Guest post by the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Consider the Oldbury wind turbine, which WattsUpWithThat.com reveals was installed a couple of years ago at a primary school in the Midlands at a cost of £5000 sterling plus Vicious Additional Taxation at 17.5% (US $9694 in all).
In the first full year of the Oldbury White Elephant’s 20-year life it generated a gratifying 209 kilowatt-hours of electricity – enough to power a single 100-Watt reading-lamp for less than three months. The rest of the year you’ll have to find something else to do in bed.
Gross revenue for the year, at 11p (18 cents) a kilowatt-hour, was, um, almost £23 ($40). Assuming that there are no costs of finance, insurance or maintenance, and after subtracting 20 years’ revenue at last year’s rate, the net unamortized capital cost is £5,415.20 ($8,900).
Even this figure understates the true cost. The UK has hidden much of the cost of its climate measures behind a calculatedly complex web of levies, taxes, charges, and subsidies, and – above all – behind a furtive near-doubling of the true cost of electricity to pay vast subsidies (“yacht money”, as we landowners call it) to anyone connected with windmills. The website of the King Canute Department amusingly calls this obscurantist mish-mash “transparency”.
How much “global warming” will Jumbo the Albino forestall? While it is in operation, it will generate 209,000/365/24 or almost 24 Watt-hours per hour on average: just about enough to drive an electric toothbrush.
Mean UK electricity consumption, according to the Ministry of Transparency, is 43.2 GW. Electricity contributes one-third of UK carbon emissions, and the UK contributes 1.5% of world emissions. So the proportion p of global carbon dioxide emissions that the Worthless Windmill will forestall is 24 / 43,200,000,000 / 3 x 0.015, or 2.76 x 10–12, or, as Admiral Hill-Norton used to call it, “two-thirds of three-fifths of b*gger all”. Skip the next few paragraphs if mathematics makes your head hurt.
Today’s CO2 concentration is 390 parts per million by volume (less than 0.04%, though most people think it’s more like 20-30%). Instead of the 438 ppmv CO2 concentration that the IPCC predicts for 2030 on its A2 scenario, thanks to the Wonder Whirligig it will be 438 – p(438 – 390), or seven-eighths of a Hill-Norton below 438 ppmv.
IPeCaC, the UN’s climate panel says 8 Watts (no relation) per square meter of radiative forcing from CO2 and other bad things (p. 803 of its 2007 climate assessment) will cause 3.4 Celsius of “global warming” (p. 13, table SPM.3) from 2000-2100 (progress from 2000-2010: 0.0 Celsius).
That gives the “centennial-scale transient climate-sensitivity parameter”, which is 3.4/8 or 0.425 C/W/m2. Multiply this by 5.35, the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation, to give the “centennial-scale transient global-warming coefficient” n = 2.274 C°. We don’t need to worry about warming beyond 2100 because, according to Solomon et al. (2009) it will take 1000-3000 years to come through, far too slow to cause unavoidable harm.
Multiply the logarithm of any proportionate change in CO2 concentration by the global-warming coefficient n and you get a central estimate of the warming that will occur (or be prevented) between now and 2100.
The Sandwell Sparrow-Slicer will only run for 20 years, not 100, so our value for n is going to be too big, overstating the warming the thing will actually forestall. But it’s Be-Nice-To-Bedwetters Week, so we’ll use the centennial-scale value for n anyway.
Let’s do it: 2.274 ln[438/(smidgen x tad <438)] is – well, put it this way, even my 12-digit-readout scientific calculator couldn’t do it, so I turned to Microsoft Excess. According to Bill Gates, the warming the Birmingham Bat-Batterer will forestall over the next 20 years will be rather less than 0.0000000000007 Celsius.
As the shopping channels say, “But wait! There’s more!!!” Well, there could hardly be less. How much would it cost, I wondered, to forestall 1 Celsius degree of warming, if all measures to make “global warming” go away were as hilariously cost-ineffective as this silly windmill?
You get the “mitigation cost-effectiveness” by dividing the total warming forestalled by the total lifetime cost of the project. And the answer? Well, it’s a very affordable £8 quadrillion ($13 quadrillion) per Celsius degree of warming forestalled. Remember, this is an underestimate, because our method tends to overstate the warming forestalled.
And that’s before we politicians ask any questions about whether IPeCaC’s estimates of climate sensitivity are wanton, flagrant exaggerations [cries of “No!” “Shame!” “Resign!” “I beg to move that the Noble Lord be no longer heard!” “What did I do with my expenses claim form?”].
Suppose it was just as cost-ineffective to make “global warming” from other causes go away as it is to make “global warming” from CO2 go away. In that event, assuming – as the World Bank does – that global annual GDP is £36.5 trillion ($60 trillion), what percentage of this century’s global output of all that we make and do and sell would be gobbled up in climate mitigation? The answer is an entirely reasonable 736%, or, to put it another way, 736 years’-worth of worldwide income.
This is an inhumanly large sum. So how much would each of the seven billion people on the planet have to cough up over the next century to forestall the 3.4 C global warming that IPeCaC hopes will happen by 2100? It will cost each of us more than £3.8 million ($6.3 milllion), and that’s probably a large underestimate. I’m going to have to sell the Lear ad go commercial. No – wait – what did I do with that glossy brochure about how many tens of millions I could make from the 30 250ft windmills I could put on the South Beat? Ah, here it is, under my expenses claim form.
“The Noble Lord,” the Canutists might say, “is deliberately taking a small, absurd and untypical example. Shame! Resign! Expenses!” etc. So here are the equivalent figures for the £60m ($100 million) annual 20-year subsidy to the world’s largest wind-farm, the Thanet Wind Array off the Kent Coast – that’s £1.2 billion ($2 billion) for just one wind-farm. KaChing! I think I’ll have another Lear. And a yacht, and a Lambo, and a bimbo.
The “global warming” that the Thanet wind-farm will forestall in its 20-year lifetime is 0.000002 Celsius, or two millionths of a degree, or 1/25,000 of the minimum global temperature change that modern methods can detect. The mitigation cost-effectiveness, per Celsius degree of warming forestalled, is £578 trillion ($954 trillion), or almost 6000 times the entire 296 years’-worth of UK peacetime and wartime national debt as it stood when Margaret Thatcher took office. That’s more than 1.7 million years’ British national debt, just to prevent 1 degree of warming.
Making IPeCaC’s predicted 3.4 C° of 21st-century warming go away, if all measures were as cost-ineffective as Thanet, would take more than half of the world’s gross domestic product this century, at a cost of more than £280,000 ($463,000) from every man, woman and child on the planet.
“The Noble Lord is still cherry-picking. Resign! Moat! Duck-island!” etc. So look at it this way. All of Scotland’s wind farms, which can in theory generate 10% of Britain’s electricity (actual output in that cold December when we needed them most: 0.0%), will forestall just 0.00002 degrees of warming in their 20-year lifetime – about the same as all of China’s windmills.
So there you have it. After the biggest and most expensive propaganda campaign in human history, leading to the biggest tax increase in human history, trying to stop “global warming” that isn’t happening anyway and won’t happen at anything like the predicted rate is the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money in human history, bar none – and that’s saying something.
The thing about gesture politics is that the politicians (that’s us) get to make the gestures and the proles (that’ll be you) get to get the bill. I think I’ll have another moat. Torquil, don’t you dare put that expenses claim form on the fire. Think of the carbon footprint!
I took an overnight train in China from Kungming to Dali and saw some of those wind turbines in action. The first bunch were not spinning but the second bunch I saw while leaving were spinning.
Either way, my comment is simply this: the country side scenery really is ruined with those massive things there 🙁
Three cheers for Our Dear Viscount (a.k.a. M. of B.) for possibly getting within an order of magnitude of the costs of controlling climate (CCC).
Unfortunately ODV’s estimate is low (by ~~~200%???) for failing to include the cost of “regulating capacity” (a.k.a. backup power) that must be added to provide power when the wind vanishes. (Where did that wind go?!)
according to Bill Owen in the September-October 2010 issue of Gas Turbine World. Owen reported that as a general rule, Westar’s wind farms produce about 40 to 45 percent of nameplate power early in the morning, drop off to a little over 20 percent by mid-day, and rise back up again to about 40 percent in the late afternoon and evening. Lee S. Langston, Powering Ahead, Mechanical Engineering May 2011 p 33.
By the way, how big is $954 trillion? ($954,000,000,000,000.00). If I pay $1/second for each of ~31,558,150 seconds/year (sideral) (~ Pi * 10^7), that will take about 30,229,908 years to pay off. (How long ago did “civilization” rise? When did it fall?)
Dear Senator
I just found out why my social security is so low.
Will you please donate your guaranteed salary to pay down our “carbon debt”? . . .
PS We first need $75 billion to provide for the most important humanitarian needs worldwide. (PS, mitigating global warming comes in dead last in that list in benefits/costs. See the Copenhagen Consensus.
Or will most of the poor be dead if we try to control climate?!)
Errat
Lee S. Langston, Powering Ahead, Mechanical Engineering May 2011 p 33.
Windmills can make money
http://www.grousemountain.com/Winter/The-Eye-of-the-Wind/Tour-Information-Attraction.asp
A live a mile of two away from this windmill and can see it clearly from my deck. It rarely turns. When it does, the maximum rated output is $6 per hour at BC Hydro’s guaranteed buy-back rate.
However, the secret to making money is in making the windmill into a tourist attraction. At $25 per head to visit the turbine, it makes considerable more as a tourist attraction that it does from energy production.
Another fine post from the good Viscount. What often occurs to me is: if the Warmists honestly gave a flying you-know-what about globull warming as they claim to, they would be as up in arms about wind farms as the rest of us, given that these things have absolutely no effect (in any practical sense) on world temperature. But as so many have already said, it’s not really about that, is it.
Gosh, here in Ontario, Canada, our florescent-green premier claims:
“Just so we’re clear, in 20 years time only 14% of our electricity will come from renewables (like solar and wind) so it’s not as if we’re going to rush to 70%-80%- 90%,” McGuinty said.
“Only” 14%? Riiiiight….
http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3099633
I find this time in history fascinating and use all the examples of behaivour, actions and decisions to show that we are witnessing a decline of a civilisation as described in history class.
We are either fortunate or not, but we are witnesses.
Windpower (particularly Offshore) is INDEFENSIBLE, and I do mean this Militarily. Any nation stupid-enough to come to rely upon Wind for more than 10% of its Electricity simply offers a Prime Target to any hostile Navy capable of dragging an anchor across the cable connecting to the mainland, or targetting land-windfarms with Missiles.
California is getting a little over 19% of its electricity from Renewables (mostly wind.)
Iowa is getting a touch over 20% from Wind.
We’re building wind farms like crazy in The States. They seem to be working; no one’s really complaining. HVDC seems to be the next logical step.
The cost of Thermal Coal is exploding.
I think you folks are “runnin’ against the wind.”
Babeshamal, in which case we should be profoundly relived that nuclear and fossil fuel power stations are such mobile, hard to hit, targets!
blastzilla, you are right, they are visually intrusive.
Suggest that the cow be propelled by cow farts. 😉
For a MUCH more accurate and descriptive analysis of the use of wind power, try reading Lester Brown. Power generation, using windpower, has become a lucrative business all over the world. [snip]
IPeCaC – I shall soo steal this brilliant new label for the tyrant, ipcc!
Anybody who’s ever had to take ipecacuana internally will immediately recognise why this excellent abbreviation created by Lord Monckton is so apt.
Any Questions BBC Radio 4 Listen Again
For those who can use the listen again facility try from about 40 minutes in. Listen to Chris Huhne talking absolute cack, Nigel Farage getting straight to the point and doubts from the other two wimps.
Regards
Paul
[[[ Nik says:
April 30, 2011 at 6:07 am
As metalworkers say, a file is the tool of tools because it can make another file.
Can a windmill give enough energy to make another windmill? ]]]
Also:
Can a solar panel make enough energy to melt the aluminum and melt the glass to make another solar panel ? It would take hundreds if not thousands of panels to produce the power to make just one more.
Any living thing with that rate of reproduction would quickly become extinct.
Jimbo says:
April 30, 2011 at 1:39 am
“I may have missed it but I did not read any mention of the co2 ouput during the production of the amove said windmills. C02 output will will also be incured during maintenance call outs.”
I don’t think we need to worry much about the CO2 from maintenance on these contraptions as based upon all the non-fuctioning eagle choppers I have seen I do not believe maintenance is government subsidized as is the original construction. Too bad. That is, too bad about the subsidy for the original construction.
Of course it can. Electricity doesn’t care how it’s generated.
The thing is, I could make steel using solar 200 yrs from now. I doubt you’ll be able to do that using coal (I know you won’t be able to afford to.)
Some of you aren’t thinking about what coal, and gas are going to cost when these windmills, and solar panels are paid for – much less 30, 40, or 50 years from now.
High Pepper says:
“Power generation, using windpower, has become a lucrative business all over the world.”
Lucrative for whom? If you took away the immense taxpayer subsidies, not one more windmill would be built, because they are not cost-effective.
# # #
Kum Dollison says:
“California is getting a little over 19% of its electricity from Renewables…”
I seriously doubt that, unless you’re including hydro power. Got a cite?
And:
“We’re building wind farms like crazy in The States. They seem to be working; no one’s really complaining.”
That’s on your home planet. Here, plenty of folks are complaining.
@ur momisugly Kum
“Wind energy plays an integral role in California’s electricity portfolio. In 2007, turbines in wind farms generated 6,802 gigawatt-hours of electricity – about 2.3 percent of the state’s gross system power.”
http://www.energy.ca.gov/wind/index.html
-Please supply real data, not the advertised numbers that include purchases from other states.
Glad so many enjoyed this one. Here are some answers to readers’ queries.
Ralph, 736% of 100 years’ global GDP is indeed 736 years, not the 7.36 years you suggest. One of the peer-reviewers of the paper that sets out the underlying climatic and economic calculations got hung up on this point too.
Matthew W, 209 kilowatt-hours averaged over a (non-leap) year is indeed 209,000/8760=24 Watt-hours per hour, as I stated.
David Hagen, always good to hear from you. To the local authority that used its taxpayers’ money to fund this absurd project, the cost of backup generation is an externality: their decision whether to buy or not to buy did not depend on it, and the district auditor, when he eventually has his attention drawn to this boondoggle, will not take it into account in his calculations. Properly speaking, costs of backup generation and suchlike fall to be considered at the macro-economic, not the micro-economic level. The underlying paper, which will be published in a few months’ time, does of course consider the overall cost-effectiveness of the UK’s climate-change measures at the macro-economic level, as well as those of the EU, the US and Australia.
Matter, the mitigation cost-effectiveness of any project is defined as the cost of forestalling 1 Kelvin of “global warming” in the 21st century on the assumption – and it is an assumption – that all policies to make “global warming” go away are as cost-effective (or, with Thanet, cost-ineffective) as the policy under consideration. The mitigation cost-effectiveness accordingly serves as as convenient if rather simpliste metric to compare the imagined (and mostly imaginary) benefits of competing mitigation policies. I gave figures for the largest and smallest wind-projects in the UK, and both are hilariously cost-ineffective. Since the Betz limit on the efficiency of rotors capturing power from a medium in flux is non-negotiable, and since the ineffable stupidity of governments worldwide is great enough to have called production-line manufacture of these useless windmills into being already, they are not going to get a whole lot cheaper than they are now: and the purpose of my research has been to demonstrate that, however much cheaper they get, they will still make no measurable contribution to forestalling “global warming”. I quite understand that, as a beneficiary of the wind industry yourself, you have to keep the flagging flag flapping, but the game’s up, mate: the underlying scientific paper provides a devastatingly simple equation that will enable anyone, even the dimmest Huhnatic in the Department of Climate Change, to calculate the mitigation cost-effectiveness of any proposed project to a high degree of reliability on any cost assumption that is desired. Once that equation and a preliminary set of results (including the wind turbines mentioned here) is in the peer-reviewed literature, steps will be taken at the very highest level to see that heads of State and Government are informed directly. Many – though not all, for the stupidity of governments today is exceptional – will thereupon have all the evidence they need to start or accelerate the process of desubsidization of so-called “renewables”, eventually requiring your industry either to stand on its own massive carbon-emitting concrete bases without subsidy or go under. As they say on the New York metro when you try to get to go around again on a single token, “You had your ride!” – Monckton of Brenchley
Thanks for a much needed laugh and for renewing my faith a little in the British. After seeing how much you chaps are willing to spend on a wedding for someone who may or may not inherent a ceremonial position, I was having my doubts about your country’s capacity to make rational decision.
Patvann says:
April 30, 2011 at 9:06 am
And that is reckoned at peak output. Actual production is less than 2%, possibly closer to 1%.
There are hundreds of years of coal, oil and gas. If we were to open these sources, and utilize them, costs would go down drastically, below $25 per barrel equivalent.
And, if these are produced abiogenically, as is likely, there is an infinite supply of carbon and hydrocarbon fuels (let’s stop calling these “fossil fuels”. Did the vast oceans of ethane, methane, and higher hydrocarbons on Titan come from dinosaurs? ROFL; Think about it…).
Also, since the lifetime of a windmill is more like <5 years before massive replacement or overhaul, let's stop buying into the 20 year lifetime nonsense. The foundations alone, not just the blades and bearings, have to be replaced because of vibration damage. They clearly need to be replaced and overhauled constantly.
Kum Dollison says:
April 30, 2011 at 7:54 am
California is getting a little over 19% of its electricity from Renewables (mostly wind.)
Iowa is getting a touch over 20% from Wind.
I am afraid I must disagree with such statements. Wind farms sell a wildly unreliable product with a generous subsidy, if there was a level playing field then wind farms would actually selling a tiny fraction of that product. In California for example electricity companies are forced to purchase electricity from wind farms at inflated prices which denies them the chance to buy real economically viable electricity from real generation companies at real prices.
The ONLY reason why wind farms are able to sell any of their rubbish over priced unreliable intermittent product is because they receive more for their product than it is worth, take away the subsides and remove the obligation to purchase wind farm generated electricity and every wind farm in the USA would close down. What the USA has done is introduce a USSR style subsidy model and it is doing incredible and lasting damage to the USA.
Latest figure for US wind farms show they operate at less than 35% of capacity, can you imagine the economic cost of encouraging that kind of abysmal efficiency? The stunningly poor performance of wind compared to coal should be highlighted and showed clearly to the people who are forced to finance such a Marxist style mess.
Stimulus money is being utterly wasted on a giant confidence trick, consumers are paying more and more money to support a political experiment, billions of dollars down the drain when for far less the consumer could have coal fired power stations delivering cheap reliable secure energy and as much as they want when they want it.
Spiv carpet bagger flimflam merchants are flocking to wind NOT because it works but because the subsidies are attracting them like a shark is attracted to blood and just like the sharks around a bleeding kill, once the free money runs out the sharks will disappear, its a feeding frenzy. The only thing keeping wind alive are the subsidies, it is a gigantic fraud and the ultimate cost goes far beyond the billions of dollars going into the pockets of sharp carpet bagger speculators, every day that goes by further damages the US economy.
What drives a successful capitalist industrial economy is cheap reliable plentiful energy, what kills that economy is expensive unreliable scare energy. The USA is wilfully killing the base of its own economy, the pitifully few jobs created in the wind farm scam are being dwarfed by the loss of jobs in the real economy but one thing is clear for all to see, sooner or later the free money pay off bribes showered on the wind farm speculators will have to be turned off and when it is all that will be left to show is a whole lot of carpet baggers with fuller bank accounts and a whole load of scrap metals littering the landscape.
The real and ultimate aim of those behind the wind farm scam is wholly political in nature, the plan is simplicity itself. To make electricity so expensive that people will be forced to use far less by way of making it unaffordable, the aim is to restrict economic growth and vitality by bribing carpet baggers with subsidies to provide a method of electricity generation that will absolutely guarantee a choking off of economic power and growth.
That is not a long term energy policy it is national economic sabotage, when all the inevitable damage is done, when the jobs are lost and the money is gone, when the economy is in ruins and the carpet bagger profiteers have retired to count their money then what will be left? The people responsible are in effect committing economic treason.
I visit a local state park regularly to hike the trails. I noticed a wind generator was installed prominently on a hill for all to see about two years ago. As many times as I’ve visited the park, I’ve never seen it turning. So I asked the park ranger what the story is on the generator, how much power it generates. He said it has never generated any electricity as far as he knows. But it does allow the park to claim that a portion of the park’s power comes from renewable sources. My tax money at non work.
It’s sad that we live in a time where we erect useless monuments to green ideology that themselves glaringly epitomize the failure to accomplish anything that actually works.