It takes a special brand of delusion to believe a modern economy can be powered by the weather. While weather forecasters struggle to get their daily predictions to match reality any more than 7 days in advance, climate warriors have no reticence in predicting the temperature 30 years from now.

As American baseball and pop philosopher, Yogi Berra put it: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”.

As we are repeatedly told, wind power is our future and our total transition to that and its co-traveller, solar, is inevitable. As to the former, there is that minor meteorological phenomenon that impedes that overblown forecast.

Calm weather has a habit of setting in for days on end: think a week of dead calm frosty mornings in June and a run of breathless 42°C days in February.

Those characters ready to throw all common sense and reason to the wind…

One hackneyed myth is that the proletariat will never vote in favour of nuclear power. The Taiwanese just put paid to that, with a landslide victory for common sense and reason.

Over the last decade or so, the wind industry has attempted to get its claws into Taiwan, with mixed results.

In June, Taiwan’s anti-nuclear government was forced to restart a closed nuclear reactor in order to meet demand. Last year, the island nation suffered its worst power outage ever when seven million homes were left without electricity.

The government was still determined to ditch nuclear power. However, a determined group pushed back, demanded a referendum and won it in grand style.

Pro-Nuclear Activists Win Landslide Electoral Victory In Taiwan
Forbes
Michael Shellenberger
24 November 2018

In a surprise victory, Taiwanese voters on Saturday decisively rejected the government’s phase-out of nuclear power, 59% to 41%.

Pro-nuclear activists in Taiwan…

Attempting to rely on intermittent wind and solar is guaranteed to send power prices into orbit. Just ask a South Australian.

Despite some desperate wind industry propaganda efforts suggesting that South Australians are currently enjoying 1970s power prices, Australia’s renewable energy capital still pays the world’s highest power prices – thanks to its ludicrous 50% Renewable Energy Target.

SA’s 50% RET was the product of an unhinged state Labor government; its Federal counterpart wants to bring the South Australian ‘experience’ to every other state in the Commonwealth, with a 50% RET to be enforced nationwide.

The promise has long been that if we roll-out millions more solar panels and thousands more of these things – coupled up with mythical mega-batteries – power prices must surely plummet. Except, reality has bitten – once again – in Australia’s wind and solar capital.

Which makes it pretty hard for wind and sun worshippers…

As the mantra has it, wind turbines are the perfect panacea for rising temperatures. Panic has spread about the planet’s temperature rising a couple of notches (apparently an increase of just 1.5°C means instant disaster and pumping it up by 2°C means an irreversible catastrophe).

Now it seems that these things are playing their part in adjusting temperatures, but not in the manner hoped for or predicted.

Study after study shows local nighttime temperatures rising by as much as 1.5°C, wherever these things are operating.

None of this would come as a surprise to grape and fruit growers who, in chillier climes, use frost fans in their vineyards and orchards to stir up the air at nighttime to prevent frosts ruining their crops.

The climate cult is driven by a (clearly burning) desire to spear millions of these things into everyone else’s backyards (not theirs, of course). So, instead of…

Costly, ugly, annoying and useless, what’s not to like?

When the challenge is thrown at wind power proponents about its hopeless intermittency, like a drug addict, the answer is always “more”. More of the same, more turbines, more panels, more subsidies, more transmission network capacity, more non-existent mega batteries, well, just more.

Germany is held up as the shining example of what our ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future will look like. The line goes that Germany has built an enormous capacity with 30,000 wind turbines, millions of solar panels and it will simply overcome issues such as sunset and calm weather, by building more, much more.

Except that Mother Nature refuses to play ball. When the wind stops blowing across Germany, it does so across the entire country, and it does so such that wind power output totally collapses in a matter of minutes. Leaving…

Wind power is utterly pointless on every level, having been abandoned centuries ago for pretty obvious reasons, starting with the weather.

The oft heard retort from those fighting the prospect of wind turbines being speared into their backyards, is “why don’t they put them offshore?” These are the characters who are simply too gutless to openly criticise renewables, lest they be attacked as “tin-foil hat wearing climate deniers”, “flat-earthers” and NIMBYS.

The last of those charges is well-deserved. The rest, though, is just the kind of mean-spirited denigration we’ve come to expect from members of the wind cult. There is no real logical argument to support wind power, so they’re reduced to ad hominem attacks on those who stand as obstacles to our purportedly ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future. [Note to Ed: why don’t they simply ask them how that’s panned out in South Australia?]

Welcome to the greatest scam on Earth.

The only way of explaining the push for subsidised wind and solar is money. And when we say money, we mean hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money.

In Australia alone, the Federal Government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target will redirect over $60 billion in subsidies to wind and large-scale solar operators (all drawn from Australian power consumers and added to their power bills) over the life of that scheme.

Although, to use the term ‘scheme’ is to add varnish to one of the greatest scams in history.

Rocketing power prices and a grid on the brink of collapse are the only ‘dividends’ to be returned from the LRET, the largest single industry subsidy scheme in the history of the Commonwealth.

Australia’s obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar means not only spiralling retail power prices, but guarantees widespread load shedding

Electricity generation started off as an extension of science. These days, it’s all about vanity and virtue signalling. Not least those millions of shiny solar panels, which we’ve all helped subsidise – to allow our neighbours to bask in their own virtuous glow.

At the theoretical level – when the sun is up and the sky is cloud free – solar panels are generating electricity around 6.5 hours a day (on average). During their most virtuous cycle, they’re dispatching power back into the grid, and reducing their owner’s power bills (attracting feed in tariffs multiples greater than the value of the electricity itself – initially some states were paying figures in the order of $540 per MWh – coal-fired power costs less than $40).

Those without panels pick up the tab for the subsidies gifted to their neighbours (whether in the form of feed in tariffs or renewable energy certificates)…

These things are a constant source of misery for way too many.

Evidence proving the unnecessary harm done to wind farm neighbours by wind turbine noise mounts by the day: Germany’s Max Planck Institute has identified sub-audible infrasound as the cause of stress, sleep disruption and more (see our post here); and a Swedish group have shown that it’s the pulsing nature of low-frequency wind turbine noise  (‘amplitude modulation’) that is responsible for sleep problems in those forced to live with it (see our post here).

STT recently reported on the German government’s efforts to erase data that shows residents are exposed to levels of wind turbine infrasound dangerous to health.

No doubt wary of the inevitable raft of litigation – that will cost it hundreds of €millions – and faced with mounting evidence of the obvious connection between exposure to low-frequency wind turbine noise and infrasound and…