourtney,
Your idiotic arguments are easily refuted, but arguing or trying to teach you is pointless. You live in a fantasy land where thermodynamics, engineering, and economics behave as you choose.
I live and work in the real world.
Go sit by a wind turbine and tell it, as you insist, it creates no useful power.
And for the record, every statement I made here is true. It is up to you to prove the falsity, if you can.
Roger Sowell:
I am copying your entire post at May 1, 2014 at 8:18 am so it is clear that I am replying to something as silly as you have written:
It is strange that I can so easily refute your untrue assertions based on the unrealities of your delusional state but you say you cannot refute the clear information I provide.
I do not intend to tell a wind turbine anything: your suggestion is pointless because a wind turbine has similar comprehension abilities to yourself (and for the same reason). However, a wind turbine does not – and cannot – provide electricity useful to a grid supply system: the intermittent supply from the wind turbine adds management costs and complexities by displacing the electricity which thermal power stations have to provide for the grid whether or not the wind turbine exists.
And, for the record, you have made no true statements here, not one. For example, at April 30, 2014 at 7:04 am you wrote saying to me
I have made no “false statements” and you have cited none. I suggest that my citations of grid operators are more than adequate, and your childish abuse does not constitute a “response” except to demonstrate that you have no answer.
Richard
Christopher Monckton,
Here is another idea which should enhance the wind array opposition group’s success.
You should encourage the wind array opposition group to get a very professional project manager who can handle coolly, calmly and disinterestedly the complexities of the many many crucial activities and arguments that need to be prepared.
The project manager should not have a big ego, but instead facilitate the energy and ownership of all involved.
Then project manager should have a documented history of success in large scale and complex actual real projects.
I cannot overstate the importance of this project manager.
DISCLAIMER: I do not advocate intellectually in any way the many ‘anti-technology’ and ‘anti-progress’ and ‘anti-growth’ ideologies in the world. My comments to Monckton wrt the group opposing the wind array are based on my assessment that the incorrect theory of CAGW by fossil fuels is the sole reason this wind array is being built and it is the abnormal government funded intervention into normal economic market decisions which is the only reason the array can start much less avoid instantaneous bankruptcy.
Good luck.
John
Could we develop the idea proposed by John Whitman a little further …
Perhaps we could ask the Project Manager to use basic Risk / Benefit analysis to work out the relative environmental, financial and societal impacts of various alternative sources of the energy we want to consume to keep our lights on ( be they Halogen or LED )
A comparative study of who would be harmed and by how much and who would benefit and by how much and then expressing the various options in terms of their impact relative to each other should help inform a more rational decision process about which one we should invest in.
For example: is it better that a few people are inconvenienced a little or that much larger population are affected by other less certain but potentially more significant changes. To return to an argument made much earlier in the forum ..is it reasonable / ethical to accept the risk that sea level may rise but to simply impose a decision to compensate those who live in areas that may be affected ( lets say the Romney Marshes of Kent or the River Delta of some far Asian Country ) for the loss of their land / houses / liveihoods.
Of course there would be huge debate about the significance and probability of each of the harms and benefits so we may need to express these in terms of ranges or distributions to see how sensitive the outcome is to different individual perceptions of harm or benefit .
The biggest problem I foresee in using such a broad and structured approach is that it might force a rational review and reduce the opportunity to make some of the more emotional comparisons ( eg comparing the size of a modern wind turbine with a Cathederal which may not really be relevant in the big scheme of things.)
Hence my expectation is that few in the debate would support such an approach.
It seems that not all puzzles are so quickly solved.