The Faults, Fallacies and Failures of Wind Power

Death machines that cannot even pay for the manufacture. Ridiculous. Absurd.

As a response to Chris – first comment. Localised drying does occur and turbine fires are almost impossible to put out.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/hot-wind-farms-120429.htm
“Analysts say wind power is a good complement to solar power, because winds often blow more strongly at night while solar power is only available during daytime hours. But Zhou and his colleagues found that turbulence behind the wind turbine blades stirs up a layer of cooler air that usually settles on the ground at night, and mixes in warm air that is on top.”

Do you like misqueitos (I give up, SP?) those pesky little insects who fly around and bite you raising welts and itching. Well, wind mills are not only bird choppers, they are bat choppers. Google NC and bat killing. I know, I know, nobody loves bats. They are spooky, and in everybody’s mind lurks vampire, but they eat misquitos right and left.. Misquitos spread disease. Enough said.

Regardless of all the nasty things wind turbines do the biggest and nastiest problem is that they are not viable in an economic way, thus we all pay and pay for smarties to make money.

With all due respect, you don’t understand the true nature of wind energy. A wind farm is a device to turn climate hysteria into state subsidies.

Everything about the current usage of wind turbines is backwards. They were never intended as a primary power source, but as backup power, charging banks of batteries to be drawn on for a limited time until your main power source was brought back on line.
There are two basic types of windmills: the hard to maintain, difficult to place, horizontal bird choppers, and the easy to maintain, (generator is housed in the base), easy to place (they’re smaller), non bird chopping Vertical Axis windmill. (Birds are attracted to updrafts, VAW causes down drafts). Go figure.

There is no case for wind. This has always been blindingly obvious even to the low levels of scientific understanding enjoyed by politicians.
It has been known from the outset that wind is an unreliable ‘energy’ source such that almost 100% backup is required to meet demand when wind conditions are inappropriate (insufficient wind, or even wind being too striong). That backup comes from conventionally powered generation which generation emits CO2 such that installing wind farms does not reduce CO2 emissions, even before one takes account of the CO2 in the manufacture, transport, installation and coupling to the grid. It is note worthy that there has not been one single conventional powered generator closed any where in the world because it was rendered redundant due to the installation of a wind farm. If no significant savings in CO2 emissions results from rolling out wind farms they fail to meet their green agenda, and there is therefore no point at all in generating power in this way since from a financial perspective, the costs of generation is prohibitively expensive.
The article suggests that turbines typically generate about 30% of nameplate rating (installed capacity). That is a tad optomistic. Evidence is coming in that it is typically between 22% and 28%. More significantly, power generation by wind is often at its least efficiency just when energy demand is at its highest. For example, during the last few winters in the UK, there has been a blocking high situated approximately over the UK and Northern Europe which has remained for about 3 to 6 weeks. A couple of winters ago, I monitored the energy being supplied by wind every day over that period. It was typically between 3 to 5% of nameplate rating (installed capacity). There were many days when it was less than 3%, and only a few days when it reached the heady heights of 8%. When it is very cold, and there is no or all but no wind, often energy has to be taken from the grid to power heaters to keep the oil warm and sometimes the rotars rotating slowly. So when it is said that wind farms in total were producing say 3% of their nameplate rating (installed capacity), the chances are that there were many turbines drawing power from the grid such that net supply is even less. Had the UK been dependent upon wind for producing about 30% of its required energy budget (this is about 17GW out of a total budget of aout 50GW), there would have been rolling blackouts. There would have been many cold related deaths since UK housing is old, damp and not well insulated and without electrity central heating does not work: even gas or oil powered heating requires electrity for ignition and pump circulation.
The article suggest that electrity from wind is very expensive (which is no surprise given the low density of the energy supply). Evidence is coming in that wind turbines need more maintenance than was initially projected and that they have a life expectancy more in the region of 12 to 15 years rather than the claimed 25 years. This will grreatly add to the cost of energy production from wind since wind turbines may need replacing every 15 years whereas conventionally powered generation may last for 60 years.
Some say that wind is a new technology and should be supported in its infant years. That claim is rubbish. Extracting power from wind is an old technology which has been around for hundreds of years. Further the key components such as the generator and rotar can be traced back at least 60 years and may be a lot longer. Generator design has not changed significantly in 100 years, and will not change short of employing some novel technology exploiting super conductivity, super magnetivity etc. Likewise prop design has been ongoing since the early days of aviation and this too is unlikely to change significantly in the future. The upshot of this is that it is extremely unlikely that in the future, there will be significant improvements in efficiency. If research and development extract another couple of percent efficiency that would be a surprise.
On the same theme, there will be no future economy of scale. Consider how the IC revolutionisd electronics whereby dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions of transistors could be incorporated into ever increasing modules. This sort of economy of scale is not available for wind. Each wind turbine has to be a seperate structure, seperately errected, occupying its own seperate space, far away from its neighbour and seperately coupled up. There is no radical economy of scale in the pipeline.
Hence what we have now is largely what we will get. Never significantly more efficient, never significantly cheaper to install, never significantly occupying less land space. The cost of energy will never be significantly cheaper from these units. So subsidies for a fledgling industry are not well spent since it will never be significantly improved and thus can never be weaned off the subsidies. Without subsidies, windfarms are simply uneconomic.
Since they fail the economic/financial test and since they do not achieve the green agenda (ie., fail to significantly reduce CO2), they should be scrapped forth with.
PS. I am not endorsing the need to curb CO2 emissions. I merely point out that if reduction of CO2 emissions was the aim, then wind farms are a fail and this fact was known by politicians when they endorsed the wind farm initiatives.

Who ever called any energy ‘free’? Windf energy is not referred to as free, but as ‘renewable’.

This articles has one of the few mentions I’ve seen about the fact that removing wind energy from the local weather system must affect weather patterns. If nothing else, reference to the so-called ‘butterfly effect’ would suggest that there could be larger unforseen weather effects down the line created by these windfarms

I read on a blog recently (can’t recall) that the issued of the cost of decommissioning wind turbines is still up in the air. That is who is going to pay for decommissioning? Can anyone confirm this?
The other problems with wind power is as follows:

The Scotsman – 26 December 2010
‘Green’ Scotland relying on French nuclear power
SCOTLAND’S wind farms are unable to cope with the freezing weather conditions – grinding to a halt at a time when electricity demand is at a peak………..Output from major wind farms fell to as low as 2.5 per cent of their potential generation capacity during the cold snap……..

Daily Mail – 26th January 2011
In China, the true cost of Britain’s clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale
This toxic lake poisons Chinese farmers, their children and their land. It is what’s left behind after making the magnets for Britain’s latest wind turbines…..
……….it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China.

More on windpower failures from Matt Ridley.