By Sherri Lange — December 15, 2022
“Combating opposition to industrial wind using Conspiracy Theory is uninformed, immature, and even comical, were the authors not taking the subject so seriously. The opponents of industrial wind will not fall prey to assertions of being paranoid or socially ‘off.’ They are conscientious, studied, well-prepared, and ready to go the full mile. There are reasons to be fighting for your own landscape, health, community, and wildlife.”
“Conspiracy theory” is a phrase tossed around mightily these days, often when people have no rebuttal to deep and real concerns about realities that are increasingly being exposed on many levels. Consider the origins of COVID, Vaccines, President Donald Trump, to name a few. (People on both sides of the argument call each other “conspiracy prey.”)
What one doesn’t expect is that opposition to industrial wind will be called out for Conspiracy. It’s an eccentric connection that authors/professors Kai Sassenberg, Matthew Hornsey, and Kevin Winter make in Anticipating and defusing the role of conspiracy beliefs in shaping opposition to wind farms published recently in Nature Energy.
The underlying assumption is that wind turbine opponents are anxious, possibly paranoid, and have “low coping skills” if they imagine harm to their communities. Additionally, the ingrates are distrustful of municipal and higher authorities.
One can agree with the distrust. But it is insulting to people, wildlife, and pristine land and water areas that do suffer harm—and all being as unnecessary as industrial wind turbines themselves. To mention that the industry worldwide is in disrepute seems moot. The very title and area of study by the professors from Australia and Germany are possibly libelous. “Tricky” and tone deaf, for sure.
Professor Hornsey‘s bio (see Appendix below) blends his interests in “mistrust and defensiveness with climate change, vaccination, evolution, and “so forth.” (The “so forth” appears to include opposition to industrial wind.)
Comments from the article:
QUOTATION ONE Australian and German researchers have found a moderate-to-large link between people who believe in conspiracy theories and rejecting wind farms. They found providing these people with more information also increased their likelihood of supporting wind power, but only if it wasn’t presented as a debate. The team says, with the urgent need for wind energy production to reach net-zero targets, preventative measures are more likely to stop these people from their oppositional opinions than just intervening later on with an info-dump.
Comment: The fix is in starting from such a pro-wind, anti-mineral-energy assumption. Why should citizens-qua-taxpayer and citizens-qua-ratepayer subsidize wind? Why should they put up with the well-known nuisances of industrial wind turbines–noise, flicker, etc.–when the giant machines are not needed to begin with? Why should the extra transmission lines be excused? A free market, anyone?
QUOTATION TWO Reaching net-zero targets requires massive increases in wind energy production, but efforts to build wind farms can meet stern local opposition. Here, inspired by related work on vaccinations, we examine whether opposition to wind farms is associated with a world view that conspiracies are common (‘conspiracy mentality’). In eight pre-registered studies (collective N = 4,170), we found moderate-to-large relationships between various indices of conspiracy beliefs and wind farm opposition. Indeed, the relationship between wind farm opposition and conspiracy beliefs was many times greater than its relationship with age, gender, education and political orientation. Information provision increased support, even among those high in conspiracy mentality. However, information provision was less effective when it was presented as a debate (that is, including negative arguments) and among participants who endorsed specific conspiracy theories about wind farms. Thus, the data suggest preventive measures are more realistic than informational interventions to curb the potentially negative impact of conspiracy beliefs.
Comment: How about focusing on those closest to wind turbines? Would any of the authors like to camp out under a turbine for a few days and report back? And it is fair for any citizen to not want government energy planning and subsidies for politically correct, economically incorrect wind. Is that a ‘conspiracy’.
QUOTATION THREE For many countries, achieving net-zero targets will require an extraordinary ramping up of energy sourced from wind. For example, when Princeton University modelled a pathway to net-zero emissions in the United States that relied entirely on renewable energy, they calculated it would require over 1 million square kilometres of land, roughly the size of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Louisiana combined1. In Germany, the current government agreed to designate 2% of the country’s landscape for the construction of wind farms2. The scale of escalation suggests a fundamental transformation in people’s exposure to—and relationship with—wind farms in the future. (Our note: the scale of escalation is not reasonable and will never create a fundamental transformation in people’s opposition. The impact will be inverse to what is hoped for.)
Comment: Thank you for including these facts. And you have refuted your premise of wind as the necessary savior. Machining up the landscape for unreliable, expensive, unnecessary wind power is an environmental imperative.
Robert Bryce encourages us to examine this renewables expansion in more depth.
The scale problem is equally obvious when it comes to wind. In fact, wind-energy’s scale problems are even more thorny because wind energy requires so much land.
Let’s consider the extent of the energy sprawl if the wind-energy sector were to supply that 450 terawatt-hours per year of incremental electricity demand.
The power density of wind energy is roughly two watts per square meter or about five megawatts per square mile. That means that by the end of 2011, the U.S. had covered a land area of about 9,400 square miles with wind turbines, a land area just slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. Therefore, just to keep up with the growth in global electricity demand by using wind energy alone, the global wind industry will need to cover a land area of some 35,000 square miles — about the size of Indiana — with wind turbines. And it will have to do so every year.
That metric’s still hard to grasp, so let me put it another way: in order to merely keep up with the pace of growth of global electricity use, the wind industry would have to cover 96 square miles every day, with wind turbines. That’s an area about the size of four Manhattans.
Then, the Nature Energy article refers to Net Zero: a reality check of Net Zero, shows an unobtainable pie in the sky concept, which has captured imaginations politically, and castrated or deformed energy policies world wide. The problem with SOME conspiracy “theories,” is that they profoundly challenge underlying misrepresentations, many Media promoted/Government endorsed mistakes. Galactic style misrepresentations. This is, indeed, anxiety producing.
QUOTATION FOUR Existing research suggests that people are positive about wind energy in the abstract, but when it comes to actually establishing wind farms in local communities, there has been substantial resistance, to the point where many proposals have been killed off3. In some cases, resistance has been amplified by organized campaigns of disinformation (for example, about negative health consequences of wind farms)4,5. These pockets of resistance might be early red flags for what other nations may soon experience once wind farms become a more visible and salient part of people’s lived experiences. Just as nations will need to massively ramp up investment in wind farms to meet renewable energy targets, so too does the scientific community need to ramp up its ability to anticipate (and defuse) factors that lead to wind farm resistance.
Comment: Abstract support of wind awaits a fair presentation and publicity about the problems of wind for rates, taxes, and the landscape. And particularly for local residents to the turbines.
Less and less do we hear of the NIMBY arguments. Opposition is well grounded in facts and is increasingly visible and fearless. And increasingly successful.
Conclusion
Combating opposition to industrial wind using Conspiracy Theory is uninformed, immature, and even comical, were the authors not taking the subject so seriously. The opponents of industrial wind will not fall prey to assertions of being paranoid or socially ‘off.’ They are conscientious, studied, well-prepared, and ready to go the full mile. There are reasons to be fighting for your own health, land, community, and wildlife.”
Professor Hornsey asks: “Why do people resist apparently reasonable messages?” Flip the script; Hornsey should understand basic energy issues before shortchanging and demeaning on-the-spot victims of wind power. He should question the wind industry to see who is fact-challenged and putting PR above real concerns and issues.
Appendix
Professor Hornsey writes on his bio:
Since graduating in 1999 I have published over 130 papers, and in 2018 I was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Scientists in Australia. A problem that I have examined throughout my career is: “Why do people resist apparently reasonable messages?” I focus on the psychology of how feelings of mistrust and threat can lead people to reject messages. These insights are then translated into concrete and do-able strategies for overcoming defensiveness. Specific examples include ARC-funded research on (1) why people embrace or resist scientific messages about climate change, vaccination, evolution, and so forth, (2) how people respond to gestures of reconciliation from transgressor groups (particularly apologies), and (3) what drives defensiveness in the face of group criticism and recommendations for change.
This professional niche begs us to investigate Hornsey further to uncover such articles as Hornsey, M. J., Harris, E. A. & Fielding, K. S. Relationships among conspiratorial beliefs, conservatism and climate scepticism across nations. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 614–620 (2018). Consider this quotation:
“Another ideology that has been implicated in climate scepticism is conspiratorial ideation, defined as an underlying worldview or predisposition toward viewing events and circumstances as the product of conspiracies12,13. There are a number of conspiracy beliefs about climate science, most prominent of which is that it is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who see it as an opportunity to wield influence, secure funding or act out a green/Marxist agenda13,14,15.”
Apparently a conspiracy theorist is defined as anyone who doesn’t accept everything the government says, as gospel truth and the best way to deal with a conspiracy theorist is to lie to them and declare that there is no evidence against whatever position the government is pushing today.
How many times has Faucci reversed himself regarding masks?
You really are just a one trick pony.
Oil hasn’t peaked and won’t for at least 100 years.
See what I mean, a complete spam storm, lacking the intelligence to see anything except what he has trained himself to see, and lacking the common decency to just shut up.
We live in times that are more Orwellian than George Orwell could have ever imagined. People, especially those who pay any attention at all to what the man behind the curtain is doing, are smeared as “Conspiracy Theorists” (the etymology of that term is a story in itself. See: Warren Commission, JFK assassination, the feds really not wanting people to look too hard at the evidence and the cohesiveness of the official narrative). People are then gaslit, their governments flat out lying to them saying that what they are seeing with their own eyes, and in the data that is collected is just a figment of their imaginations. They are labelled “deniers” and other smears, but never engaged on the merits or with facts. This is done deliberately, these days through the use of “Nudge Units” (Officially called Behavioral Insights Teams), which use behavioral psychology to “nudge” the population into “making the right choices”, which in reality means just doing what the government wants them to do. In some ways, this is more insidious and evil than an outright tyranny, since the blatant tyrant at least has the honesty to do it to your face, not use underhanded psychological manipulation to cajole and coerce the populous. These days, you are more likely to be psychologically manipulated with fear, shame and guilt (each of which work on different personality types) than to be coerced through direct force. The results are no different.
Something has to give, society cannot keep going on this path and remain functional. Most people just want to be left alone (as much as is possible). We can warn those who want to control every aspect of our lives as many times as we want, but they don’t seem to be listening. No one will like what is coming if they don’t stop, and go back.
It’s almost as if Orwell got hold of some globalist cabal’s implementation plans from 1947.
Or “the old tricks are the best tricks” is true.
Speaking of Fauci here’s what a couple of conspiracy theorists look and sound like-
https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/chris-kenny/puts-the-nail-in-the-coffin-scientist-and-author-backs-accidental-covid-lab-leak-theory/video/9d8654e1a7e32dadb59f458b683f3449
That’s also how criminals are defined.
BTW, in case you didn’t know. A flimsy piece of cloth with 12 micron holes isn’t gonna stop 0.128 and 0.154 micron viruses from coming in and is only going to literally increase diffusion on exhale and blast exhalations thus improving the ratio of smaller more easily suspended particulate accretions. The material on the mask will dry out and break up as well, so wearing them for more than about 20 minutes in dry warm locations makes them have no real effect other than stopping other people from killing you for coughing loogies on them.
A single virus, floating all by itself in the air, will die in a minute or two anyway, as it dries out.
Viruses that hitch a ride on much larger water droplets however, will survive for a much longer period of time.
So that infers the mask breaks up the water droplet when exhaled, leaving the virus with less to survive on? Conversely, that would imply that the virus would not be affected on inhalation through the mask as it is nearly at its host.
The mask at best protects others around you – but only if you are coughing, sneezing, or panting.
I’m old. I need to see people’s faces when they talk to me. I don’t want their “protection” even without getting my jab.
Apparently Professor Hornsey is an authority on conspiracy theories, and his eagle eyes see them everywhere 🙂
Perhaps Hornsey could study the time it takes for what the lefties claim to be a conspiracy theory to become accepted by them as the truth?
I rather think it is overlap between leftists and environmentalists, rather than leftists coming up with environmentalism as a tool. That is not to say that leftists have not used environmentalism as a tool, just that it was not original with the left.
If anything, the social climate in Germany before WWI led to several social movements, one of which was environmentalism.John Muir has the same sort of mystical view of nature, as distinguished from the rather more practical Gifford Pinchot conservationists. However, a good number of social movements arose at the same time, like progressivism, eugenics, and “race science”.
Did your meds run out?
That works out less than 2 months per paper. Not much time for thought or research on any of them.
Once again, see what I mean.
Moderators, will you please show the troll to the door.
Same paper different title? 🙂
I doubt thought plays much of a role in it, at least not thought as we know it.
They don’t need to deny it. Nature has already done that for them.
That reply makes as much sense as giving a jackhammer to a jackrabbit
Would appear that someone got “Vanished” and now certain posts don’t make sense
A certain someone earned himself a lifetime ban quite a while ago, but that doesn’t prevent him from trying to sneak back in and resume the behavior that got him banned in the first place.
For those who don’ remember, Ingraham got himself moderated because of his habit of constantly bombing every article with his claims that he has proven we have passed peak oil and the society is collapsing because of it.
Last time you infested this site, I discovered the futility of trying to debate someone who spends the majority of his time in a world of his own making.
This will be my last comment to you.
Speaking about yourself again?
I see your working really hard to get yourself banned again
The underlying assumption is that wind turbine opponents are anxious, possibly paranoid, and have “low coping skills” if they imagine harm to their communities.
I live a mile from some wind turbines. I am thankful for this distance and that they are smaller turbines but feel sorry for those living closer. If these writers lived near some of the larger wind farms they would certainly not be throwing out these ill informed accusations.
They think we are as nutty as they are! European blackouts approaching – then what will their excuse be?
It will be the failure of gas or coal. The subsidy miners in Texas attributed the failure of wind and solar in a Feb 2021 period of freezing rain and dead air to gas power plants.
developing industrial offshore wind , or protecting endangered whale species . pick one .
“Why do people resist apparently reasonable messages?”
What a completely screwed approach to science!
Work backwards through these words, starting with “messages”. Many people know that some messages are useful and some should be ignored, even contested.
So the author shifts goalposts to deal with only “reasonable messages” a subjective distinction that allows the author to choose examples that suit.
To get more freedom to select the author’s hobby horses, narrow the field further to “apparently reasonable messages” by which the author gains wriggle room and more freedom to dictate which messages can be ignored in the “study” to preserve the author’s pet topics.
Now to “resist”. It is human nature to initially resist just about every new message, to create evaluation time. People commonly resist more complex messages and ones that might affect them seriously, while they gather evidence on which to make an informed decision. Even the gambler at the races usually thinks about which horse to back, futile as that usually is.
The author indicates by these quoted words a willingness to dress up an ordinary personal rant with sciencey terms. This is a disgusting waste of a professorial place and salary. Science should present balanced views, not cherry picked special cases. Geoff S
The technique of attributing some kind of mental problem to those you disagree with is what I find offensive. Moreover, there are lots of “conspiracy theories” that turn out to be correct.
cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB2f37nDdPo
For example, the theory that COVID 19 may have accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, was originally vehemently denied by “Dr.” Fauci and the rest of the government medical establishment. Dismissed as a conspiracy theory. As time has gone on, it’s no longer considered a crank position, even if absolute proof won’t be available until after the Bamboo curtain comes down.
PS: A lot of “conspiracy” theories about the former Soviet Union were found to be true after the west got access to the Soviet archives.
> A problem that I have examined throughout my career is: “Why do people resist apparently reasonable messages?”
LOL! He only needs to ask himself that question, as it’s clear he’s incapable of accepting the reasonable message that wind power is not a suitable (ie. clean/cheap/reliable) substitute for fossil fuels!
Or, more implicitly, that many, if not most, objections are very reasonable and that objections to those reasons cannot be made based on real facts or data.
I intended to write about the case of an island off the coast of Tasmania where consent has been given for a huge 340 MW wind farm that will be required to close for five months of the year to protect an endangered bird. This is the first time I have looked at comments since the registration was implemented and was saddened to find abusive nonsensical comments still being permitted.
As, for instance?
A certain someone who has already earned a life time ban tried to sneak back in.
If you here back then, he believes that he has proven that we reached peak oil 20 years ago and that anyone who doesn’t agree with him is a moron, unable to read and a liberal to boot. The posts were probably deleted before you arrived, certainly prior to the time stamp on the post I’m responding to.
There are several conversations that make no sense anymore because of these deleted posts.
The problem is that “nonsensical” is in the eye of the beholder.
Do we do as the so called social media giants and delete any opinions that the government deems to be nonsense? Or do we pick some other source of authority and ban anything that they declare to be nonsenes?
In general, it’s best to let the nonsense stand and refute it with facts and reason.
Abuse on the other hand is a problem when it is in excess. Strong feelings engender strong words.
A certain someone has had his posts removed not so much because of the abuse that he flung at anyone who disagreed with him (which was excessive and he was warned about it before he was banned the first time) but because he couldn’t resist trying to drown out every conversation in an effort to force everyone to talk about only what he wanted to talk abouit.
The word ‘ideation’ has a Stephan Lewandowsky ring to it and sure enough the Hornsey, Harris, & Fielding paper has seven Lewandowsky references.
Why do the learned academics refer to our beautiful, wide-open spaces in the US midwest as preferable sites for their annoying and unsightly wind farms? Siting windmills in, say, the academic’s tony neighborhoods would place the power where its needed, and would “share the blight”.
Agree with the thrust of what you’re saying, but what is a “tony neighborhood?”
“marked by an aristocratic or high-toned manner or style”
In my opinion, most “tony neighborhoods” are self declared.
This
Boston wind power, for example.
San Francisco could be considered “tony.”
Isn’t that where Tony resides?
They’re great.
We don’t have the ammunition to attack the message since wind power is economically and environmentally unsound. So let’s bring in some shrinks who can attack the messenger.
Alarmists always attack the messenger because they never have any ammunition to attack the message.
“in 2018 I was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Scientists in Australia.”
But he is a “Social Scientist” so he just knows stuff. How dare you excoriate him. 😉
Engineer – No
Climate Scientist – No
Spin Doctor – Almost certainly
Politial Advocate – Almost certainly
Knowledgeable on any topic – Most certainly not
“Reaching net-zero targets requires massive increases in wind energy production,”
Actually, ‘massive’ in this context means something way beyond what supporters of renewables think they mean. Imagine the climate change itself created by wind farms impeding the normal flow of air over ‘state-sized’ wind farms. Wind is created by meteorologic low pressure cells that lie downwind from the turbines. The ‘demand’ for airflow of the low pressure cells won’t be denied. If impeded from the usual direction, airflow will be drawn in part from end runs around the ‘farms’ and from flanking directions.
Has anyone studied this? Is there good ‘before and after’ data once in operation? It seems to me that we are hearing almost daily about large areas of idle mills over weeks that appears to have taken this industry by complete surprise.
Here’s some spectacular weather created by Danish offshore wind farms. Maybe increased floods and other ‘weather’ damage results from renewables zeal!
negative hypothesis and negative research results are not tolerated. There will be no research to answer questions when those answers have the possibility of negative impacts on ‘the cause’.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/08/18/long-range-wake-losses-offshore-much-greater-than-expected-new-study-shows/
Yup I have said the same many times. They clamor over the hypothetical, but based on empirical observation, imaginary effect of CO2 on climate, yet they have never for even a moment considered the negative effects of extracting energy from the wind and Sun might have on weather or climate!
I don’t know if there are any wind farms large enough to create measurable impacts on wind patterns yet.
Don’t forget that air can flow over the wind farms as well as around them. That can have an impact on cloud formation as rising air cools, however it also won’t be a large affect.
Covid lies, economic number lies, climate lies, temperature lies, unemployment number lies, etc, etc.
Now this:
Claim: CDC Deleted Defensive Gun Use Figures Under Pressure from Left (breitbart.com)
Nah! Nobody has any reason to question what the government is telling you.
Yes, we are at the point where we have to question everything the government is telling us.
The Intelligence community and the Justice Department/FBI look to be completely compromised by the radical Democrats, and are doing their bidding. We can’t believe anything the federal government says. Those of us who are not radical Democrats are in trouble. The Deck is deliberately stacked against us by the power of the federal government.
The first step to correcting this problem and saving our personal freedoms is to recognize the problem we have: The federal government is being used as an arm of the Democrat Party since the Obama administration.
The Republican Party needs to come together and stop these outrages by the radical Democrats against the U.S. Constitution and against the American people.
Unfortunately, we have many weak-kneed and/or clueless Republican politicians. Maybe too many.
If Republican politicians don’t see the radical Democrats and the Mainstream Media as an Existential Threat to the freedoms of all of us, then we are all screwed. Then, it will only be a matter of time before the radical Democrats control all the levers of power.
Are Republicans too stupid to put up an effective defense? We shall see.
We are NOT paranopid – just following the believable science, not the nonsense followed by the alarmists!
What I find funny so called “scientist” seem to forget that science is question everything. Most science is on shifting sand as we learn more, we find out we “know” less.
I live 10 miles from a bunch of wind towers and can neither see them nor hear them.
However, I have been in the entrance/base of an operating large tower and encourage
anyone that can to do so. This is an interesting technology. Stupid and unnecessary,
but interesting.
I wonder if any of the authors have a similar experience.
[I just noticed WordPress is suggesting words and phrases. One has to be watching
and press ‘tab’. As a touch-typist I have either missed this or it is new.
When I typed “touch’ a moment ago it gave me “touchy subject”.] WTF
Is it really WordPress, or if you are using a mobile device is it really the keyboard app doing the suggesting?
So far no suggestions from WordPress coming up, using Chrome on Windows10. I’ll try it using Firefox in a moment.
Would love to have it suggest words (and also give me the ability to turn the feature off!)
Back with Firefox. The quick brown fox … thought that would trigger a suggestion at least but unfortunately no (and I’m typing slow to give it a chance).
It has never happened to me
Most software has a setting for those features somewhere. Though they have so many settings now days it may take you a while to find it.
I like leaving it on because when I type fast, I have a tendency to let my right hand get ahead of my left hand, causing letters in some words to transpose. It’s been getting worse in recent years, I like having software that can catch some of my more egregious errors. There are other times when I’m really not sure how to spell a word, and rather than thinking up a good synonym, I let the software give me suggestions.
A number of software editors started critiquing spelling about a decade ago. Today it seems almost ubiquitous. However it’s only been in the past year that software has started critiquing my grammar as well. How long till it finishes my thought before I’ve even thought it?
5MW per square mile!
Is this capacity or outturn? Probably outturn. The following study estimates capacity per square km at about 20MW
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082620303367
That is capacity. You then however have to reckon with the difference between capacity and output. The factor for land is about one third, so you will get roughly 7MW per square km, which is still a lot more than the number in the piece. But does it make the project any more feasible?
Lets take the case of the UK, as a for instance. Current demand roughly 40GW. Paul Homewood has done excellent analysis showing that with the Net Zero program it would rise to about 120GW.
Suppose you wanted to supply 70% of UK demand of 120GW from onshore wind.
This would be about 85GW. Then divide by 7MW, the output you actually get per square km. The answer seems to be about 12,000 square km. Britain is about 242,000 square km in total. If I have got this right it would take about 5% of the area of the country. If the number in the piece is correct, it would be a lot more.
And that is just for the farms themselves. If you have a zone around them you would end up with a much higher percentage.
Have I got this right or am I missing a decimal somewhere?
It is really politically impossible to take 5-10% of the country for wind farms. No government proposing that would survive. And the expense would be huge.
And this is even before you consider the need for excess capacity to charge up all those batteries to smooth out intermittency and for the winter blocking, when your 85GW falls to more like 2GW. If in fact you are supplying 85GW you need far more average wind output than that in order to be able to meet it.
I recall a very nice study of the Dutch situation in which the author concluded that there was not enough North Sea area to power Holland from off-shore wind, lost the link to it now.
Have I got this right?
This is a calculation I like.
https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/wind-still-making-zero-energy/
Then there’s the late David MacKay at a TED talk. A committed ‘green’ explaining the impossibility of renewables.
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables
A 100MW gas turbine is about the size of a residential home. To provide the same output would require 20 large (500 ft) turbines on 10sq miles of land.
‘The Hard Math of Minerals’ Mark P Mills Jan 27th 2022
https://issues.org/environmental-economic-costs-minerals-solar-wind-batteries-mills/
From the link:
And if solar and wind are to become the primary sources of power, then utility-scale electricity storage and additional generating capacity will be required to meet demand and to produce excess energy to be stored. Thus, replacing a 100 MW gas turbine would necessitate at least 200 MW of solar or wind capacity, more than doubling the hardware and materials requirements—along with yet more materials associated with building about 10,000 tons of batteries for energy storage.
In fact you would need a lot more than this. You would only get a third of faceplate, and that would be intermittent, quite a bit when you cannot use it. And then you have to have extra to charge up the batteries.
Replacing, really replacing, 100MW gas would need at least 300MW wind. And storage. And constraint payments when its producing too much at the wrong time.
In other words, it’s completely impractical and will never happen.
Yes and no. It will never happen as planned and promised, that is for sure. But when, as in the UK, all political parties are intent on doing something, even if its completely impractical and will not deliver the intended results, the likelihood is that it will be done. Its just it won’t deliver what was promised.
So the UK probably will build out huge amounts of wind, and probably will make a serious attempt to install batteries and turn off gas generation. Its just that the results will not be zero carbon – or they may be zero carbon, but accompanied by wildly fluctuating prices and frequent blackouts.
An example of the lunacy in the UK political establishment is that they are going to require all gas boilers sold after 2026 must be capable of burning hydrogen. A fuel for which there is neither a source, a grid capable of transporting it to homes, or in-home pipework which can carry it. But they will be ready, if one day all of that is donated by a divine angel!
You forgot the ADDITIONAL land for the “battery storage,” and for the giant pylons for the extra power lines to bring the wind power or solar power from the distant sites to where the power is needed.
The gas turbine can be placed near the demand for its power, and requires none of those “extras” in terms of “footprint.”
“Conspiracy theorist” was once an insult, these days it’s a badge of honour.
Judging by the number of theories which have proven true these days, we’ll soon be meeting the Lizard people.
So the author is neither a climate scientist or any sort of systems engineer yet feels qualified to doubt the veracity of anyone who dares question the messaging. I trust engineers more than I trust PR or marketing or political types.
All men are in an active conspiracy against women to subjugate them. Discuss. A scientist says. You can buy a scientist, it’s cheaper than thinking. In Britain we have national institutions, but who wants to live in an institution? We are given a choice between the possibility of Global Warming in some contrived future, or, as things are at the moment dying from cold, the conflict of certainties.
Define ‘apparently reasonable messages’.
Let me offer a few ‘reasonable messages’: – heavier objects surely fall faster than lighter ones, – an object heavier than air can not fly, – fire is obviously some substance, let’s call it phlogeston, – there is no such thing as atoms, – the stars obviously control your character.
let me pose a hypothesis. The reason that people ‘resist’ such ‘messages’ is that they are actually rather clever and have been educated.
These days, “education” reduces the ability to do critical thinking, since it has devolved into “indoctrination” as opposed to “education.”
…so now have to start doubting everything I ever knew about evolution? I mean, really, evolution is not believed in hard enough?
Sounds like someone want me to think some particular way about evolution, and now I have a new conspiracy to worry about.
Oh my…
What I actually wanted to remind everyone of is the recently-discussed program of official Pre-Bunking. The campaign was widely announced, and promptly ridiculed.
Well folks, this is the new academic purse string; “pre-bunk every possible counter-argument those pesky individualists in the herd are likely to come up with”.
I reckon that the first thing to do in opening up the Wind Power debate is to state that the Net Zero Emissions theory is a CONSPIRACY THEORY ITSELF. (calling it a SCAM debases the debate. I should remember that!!)
I have observed over the years that Communists always seem to accuse their challengers of the SIN in which they indulge in themselves.
As for the Wind Challengers:—- How can the Thermodynamic Laws be a Conspiracy? Or merely pointing out the dire consequences, come to that
What objective standards did the authors use to establish whether or not an opinion is a conspiracy theory? The probability is that they didn’t. They just decided that certain views, that they disagreed with, are conspiracy theories. So it becomes a question more of people having certain views more likely to be opposed to windfarms. So, for example, people who raise questions about the validity of vote-counting in certain elections might be more sceptical of claims made by those who want to build more windfarms. Or people who are sceptical of Russian involvement in the Hunter Biden story might also be sceptical of claims made by those promoting more windfarms. Or, simply, that people who like to base their views on evidence also have views about windfarms based on evidence.
After reading this whole thread I stuck on the last two words here:
I’m wondering how “Manhattans” became such a ubiquitous metric for measuring land surface.
For those of us who have never been to New York City it really isn’t any more meaningful than measuring land surface in Delawares, Rhode Islands or even square miles.
There is some debate here about the amount of land that is required for wind turbine plants. Over about 900 square miles of recent permits issued near where I live the average in about 7.5MW per square mile of nameplate rating — 80acres per MW is the figure I quote in testimony.
As for the hazards to wildlife, a recent EIA for the Two Rivers project has nothing at all to say about game animals except that “we don’t know much about them” but even the developer admits that Bald Eagles alone will likely suffer a 28% mortality per year of these birds within their Local Area Population (LAP) which, by the way covers an area of 28,000 square miles of Colorado and Wyoming. Yet, even a 28% annual mortality is countered with a claim that the number of Bald Eagles is probably increasing at something like 15% per year over the LAP…the disconnect is obvious but local FWS and BLM people are in favor of the development. It already has all of its permits from all local and state government entities.
I should clarify that the mortality is from all built and currently permitted wind plants in the LAP. We are just getting started, unfortunately.
Seems to me that a 28% mortality could easily exceed the replacement rate.
Here in fossil fuel rich AB, the civil servant bureaucrats have been pushing for more green energy. However buried in their Alberta Energy System Operator 2021 Market Statistics “During extreme weather events, such as a polar vortex in the winter or a heat wave in the summer, wind generation tends to be very weak”
i.e. when the consumer needs even more electricity during ‘extreme events’ wind energy is a no show.
It is amazing, isn’t it? All sorts of flies apparent in the ointment for the “climate crisis”, buried perhaps but often in the clear in official documents. Yet getting people to pay attention is nigh impossible.
Quotation ONE sounds like a conclusion in one of Lewendowski’s “studies” where using faulty statistics, including minute sample sizes, he concluded that global warming “denial” correlated to disbelief in the moon landing.
The other question is what actual beliefs did they use to define “belief in conspiracies”?
If I thought there were irregularities in the 2020 election am I a conspiracy theorist?
If I thought the charges of Russian Collusion were generated without basis by the opposition party am I a conspiracy theorist?
I’d say you’re much closer to being a “conspiracy theorist” if you believed that there was “Russian Collusion” in the 2016 election, and even more so if you believe that it was the cause of a polarizing and unpopular Hillary Clinton losing said election.
Endless politically motivated “investigations” couldn’t come up with any such evidence.
The Russians have had very minimal influence on U.S. elections. The Democrats claim they are rigging our elections, but there’s never any evidence of any Russian involvement.
There is evidence that the Democrats are rigging our elections.
The Russians and the Chinese are not rigging our elections. They would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to have any effect at all, and neither one of them does anything like that. I think the most the Russians spent in the 2016 election was a few hundred thousand dollars, and they paid for political rallies for *both* Clinton and Trump. The Russians are a minor player in our elections.
Show me some evidence of Russian or Chinese influence in our elections. It’s a conspiracy theory of the Democrats. Sure the Russians and Chinese try to influence what we think but they have very little penetration into our thought processes.
Those messing with our thought processes are the radical Democrats and their mouthpiece, the Leftwing Media. This is the clear and present danger.
Clinton was threatening to continue the Democrats policy of disabling American fossil fuel production.
Trump promised to remove government restraints and let more American fossil fuels be developed.
The Russians make almost all of their money from selling gas and oil. Why the heck would they ever prefer Trump over Clinton?
Honestly, knowing that the thermal gain from CO2 exists mostly down in the 245°K range and being completely unconcerned about it I DO think that consuming the wind aggressively with ginormous windmills is plausibly more damaging to the environment than adding a plume of fertilizer that wanders back and forth with wind direction adding stress to the plants.
The whole study about higher CO2 causing the plants to have fewer pores is all nice and all but the CO2 isn’t actually uniformly higher everywhere – it is plausible that we won’t see anywhere near as much gain from elevated CO2 as mathematically expected in fertility and there IS a mild concern about increase acidic leaching of crop soils from it just like we experienced with acid rain from sulfuric solution precipitation.
Having seen all the different options for wind generation and agreeing that the large arrays of smaller fan assemblies make more sense from an environmental perspective I can see a way through this.
The last satellite measurements had CO2 ranging from around 395ppm to 405ppm.
That qualifies as higher everywhere.
Ask any non biased electrical generation Engineer about wind & solar power, compared to gas, coal and nuclear – the alarmists and nut zero pushing politicians won’t like the feedback – believe me, I do it regularly
In 2021, wind generated power in the UK was 5.6GW on average
in 2022, thus far, wind generated power in the UK is 6.8GW on average
Out of a total installed wind power of over 25GW, that’s poor, by any low standard – thankfully gas, coal & nuclear keep 60-80% of the lights on all year, every year
Dick was wrong. Social scientists would be a better starting point before the lawyers. Not that I am advocating anything! > ; }