Month: January 2015

Windpushers Do Not Protect the Health of Vulnerable Children, (or anyone else)

/ 1957chev / 1 Comment

West Norfolk mother tells of blindness fears for son over wind farm scheme

Karen Robinson with her son Ronnie Robinson (9) in the garden at Clenchwarton Hall, showing the current view. ANL-150129-112536009

Karen Robinson with her son Ronnie Robinson (9) in the garden at Clenchwarton Hall, showing the current view. ANL-150129-112536009

Ronnie Robinson suffers from primary congenital glaucoma, a severe visual impairment in which his eyes cannot cope with changing light conditions.

Developers of the Ongarhill wind farm, which is due to be debated by the West Norfolk Council planning committee next week, say conditions attached to any permission, and technology on the turbines themselves, will prevent shadow flicker from affecting residents.

But Ronnie’s mum Karen says she has been warned by doctors that she will have to leave her home on Hall Road, Clenchwarton if the plan goes ahead, in order to save his sight.

She said any flicker would leave Ronnie at risk of becoming disorientated and banging his head.

The slightest knock could mean he loses all his remaining vision.

Mrs Robinson, who moved to the area from Hertfordshire five years ago, said: “The whole reason we moved here was because it was off the road and it was safe for him to live.

“Why should we suffer just because they want to put turbines there? We moved here for a better life.”

A planning report, published last week, recommended that councillors approve the wind farm proposal, subject to the completion of a legal agreement for an ecological improvement plan within three months.

But opponents are unhappy with what they claim will be the unacceptable impact on localresidents and wildlife.

Mrs Robinson, who will be addressing Monday’s planning meeting, also fears the noise of the turbines would affect Ronnie, as he relies on his more sensitive hearing due to his eye problems.

But Cath Ibbotson, project manager for developers Coriolis Energy, yesterday said they had discussed Mrs Robinson’s concerns with her and were taking them seriously.

She said: “Tried and tested technology exists to switch off turbines at appropriate times and therefore prevent any shadow flicker occurring at the property or in the grounds for those few hours a year when it might otherwise do so.

“The council has proposed that a planning condition would be attached to any planning permission to ensure this.

“In respect of noise, anyone who has visited a wind farm for themselves will know how quiet turbines are in operation. However, national noise limits exist to protect residents.

The council have proposed in this case that the Ongarhill wind farm would have to operate to even more stringent limits, and we have agreed that we would do so. Again, this would be secured through planning conditions.”

Monday’s planning committee meeting will take place at the Lynn town hall, starting at 10am.

Eric Jelinski – Canadian Energy Engineer, Tells the Truth about the Wind Fraud!

/ 1957chev / 5 Comments

Top Canadian Energy Engineer – Eric Jelinski – Slams the Great Wind Power Fraud

January 31, 2015 by

engineering-image-4

Provided they haven’t got their trotters in the wind industry subsidy trough, engineers are quicker than most, when it comes to rumbling the great wind power fraud.

Practically minded, and with heads for real numbers, engineers are able to pick apart the complete pointlessness of trying to rely on an energy source that will NEVER be available on demand (can’t be stored) – is entirely dependent upon the weather – and is, therefore, not a generation “system” at all: “chaos” and “system” are words that come from completely different paddocks; and which mean completely different things (see our post here).

And engineers, who build “systems”, don’t like “chaos”.

Google’s top engineers – Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork – came out and recently tipped a bucket on the nonsense of attempting to run 21st Century economies using a ‘technology’ that was dumped way back in the 19th Century (see our post here).

Now, one of Canada’s leading energy engineers, Eric Jelinski has come out swinging too.

An Engineer Speaks
Windfarm Action
27 January 2015

The following was written by Eric Jelinski, P. Eng., a Canadian engineer who specializes in energy production. Gas plants. Nuclear plants. Wind &solar energy. He explains to his township (Clearview Township, Ontario) why wind energy is folly.

Jelinski

I am writing to express my objections to the installation of Industrial Wind Turbines in Clearview Township, Ontario, Canada.

My wife and I moved here to retire on 50 acres, building a house, market garden, as well as taking many other initiatives to become part of the vital social fabric.

It is bad enough that under Ontario Premier McGuinty, the social fabric in big cities like Toronto is in need of repair, as it happens, in part because those “50,000 jobs” in renewable energy have not materialized, and there is little productive activity for many of the youth in the cities. Guns and drugs are very much part of the social fabric in some neighbourhoods.

What gives McGuinty, with his Toronto constituent Members of the Provincial Parliament (MPP’s), the moral right to tell us in Clearview that we must accept wind turbines “or else”?

One way to stop the wasted energy and environmental impact of urban sprawl is for big city MPP’s to clean up their own yard and make cities safer and more habitable. While they listen to those who object to new gas plants, and cook up a new “plan of the month” for public transport, why do they ignore the issues with wind turbines?

My background is nuclear and chemical engineering, with over 30 years combined working at each of the nuclear plants in Ontario. I teach nuclear engineering at University of Toronto and Georgian College (Power Engineering) in Owen Sound for the purpose of training the next generation of staff who will design plants and work them safely.

I know nuclear reactors and how e=mc2 gets us the energy. I know chemical reactors, e.g. to make gasoline from crude oil, and refining metals. I know solar and wind energy going back to the 1970’s, as energy and exergy are my major fields of study.

The application of Ontario’s “Green Energy Act” is in violation of principles in engineering, where we teach engineers to anticipate unintended consequences and not proceed with implementation until consequences and risks are taken into account.

The Green Energy Act is an abomination that is creating a living hell for almost everybody in rural Ontario, and the provincial government is ignoring the data of emerging health issues, property value issues, setbacks and zoning, impacts on fowl, fauna, and fish, impacts on local weather such as the dew point and foliar uptake by plants that is important in particular to alleviate heat stress on biota.

I have seen firsthand one of my neighbours from the 1980’s near Ripley forced out of his farm home due to wind turbines in Huron Township. Others are putting up with the impacts.

The energy available from wind in Ontario is borderline minimal compared to other countries and areas of the world. 25% to 30% is the capacity factor.

The wind is not available when we need energy the most, i.e. summer air-conditioning and winter heating. The shoulder seasons have the most wind here, yet this is when air-conditioning and heating demands are minimal.

The power equation for wind results in 8 times the energy for a doubling of wind speed, and the excess energy has to be “dumped.” Storage systems are available, but prohibitively expensive. Hythanation is possible, but wind turbines are not economic for hydrogen production given the added infrastructure relative to the cost of natural gas.

Wind turbines use 5 to 7 times the amount of concrete and steel vs. say a nuclear plant on a per Megawatt basis. It will require some 10,000 wind turbines to replace the ~ 6000 MW of coal generation at 25% CF (capacity factor). Back-up gas fired plants have to be added like plug-ins everywhere because the wind is not reliable.

The pastoral scene of a field of wind turbines slowly turning in almost still air has environmentalists dreaming in technicolour.

The truth is that these wind turbines need about 8 km/hour of wind before they will start generating electricity. Any rotation of the blades at wind speeds below 8 km/hour is accomplished by taking power from the grid to get the wind turbine started in anticipation that the wind may pick up.

The economy of scale that has historically brought competitive energy prices in Ontario is not available, given the thousands of wind turbines, and that will also become a maintenance nightmare as machines and contracts approach end of life. Why do we not refuel Nanticoke, Lakeview, Lambton, Lennox and complete Wesleyville to run on natural gas?

What makes McGuinty et al. think they can impose industrial wind turbines on Clearview and all of rural Ontario? Is Clearview thinking of becoming part of this scheme of waste?

This scheme of waste is happening not just by government order, but it is happening because of the salacious relationship between government and the developers.

The most telling example is the head of the Federal Liberal Party is a wind developer. The activity surrounding the recent cancelled “gas plant” in order to preserve seats, and thus preserve the Green Energy Act, is also telling.

We also have the government using engineers from wind developers making recommendations on health impacts. As a P. Eng. I can say that engineers are not the authority on health. The conflict of interest between the engineer being paid for engineering work, vs. the same engineer as proponent and key advisor to the government is quite apparent.

The set-back of 550 meters has no scientific basis. Noise from wind turbines has been measured up to 10 kilometers away in some locations. Medical doctors have noted the health impacts, yet they are being ignored by the Ontario government.

The Feed-in Tariff takes billions of dollars out of communities, out of the province, and out of the country. This is money that is very much needed for healthcare, for schools and teachers, and to replace aging infrastructure and to build much needed new infrastructure such as public transit.

For the first time in decades (I don’t think it ever took place), Ontario is taking equalization payments from the Federal Government, and this points to not only the unsustainability of Ontario as an economy, it is dragging down the rest of the country. It would be different if we owned everything, did local planning, and used a process that garnered respect.

The Ontario government is following the advice of foreign countries and foreign companies to give our money away to them irrespective of the advice of many MP’s. It is most interesting to note that one of the political parties with a labour platform appears in complete agreement with giving away the work and the money and the surplus electricity.

Japan is restarting its nuclear fleet. Russia, China, India, Britain, the US, and even the United Arab Emirates are building or planning to nuclear reactors for electric generation. What is the purpose and value of Ontario energy policy? Every product we buy in Ontario that is made someplace else (most items, can you name one thing that is made here?) has a nuclear energy component in that product.

It is time to stop being altruistic or hypocritical about our energy. There is no rational reason for the 50% cap on nuclear in Ontario. Are we on some unwitting “race to the bottom” being orchestrated by some competitor countries wanting to control us? Having ample low cost energy is crucial to sovereignty, internal peace, and security.

As such, there is no respecting McGuinty, Bentley et al. for this indictment. There is also no need to respect any wind developers as they have already indicated their respect for us. I commented last year on WPD, and sent comments to their consultant as requested, and they have not replied, and their silence speaks volumes. I have sent many an e-mail to the government recommending a moratorium and have not been given the courtesy of any reply.

The purpose of the developer is to make money, i.e. take our money as allowed for by the government, and with minimum effort on their part. This speaks to the quality of the public meetings and their answers to our concerns. The public meetings are a sham.

There are quite a number of lawsuits already taking place and others pending. I thank the Federal government for the recent announcement on the health study. It is also pivotal to learn today that the Ministry of Health is being forced to testify.

My recommendation is for Clearview to take the high road and avoid complicity in matters that are before the courts, and who knows, but it is quite possible (I hope) that the renewed call for a moratorium may take hold for good reasons posted here.

A moratorium in Clearview is very appropriate.

While the WPD wind turbines west of Stayner are quite a few km from our place, they are likely the thin edge of the wedge planned for coming into Clearview. Let me remind you, we came here because this is a good place to live with good opportunities for business. All of that changes if wind turbines are allowed to disrupt the neighbourhood. And 10,000 wind turbines and solar farms are not the answer to Ontario’s energy needs.

As I said before, a province-wide moratorium is needed, and I believe this will come as a matter of time because the inconvenient truth about wind turbines is too big for McGuinty’s carpet. The track record for dictatorial governments throughout history is that all dictatorships eventually capitulate. A moratorium in Clearview would be a “made in Clearview” solution to stop the waste sooner than later.

Eric Jelinski, P. Eng.

What is interesting is that this is not only a UK or European problem and the US and Canada predates much of our wind fleet. But the problems are endemic in the industry and the political myopia of the issues and problems of wind a mystery to the other 97% of the population!
Windfarmaction

The Futility and Ridiculousness of the Windscam!

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It Don’t Take Sherlock to Know; When the Wind Don’t Blow, The Power Don’t Flow

January 30, 2015 by Leave a Comment

yacht

STT has – just once or twice – smashed the myth that wind power can provide a meaningful supply of electricity (ie power “on-demand”) – and relegated to the fiction aisle the the wind industry’s “playbook”, where you’ll find, in bold print, the oft-told furphy about wind farms “powering” 10s of thousands of homes.

At STT the term “powering” means exactly what it says: that when someone – at any time of the day or night – in any and all of the thousands of homes claimed to be “powered” by wind power – flicks theswitch the lights go on or the kettle starts boiling.

The wind industry never qualifies its we’re “powering thousands of homes” mantra by saying what it really means: that wind power might be throwing a little illumination or sparking up the kettle in those homes every now and again – and that the rest of time their owners will be tapping into a system of generation that operates quite happily 24 x 7, rain, hail or shine – without which they’d be eating tins of cold baked beans, while sitting freezing (or boiling) in the dark.

Here’s a little collection of posts busting that and other wind power myths in Australia:

And hammering the same myths, elsewhere around the world:

Now, Andrew Rogers of Energy Matters has done a beautiful number on the same myths, as relentlessly pedalled by the wind industry in Europe. (Oh, and if the graphs are too puny or fuzzy, click on them, they’ll pop up in a new window and you can magnify them from there.)

Wind Blowing Nowhere
Energy Matters
Roger Andrews
23 January 2015

In much of Europe energy policy is being formulated by policymakers who assume that combining wind generation over large areas will flatten out the spikes and fill in the troughs and thereby allow wind to be “harnessed to provide reliable electricity” as the European Wind Energy Association tells them it will:

The wind does not blow continuously, yet there is little overall impact if the wind stops blowing somewhere – it is always blowing somewhere else. Thus, wind can be harnessed to provide reliable electricity even though the wind is not available 100% of the time at one particular site.

Here we will review whether this assumption is valid. We will do so by progressively combining hourly wind generation data for 2013 for nine countries in Western Europe downloaded from the excellent data base compiled by Paul-Frederik Bach, paying special attention to periods when “the wind stops blowing somewhere”. The nine countries are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, Spain and the UK, which together cover a land area of 2.3 million square kilometers and extend over distances of 2,000 kilometers east-west and 4,000 kilometers north-south:

map

We begin with Spain, Europe’s largest producer of wind power in 2013. Here is Spain’s hourly wind generation for the year. Four periods of low wind output are numbered for reference:

Hourly wind generation Spain 2013

Now we will add Germany, Europe’s second-largest wind power producer in 2013. We find that Spanish low wind output period 4 was more than offset by a coincident German wind spike. Spanish low wind periods 1, 2 and 3, however, were not.

Hourly wing generation, Spain and Germany, 2013

Now we add UK, the third largest producer in 2013. Wind generation in UK during periods 1, 2 and 3 was also minimal:

Spain + Germany + UK, 2013

As it was in France, the fourth largest producer:

Spain, Germany, UK, France, 2013

And also in the other five countries, which I’ve combined for convenience:

The others

Figure 7 is a blowup of the period between February 2 and 15, which covers low wind period 2. According to these results the wind died to a whisper all over Western Europe in the early hours of February 8th:

Feb 2013

These results are, however, potentially misleading because of the large differences in output between the different countries. The wind could have been blowing in Finland and the Czech Republic but we wouldn’t see it in Figure 7 because the output from these countries is still swamped by the larger producers. To level the playing field I normalized the data by setting maximum 2013 wind generation to 100% and the minimum to 0% in each country, so that Germany, for example, scores 100% with 26,000MW output and 50% with 13,000MW while Finland scores 100% with only 222MW and 50% with only 111MW. Expressing generation as a percentage of maximum output gives us a reasonably good proxy for wind speed.

Replotting Figure 7 using these percentages yields the results shown in Figure 8 (the maximum theoretical output for the nine countries combined is 900%, incidentally). We find that the wind was in fact still blowing in Ireland during the low-wind period on February 8th, but usually at less than 50% of maximum.

fig 8

But even Ireland was not blessed with much in the way of wind at the time of minimum output, which occurred at 5 am. Figure 10 plots the percentage-of-maximum values for the individual countries at 5 am on the map of Europe. If we assume that less than 5% signifies “no wind” there was at this time no wind over an area up to 1,000 km wide extending from Gibraltar at least to the northern tip of Denmark and probably as far north as the White Sea:

Figure 9: Map of percent of maximum wind generation, February 2013

During this period the wind was clearly not blowing “somewhere else”, and there are other periods like it.

Combining wind generation from the nine countries has also not smoothed out the spikes. The final product looks just as spiky as the data from Spain we began with; the spikes have just shifted position:

Figure 10: Spain wind generation vs. combined generation in all nine countries, 2013 (scales adjusted for visual similarity)

Obviously combining wind generation in Western Europe is not going to provide the “reliable electricity” its backers claim it will. Integrating European wind into a European grid will in fact pose just as many problems as integrating UK wind into the UK grid or Scottish wind into the Scottish grid, but on a larger scale. We will take a brief look at this issue before concluding.

Integrating the combined wind output from the nine countries into a European grid would not have posed any insurmountable difficulties in 2013 because wind was still a minor player, supplying only 8.8% of demand:

Figure 11: Wind generation vs. demand, nine countries combined

But integration becomes progressively more problematic at higher levels of wind penetration. I simulated higher levels by factoring up 2013 wind generation with the results shown on Figure 12, which plots the percentage of demand supplied by wind in the nine countries in each hourly period. Twenty percent wind penetration looks as if it might be achievable; forty percent doesn’t.

Figure 12: Percent of hourly demand supplied by wind at different levels of wind penetration using 2013 data

Finally, many thanks to Hubert Flocard, who recently performed a parallel study and graciously gave Energy Matters permission to re-invent the wheel, plus a hat tip to Hugh Sharman for bringing Hubert’s work to our attention.
Energy Matters

sherlock-holmes

POINTMAN – Always Gives Us Something to Ponder….

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Pop, pop, and poppety pop.

by Pointman

A friend once turned to me on a day that had no mercy in it and said, “you’re right, there is no God.” We were both watching something slowly unfolding, something cold and just petrifying cruel which couldn’t be stopped by either of us. We couldn’t exert any control over it, we could only watch; emasculated observers at the final end of world extinction event of any residual hope about how low us human beings could really get. Pop, there they go, pop, pop, another couple of the buggers. Pop, pop, and poppety pop and yet a few more of them.

At the time and in a vague distracted sort of way, it broke my heart to see him lose his faith, because I loved him as only one man can love another and I’d always somehow relied on him to be the last unwavering believer in some sort of floor of decency that none of us could ever drop through, though I’d never quite realised that until that moment. It was a sort of good-natured buddy buddy routine we did. I’d always dissed his notions of a big G, he’d always thought I was joking as he worked on me but I wasn’t. Not really.

He did have a certain something about him and whatever that was, it became an unexamined backstop of our friendship. He was my touchstone, a glimmer of hope and my ace in the hole, someone who’d pushed through all my tough-guy BS front and taken a deep look down into me and found the little me who still wanted to be a believer. He was always confident he’d get me back into the fold and I had a sneaking hope he just might pull it off, but I should have known I couldn’t protect him from the fire, because he’d never really seen the fire. That day, he saw it and it burnt that something out of him.

It roasted the poor bastard alive.

As bad days go, the complete destruction of the steady and sure religious underpinning of his life was the cherry on top of it all. Lord help an unbeliever out here, at least spare him because I knew he’d be no bloody good wrestling with all the godless doubts that have always nagged away at a low creature like me. It was a slow, untreatable and seventy per cent, first class, New York primo steak, first degree burns injury that no amount of skin grafts could make better. In the end he became someone looking for nothing more than a meaningful way of checking out, but the reality was that he was just another casualty of that day.

It was a kind of delayed reaction thing which took a few more years of his life to play itself out. Corny but true, life has a habit of taking out the decent ones early, and again I watched and couldn’t do anything more than help see him out of the chaos his life eventually became. Hush up now, it’ll all be okay, I swear to Christ. You take your rest, I’ve got you. You just pop along now.

You stagger out of a few discos like that and it becomes clear that the common denominator, that promised basis of all religions simply doesn’t stack up with the reality – behave yourself, follow whatever scriptures you’re supposed to do and you’ll end up in Heaven, Nirvana or wherever deist carrot is being dangled. The innocents never even had the time to be bad boys or girls, so the whole idea of a life as some sort of test you run in order to earn entrance into some higher plain of existence is quite frankly open to question. The wake up message is as old as Agamemnon’s soldiers throwing Troy’s babies from the battlements of a city being sacked.

This is supposed to be a climate skeptic blog and we’re straying into areas theological, which I’m pretty sure most skeptics are uncomfortable with, but I’m afraid that atrophied appendix of a religious upbringing is the mainspring of why I blog. Relax, I’m not some born again Christian after you on the sly. Rather, anything I do here is out of a sense of fairness, which as a reason can be tinselled and tarted up to something as grand as ethics or dare I say it, morality.

Of late, notables like Andrew Montford, Peter lee and somewhat indirectly Richard Tol, have dipped their toe into those murky waters to a slightly puzzled silence from the skeptic blogosphere. Where are you Matt? Even allowing for the stiffness of the articles, it’s about time they moved out of their comfort zones and made the human case for opposition to an agenda that’s supposed to save the Earth at our expense, and I mean that not only in terms of dollars and cents but lives lost.

Lives. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about us being proved right, about egos, about proving them wrong, but about fishing a few people out of a raging sea. We have to be focused, direct and a lot better than the stereotype we’ve always portrayed us as, so we can pull as many out as we can. The fundamental indecency of the whole thing is the widespread and unquestioned belief on both sides that it’s somehow a quasi-scientific argument, a fencing bout with supporters on sides cheering on their champions. It’s all too easy to see why the developing world see us, all of us, as totally irrelevant, if only because we behave like pampered children who’re puzzled that they don’t have any cake to eat.

I can point this very day at the harm being done to human beings by policies which are supposed to save people a century or so in the future. We don’t allow them GM crops, so they die. We don’t allow them to do coal-powered generation, so they die. We don’t allow them to DDT the arse off mosquitos that kill them with Malaria, so they die. We just don’t allow anything we think wouldn’t be good for them and they just obligingly die. It’s not a problem. Nobody sort of notices and anyway, mostly their arses aren’t white so they don’t actually count as real people.

We’ve already done the whole trip and totally ruined our own environment so there’s definitely no way we’d allow them to make the same mistakes. We’ll guide them forwards towards some medieval rustic, but yet beautiful and untainted existence skipping around the savannahs like seventeenth century French peasants and they’ll love us for doing it.

All I see are dire scientific predictions of an approaching Armageddon, which can only be prevented by throwing buckets full of money vampired out of the poor and passed on to the already rich. With a certain boring regularity, the predictions just fail to materialise and are therefore just ratcheted on a decade or two into the future. Nobody cares because it’s a feeding frenzy. Trough it baby, go for it. Get your piece of the pie while it’s still there.

I see people lining their pockets. I see greed, I see lies, mendacity, deceit and raw naked academic thuggery being used to advance a discredited theory that’s been crumbling like a sandcastle before an incoming tide for the last decade. It’s being crushed under the Everest weight of real world data that simply refuses to conform to its projections. What the hell, nobody cares anyway.

You have enough bruising encounters with ethics in the real world and I’m afraid your wonderful standards slip because you end up with the choice of being a righteous prick who’s paralysed within a dilemma of your own artificial ethical framework or someone who’s decided to do something expedient right now because you yielded to your own humanity.

If you’ve ventured to knock around the edges of our comfortable existence in the rich world, that bad day will eventually pay you a visit and it’ll be make your mind up time – and there’ll always be an urgent window on it too. Do something now, right now, because if you keep chewing it over for the next few minutes, circumstances will effectively make your decision for you.

If policies are killing people for no better reason than an unproven theory, then those policies are simply misguided, and if those policies are pursued while turning a blind eye to their impact on the most helpless ones amongst us, then anyone knowingly supporting such policies are not simply bad or ignorant people, they are immoral, if not simply evil. Their finger might not actually be on the trigger, but to my mind they’re still doing the popping.

Perhaps we’ve finally reached the stage where it’s now been recognised that it’s not about whether there actually is a legitimate moral argument which can be made by climate skeptics, but that it’s actually the argument to be made.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Tell me why.

Is there a moral dimension to being anti-environmental?

Interest in Wind Projects Wanes, and Prices Dropping Fast!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

    • Wind auction sees low interest

      Only two of four offshore MA wind areas get bids; sale prices much lower than prior sales off other states
  • By Mike Lawrence

    Only two of four wind energy lease areas in federal waters south of Martha’s Vineyard received bids in an auction today and the sale prices were millions of dollars lower than previous auctions for leases of smaller sizes off other coastal states, according to statements by federal energy officials.

    Leaders of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) expressed a sunny outlook, though, in a conference call to media following the sales.

    BOEM put four lease areas up for auction this morning. The areas are collectively known as the Massachusetts Wind Energy Area and cover more than 742,000 acres in federal waters about 12 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.

    BOEM Deputy Director Walter Cruickshank said the 187,523-acre lease area closest to shore sold for $281,285 to Renewable Energy Systems (RES) Americas, and the adjacent 166,886-acre lease area sold for $166,886 to Offshore MW. The other two lease areas, farther from shore, were not bid on, he said.

    U.S. Wind paid $8.7 million in August for leases on two areas totaling 79,707 acres off the Maryland coast, according to BOEM data. In September 2013, Dominion Resources paid $1.6 million for a lease on 112,799 acres off the coast of Virginia.

    Deepwater Wind paid $3.8 million for two lease areas totaling 164,749 acres in the Rhode Island/Massachusetts Wind Area – adjacent to, and closer to shore than, the areas auctioned today – in BOEM’s first competitive auction of offshore wind development leases, in July 2013.

    BOEM Director Abby Ross Hopper said the bureau was “happy with the results of (today’s) auction” and set the minimum bids lower than in previous auctions because of water depth and other factors.

    “The Massachusetts Wind Energy Area is located in deeper water than some of our other wind energy areas in other states,” Hopper said. “We knew that developing…in this area was going to be more expensive.”

    Hopper said another factor was that, unlike Massachusetts, other states had offered offshore wind credits and other financial incentives to renewable energy developers.

    “That obviously has value,” Hopper said, adding that legislation has been introduced in Massachusetts to add incentives for offshore wind, but has not yet been approved.

    Cheap oil and gas prices this month also may have deflated interest in wind power ahead of today’s auction. Additionally, the regional wind industry recently took a separate hit to the jaw, when utility giants NStar and Northeast Utilities announced the termination of their contracts to buy wind power generated by Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound, saying Cape Wind failed to meet critical financing milestones.

    Hopper denied a connection between Cape Wind and the lack of bids on two lease areas today.

    “I think the recent activity at Cape Wind shouldn’t be read as any sort of indicator of what happened in today’s auction,” she said. “I am very encouraged by the fact that two experienced wind developers have won provisional leases in the state of Massachusetts.”

    The provisional leases bought today represent less than half of the 742,000 acres that were up for auction.

    Cruickshank said the two areas that did not receive bids “are still part of the Massachusetts Wind Energy Area” and the bureau will discuss future options for their use with state agencies.

    He said RES Americas and Offshore MW were the only companies that placed bids in today’s auction.

    Follow Mike Lawrence on Twitter: @MikeLawrenceSCT

Infigen Imploding: Puts US Wind Farms On the Market in Last-Ditch Attempt to Balance its Books

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Financial Woes for Another wind Pusher!

stopthesethings's avatarSTOP THESE THINGS

turbine-collapse-germany1 The wind industry: not quite as robust as originally thought.

Infigen is an all-wind-power-outfit that used to be called Babcock and Brown, which collapsed in spectacular fashion back in 2009: the way things are headed, get set for a replay.

Infigen is bleeding cash (it backed up a $55 million loss in 2011/12 with an $80 million loss in 2012/13 and keeps losing money, booking a $9 million loss last financial year). It scrambled to get development approvals for all of its Australian projects so they could be flogged off ASAP, and the cash used to ward off the receiver. But, no luck: in the current climate, its chances of finding buyers are slimmer than a German supermodel.

During its first incarnation as Babcock and Brown, these boys fleeced investors and creditors to the tune of something like $10 billion (while its directors pocketed – and somehow managed to retain…

View original post 1,014 more words

Some Key Points on My Submission To the ERT, Re: wind turbines Check it Out!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment
                                     TABLE OF CONTENTS…..   (not all documents included…..more to come)

1.wpd Table of Contents ERT Jan 4.pdf

Preview attachment Presentation at the Environmental Review Tribunal.pdf

Presentation at the Environmental Review Tribunal.pdf

Preview attachment Shelley’s presentation1.pdf

Shelley’s presentation1.pdf

Preview attachment Letter to Kathleen Wynne _ SCorreia April 18, 2013.docx

Letter to Kathleen Wynne _ SCorreia April 18, 2013.docx

Preview attachment Shellie-April8 final Nuremberg.pdf

Shellie-April8 final Nuremberg.pdf

Preview attachment Request stop Health Canada experiment on Canadians March 21 2013.pdf

Request stop Health Canada experiment on Canadians March 21 2013.pdf

Preview attachment Health Canada_Risks to children Correia May 15 2013 (1).pdf

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The Not-so-Great, Wind Power Fraud!!! Falling apart at the seams!

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Wind Industry RUNS & HIDES as World Wakes Up to the Great Wind Power Fraud

January 28, 2015 by 5 Comments

Nightmare (1962) Jerry wakes up

Around the world, people are waking up to the scale, scope and magnitude of the great wind power fraud.

Rural communities are fighting back hard – in efforts to protect their homes, health and well-being. Their anger extends to the goons that lied their way to development approval – and the bent officials that rubber-stamped their applications and who, thereafter, help the operators ride roughshod over locals’ rights to live in and enjoy the peace and comfort of their own homes and properties (see our post here).

A little while back, the usual response from those opposed to wind farms was along the lines of: “we’re all in favour of renewable energy, so long as wind farms are built in the right place”.

But that was before people understood the phenomenal cost of the subsidies directed at wind power through massive corporate welfare schemes, like Australia’s mandatory LRET (see our post here) – and the impact on retail power prices (see our post here).

Fair minded country people are usually ready to give others the benefit of the doubt; and, not used to being lied to, accepted arguments pitched by wind power outfits about the “merits” of wind power: guff like “this wind farm will power 100,000 homes and save 10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions” (see our post here).

Not anymore.

Switched-on people everywhere have cottoned on to the fact that wind power – which can only ever be delivered at crazy, random intervals – is meaningless as a power source because it cannot and will never replace on-demand sources, such as hydro, gas and coal.

And, as a consequence, that wind power cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector. The wind industry has never produced a shred of actual evidence to show it has; and the evidence that has been gathered shows intermittent wind power causing CO2 emissions to increase, not decrease (see our post here; this European paper here; this Irish paper here; this English paper here; and this Dutch study here).

The realisation that the wind industry is built on series of unsustainable fictions has local communities angrier than ever and helps explain the remarkable numbers opposed: 90% is what’s fairly called a solid “majority” in anybody’s book (see our post here).

Up until now, the lies pitched up endlessly from the wind industry’s well-scripted “playbook” by wind industry parasites – like the American Wind Energy Association (AEWA) and Australia’s Clean Energy Council (CEC) – among others – have worked a treat.

Wind industry spuikers have been aided and abetted with the aid of the useful idiots that happily parrot for them in the media. You know, the usual ABC wind industry love-ins that occur with remarkable regularity on The Drum; and the sheep-like publication of the endless stream of press releases pumped out, ad nauseam, aimed at “shaping” the debate: aka “churnalism”.

Well, it seems that the wind industry’s spin-doctors are having a harder time of it these days –  as real journalists get a grip on the fundamental nature of what is – without a shadow of a doubt – the greatest economicand environmental fraud of all time.

Better still – there are a growing number from the fourth estate with the temerity to call it for what it is; and equally keen to wallop those that have profited handsomely from it.

When finally rumbled by well-briefed journos with the facts of their own infelicities – like any good fraudsters – these hucksters do the only honourable thing: they run and hide.

Here’s a great little report from Michigan Capitol Confidential that shows how – when factual push comes to shove – the wind industry’s “case” turns to water; and its spruikers respond in kind, by slamming doors and slamming down phones.

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RUN-HIDE-logo_crop

Nightmare (1962) Jerry wakes up

Around the world, people are waking up to the scale, scope and magnitude of the great wind power fraud.

Rural communities are fighting back hard – in efforts to protect their homes, health and well-being. Their anger extends to the goons that lied their way to development approval – and the bent officials that rubber-stamped their applications and who, thereafter, help the operators ride roughshod over locals’ rights to live in and enjoy the peace and comfort of their own homes and properties (see our post here).

A little while back, the usual response from those opposed to wind farms was along the lines of: “we’re all in favour of renewable energy, so long as wind farms are built in the right place”.

But that was before people understood the phenomenal cost of the subsidies directed at wind power through massive corporate welfare schemes, like Australia’s mandatory LRET (see our post here) – and the impact on retail power prices (see our post here).

Fair minded country people are usually ready to give others the benefit of the doubt; and, not used to being lied to, accepted arguments pitched by wind power outfits about the “merits” of wind power: guff like “this wind farm will power 100,000 homes and save 10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions” (see our post here).

Not anymore.

Switched-on people everywhere have cottoned on to the fact that wind power – which can only ever be delivered at crazy, random intervals – is meaningless as a power source because it cannot and will never replace on-demand sources, such as hydro, gas and coal.

And, as a consequence, that wind power cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector. The wind industry has never produced a shred of actual evidence to show it has; and the evidence that has been gathered shows intermittent wind power causing CO2 emissions to increase, not decrease (see our post here; this European paper here; this Irish paper here; this English paper here; and this Dutch study here).

The realisation that the wind industry is built on series of unsustainable fictions has local communities angrier than ever and helps explain the remarkable numbers opposed: 90% is what’s fairly called a solid “majority” in anybody’s book (see our post here).

Up until now, the lies pitched up endlessly from the wind industry’s well-scripted “playbook” by wind industry parasites – like the American Wind Energy Association (AEWA) and Australia’s Clean Energy Council (CEC) – among others – have worked a treat.

Wind industry spuikers have been aided and abetted with the aid of the useful idiots that happily parrot for them in the media. You know, the usual ABC wind industry love-ins that occur with remarkable regularity on The Drum; and the sheep-like publication of the endless stream of press releases pumped out, ad nauseam, aimed at “shaping” the debate: aka “churnalism”.

Well, it seems that the wind industry’s spin-doctors are having a harder time of it these days –  as real journalists get a grip on the fundamental nature of what is – without a shadow of a doubt – the greatest economicand environmental fraud of all time.

Better still – there are a growing number from the fourth estate with the temerity to call it for what it is; and equally keen to wallop those that have profited handsomely from it.

When finally rumbled by well-briefed journos with the facts of their own infelicities – like any good fraudsters – these hucksters do the only honourable thing: they run and hide.

Here’s a great little report from Michigan Capitol Confidential that shows how – when factual push comes to shove – the wind industry’s “case” turns to water; and its spruikers respond in kind, by slamming doors and slamming down phones.

RUN-HIDE-logo_crop