Climate fear mongers

Wind Industry Tries To Silence Dissenters. No Truth Allowed!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Top Professor Fired for Exposing Huge Wind Energy Scam

Written by John Droz, Jr on 05 August 2014.

wind-farm-landHenrik Møller, Denmark’s leading academic expert on noise research, has been fired by his university after exposing a far-reaching cover up by the Danish government of the health risks caused by wind turbine noise pollution. 

Shock and outrage at this latest example of the heavey-handed cover up of government-backed junk science has brought strong condemnation from independent scientists. John Droz Jr, a respected critic of wind farms, has issued the following condemnatory response:

As you probably know, a passion of mine is defending my profession (Science) from assault.

This is approaching a full-time job, as those promoting political or economic agendas are painfully aware that real Science is a major threat to their aspirations — so they are aggressively attacking it on multiple fronts. (See ScienceUnderAssault.info.)

We now have yet another distressing example, where a leading scientist has lost his job — apparently for the crime of being a conscientious, competent academic, focused on quality research (instead of chasing grant money).

Dr. Henrik Møller, is an world-renown expert on infra-sound, and has published several high-quality studies on low-frequency acoustics (like here, here, here, and here). More recently, some of these have dealt with industrial wind energy noise (e.g. here — which was peer-reviewed).

He has been praised as Denmark’s “leading noise researcher.” What’s even more important is that he has been courageous enough to have publicly spoken out against poor government policies, as well as the misinformation disseminated from the wind energy cartel.

In Denmark there have been several newspaper reports about this surprising firing, but I’m sending this to the AWED list as such an event should have much wider coverage.Here are English translations of a few Danish articles (I have the originals as well). It seems to me that some of the key points made in them are:

— Dr. Møller has had thirty eight (38) years of distinguished service for Aalborg University.

— Ironically, this institution publicly prides itself as looking out for its professors: “At Aalborg University we focus intensively on staff welfare and job satisfaction.”

— He was the only one of 200± researchers at the Department of Electronic Systems in Aalborg who was let go…

— The purported reason for his firing, is that the professor is no longer “financially lucrative” for the university…

— Despite claiming that the termination was due to a shortage of funds, the university had recently hired two additional people in the same department…

— Dr. Møller’s reasoned responses were:

1) During the last year he may not have produced that much income, but in many other years his work resulted in substantial profit to the university.

2) Statistically, approximately half of the faculty would be operating at a loss — so why single him out?

3) In his prior 38 years of employment, and reviews, he was never informed that his job was solely dependent on outside funding.

4) Additionally, prior to the sacking, he had not been informed that his income production was a problem that need to be addressed — giving him a chance to do so.

— The Danish Society of Engineers, and the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs, have gone on record stating that it is unreasonable to dismiss researchers due to a lack of grants. Furthermore they reportedly said such a policy is contrary to the Danish University Act, which specifies that the purpose of research is to promote education, not to be a profit-making venture…

— The VP of the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations stated that it’s rare that a Danish professor is fired.

— It has been reported that the wind industry has frequently complained about Dr. Møller to his boss (Dean Eskild Holm Nielsen)…

— Consider this: the same Dean Nielsen was a keynote speaker at the Wind Industry Association’s meeting, the day after he fired Dr. Møller!

— As one article explains, this termination might have also come from the fact that the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has a very close association with the wind industry, and that Dr. Møller’s scientific research had resulted in embarrassing revelations.

— The same article states that with Dr. Møller out of the picture, wind industry friendly DTU will now take over responsibility for assessing acoustical impacts of industrial wind turbines on Danish citizens. (I wonder what conclusions they will reach?)

As one report accurately stated: it takes courage for academics to focus on scientific research, instead of pursuing outside funding.

Please consider writing a short, polite email to Dr. Møller’s boss (the person who fired him), Dean Nielsen (dekan-teknat@adm.aau.dk),  objecting to this shameful termination. It would be helpful to cc a reporter at an important Danish newspaper: Axel Pihl-Andersen (axel.andersen@jp.dk), and bcc Dr. Møller (henrikmoeller2@gmail.com).

Regards,

John Droz, Jr.

Physicist & Environmental Advocate

PS — Although his studies on industrial wind energy only comprise a small amount of his thirty eight years of academic work, they may have resulted in the most notoriety.

Since many of the people on this list are interested in that topic, here are a few other examples of Dr. Møller’s work related to wind energy, in his words:

1) We made an analyses of a wind project in Maastricht, planned to possibly have turbines from a Danish company. The City Council stopped the project after our report — a result that did not make us popular with the Danish wind industry.

2) A reason why we seem to be a nuisance to the wind industry in Denmark is that we keep finding errors in noise calculations and evaluations. As an example, we found serious errors in the environmental impact assessment behind a new law on a wind turbine test center, and the law had to be changed.

3) We also revealed that in a big Vestas promotion, they mixed up two acoustical terms (and Vestas had to change part of their campaign). I’m afraid there are only Danish newspaper articles about that — which is unfortunate, because it was quite funny.

4) We also criticized Danish regulation of wind turbine noise, which resulted in feature articles in Danish newspapers. I am not sure if others have been translated, but here is one example.

5) We also put together some web pages about the Danish wind regulations, which made the wind industry complain about me to the Dean (again).

Unaffordable Renewables. Lefties love them, while we get poorer.

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

KONRAD YAKABUSKI

A sunny Ontario experiment gone wrong

KONRAD YAKABUSKI

The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Aug. 04 2014, 

That glare coming off selected southern Ontario farmlands these days is not the result of some secret state experiment with atomic vegetables. No, it’s the product of another form of state-sanctioned mad science that is costing Ontarians dearly without doing diddly to improve the environment.

After Germany and California, Ontario is “enjoying” its day in the sun as a global hot spot for solar power. Photovoltaic panels are carpeting fertile and fallow farmlands at a furious rate this summer as solar power promoters rush to complete projects before the subsidy gusher slows.

By the end of 2015, more than 2,000 megawatts of solar power will be connected to the Ontario grid as developers take advantage of the province’s feed-in-tariff, guaranteeing them a heady two-decade return on their investment, courtesy of the weary Ontario electricity consumer.

The newly re-elected Liberal government scaled down the FIT program last year, but not before a small group of savvy operators hit the sweet spot by locking into its risk-free cash flow. One 10MW solar farm under construction in eastern Ontario’s cottage country will get 44 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity it produces over 20 years.

Compare that to the average 8.55 cents per kWh that Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator says it cost to produce power in the province in 2013. The price includes a wholesale price of 2.65 cents (what the power was actually worth on the open market) and a so-called “global adjustment” of 5.9 cents to cover the sunk costs in existing nuclear, hydro and wind projects.

No other province has imitated Ontario’s folly. No wonder the solar lobby worked so hard to re-elect Premier Kathleen Wynne in the June election. The opposition Progressive Conservatives vowed to pull the plug on Liberal FIT contracts that will further burden the province’s already uncompetitive manufacturers and saddle consumers with a 50 per cent rate hike within a decade.

Solar power is not the only culprit. Far more FIT-contracted wind power will be added to the grid. Together, these contracts demonstrate the madness of Ontario’s so-called green energy policy. Not only will it cost more, it won’t remove much if any carbon from the atmosphere.

The biggest myth about wind and solar power is that they automatically displace carbon dioxide produced by coal- or gas-fired power plants. Solar power producers consistently make this claim without any proof to back it up. Quite often, the opposite is true.

Take Ontario, which counts on baseload nuclear power for 60 per cent of its installed electricity capacity. Nuclear produces no carbon emissions. Neither does the hydro power that accounts for about one-quarter of Ontario’s capacity. On many days, demand in Ontario isn’t high enough to require power from additional sources. But when it is, wind and solar can’t be counted on.

Quite simply, neither wind nor solar are reliable sources of electricity. In its latest 18-month outlook, the IESO forecasts that 99.5 per cent of Ontario’s 12,947 MW of installed nuclear capacity will be available during summer consumption peaks. But it predicts only 13.7 per cent of the 1,824 MW of installed wind capacity will be available. Solar is even less reliable. So, when wind and solar actually do produce power, it’s usually dumped.

To meet consumption peaks, Ontario’s grid operator needs a dependable supply of complementary power. In the past, that came from coal plants, which could be fired up on an as-needed basis. Thankfully, they’ve all been closed and replaced by natural gas-fired plants.

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, but its carbon footprint is half or less that of coal. And modern combined-cycle gas plants are so efficient, reliable and cheap to build (relative to other forms of electricity) that Charles Frank of the centrist Brookings Institution calls them, along with nuclear power, “the ‘best bang for our buck’ as we seek to reduce emissions.”

“A nuclear or gas combined-cycle plant avoids far more emissions per MW of capacity than wind or solar because it can operate at 90 per cent of full capacity,” Mr. Frank notes in a new study. “Limited benefits and higher costs make wind and solar less socially valuable than nuclear, hydro and combined-cycle gas.”

Add in the alarmingly high failure rate of solar panels, the absence of a long-term track record, and the quashing of local content rules and the outcome of Ontario’s sunny experiment could be even darker than it looks.

People All Over the World, Fed Up With the Wind Scam!

/ 1957chev / 2 Comments

Angus Taylor: Community Backlash Brewing Over ACT Wind Farm Plan

August 5, 2014 by  

Angus 'The Enforcer' Taylor

Canberra’s costly carbon follies outdo even the Danes
The Australian
Angus Taylor
1 August 2014

AUSTRALIANS are learning the hard way that moral vanity comes at a high price. After many years of climate policy chaos, we know that most people want some action on climate change but they don’t want to waste money on expens­ive, inefficient schemes.

Yet politicians spruik and implement them, we all wake up to the cost and the policy has to change. It’s bad for households, consumers and investment. And the merry-go-round achieves little or nothing for the planet.

Bjorn Lomborg recently exposed on these pages the folly of Copenhagen’s plans to be the world’s first CO2-neutral city.

Hot on Copenhagen’s heels, Canberra has announced a plan to mandate that a dizzying 90 per cent of the ACT’s electricity­ ­supply will come from large-scale ­renewables by 2020, with a 50 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.

Canberra’s blueprint suffers from the same overreach as Copen­hagen’s. As old-style industry protection has fallen out of favour, rent-seekers are hungrily eyeing green industry subsidies.

The ACT government is hopping on the merry-go-round with a blueprint focused on building masses of wind turbines, and the odd solar farm.

Not content to focus on efficient means to reduce carbon emissions, the proposal props up the troubled wind industry. Yet as the Productivity Commission, last week’s Deloitte report and mainstream economists tell us, wind energy — viable only on the back of vast subsidies — is an expensive way to reduce carbon emissions.

The ACT has ignored sensible alternatives. For instance, decentralised solar is economic without, repeat, without subsidies in many rural and remote areas. Farmers know this — many have been using solar for years for a range of purposes.

But the present NSW regulatory regime hurts the economics of solar: electricity distributors increase profits and returns through massive network investments where rooftop solar is a better option. Nor is increasing soil carbon part of the ACT plan, despite the obvious opportunity in the surrounding agricultural regions.

On the ACT government’s own numbers (which are questionable), the 90 per cent renewables plan will cost an additional $370 million between now and 2020. These costs will be passed on to ACT households in their electricity bills, hurting the poor, and the government tries to downplay the impact by assuming offsetting efficiencies.

In many countries, renewable energy targets are growing rapidly because today’s huge investment costs are hidden in tomorrow’s electricity bills.

The ACT plan expects wind power to cost about $100 per megawatt hour, roughly three times the market price. This is consistent with Deloitte’s recent finding that the federal large-scale renewable energy target is costing $103 per tonne of carbon abated — four times the cost of our inflated carbon tax.

Ironically, in a recent effort to reduce costs, the ACT government itself has pulled back on the use of green power — renewable energy use in the government’s nine directorates plunged by 83 per cent in 2012-13.

It is unclear how the ACT plan may fit with a revised federal RET. The present federal target is intended to include all renewable generation, and ACT efforts should ordinarily be taken into account. This will be a decision for the federal government following the RET review, but there is a real prospect that the ACT’s expensive efforts will have no impact at all on Australia’s emissions.

The ACT blueprint also does not include the extra costs of full-scale back-up from another electricity source. Wind blows only some of the time, so Canberra will need to call on coal-fired electricity. In practice, this means that when the wind blows, ACT-sponsored wind farms will send their electricity into the NSW grid, yet the ACT will demand a reliable and constant supply in return. The NSW grid also will need to address large fluctuations in supply, causing unprecedented operational pressures and additional costs.

The most extraordinary part of the blueprint is the assertion that communities outside the ACT, where the turbines will be built, actually want them. This wind-industr­y-inspired propaganda is simply untrue.

I represent a large swath of NSW where there are turbines and where many, many more are planned. I know that a growing majority of people in these quiet, beautiful, unique, windswept communities do not want them.

Wind farms nearly always cause deep community fractures and risk serious downward pressure on the value of adjacent land. Typical wind-farm victims are tree-changers from Canberra who have put their life savings into their dream block, only to find it virtually unsaleable. Wind developers have been known to tell these people they should simply “take one for the planet”.

Middle Australia is willing to support sensible carbon emission-reduction efforts, but it will not tolerate big economic hits to achieve it, which is why Australia rejected the world’s biggest carbon tax.

Experience abroad (witness the 2009 Copenhagen Summit) and here tells us that overreach will thwart well-intended initiatives. We need efficient, careful and well-timed emission-reduc­tion policies. The ACT renewables blueprint fails on every front.

Angus Taylor is the federal member for Hume. He was a partner at McKinsey & Co and director of Port Jackson partners, where his work included carbon and energy strategy and policy development.
The Australian

STT agrees with Angus Taylor’s observation that decentralised (“stand-alone”) solar makes good economic sense: providing grid access to handfuls of remote rural properties (at huge ongoing expense) makes little sense where a stand alone solar system (panels, batteries and back-up generator) can be set up for around $35,000 (see our post here).

The other point raised by Angus’ article is that the ACT’s plan is dependent on turbines being slung up in NSW – not in the ACT. The ACT has banned wind farms through planning controls that are aimed at protecting the visual amenity enjoyed by Canberra residents. So, to add hypocrisy to insult, it’s their neighbours in NSW who are being told to “take one for the planet”.

But don’t expect them to take it lying down.

Communities across the Southern Tablelands faced with the threat of a turbine invasion are up in arms at the ACT’s plans to destroy their lives and properties.

Anger has erupted at Lake George near Tarago, NSW over the Jupiter wind farm proposed by Spanish-Australian company EPYC. Locals are furious at the developer’s lies, treachery and deceit – the level of community outrage is clearly palpable (see our post here).

And – just up the road at Rye Park (near Goulburn) in NSW – locals have united in their opposition to plans to spear 100 or more giant fans into their peaceful community. A little while back, in covering what “community division” caused by wind farms really means, we touched on the developer’s “community consultation” that took place there (see our post here).

The “community consultation” in question was held by Epuron – an outfit hoping to develop what it calls the “Rye Park” wind farm (north of Yass and east of Boorowa, NSW).

On a show of hands, the 32 present “divided” as follows: 23 locals, firmly against; and 9 in favour – 4 of whom were employed by Epuron, 2 were contracted as turbine hosts and 3 were “unknowns” (check out this video of the count).

A few weeks after the “community consultation”, the community of Rye Park held its own meeting, where – joined by others from the neighbouring communities of Boorowa, Yass and Rugby – 104 turned up to hear – among others – Angus Taylor (their local Federal Coalition MP) talk about the greatest state sponsored fraud of all time. Angus is clearly on a mission to bring it to a screaming halt – as the cracking speech covered in this post makes clear.

A survey of those at the meeting was taken by organisers to determine the level of support for wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park. After the speakers finished the crowd delivered their responses to the survey to organisers: of the 104 in attendance, 88 people participated. The results were:

  • “I do not support wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park”: 80 votes (91%)
  • “I do support wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park”: 6 votes (7%)
  • “I am undecided about wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park”: 2 votes (2%).

No surprises there.

One thing’s for certain: the ACT government’s plan to invade NSW is going to be met with an eruption of hostility and anger from people who aren’t willing to “take one for the planet” – especially given the fact that wind power cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector. People will generally suck up a little pain; but not without a purpose.

angry-mob

Ontario’s Folly…..What a Complete Waste of Taxpayer Dollars!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment
 That glare coming off selected southern Ontario farmlands these days is not the result of some secret state experiment with atomic vegetables. No, it’s the product of another form of state-sanctioned mad science that is costing Ontarians dearly without doing diddly to improve the environment.

After Germany and California, Ontario is “enjoying” its day in the sun as a global hot spot for solar power. Photovoltaic panels are carpeting fertile and fallow farmlands at a furious rate this summer as solar power promoters rush to complete projects before the subsidy gusher slows.

By the end of 2015, more than 2,000 megawatts of solar power will be connected to the Ontario grid as developers take advantage of the province’s feed-in-tariff, guaranteeing them a heady two-decade return on their investment, courtesy of the weary Ontario electricity consumer.

The newly re-elected Liberal government scaled down the FIT program last year, but not before a small group of savvy operators hit the sweet spot by locking into its risk-free cash flow. One 10MW solar farm under construction in eastern Ontario’s cottage country will get 44 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity it produces over 20 years.

Compare that to the average 8.55 cents per kWh that Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator says it cost to produce power in the province in 2013. The price includes a wholesale price of 2.65 cents (what the power was actually worth on the open market) and a so-called “global adjustment” of 5.9 cents to cover the sunk costs in existing nuclear, hydro and wind projects.

No other province has imitated Ontario’s folly. No wonder the solar lobby worked so hard to re-elect Premier Kathleen Wynne in the June election. The opposition Progressive Conservatives vowed to pull the plug on Liberal FIT contracts that will further burden the province’s already uncompetitive manufacturers and saddle consumers with a 50 per cent rate hike within a decade.

Solar power is not the only culprit. Far more FIT-contracted wind power will be added to the grid. Together, these contracts demonstrate the madness of Ontario’s so-called green energy policy. Not only will it cost more, it won’t remove much if any carbon from the atmosphere.

The biggest myth about wind and solar power is that they automatically displace carbon dioxide produced by coal- or gas-fired power plants. Solar power producers consistently make this claim without any proof to back it up. Quite often, the opposite is true.

Take Ontario, which counts on baseload nuclear power for 60 per cent of its installed electricity capacity. Nuclear produces no carbon emissions. Neither does the hydro power that accounts for about one-quarter of Ontario’s capacity. On many days, demand in Ontario isn’t high enough to require power from additional sources. But when it is, wind and solar can’t be counted on.

Quite simply, neither wind nor solar are reliable sources of electricity. In its latest 18-month outlook, the IESO forecasts that 99.5 per cent of Ontario’s 12,947 MW of installed nuclear capacity will be available during summer consumption peaks. But it predicts only 13.7 per cent of the 1,824 MW of installed wind capacity will be available. Solar is even less reliable. So, when wind and solar actually do produce power, it’s usually dumped.

To meet consumption peaks, Ontario’s grid operator needs a dependable supply of complementary power. In the past, that came from coal plants, which could be fired up on an as-needed basis. Thankfully, they’ve all been closed and replaced by natural gas-fired plants.

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, but its carbon footprint is half or less that of coal. And modern combined-cycle gas plants are so efficient, reliable and cheap to build (relative to other forms of electricity) that Charles Frank of the centrist Brookings Institution calls them, along with nuclear power, “the ‘best bang for our buck’ as we seek to reduce emissions.”

“A nuclear or gas combined-cycle plant avoids far more emissions per MW of capacity than wind or solar because it can operate at 90 per cent of full capacity,” Mr. Frank notes in a new study. “Limited benefits and higher costs make wind and solar less socially valuable than nuclear, hydro and combined-cycle gas.”

Add in the alarmingly high failure rate of solar panels, the absence of a long-term track record, and the quashing of local content rules and the outcome of Ontario’s sunny experiment could be even darker than it looks.

Follow Konrad Yakabuski on Twitter: @konradyakabuski

The Truth About the Faux-Green Renewables Scam!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Carbon Footprint of Wind Turbines

This is a thought provoking essay from an Australian website called “Andy’s Rant”. 

http://www.andysrant.com/ ; His carbon focus is mostly on the base but frequently the question has come up about what goes into the base and the fact that manufacturing cement is a heavy carbon emitting process.  I thank him for that analysis alone.  He also states what I have been saying all along in this battle to educate the public about the false promises of wind:  “wind turbines will incur far more carbon dioxide emissions in their manufacture and installation than what their operational life will ever save.”

Measures are metric, so if you don’t think in metric, open another window and set up a metric converter (meters to feet, etc.)

So What’s the Carbon Footprint of a Wind Turbine

with 45 Tons of Rebar and 481 M3 of Concrete?

Its carbon footprint is massive – try 241.85 tons of CO2.

Here’s the breakdown of the CO2 numbers.

To create a 1,000 Kg of pig iron, you start with 1,800 Kg of iron ore, 900 Kg of coking coal 450 Kg of limestone. The blast furnace consumes 4,500 Kg of air. The temperature at the core of the blast furnace reaches nearly 1,600 degrees C (about 3,000 degrees F).

The pig iron is then transferred to the basic oxygen furnace to make steel.

1,350 Kg of CO2 is emitted per 1,000 Kg pig iron produced.

A further 1,460 Kg CO2 is emitted per 1,000 Kg of Steel produced so all up 2,810 Kg CO2 is emitted. 

45 tons of rebar (steel) are required so that equals 126.45 tons of CO2 are emitted.

To create a 1,000 Kg of Portland cement, Calcium carbonate (60%), silicon (20%), aluminium (10%), iron (10%) and very small amounts of other ingredients are heated in a large kiln to over 1,500 degrees C to convert the raw materials into clinker. The clinker is then interground with other ingredients to produce the final cement product. When cement is mixed with water, sand and gravel forms the rock-like mass know as concrete.

An average of 927 Kg of CO2 is emitted per 1,000 Kg of Portland cement. On average, concrete has 10% cement, with the balance being gravel (41%), sand (25%), water (18%) and air (6%). One cubic metre of concrete weighs approx. 2,400 Kg so approx. 240 Kg of CO2 is emitted for every cubic metre.

481m3 of concrete are required so that equals 115.4 tons of CO2 are emitted.

Now I have not included the emissions of the mining of the raw materials or the transportation of the fabricated materials to the turbine site so the emission calculation above would be on the low end at best.

Extra stats about wind turbines you may not know about:

The average towering wind turbine being installed around beautiful Australia right now is over 80 metres in height (nearly the same height as the pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge). The rotor assembly for one turbine – that’s the blades and hub – weighs over 22,000 Kg and the nacelle, which contains the generator components, weighs over 52,000 Kg.

All this stands on a concrete base constructed from 45,000 Kg of reinforcing rebar which also contains over 481 cubic metres of concrete (that’s over 481,000 litres of concrete – about 20% of the volume of an Olympic swimming pool).

Each turbine blade is made of glass fibre reinforced plastics, (GRP), i.e. glass fibre reinforced polyester or epoxy and on average each turbine blade weighs around 7,000 Kg each.

Each turbine has three blades so there’s 21,000 Kgs of GRP and each blade can be as long as 50 metres.

A typical wind farm of 20 turbines can extend over 101 hectares of land (1.01 Km2).

Each and every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2,500 Kg of it in each of the behemoths that have just gone up around Australia.

The mining and refining of neodymium is so dirty and toxic – involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product – that only one country does it – China.  

All this for an intermittent highly unreliable energy source.

And I haven’t even considered the manufacture of the thousands of pylons and tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission wire needed to get the power to the grid. And what about the land space needed to house thousands of these bird chomping death machines?

You see, renewables like wind turbines will incur far more carbon dioxide emissions in their manufacture and installation than what their operational life will ever save.

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t the “cure” of using wind turbines sound worse than the problem? A bit like amputating your leg to “cure” your in-growing toe nail?

 

This was posted by Tory Aardvark, Last November. The Numbers Have Grown!

/ 1957chev / 3 Comments

14000 Abandoned Wind Turbines In The USA

Posted by

There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people’s lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape.

The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or  the wind speed is too high.

The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms.

The US has had wind farms since 1981:

“Some say that Ka Le is haunted—and it is. But it’s haunted not by Hawaii’s legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are “Na leo o Kamaoa”– the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm…

The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles—but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California “big three” locations—Altamont Pass, Tehachapin (above), and San Gorgonio—considered among the world’s best wind sites…
California’s wind farms— comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity—ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills…”

The problem with wind farms when they are abandoned is getting the turbines removed, as usual there are non Green environmentalists to be seen:

The City of Palm Springs was forced to enact an ordinance requiring their removal from San Gorgonio. But California’s Kern County, encompassing the Tehachapi area, has no such law

Imagine the outraged Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.

It took nearly a decade from the time the first flimsy wind turbines were installed before the performance of California wind projects could dispel the widespread belief among the public and investors that wind energy was just a tax scam.

Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst focusing on energy and environmental issues for the Heritage Foundation, is not surprised. He asks:

“If wind power made sense, why would it need a government subsidy in the first place? It’s a bubble which bursts as soon as the government subsidies end.”

“It’s a bubble which bursts as soon as the government subsidies end” therein lies a lesson that is going be learnt by those that sought to make fortunes out of tax payer subsidies, the whole renewables industry of solar, wind and biomass is just an artificial bubble incapable of surviving without subsides from governments and tax payers which many businesses and NGO’s like WWF, FoE and Greenpeace now think is their god given right, as the money is going on Green Climate Religion approved clean energy.

The Green evangelists who push so hard for these wind farms, as usual have not thought the whole idea through, no surprises for a left agenda like Climate Change, which like all things Green and socialist is just a knee jerk reaction:

Altamont’s turbines have since 2008 been tethered four months of every year in an effort to protect migrating birds after environmentalists filed suit. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, 75 to 110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333 American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually. A July, 2008 study by the Alameda County Community Development Agency points to 10,000 annual bird deaths from Altamont Pass wind turbines. Audubon calls Altamont, “probably the worst site ever chosen for a wind energy project.”

The same areas that are good for siting wind farms are also good for birds of prey and migrating birds to pass through, shame for the birds that none of the Green mental midgets who care so much about everything in nature, thought that one through when pushing their anti fossil fuel agenda.

After the debacle of the First California Wind Rush, the European Union had moved ahead of the US on efforts to subsidize “renewable” energy–including a “Feed in Tariff” even more lucrative than the ISO4 contracts.

The tax payers who paid for the subsidies to build the wind farms, then paid over the odds for an unreliable source of power generation will, ultimately be left to pick up the bill for clearing up the Green eco mess in the post man made Global Warming world.

 

Updated November 24th

In answer to several allegations that the number of abandoned wind turbines was made up,  the following quote from the article and link will confirm this figure to be true:

California’s wind farms — then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity — ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth,over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.

Green is the New Black…..Hearted, that is! Faux Green Terrorists!

/ 1957chev / 2 Comments

Greens go violent

Aug 4, 2014

The BBC is reporting that an employee of an unconventional gas company in Northern Ireland has had his home petrol bombed.

The company exploring for shale gas in County Fermanagh has confirmed that the family home of one of its site workers has been attacked with petrol bombs.

Two petrol bombs were thrown at the house in Letterbreen during the early hours of Sunday, but no-one was hurt.

The fracking firm, Tamboran, said it followed a number of unlawful incidents and threats to its security staff.

Staff were threatened at a quarry in Belcoo, where Tamboran is intending to drill a gas exploration borehole.

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth. They all sound so nice, don’t they?

 
21 comments

Stop the Windweasels Dead in Their Tracks! It’s a SCAM! NO R.E.T.!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Lessons from Germany’s Wind Power Disaster

August 3, 2014 by  

crystal-ball

All lies and promises – the wind industry has finally been rumbled in Germany and is about to be shown the door in Australia.

The wind industry and its parasites have been guilty of more than just a little hubris.  Claiming to be able to deliver cheap, reliable sparks was always going to be their undoing. Gradually, Europeans are waking up to the unassailable fact that wind power is based on a technology that was redundant before it began.

No modern economy can run with electricity delivered at crazy, random intervals.  To compensate for that meteorological fact, Germany is flat out building more coal fired power stations – not less.  Around the globe the wind industry promises to displace “dirty” coal fired power and Germany is no exception. But the reality is very different: the facts have finally caught up with them – wind power will never replace fossil fuel generators and the costs of having capacity to back up wind power is astronomical.

German industry is bailing out and heading to the US – where power is a third of the cost that it is in Germany – and some 800,000 German homeshave been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. For Germans the attraction to wind power is fading fast – funny about that.

A group of Swiss energy market economists have launched a scathing attack on Germany’s wind and solar policies: “Development And Integration Of Renewable Energy: Lessons Learned From Germany” – Hans Poser; Jeffrey Altman; Felix ab Egg; Andreas Granata; and Ross Board
July 2014 (pdf available here).

We’ve extracted some of the key findings and conclusions below.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Over the last decade, well-intentioned policymakers in Germany and other European countries created renewable energy policies with generous subsidies that have slowly revealed themselves to be unsustainable, resulting in profound, unintended consequences for all industry stakeholders. While these policies have created an impressive roll-out of renewable energy resources, they have also clearly generated disequilibrium in the power markets, resulting in significant increases in energy prices to most users, as well as value destruction for all stakeholders: consumers, renewable companies, electric utilities, financial institutions, and investors.

The rapid growth of renewable energy in Germany and other European countries during the 2000’s was due to proactive European and national policies aimed at directly increasing the share of renewable production in their energy mixes through a variety of generous subsidy programs. Two main types of subsidy programs for renewable power developed in Europe include feed-in tariffs (FITs), which very quickly became the policy of choice for Germany and many other European countries, and quota obligation systems.

FITs are incentives to increase production of renewable energy. This type of subsidy guarantees long-term (usually for 20 years) fixed tariffs per unit of renewable power produced. These fixed tariffs normally are independent of market prices and are usually set by the government, but can be structured to be reduced periodically to account for technology cost decreases. The level of the tariffs normally depends on the technology used and the size of the production facility. Because of their generosity, FITs proved capable of quickly increasing the share of renewable power, but since the FITs are set administratively, it is difficult to meet renewable energy goals in the most cost-effective way possible.

The most important lessons learned include:

Policymakers underestimated the cost of renewable subsidies and the strain they would have on national economies. As an example, Germany’s FIT program has cost more than $412 billion to date (including granted and guaranteed, but not yet paid FIT). Former German Minister of the Environment Peter Altmaier recently estimated that the program costs would reach $884 billion (€680 billion) by 2022. He added that this figure could increase further if the market price of electricity fell, or if the rules and subsidy levels were not changed. Moreover, it is estimated that Germany will pay $31.1 billion in subsidies for 2014 alone. A recent analysis found that from 2008 to 2013, Germany incurred $67.6 billion (€52 billion) in net export losses because of its high energy costs, compared to its five leading trade partners. Losses in energy intensive industries accounted for 60 percent of the total losses. This was further highlighted by a recent International Energy Agency report, which stated that the European Union (EU) is expected to lose one-third of its global market share of energy intensive exports over the next two decades due to high energy prices, expensive energy imports of gas and oil, as well as costly domestic subsidies for renewable energy.

Retail prices to many electricity consumers have increased significantly, as subsidies in Germany and the rest of Europe are generally paid by the end users through a costsharing procedure. Household electricity prices in Germany have more than doubled, increasing from €0.14/kilowatt hour (kWh) ($0.18) in 2000 to more than €0.29/kWh ($0.38) in 2013. In Spain, prices also doubled from €0.09/kWh in 2004 to €0.18/kWh in 2013 ($0.12 to $0.23) while Greece’s prices climbed from €0.06/kWh in 2004 to €0.12/kWh in 2013 ($0.08 to $0.16). Comparatively, household electricity prices in the United States average $0.13/kWh, and have remained relatively stable over the last decade.

Fossil and nuclear plants are now facing stresses to their operational systems as these plants are now operating under less stable conditions and are required to cycle more often to help balance renewables’ variability. Investments in retrofits will be required for these plants in order to allow them to run to these new operational requirements. Moreover, renewable resources are dramatically changing thermal plants’ resource planning and margins. As a result, many of these plants are now being retired or are required to receive capacity payments in order to economically be kept online.

Large scale deployment of renewable capacity does not translate into a substantial displacement of thermal capacity. Because of the variability of wind and solar, there are many hours in the year during which most generation comes from thermal power plants, which are required to provide almost complete redundant capacity to ensure the reliability of the system. In turn, grid interventions have increased significantly as operators have to intervene and switch off or start plants that are not programmed to run following marketbased dispatching. For instance, one German transmission operator saw interventions grow from two in 2002 to 1,213 in 2013. It is higher amounts of renewables with low full load hours relative to the total portfolio of power production that creates greater variability and strains on the grid. In the case of Germany, it is the large-scale deployment of both wind and solar that has impacted the entire system.

Large-scale investments in the grid are being required to expand transmission grids so they can connect offshore and onshore wind projects in the north of Germany to consumers in the south of the country. The total investment cost for the build-out of German onshore and offshore transmission systems is estimated to be around $52 billion (€40 billion) over the next 10 years. Moreover, the grids are now being challenged to meet the dynamic flows of variable renewables and require significant additional investment to accommodate increased penetration of renewables. All of these costs will ultimately be passed on to electricity consumers. This has not gone unnoticed in Germany or in the EU. A report was released in late February 2014 by an independent expert commission mandated by the German government, which concluded that Germany’s current program of incenting renewables is an uneconomic and inefficient means to reduce emissions and therefore should be stopped. Moreover, the European Commission released new guidelines on April 9, 2014, with effect starting in 2017 that will correct market distortions. It will essentially ban all FIT subsidies and introduce technology agnostic auctions as the only incentives for renewables.

Large thermal as back-up – grid interventions 

The more variable renewables there are, the more the thermal power plants will serve as back-up and balancing for renewables.

Fig 24

Figure 24 shows the daily production of solar, wind, and conventional generation in Germany. The maximum daily solar and wind-combined production in 2012 was 530 GWh on January 5, 2012, while the minimum was only 30 GWh on December 19, 2012.

Given the average daily power consumption of around 1,643 GWh in Germany, this means that in spite of the 13.2 percent share of wind and solar power in total power generation, there must be almost complete redundant capacity of thermal plants or storage.

Wind and solar energy, by their very nature, are highly variable, with fluctuations in weather conditions causing significant variance over multiple timescales: seconds (gusts of wind and passing cloud cover), minutes (wind speed variations, briefly overcast skies), days (diurnal cycles, creating peaks of solar condition), months/quarters (seasonal cycles), and years (annual variation in environmental conditions).

At yearly and seasonal levels, both wind and solar generation can be forecasted with relative certainty. It is when considering diurnal (daily) generation profiles that variability occurs and requires system operators to intervene and make sure that supply and demand of electricity are equal at all times.

In Germany, as the percentage of renewable power increased, so did the number of times that grid operators had to intervene to rebalance the market. In 2012, there were 1,213 such interventions.

fig 25

For new thermal power plants to replace the currently uneconomical power plants once they reach their technical lifetime, current prices will have to rise. The effect of fewer operational hours needs to be compensated by higher prices in these hours. As a consequence, it is likely that markets will experience lower prices in times when there is sufficient renewable power and much higher prices at other times.

Renewables generate higher direct costs than traditional power production. Traditional base load wholesale power can be generated in Germany at around €65/MWh, but wind power and solar PV in Germany receive a FIT of around €90 /MWh.

Because renewables, like wind and solar, do not produce at certain times, available back-up power to the system is required. The back-up capacity must be financed even if it is used only occasionally as back-up. Therefore the little power that is produced in the back-up plants will become expensive. Data drawn from business models of Finadvice show that a CCGT can produce 3000 GWh per year at fixed costs of €11/MWh, in a power system without renewables. If renewables reduce the production of the CCGT to for example 1500 GWh, the price needed to recover fixed costs will double to €22/MWh. In a nutshell, this could mean that the cost of power in the hours with renewable power is the subsidized €90/MWh instead of conventional €65 MWh, and when there is no renewable power, the (back-up) power price will be €76/MWh (65 + 11).

CONCLUSION: TAKEAWAYS OF THE GERMAN AND EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE WITH RENEWABLES

The United States and other countries have a unique opportunity to assess the lessons learned in Germany and other European-member states and achieve positive results at lower cost and risk for all stakeholders.

The large increase in market share of variable renewable generation (mainly from solar PV and wind) is changing the dynamics and operations of electricity markets, as exemplified in Germany:

  • While in the past, German wholesale prices followed the demand curve, they now react to the weather, going down when the sun shines and the wind blows, and up, during times of high demand, when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Accordingly, price forecasts and power trading now require new modeling and different inputs, including a much greater focus on weather forecasting.
  • Power trading has become more short-term (intra-day, quarter hour, regulation, capacity) than in a conventional generation environment.
  • Regulatory policies were not designed to incentivize flexible renewable power to be available where and when needed. Therefore, further regulatory interventions will be required to create a balanced system that will ultimately impact investments for both renewable companies and utilities over time as various energy markets transition to an increased portfolio of renewables.
  • The power grid has to be upgraded to accept dynamic power input from many decentralized and distant variable sources.
  • In the absence of energy storage, current electric systems cannot easily cope with the surplus of renewable energy, and curtailment will be required at times in order to maintain reliability.
  • Intermittent renewables, like solar and wind, tend to cannibalize their own market by reducing prices when they are available. With current cost structures, if wind and solar are to produce a significant share of the power generation, they will likely require support through energy storage or additional subsidies to be profitable.

In conclusion, the lessons learned in Europe prove that the large-scale integration of renewable power does not provide net savings to consumers, but rather a net increase in costs to consumers and other stakeholders. Moreover, when not properly assessed in advance, large-scale integration of renewables into the power system ultimately leads to disequilibrium in the power markets, as well as value destruction to both renewable companies and utilities, and their respective investors.

Finadvice FAA Financial Advisory AG
July 2014

The takeaway from all that is that if Australia wants energy market chaos; energy poverty; and to kill what’s left of its manufacturing sector it need only keep following Germany’s lead.

The mandatory RET must go now.

abbottcover

Some Honesty from Climate Scientists….How Refreshing!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

PETER LILLEY & GRAHAM STRINGER VOTE AGAINST CLIMATE COMMITTEE’S IPCC REPORT

  • Date: 28/07/14
  • Peter Lilley MP and Graham Stringer MP

Peter Lilley and Graham Stringer voted against the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee’s report on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Report because “we believe the role of the Select Committee is to hold public institutions critically to account not to act as their cheer leaders”.

They added: “As scientists by training, we do not dispute the science of the greenhouse effect – nor did any of our witnesses.  However, there remain great uncertainties about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation to versus prevention of global warming.

The bulk of the main IPCC technical report recognises these uncertainties and is simply a useful compilation of the research in the field.

However, the Summary for Policy Makers is far less balanced than the report it purports to summarise.

Its headline conclusion was that “evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”.   It is hard to justify that increase in confidence that CO2 emissions are dominant given that: about one third of all the CO2 omitted by mankind since the industrial revolution has been put into the atmosphere since 1997; yet there has been no statistically significant increase in the mean global temperature since then.    By definition, a period with record emissions but no warming cannot provide evidence that emissions are the dominant cause of warming!

The pause in surface warming does not invalidate the greenhouse effect.   But it does mean that other factors – natural variations – can be of the same magnitude as the greenhouse effect over at least a decade and a half.   Since such variations are presumed to cancel out over the long term variations in the opposite direction may have contributed a significant portion of the surface warming over the previous two and a half decades.

The IPCC’s conclusion flies in the face of the Inter Academy Council Review on the previous IPCC report which criticised its “authors [who] reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence” and recommended that “Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs)”.   No such basis for assigning this enhanced probability was given even though it is the headline conclusion of this report.

Moreover, the Summary for Policy Makers systematically omits mentioning or plays down key information in the main report which might suggest that the problem of global warming may be less acute or less certain than previously suggested.   Notably it omits to alert Policy Makers to the following facts:

1. The IPCC’s medium term forecast for temperature to 2035 is below that given by the climate models since the experts believe these to be “overheating”.   However, the forecast to the end of the century assumes the temperature will revert to following the projections of the models with no allowance for their tendency to exaggerate warming.

2. New estimates of the impact of aerosols based on satellite observations are both more certain and suggest a smaller cooling effect than previously assumed.   However, there was not time to rerun the models using these latest aerosol figures.  They will, however, inevitably mean that the models are even more out of line with temperature data than previously thought.  This was described by one of our witnesses as ““the most significant thing in AR5because if aerosol cooling is lower and … we know how much warming there has been, then it must follow … a much lower figure [is] attributable to carbon dioxide”.

3. For the first time the IPCC authors cannot agree on a best estimate for climate sensitivity even though they did in previous reports.  There is only a cryptic reference to this in a footnote in the SPM.   It is hard to square this unprecedented disagreement between the experts with the stated increase in their confidence in the scale of global warming.

4. Most recent empirically based studies suggest that the sensitivity of the climate to increases in CO2 is probably lower than assumed in the climate models.

5. The pause in global warming since 1997 may well be the result of natural variations offsetting the warming effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere.   But if that is the case it follows that natural variations may have contributed a sizeable proportion of the warming in the 25 years prior to 1997.

6. Over the last 35 years (not just during the hiatus) the composite of models followed by the IPCC have collectively run 15% too high.

7. Forecasts of global warming generated by climate models have progressively converged on each other but diverged from actual observations of mean global surface temperature.

These issues were raised during the Committee’s inquiry.   It is unfortunate that they were not dealt with in the Committee’s report.   The Committee’s report would have been more balanced if it had drawn a distinction between the largely technical main Report and the much more politicised Summary for Policy Makers.

Graham Stringer MP and Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP

Members of Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change

Bill Weir, from CNN, Proves that “Emotion, not Logic”, rules Climate Alarmists!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

The ‘Gore effect’ turns ugly – CNN climate bias revealed

Posted on July 31, 2014 by

You know of the “Gore effect“, Wikipedia describes it as  “…an informal and satirical term which alleges a causal relationship between unseasonable cold weather phenomena and global warming activism”, so it was appropriate to apply to the situation where the Gore’s Climate Reality Project group tried a political ploys that looked stupid: “I’m Too Hot” trucks and offers of free ice cream to this week’s Environmental Protection Agency hearings on power-plant emissions…when it was 58 degrees and raining. Obviously, CNN’s Bill Weir doesn’t understand satire, much less how to be a professional journalist.

From Mediaite:

It’s safe to say CNN anchor Bill Weir is not a fan of climate change deniers.

On Thursday, the Twitter account for Fox Nation, a blog run by Fox News, tweeted a link to a post headlined, “Climate Doesn’t Cooperate With Al Gore’s Group’s Visit to Denver EPA Hearings.”

The story, aggregated from the Washington Times, relates to a Denver visit by former Vice President Al Gore‘s “Climate Reality Project” for EPA hearings on power plant emissions.

The group showed up to hand out ice cream even though it was 58 degrees.

Weir retweeted the link, with his own comment: “Weather is not climate, you willfully ignorant fucksticks.”

BillWeir

[ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillWeirCNN/status/494670062092296192 ]

==============================================================

One wonders why he didn’t say same the same thing about Gore and his ice-cream trucks to treat the “I’m too hot” weather that never materialized. Oh, yeah, bias.

This is probably the best reason ever to tune out CNN, when they hire emotional children like this instead of journalistic professionals, it’s pretty much pointless to watch any longer.

After what I experienced recently, I’m beginning to think that most climate alarmists are nothing more than emotional children disguising themselves as professionals.

UPDATE: I posted this short message, twice. It was deleted both times, but the second time I saved a screen cap. Apparently Bill Weir has an ego that is easily bruised, or there’s somebody at CNN running interference.

BillWeir_deleted

You can look here as see that it is now missing.

[ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillWeirCNN/status/494670062092296192 ]

Class act, guys. No bias there at CNN.