Wind turbines are a poor way to harness energy – but a very good way to generate public subsidies, says Andrew Gilligan.
By Andrew Gilligan from The UK Telegraph
Published: 7:00AM BST 13 Jun 2010
From the summit of Plynlimon, in the deep country of the Cambrian Mountains, there is a 70-mile panorama of the Cader range, hill after green-blue hill stretching into the distance, from the peaks around Bala to the shores of Cardigan Bay.
It was a view that caught the breath. It still does, in a different way. The view from Plynlimon now is of more than 200 wind turbines, nearly a tenth of Britain’s onshore total, stretching across ridge-lines, dominating near and far horizons. The author George Borrow wrote a whole chapter on Plynlimon in his classic 19th-century travelogue, Wild Wales. It’s not so wild these days.
Last week’s decision by Miriam González Durántez, wife of the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, to join a leading wind-farm company has thrown the spotlight on one of Britain’s most controversial industries.
Mrs Durántez’s firm, Acciona, is seeking planning permission to add another 23 wind turbines to the view from Plynlimon, filling up some of the remaining skyline not yet occupied by them.
To opponents, land-based wind-turbines – there are currently 2,560 – are, in the words of the chairman of the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, “creatures from the War of the Worlds”, industrialising the countryside, invading precious landscapes.
Supporters are no less high-pitched. At the annual conference of the wind farm trade body, the BWEA, John Prescott, Mr Clegg’s predecessor, stormed: “We cannot let the squires and the gentry stop us meeting our moral obligation to pass this world on in a better state to our children. So let me tell them loud and clear: it’s not your backyard any more – it’s ours!”
The then energy and climate change secretary, now Labour leadership contender, Ed Miliband, said that it “should be socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area – like not wearing your seatbelt”.
Yet like so much else in the climate change debate, the emotions – on both sides – get in the way. Presenting wind farms as either an alien scourge or a moral crusade obscures what is surely the real question: are they effective at reducing CO2 emissions? Do the benefits they bring outweigh the costs they impose?
Read the rest of the story here:
h/t Neil Jones
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Jim Cripwell says:
June 13, 2010 at 9:16 am
Given how few people understand the difference between watts and watthours, I fear you may be tilting at windmills. 🙂
The dead corpses of these giants will be the laugh of the following generations. Future teachers will teach their pupils how a bunch of fools, turned crazy by their masters by making them drink Kool-aid instead of milk, invented and built up these silly structures, with the sole purpose of depriving the world and its inhabitants of real sources of energy and so to obtain the Global Governance of all the fruits of the peoples´ hard and daily labour.
A 2MW wind turbines costs 3.5 million. Financed for 20 yrs at 7% that is $330,000. Add another $70,000 for land, local kickbacks, and maintenance to yield $400,000 in costs. If it has a 30% output of capacity it will create 5.3 million kWh’s. Wholesale electricity sells roughly for 5 cents per kWh to yield $262,0000, not even close to meeting the costs of construction. So the Gov’t gives an enormous amt in subsidies to make up the difference.
Now here is what is unique about this problem. The public gets nothing out of it. There is no benefit to the quality of electricity, in fact the opposite is true for many factors. Same plug, same power, not a soul notices a difference for the better. But the reality of wind. Is that we are sacrificing the future of our children and descendants for this dream. We are leaving our children a landscape covered with these monstrosities AND because we would never pay for this NOW, we simply add it to the deficit and pay interest on the turbines FOREVER. Because a turbine is not like constructing a road, where you put up front capitol costs and then receive benefit for many years. Although they frame it that way, build it and get FreeWind forever. It is the opposite, what happens in reality, is that we will pay the interest on the electricity produced today, forever more. This is like taking a vacation, putting it on your credit card, and just paying the interest forever. Because electricity is like a vacation, used for a temporary time and forgotten soon enough.
Every megawatt of this foolishness will be paid by one gigawatt of men´s muscles energy.
That is the 21st.century slavery, the fair redistribution of energy to the service of the Few Lords of the Investment Banks, the same inventors of the 19th and 20th centuries “Ponzi schemes” and most invisible, untouchable, and ethereal “derivatives”.
The public is scammed because they Want To Be Good. Most of us have an altar in our head, pushing us to morality and doing the right thing. Why do terrorists blow up bombs and kill people. Not because they are being bad, but because in their own heads they are being good. The perverted version of Allah in their head calls them to action to be good. Most people think that wind turbines are good, they represent “goodness”, just look at the variety of commercials on our TV’s now that have nothing to do with wind, but there is the turbines spinning in the background. The symbol of goodness. So people are willing to ignore the subsidies, the environmental destruction, all of the arguments they ignore because they want to “be good”. And the NGO’s (non-governmental orgs like Audubon, Greenpeace, WorldWildlifeFund etc0 all use that power of Wanting To Be Good to their utmost advantage, that is why the Global Warming Scam works so well, people want to be good.
Windmills generating power?
Here’s the other side of the coin … Windmills USING power!
http://www.aweo.org/windconsumption.html
A lot of what meagre amounts of power the ‘mills generate appears to be used on site and power has to be put into the ‘mills under often-occurring circumstances. It makes them even less appealing as a power source for the public.
Here is one simple formula that everyone should know.
Susquehanna Nuclear is supplying much of the power for this computer and my home right now. They create 2400 MW of electricity almost 24/7 365 days per years. Some years they produced that in 100% of the hours, non-stop.
To replace that amount of energy – how many turbines.
Take 5,000 (five Thousand) 2 MW turbines that supply about 25% of their nameplate capacity to yield 2500 MW. We need 5,000 turbines and that woudl not even replace the nuclear plant, we would always need it, because regularly, not occasionally, but regularly, the turbines would produce less than 10% and many times just 1-5% of their capacity.
The 5,000 turbines will be placed on mountain ridges in many states, completely destroying the ecosystem.
http://premium.fileden.com/premium/2009/6/11/2474018/nofreewind/boone_fragmentation.pdf
(slow loader)
At least 20,000 acres will need to be clearcut to build the turbines and 10’s of thousands more will be affected by fragmentation. But no matter, everyone is quite content, because they know the sacrifice is worth it, because they are “being good”.
Gail Coombs writes “The only use I can see for windmills is the traditional one of using them for moving water up hill. Two lakes with a generator between is the only reasonable possibility for making the blasted things anywhere near viable for a country’s energy needs. That system would at least allow the energy to be stored so it could be used as needed.”
An interesting comment. Here in Ontario, Canada, we would seem to have everything required for “pumped storage”; large numbers of hydro dams and lakes already in place, and a substantial WF generation capacity. At Niagara Falls, pumped storage is used on a daily basis; the falls are a tourist attraction, but tourists only view them by day. So at night, the falls are “turned off”, and the power generated is used to pump water into a storage lake, to be used the next day.
One would thought with all these facilities, and all the expertise, we would be in the forefront of using WF for pumped storage. Yet we dont have a single project even in the planning stage. I have tried to find out why, with absolutely no success whatsoever. I suspect pumped storage from WF is simply not that straightforward.
With regard to my previously posted link, here’s the “mother-link” wihich has side links to other, very informative articles. All assertions appear to be well referenced and some interesting (and real) experts make a variety of telling comments about wind powered electricy generation.
http://www.aweo.org/problemwithwind.html#Links
@roger Sowell says: June 13, 2010 at 12:06 pm
“@Martin Brumby: actually, California had 3 small hydro projects that received $2.7 million in subsidies since 1998 – for a total of 31 MW installed capacity.”
I think the clue here is the word “small”. 10 MW each is peanuts.
In the UK you will be able to get very attractive subsidies for anyting small and inefficient. Like Cameron with his little wind turbine on the roof. Like the people with solar panels. Like those who put some pathetic turbine into a neighbouring stream.
The way it works is that you feed the electricity into the National Electricity Grid and are GUARANTEED about four times the amount you pay for electricity FROM the grid.
The Germans went down the same route and now pay Billions for electricity which turns up when it is least needed.
But I have absolutely no doubt that, if there was a planning application for a large hydroelectric dam in England or Wales (I think there are a couple of modest schemes in Scotland that might be built), not only would it get no subsidy but it wouldn’t get permission to be built anyway!
The Severn Barrage (which has been planned for at least 60 years now and which, potentially could be the largest tidal barrage in the world) will not get built. The greenies wouldn’t want to upset the ducks that roost there.
meagwatts sounds about right to me, the international abbreviation for meagrewatthours. 🙂
Mick
Wind is really like having an employee that shows up when they feel like it, they demand to get paid whether or not any work needs to be done.
Of course if one wants to have ‘reliable electricity’, then one has to hire additional employees who show up when needed.
Wind across the U.S. has slowed down by 10 % over the last 30 years:
http://www.windaction.org/news/22240
Ric Werme says:
June 13, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Are you saying that we should forget the FACT that wind is not working when needed,but that we should allow folks to roll up the output for a year and and allow the sc*m to continue ? Last Sunday lunchtime in the UK wind was delivering 11Mw of the total load of some 44500 Mw . Get real chaps, wind is a waste of time be it in hours or megahours 🙂
When I see or hear the words moral obligation I know that it is religion of one sort or another.
The most heinous acts against humans recorded in history have been justified by the perpetrators by what they claimed were moral obligations.
1DandyTroll
I believe EU calculated the need for some 50 million more people coming into EU, and that’s on top of internal population growth.
Hey, why not just install little generators on the turnstyles at the EU borders?
Enneagram says:
June 13, 2010 at 12:23 pm
The dead corpses of these giants will be the laugh of the following generations.
Yes, and their advocate’s genetic lineage will be seen, with
Darwinian trepidation, as something to be avoided.
Quite predictably, we are being inundated with images of oil soaked birds in the Gulf from everyone of the legacy media sources. Given that such images are considered to be “good television” by media professionals and their consultants, and the public’s continued interest in the Big Spill the prevalence of these images is entirely understandable.
What is less understandable is the fact that the opportunity to collect and display this type of “good tv” image has been available at the base of nearly every one of the thousands of wind turbines that has been erected in the last decade. YouTube is loaded with videos of this avian armageddon in progress, but very few are from legacy media sources. Of those that are virtually none are from sources in the good old US of A.
If even the middle ground estimates of wind turbine bird kills are close to correct. the turbines have killed and are killing more birds than even the worst case projections from BP’s leaking well.
I don’t expect that pointing out this blatant hypocrisy will in any way change their behavior, even if I could miraculously persuade a hundred thousand people to join me in emailing every legacy media source to protest it. However, it does perfectly illustrate that, despite constant proclamations to the contrary, this has never been about protecting the “environment” but about insuring the implementation of the distopian agenda of the statist collectivists.
As well as being appalingly inefficient and costly. I read that wind turbines even fail on the greenies own terms of CO2 reduction. The inefficiencies of ramping up and down the associated conventional reserve – easiest done via open cycle gas turbines, whereas combined cycle (gas turbine exhaust driving steam turbine) are much more efficient – means MORE Co2 is produced than if one just generated conventionally without the wind power. The German figures were used, I recall. And then there’s all the CO2 to build them, etc, reflected in the price….
And yet mad Governments press on. A case of “we must do something. Oh, look, there’s something, let’s do it!”
@ur momisugly Darrin, re wind power not replacing gas/coal/hydro or other power.
The clear fact is that wind power certainly does replace those you mention. For one who operates a power grid, wind (and solar) plants generally are allowed to produce as much as they can, whenever they can. The other power plants such as ones you listed, are then reduced in rate according to a plan so that the grid retains adequate supply and stability. Where this gets tricky is when wind power becomes a significant part of the grid’s load, and the grid operator must decide whether to take a non-wind plant offline because it cannot be reduced any further. It appears that grid instability occurs at approximately 30 to 50 percent wind and solar.
With the present wind technology, what wind does not replace is other power plants – such as gas/coal/hydro. Until economic grid-scale storage is available, this is our situation. As Gail mentioned above, using wind to pump water uphill is a good idea. However, there are far too few sites for pumped storage hydroelectric plants. Consequently, there are several companies developing power storage systems, such as batteries, capacitors, compressed air, and high-speed flywheels. None of them yet works at grid scale and at low cost.
Sweet rethoric of microgeneration:
“But we are not forgetting the role which schools can play in educating our children on the issues of climate change. By sowing the seeds at an early age, we can grow our future citizens into a responsible, energy and climate change aware population.
We want to see renewable technologies in every school in Scotland. A number of schools are reaping the benefits already. We will fund a Schools Development Officer to spread these benefits much more widely.
We want to win the hearts and minds of our children, therefore we will join up with education initiatives in the curriculum and through Ecoshools and Careers Scotland. As our children are learning about energy and climate change – they will be seeing it in action.
”
Sowing the seeds at an early age… reaping *benefits*. Yeah, you’ll be dependent on benefits, get used to it in a tender age… Wait, we got a photo with it:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/This-Week/Speeches/Greener/oilclimatechange
Nofreewind
You are looking to produce 2,500MW from 5,000 turbines? Well we have over 2,500 wind turbines operating here, so for example, taking some figures from NETA (Great Britain) ‘Generation by fuel type’ table, print outs on the days…
7th June ….Wind 0.0% (4MW) last half hour (4MW)
5th June ….Wind 0.0% (3MW) last half hour (2MW)
3rd June…..Wind 0.0% (11MW) last half hour (10MW)
out of a total of aprox. 38,872MW generated by all means
Today, as I write? it is…
13 June……Wind 0.6% (191MW) last half hour 0.6%(193MW)
You will have a harder time hitting 2,500MW than you imagine, I think.
OMG! Look what the UK Government has just proposed!
If this rubbish gets adopted we will cease to exist as country.
No industry. No jobs. no nothing. USA beware! This is coming your way right now.
http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/energy-and-climate-change/
“Stephen Brown says:
June 13, 2010 at 2:19 pm
OMG! Look what the UK Government has just proposed![…]”
My sincere condolences. Unfortunately you don’t qualify for the Trillion Euro safety net as you have the opportunity to devalue your own currency. Hey! Why don’t we play a game: We devalue the Euro and you devalue the Pound and we’ll see who reaches US Dollar parity first?
Fenbeagle says:
June 13, 2010 at 11:31 am
Gail Combs says:
June 13, 2010 at 9:39 am
says….
The only use I can see for windmills is the traditional one of using them for moving water up hill. Two lakes with a generator between is the only reasonable possibility for making the blasted things anywhere near viable for a country’s energy needs. That system would at least allow the energy to be stored so it could be used as needed.
….The article is specifically mentioning Lincolnshire. As a resident of the Lincolnshire Fens can I point out the error in your proposal?
___________________________________________________________________
I am in favor of nuclear and hydro. I only made the comment because I had considered it for my farm if they go through with this madness. I am on a windy ridge with a stream and a good drop but it is still way too expensive. For home use there is a small turbine that works on about a 2 meter drop. If I recall correctly one farmer came up with a system that will work on a one meter drop. The biggest head ache is all the miserable permits.
Please do point out the errors, I am all ears. As I said I am considering a small set up if the madness continues. For England perhaps the drop should be in and out of a cave. As I recall England is hollow. I spent about a month “IN” England and Wales but I did not spend much time on the topside.