The Horrific Slaughter of Birds, Even Endangered Species, is Hidden by the Wind Industry.

May 17, 2015May 17, 2015 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

Covering up the massacre

European crane.
Unlike cats, cars and buildings, wind turbines kill cranes, eagles, storks etc.

Wind farms: a slaughter kept hidden from the public
15 May 2015

Submission to the Australian Senate – updated version
WIND TURBINES SELECT COMMITTEE
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

Subject:
Impact of wind turbines on bird and bat populations

Distinguished Senators of the Commonwealth of Australia,

Australian members of our organisation have complained to us that mortality predictions being used in Australia to assess the impacts of wind turbines on birds and bats are minimised to a level that thoroughly misleads decision makers. To wit, in a widely used report prepared for the Australian Government by consultant Biosis Research Pty Ltd, we read: “the additional mortality predicted for the cumulative effects of turbine collisions for wind farms within the range of the Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle (TWTE) is likely to result in the additional death of approximately one bird per annum” (1). Yet, actual eagle mortality at just one of the 7 wind farms considered by the study turned out to be 3.2 eagles per year, according to the operator of the Woolnorth wind farm (2). Dr. Stephen Debus puts the number at 5 TWTE per year (3). As the 6 other wind farms have not been monitored, “there might be tens of eagle deaths per year in Tasmania” (from blade strikes), adds Dr. Debus. Of these, the vast majority concerns the TWTE: at the Woolnorth wind farm, from 20 eagles killed in 4 years, 17 were TWTEs and 3 were white-bellied sea eagles (2).

The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle, a (bigger) sub-species of the Wedge-tailed Eagle, numbered only 130 successful breeding pairs in 2010 according to the state’s National Parks and Wildlife Service (2) – and obviously less now, as the killings are allowed to continue. It is classified as “endangered”. The result of the misleading assessment of Biosis will be to condemn to extinction the largest of Australia’s eagles.

I analysed the Biosis TWTE study in 2010, and found disturbing “errors” in it, huge ones at that, totalling two orders of magnitude. So I wrote an open letter to the authors (4). They failed to reply. Australian ornithologists, which had been copied on it, also kept silent. The letter generated record levels of traffic on the Iberica 2000 website that had published it, but nobody responded, no one. Apparently, nobody wanted to hear the bad news, let alone acknowledge them, especially ornithologists, bird societies, and even the media, enthralled as they all are by the “goodness” of wind turbines. In fact, I realised that everyone had an interest in continuing business as usual. And business as usual it has been, in the five years that followed to this date. As we speak, mendacious mortality predictions from eager-to-please consultants continue to be used to promote wind farms across your great country.

The Tasmanian situation was resolved by making sure that no more news of eagles killed by wind farms on the island would be published by the media. This cover-up is now 5 years old, and has been quite effective: no news of eagle mortality has transpired from Woolnorth or any other Tasmanian wind farm.

I shall come back to the matter of unethical consultants and bird societies later, but I would like to cite another example briefly, to make my point. It’s about the Macarthur wind farm, in Victoria. Before the project was built, consultants had estimated that the level of bird activity was low in the area, and that the impact on birds would be insignificant. But after construction, a monitoring surveycounted the carcasses and estimated the death toll at about 1500 birds in one year, including nearly 500 raptors – among which 6 wedge-tailed eagles) (5). So much for the negligible bird mortality…

This scenario is repeating itself at wind farms all over the world, wherever post-construction monitoring surveys are performed. My experience has been that predicted rates of mortality are often two orders of magnitude (100 times) lower than reality. The monitoring surveys themselves play their part, by never reflecting the full extent of the death toll (for technical reasons – e.g. the insufficient size of the area searched under each turbine * – as well as conflicts of interest).
* search area: a 50-meter-radius circle around each mast, whereas a 150-meter-tall wind turbine can project the body of a small bird 200 meters away and beyond).

MANIPULATED MORTALITY STATISTICS

It is my duty, as President of the World Council for Nature, to bring to your attention the true extent of the carnage which is taking place at wind farms around the world, including Australia. The deception being staged by consultants in order to fool people and their governments will have unfathomed consequences for wildlife, biodiversity, natural habitats, and the health of forests and agriculture. We are facing widespread corrupt behavior, which is putting private interests ahead of the common good.

In Australia, but also elsewhere, consultants mislead decision-makers by predicting insignificant mortality. We have seen the case of the Macarthur wind farm. In Europe it is much the same, e.g. in France the official mortality estimate is about one bird/turbine/year (6). Here again,consultants willing to please the wind industry, their main employer, are the source of the deception.

In the US, the latest nationwide windfarm mortality estimates are Dr. Smallwood’s 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats per year, i.e. almost 15 birds and 23 bats per turbine (7). But there are also European estimates of interest: for instance, extrapolating to Germany the findings of reknowned Dutch biologist J.E. Winkelman, ornithologistBernd Koop had calculated that annual mortality would be 60,000 – 100,000 birds per Gigawatt of installed wind capacity (8). For today’s Germany, which has 39 Gigawatts, this would add up to 2,340,000 – 3,900,000 dead birds a year.

The Koop estimate is much closer to reality, which was revealed in 2012 by a comprehensive evaluation of wind farm mortality by the Spanish ornithological society SEO-BirdLife (Sociedad Española de Ornitología). In response to a request based on the right to information in environmental matters (Aarhus Convention), SEO has obtained copies of 136 monitoring studies of wind farms, studies that the Spanish government had filed without publishing. Having analysed them, SEO researchers estimated the mortality as follows: Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines kill on average 6 – 18 million birds and bats a year. Considering that wind turbines kill roughly twice as many bats as birds, this comes to a death toll of 100 – 300 birds and 200 – 600 bats per turbine per year (9). Averaging these numbers, we can say that, on average, each wind turbine kills 200 birds and 400 bats a year. For the Macarthur wind farm: 200 birds x 140 turbines = 28,000 birds a year, as opposed to 1,500 estimated by monitoring consultants.

These figures are actually shy of the first estimates of two decades ago. In a study published by an agency of the California government, the California Energy Commission, we can read as follows: “In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al. (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden “(10). We are very far indeed from the 1 bird per turbine/year being routinely predicted by some remarkably mendacious consultants or government agencies.

THE COVER-UP

Something obviously happened between the high mortality found in the early days of wind farms by biologists such as Winkelman, Benner, Lekuona, Everaert etc. and present estimates as low as 1 bird per turbine/year being “predicted” in Australia, France, the UK etc. Could it be that actual mortality has come down to such a low level?
– Not in the least: if you need convincing, see the mortality at Altamont Pass, Macarthur, Wolfe Island etc.

What actually happened was that powerful political and financial interests have worked together towards deceiving our perception of mortality from wind turbines – i.e. putting in place a cover-up. To succeed in this mystification, it was essential to obtain the cooperation of ornithological NGOs. This was generally done by way of donations, and a plethora of attractive contracts: impact studies for wind projects, monitoring avian mortality once the projects are built, modelling ornithological mortality etc… In countries with high penetration of “green” energy, the wind industry quickly became the main employer of ornithologists.

In Spain, Iberdrola and Banco Triodos (the renewable energies’ bank) used to make donations to SEO-Birdlife amounting to nearly 25% of its budget. After a number of years, this finally caused some dissension among members, eventually resulting in the departure of the General Manager, Alejandro Sánchez, in 2010 (11). Less than two years later, the ornithological society published its estimate of windfarm mortality in Spain, revealing the enormity of the massacre (9). But their report was neither published nor mentioned by ornithological societies in other countries –what better proof of the collusion between wind interests and ornithology?

An average of 200 dead birds per turbine per year is not at all surprising: it is less than one bird per 24 hours. It could easily be more, considering that song birds migrate at night, to avoid overheating. On moonless nights, all they can see from the turbines are the position lights on the nacelles, while the blades are slashing through the air at up to 300 km/h, invisible, up to 30, 40 or 50 meters away…

Accidents also happen during the day, particularly in the case of those species that are attracted to wind turbines(12). This attraction puts their lives in danger, because the blades can reach speeds of 300 km/h at the tip (see further below). It is the case for swallows, swifts and other birds that catch insects on the wing; Professor Ahlén found that they look for insects that are themselves attracted to wind turbines (12).

THE CASE OF RAPTORS

It is also the case of raptors, which are attracted by dead or wounded birds or bats that lie under the turbines, or by the mice and rabbits that live there. Indeed, rodents find plenty of food in these open spaces covered in gramineae; also, it is easy to dig burrows where the soil has been softened up by foundation work – see picture below.

Rabbit in front of its burrow, Altamont Pass wind farm, California – (first generation turbines).

Perched on the still blades (picture further below), or on the nacelles, birds of prey have a commanding view of this exceptional hunting territory. Many will hunt successfully without getting struck by a blade. But their very success will cause their brains to establish a connection between wind turbines and great hunting opportunities. Thus, when they spot some wind turbines, which may be seen from many miles away, they will be attracted to them. Young, unattached raptors will therefore visit many windfarms, and so will adults on migration. Breeding adults, on the other hand, will only visit the wind turbines within their territories, but will do it over and over again. In either case, the more time they spend near the turbines, the greater the chances they will be struck by a blade, the speed of which it is very easy to misjudge .

For birds as for humans, the blades appear to be moving at a leisurly pace. Yet, they travel at up to 300km/h at their tip. Here is the calculation for a 2.3 MW ENERCON Model E-70: 71m (diameter) x 3.14 = circumference of 223m x 21.5 revolutions per minute (in winds above 45 km/h) = 4.794m travelled by the tip of each blade in a minute x 60 minutes = 287,640m travelled in an hour, i.e. at a speed of 287km/h. In low winds, the speed is of 100 – 200 km/h. The difference between apparent slowness and actual high speed, plus the attraction they exert, are what turn wind turbines into deadly traps for birds and bats.

Raptors, experience has shown, are prone to be decimated by wind turbines (13). Yet these birds are very useful to us, as they control certain animal populations (rats, mice, rabbits, and nest plunderers such as magpies, crows etc.). They also eliminate sick or dead animals, thus preventing epidemics and contributing to the health of many species. Their role is important for the maintenance of natural balances, biodiversity and ecosystems. Yet, a new peer-reviewed study is alerting us that wind turbines are partly responsible for the coming extinction of some species of raptors (in southern Europe). One of them, the Egyptian Vulture, is seeing its population of breeding adults decline by 3-4% per year (14). This spectacular glider is already very rare in Europe, and millions of euros have been spent for its protection (and its reintroduction in France).

Photo: Red-tailed hawk perched on a blade, Altamont Pass, California.

Perching opportunities make wind turbines attractive to raptors, so does the prey or carcasses to be found under them (as we commented above). Here are more pictures (15), and videos (25 and 26) proving the point. But consultants promote the fiction that raptors “avoid” wind turbines, and the ornithology profession turns a blind eye to that baseless assertion, all of which is helping their common employers: wind farm promoters. But if raptors avoided wind turbines, why would so many be killed by their blades? (13).

Consultants use a wide array of deceptive tricks, which they developped over the years. I listed some of them years ago in an article, “the Shame of Scotland” (16). One of these tricks has been pushed to unprecedented levels in Australia: the “core-range manipulation” (16). There, consultants have decided, based upon unscientific, biased and unpublishedobservations, that wind turbines can be safely erected as close as 300 meters from the nests of eagles or other raptors. For instance, in the Bulgana Windfarm Flora and Fauna Assessment Report No. 13051 (7.6), page 97, we read: “Previous studies on wind farms have shown that resident Wedge-tailed Eagles are able to successfully nest and raise young on wind farms, if turbines are located at least 300 metres away (BL&A unpublished data )”.

Years ago, I debunked an identical assertion which was based on 24 searches spread over two years at theChallicum Hills wind farm – hardly constituting solid scientific evidence, to say the least. Biosis even admitted:“the work does not discount the possibility of WT eagle collisions” (17). Yet the fiction perdures, and wind turbines continue to be erected in Australia as close as 300 meters from eagle and other raptors’ nests. Nowhere else in the world are protected birds being treated so carelessly. We have seen the tragic results of this attitude at Woolnorth, Macarthur, Starfish Hill, etc. Australia’s eagles are being slaughtered, but the cover-up keeps Australians uninformed.

By contrast, Scottish raptor expert Michael J. McGrady recommends a 5 km buffer zone for the Golden Eagle, in the peer-reviewed study “A model of golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) ranging behavior”, J. Raptor Res. 36 (1 Supplement): 62-69 – by McGrady, M.J., Grant, J. R., Baingridge, I. P. & David R.A. McLeod D.R.A. (2002) (18). This study and its recommendation are mentioned in SEO-Birdlife’s guide for the assessment of windfarms as regards bird life, in which one can find the buffer zones recommended by scientists for various protected bird species (18). The shortest is 1 km, for the smallest of the kestrel species. For eagles, they vary from 5 to 10 km (18). Ospreys (“Águila pescadora” in Spanish): 2 km. Peregrine falcons: 2 – 4 km. Cranes: 10 km.

PLUNDERING NATURE WITH PUBLIC FUNDS

Out of control windfarm development is hurting many protected species, riding as it does on the optimistic estimates put out by hired consultants, government agencies, bird societies, the wind industry and its agents, pro-wind activists etc. It is also facilitated by considerable flows of public money, in the form of subsidies, tax credits, special loans, carbon certificates, etc. These millions of dollars (billions in those countries that have thousands of wind turbines) enable private interests to remove all obstacles to their greed, and this includes overriding nature protection legislation. Migration routes and stopover areas, shrinking habitat of threatened species (e.g. brolgas), high bird-traffic areas bordering natural reserves (e.g. Bald Hills, Victoria), nothing is sacred: the plunder has no limits.

Planning authorities which give the green light to wind projects rarely have other bird data at hand than what’s reported in impact studies prepared by unethical consultants. I read about a hundred of these reports over the past 12 years, and none concluded that the impact on the environment would be unacceptable, even when the project was to be located inside a protected nature reserve, or was threatening an endangered species with extinction. None of them was honest, without errors or omissions, and free of manipulations.

MITIGATION

To obtain approval for wind projects that will highly impact protected species, consultants usually suggest applying some techniques for avoiding, minimising, or attenuating the risks of collision. They call these “mitigation”. But we must be aware that none of these schemes, none of these formulas have proved effective. Wherever they have been implemented, they have failed (Altamont Pass, Woolnorth, Smola, Tarifa). The President of the French bird society LPO-Birdlife acknowledged the fact that mitigation does not work (19).

In situations where opponents to a wind project have raised the issue of bat mortality, consultants often propose a mitigation which consists in increasing the cut-in wind speed to, say, 6 meters per second. This means not letting the blades rotate unless the speed of the wind exceeds 22 km/h. The idea is that, as few bats fly when the wind exceeds that speed, mortality will be reduced by about 90%. We would comment on this particular mitigation as follows:

– First observation: the promised reduction in mortality to 90% has not been verified. To our knowledge, no wind farm has put this measure into practice and published the results.

– Second observation: a 10% residual mortality is considered by consultants to be negligible, as if it were acceptable to kill 1.2 million bats per year instead of 12 million (supposing a country that has, or will have, 18,000 wind turbines as in Spain). Most bat species are endangered, all are extremely useful. Killing them in such numbers is irresponsible. Also consider that the figure of 1,2 million will be much higher, as a) the reduction to 10% is unproven, b) only few wind projects contemplate “bat mitigation”.

– Third observation: the practical application of such a measure is not verifiable . Indeed, who would make sure that, during 25 years, the computer program controlling the feathering of the blades a) reflects that mitigation, b) is in good order and c) is being applied? The interest of the windfarm owner is to not apply it, as it reduces his income. Thus, inspectors would be needed, but who would pay them during 25 years? It would have to be the State. And who would ensure that the operators of the wind farms will not “convince” these civil servants to turn a blind eye? Indeed, wind farms are often associated with corruption (20).

BATS

Thus, mitigation of bat mortality is doubtful at best. Yet bats are killed in bigger numbers than birds – about twice as many, i.e. circa 400 per turbine/year, or one bat per turbine/night. According to a study published in France, bats“are the most valuable fauna group” (in French:«constituent le groupe faunistique ayant la plus forte valeur patrimoniale» )(21). Indeed, bat species are very useful to humans, but they all are in decline. To make things worse, their populations cannot recover easily, most females only raising one pup a year.

Many of the chiropter species are classified as threatened with extinction. This is especially worrying because, without bats, farmers, the forest industry, and national forestry administrations would have to use more pesticides to control insects that attack trees and crops. This would lead to undesirable effects on prices and on the health of citizens. Services rendered by bats to US agriculture have been valued at $3.7 billion – $53 billion annually (22). That we know of, no evaluation has been made for services rendered by chiropters to forestry, but their usefulness in controlling some forest pests is recognised (23). Yet they are being killed in their millions by wind turbines. This is causing considerable harm to the environment.

In this video (24), we see bats getting hit by turbine blades, and others falling to the ground due to “barotrauma” (fatal injuries in the lungs caused by large pressure differences created around the blades).

COMPENSATION

The ineffectiveness of mitigation resulted in wily consultants proposing yet another deceptive scheme: “compensation”. This stratagem is useful to businesses that are causing serious harm to nature as a result of their activities. So much so that “offset programs” (27) are being set up, fooling people into believing that destroying more nature can be compensated. “No net biodiverity loss” is the publicised goal, but it is yet another scam to facilitate more plundering of nature. It boggles the mind to see most ecologists and bird societies support this. Here again, ethics vanish where there is money to be made…

Natural wetlands cannot be replaced by man-made reservoirs, any more than destroying primary tropical forests can be compensated by planting eucalyptus, nor killing birds of a protected species can be offset by giving money to a bird society. This scheme of redeeming one’s ecological sins with money is not without parallel with the indulgences that were sold by the Church in the Middle Ages.

Compensation is increasingly being used in the windfarm business. For instance, it is being alleged that, if new hunting areas for raptors are created nearby, it is acceptable to install wind turbines in their breeding territories. But this only works on paper. It hasn’t been successful anywhere in the world. The example of Beinn an Tuirc, Scotland, is sometimes quoted by some consultant as a reference. But this example is anything but conclusive. I exposed its false claim to success years ago (28).

The since-discovered fact that raptors are attracted to wind turbines further proves the ineffectiveness of this compensation. A wind farm is a giant bird trap which acts as a population sink, attracting its victims from many miles around. Nothing can compensate this ongoing massacre. Creating new hunting grounds next to it is as absurd as “killing the children but building orphanages”. .

No government in the world has considered objectively the cumulative effects of so many wind turbines, each of them an ecological trap attracting and killing many protected species. Some residents report that, since wind turbines were built, there are no more bats where they live; others noted that they see fewer and fewer raptors. Swallows and swifts are becoming rarer too, according to others.

The situation is serious, if only because these species are of great benefit to humanity. Natural equilibriums are also at risk, and so is quality of life. Are we willing to replace our countryside with industrial landscapes, our birds and bats with crop dusters? Where are we headed, with this “green” ideology which destroys nature by calling for a new, unnecessary industrial revolution, and misleads people into thinking it’s for the greater good of the planet?

What an awful mess are these ideologues making of our world, under the pretext of saving it… The wind industry has never been able to prove it can achieve its goal of significantly reducing harmful emissions. The wind’s intermittency stands in its way. The German experience is far from being conclusive in this regard, to say the least (29). A few years from now, when all the expensive tinkering will have failed (more power lines, international connections, smart meters, giant batteries, reservoirs and pumping stations, etc.), the Germans will have to face the harsh reality: wind intermittency has no economically viable solution.

Independent engineers keep repeating it (30), but stubborn governments are not listening. Through the famous “revolving door” of politics, wind power subsidies help finance political parties. Thus, cutting subsidies would be suicide for the party that would decide to do so (30). The wind industry clearly calls the shots, be it in Canberra, Copenhagen, London, Berlin, Paris or Washington.

The renewable energy bubble has burst in Spain and other southern European countries. It occurred when the cost of subsidies became unaffordable, i.e. when these countries became technically bankrupt and HAD to cut down on government expenses. When this happened, the so-called “green jobs” vanished. The countries were left with households impoverished by the high cost of “renewable” electricity. Some companies relocated abroad due to this cost, or are contemplating doing so. Tourists looking for nature, landscapes and relaxation choose other destinations. In the countryside, residents are poorer as their homes are worth a fraction of their normal value. Many live unhappy lives because of the Wind Turbine Syndrome, shorter too as they suffer chronically from high levels of cortisol. As for the birds, they keep being chopped up year after year…

Mark Duchamp
Chairman, World Council for Nature
Tél: +34 693 643 736 wcfn@live.com

References:

1) –http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/2d42fcbd-31ea-4739-b109-b420571338a3/files/wind-farm-bird-risk.pdf page 32 of TWTE modelling study

2) – http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/deaths-of-rare-eagles-rise-20101116-17vy7.html

3) –http://www.iberica2000.org/documents/eolica/BIRD_MORTALITY/Yaloak_South_Debus_comments.pdf

4) – http://www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=4382

5) –http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/news/national/wind-farm-turbines-take-toll-on-birds-of-prey/story-fnkfnspy-1227066199577

(6) – http://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/2007/03/19/01008-20070319ARTFIG90140-l_effet_des_eoliennes_sur_les_oiseaux.php

(7) –http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.260/abstract

(8) – (Koop B., 1997. Vogelzug und Windenergieplanung. Beispiele für Auswirkungen aus dem Kreis Plön (Schleswig-Holstein). Naturschutz und Landschaftsplanung 29 (7): 202-207).

(9) –http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/releases/spanish-wind-farms-kill-6-to-18-million-birds-bats-a-year.html

(10) –http://www.iberica2000.org/documents/EOLICA/REPORTS/Dave_Sterner_2002.pdfPage 12, 1er paragraphe.

(11) –http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_S%C3%A1nchez_P%C3%A9rez

(12) – http://wcfn.org/2013/07/24/biodiversity-alert/

(13) – Some of the eagles killed by wind turbines (tip of the iceberg)
http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=3071 – Last updated in 2006

– Some of the ospreys killed by wind turbines (tip of the iceberg)
http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/843-2.html

– Effects on red kites
http://rapaces.lpo.fr/sites/default/files/milan-royal/63/actesmilan150.pdf (pages 96, 97).

(14) – Study “Action on multiple fronts, illegal poisoning and wind farm planning, is required to reverse the decline of the Egyptian vulture in southern Spain”
Ana Sanz-Aguilar, José Antonio Sánchez-Zapata, Martina Carrete, José Ramón Benítez, Enrique Ávila, Rafael Arenas f, José Antonio Donázar (a).
Study published on April 21 2015 by ELSEVIER, Biological Conservation, Volume 187, July 2015, pages 10–18
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320715001408

(15) – –https://savetheeagles.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/raptors-attracted-to-windfarms-2/

(16) – The Shame of Scotland:http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=3426
See –> ” 3 . THE CORE RANGE MANIPULATION ”

(17) – http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=4313
See –> ” 4 – The precedent of Challicum Hills ”

(18) – https://www.seo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/MANUAL-MOLINOS-VERSION-31_WEB.pdf
See –> Annex II, pages 106 and 107
Literature review of recommended buffer zones and sizes of home range for eagles and other raptors.

(19) –https://conseilmondialpourlanature.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lpo-et-systemes-de-dissuasion-avienne/

(20) – http://wcfn.org/2015/04/22/huge-wind-farm-corruption-scandal-in-spain/

(21) –http://www.aude.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/Etude_d_impacts_CVO_21-06-2013_Partie2_cle55bcf8.pdf
See –> page 89

(22) –
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2743#.VU4hv_ntmkp

(23) –http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4186828/

(24) – VIDEO http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/bats-struck-by-wind-turbines.html

(25) – VIDEO http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/vulture-struck-by-wind-turbine.html

(26) – VIDEO http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/vultures-killed-videos.html

(27) – http://bbop.forest-trends.org/

(28) –http://www.iberica2000.org/Documents/eolica/BIRD_MORTALITY/Critique_Beinn_an_Tuirc_report.rtf

(29) –
http://online.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602 Available upon request to wcfn@live.com

(30) – http://www.epaw.org/documents.php?lang=en&matter=backup

(31) – http://en.friends-against-wind.org/realities/windfarms-are-only-good-for-financing-political-parties

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Windpushers Lie about CO2 Abatement from Wind Turbines. Top Physics Professor Disputes Their Claims.

May 16, 2015May 16, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Industry’s CO2 Abatement Claims Smashed by Top Physics Professor – Dr Joseph Wheatley

May 17, 2015 by stopthesethings

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The mandatory RET has seen the cost of around $9 billion worth of Renewable Energy Certificates added to retail power prices and recovered from all Australian power consumers.

Under the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target, a further $45 to $55 billion will be transferred from power consumers to wind power outfits via the REC Tax/Subsidy over the next 17 years; depending on whether Ian “Macca” Macfarlane and his youthful ward, Gregory Hunt strike a deal with Labor to cut the ultimate annual target from 41,000 GWh to 33,000 GWh (see our post here). The ‘deal’ is aimed at saving their mates at Infigen, Vestas & Co – and is doomed to fail, in any event (see our postshere and here).

With that phenomenal cost being added to already spiralling power bills – there will be many more households who will be unable to afford power; adding to the tens of thousands of homes already deprived of what was once a basic necessity of (a decent) life. And thousands more destined to suffer “energy poverty” as they find themselves forced to choose between heating (or cooling) and eating:

Victoria’s Wind Rush sees 34,000 Households Chopped from the Power Grid

Casualties of South Australia’s Wind Power Debacle Mount: Thousands Can’t Afford Power

If our political betters in Canberra don’t get a grip and line up to kill the LRET very soon – in less than a decade – Australia will have created an entrenched energy underclass, dividing Australian society into energy “haves” and “have-nots”.

For a taste of an escalating social welfare disaster, here are articles from Queensland (click here); Victoria (click here); South Australia (click here); and New South Wales (click here).

There’s something deeply troubling about thousands of Australian households descending into gloom after dark – unable to afford the power needed for electric lighting; or troubling, at least, for those with a social conscience.

The ONLY justification for the massive stream of subsidies filched from power consumers and directed to wind power outfits is the claim that wind power reduces CO2 emissions in the electricity sector and, therefore, provides a solution to climate change (or what used to be called “global warming”). The former proposition is a proven fallacy (seeour post here). And, because the planet hasn’t reached boiling point (in bitter defiance of the IPCC’s models), the once concrete relationship between CO2 emissions and increasing global temperature now seems murky, at best.

Claiming the “global warming” moral high ground, wind power proponents continue to blindly chant the mantra that wind power reduces CO2 emissions – although they rarely, if ever, talk about the actual cost of the claimed reductions. Probably because there are, in fact, no reductions.

STT has focused on the fact that industrial scale wind power does not – and will never – reduce CO2 emissions simply because it is intermittent; being delivered at crazy, random intervals, such that 100% of its capacity must be backed up 100% of the time by fossil fuel generation sources (see our post here). Accordingly, we call it an environmental fraud.

Because wind power fails to deliver on its primary claim (and the wind industry’s only reason for existence) the $billions in subsidies purloined from taxpayers and power consumers have been received on an utterly false premise. Accordingly, we call it an economic fraud. Wind power, whichever way you slice it, is not, and will never be, a meaningful power generation source.

With that in mind, power consumers and taxpayers are clearly entitled to ask whether the subsidies received by wind power generators represent a cost-effective means of reducing CO2 emissions; if, indeed, there is any such reduction at all.

One such group is the Association for Research of Renewable Energy in Australia (ARREA): a band of hard-hitting, pro-farming and pro-community advocates, with a mission to ensure Australia gets the sensible energy policy it needs. Rather than the present policy fiasco, foisted on power consumers and rural communities by eco-fascist nutjobs – that wouldn’t know the first thing about markets and/or power generation – and the rent-seekers from the wind industry and its parasites that profit from the useful idiots they pay handsomely to run cover on their behalf: like yes2-ruining-us, GetUp!, the Climate Speculator and ruin-economy.

On that score, ARREA’s latest effort is to put some facts before the Senate Inquiry into the great wind power fraud – that kicked off in Portland on 30 March, and which continues at a clip this week in Cairns and Canberra. ARREA’s submission is available here: sub372_ARREA

ARREA has a very solid crack at the most colossal industry subsidy scheme in the history of the Commonwealth; and the fact that, despite the ridiculous cost of the LRET (set up as a $3.8 billion a year subsidy for wind power), there has never been any cost/benefit analysis of the policy in its 15 years of operation.

ARREA also takes a well-aimed swipe at the ludicrous claims by the wind industry that each and every MWh of wind power dispatched to the grid results in the abatement (or reduction) of 1 tonne of CO2 gas in the electricity generation sector.

It’s that relationship that is said to justify – what Greg Hunt calls – the “massive $93 per tonne carbon tax” imposed on all Australian power consumers under the LRET (see our post here).

Under the LRET, a REC is issued for each MWh of wind power dispatched to the grid, on the assumption that it in fact reduces or abates 1 tonne of CO2, that would otherwise be emitted by a conventional generator. The figure of $93 talked about by Hunt as a 1 “tonne carbon tax” is the full cost of a REC, that will be reached when the shortfall penalty starts to apply: the full cost of the REC is added to retail power bills.

STT hears that young Greg has taken to arguing that there is no such assumption: his argument appears to be that a REC is issued for a MWh of wind power, irrespective of whether any CO2 is abated elsewhere in the electricity sector; which simply begs the question as to what Australians are getting for their $93 per MWh electricity tax? Hmmm …

ARREA’s submission also picks up on the work done by Dr Joseph Wheatley, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in condensed matter physics from Princeton University. Here’s a little primer on Dr Wheatley’s submission from Graham Lloyd.

Emission cuts due to wind power ‘not so big as claimed’
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
16 May 2015

Carbon dioxide emissions savings from wind turbines were 20 per cent less than claimed, leading to the overpayment of renewable energy certificates worth about $70 million last year, according to an international analysis of Australia’s national electricity market.

The study found wind farm inefficiencies were likely to grow as more turbines were added to the grid under the renewable energy target.

Joseph Wheatley analysed the output of 256 generators connected to the national electricity market last year. His research, funded by private individuals through the Association for Research of Renewable Energy in Australia, found that while wind provided 4.5 per cent of national electricity generation, it reduced emissions by only 3.5 per cent.

“This represents a significant loss of effectiveness,” Dr Wheatley said. His research found the possibility that wind power was 100 per cent effective in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, as is the current basis for issuing renewable energy certificates, was not supported by evidence.

“The evidence in this study suggests that effectiveness in the national electricity market would fall to less than 70 per cent if the proportion of energy provided by wind is doubled from 2014 levels,” the report says.

Dr Wheatley said more data was needed on actual fuel consumption at coal-fired power stations but there were several reasons for the inefficiencies of wind in abating emissions.

“Lower emissions gas and black-coal plant were displaced more than brown-coal plant,” he said. “Displaced thermal generators operating under part load were less efficient on average and wind power also tended to be subject to larger system losses.”

Dr Wheatley is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in condensed matter physics from Princeton University. He has worked as a researcher at Cambridge University. A report of his findings has been submitted to the Senate inquiry into wind turbines and health issues.

The Clean Energy Council said it would not respond to the detailed findings in Dr Wheatley’s paper. But Clean Energy Council policy director Russell Marsh said “the vast majority of Australians support renewable energy and would be better served by objective scientific analysis rather than a group of grumblers brainstorming imaginary problems”.

ARREA is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2013 by a group of senior businessmen including former liquidator, Tony Hodgson. ARREA spokesman Rodd Pahl said the group believed “the behaviour of wind farm companies and the level of subsidies they are given is the result of bad policy settings and sloppy administration”.
The Australian

Nice ‘work’ there from wind industry spruiker, “Rusty” Marsh!

STT followers will remember Rusty as the creator of the “Atari defence“, which he conjured up in answer to the highly relevant work done by NASA in the 1980s, that proved the direct causal relationship between turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound and adverse health effects, and which Rusty and his ilk have spent 30 years covering up, ever since (see our post here).

Now, Rusty appears to be more than just a little flummoxed by the hard-hitting qualifications of Jo Wheatley and what he has to say. So, as is the wind industry fashion, he sets out to attack the boys at ARREA, instead. Clever!

Jo Wheatley’s submission to the Senate Inquiry is available here:sub348_Wheatley

STT thinks that Dr Wheatley is on the right track – he’s travelled the path before (see his paper on the Irish situation here).

However, his findings are estimates, based on assumptions, rather than a complete set of actual fuel use data. As is noted in the piece above, where Dr Wheatley says: “more data was needed on actual fuel consumption at coal-fired power stations”. For that reason, his finding that the chaotic delivery of wind power connected to a coal/gas fired grid might reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector as a whole is a form of polite flattery.

The coal and gas generators have never been that keen to hand over their fuel use data; the ‘carbon’ tax set up under the Green/Labor alliance would have seen them liable for a much greater whack if they did. And, with the threat of such a tax always on the horizon, they have no incentive in opening their fuel use books to public scrutiny, any time soon.

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And it was for that reason that, STT Champion, Hamish Cumming ran into a brick wall, as he set about thumping the wind industry’s wild claims about CO2 abatement. Hamish – a farmer and grazier and engineer with 20 years of international experience – has already given evidence to the Inquiry about the wind industry’s bogus CO2 abatement claims:

Senator LEYONHJELM: Thank you. I have a couple more questions, and then I will give someone else a go. Mr Cumming, in your submission you say that the Loy Yang A power station annual report shows a rising carbon intensity, which is increasing proportionally to the increase in wind turbine output. Why is this so?

Mr Cumming: If you look through the annual reports from 2005 report through to about 2013 you will see that carbon intensity has continued to rise. Off the top of my head, it was something like 1.14 tonnes of carbon per megawatt and it is currently running at about 1.35. If you look at all the power stations, you will see where you can get the information – it is very hard to get some of it – and you will see that it is happening across the board, even in Queensland.

The Queensland power stations are the same. It is all to do with backing up wind farms and making the grid safe so that it will not blackout. The more wind farms that come on, the higher the backup has to be. In 2005, it was something like 600 megawatts and now it is over 1,000. Nothing has changed in the grid. In fact, demand is less. The reasons for having it should be less. Industry is less. And it is all in line with wind farms coming on line.

Senator LEYONHJELM: So you think Loy Yang, Yallourn and Hazelwood burn more coal now than prior to the penetration of wind energy capacity into the grid?

Mr Cumming: Very much so. The data for Loy Yang is very clear and very public – much to their horror when I point it out to them. Now they have even changed the way they do their carbon intensity calculation. They have removed a third of the input data to try and make it look smaller, but it is very public for Loy Yang.

If you look at the savings that they have made in thermal efficiency and other in-house savings of performance of the plant and then you look at the coal-led burning, there is a gap for Loy Yang of six million tonnes of coal a year today versus 2005.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Did you hear the evidence of Pacific Hydro this morning?

Mr Cumming: No. I was not here for that, sorry.

Senator LEYONHJELM: They basically put a completely alternative point of view to us on that.

Mr Cumming: Did he use Loy Yang’s annual reports and public data?

Senator LEYONHJELM: He did not provide any data. The view was simply that there was no increase in spinning capacity.

Mr Cumming: That is incorrect. You have to look at the documents that the industry runs on. There is a guy called Hugh Saddler, who works for Pitt & Sherry. He does what are called CEDEX reports, ACIL Tasman reports. That is what the industry is always based on. All the emissions, all the RECs – everything – is based on that.

It is all reverse calculated. It is all calculated from what power is sold through theoretical thermal efficiency and data. It has a number of errors in it, including a seven per cent error for the Yallourn power station. When I highlighted this to them, they said, yes, they know. It is the closest thing they have got, whereas carbon intensity is actual fuel burnt. You cannot get away from it.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Do you think the Clean Energy Regulator’s reports of emissions reductions are accurate?

Mr Cumming: No, not at all.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Why is that?

Mr Cumming: Because they are relying on the CEDEX reports and the ACIL Tasman reports and those are all based on reverse calculation. None of it is based on fact. The fact has to come from the actual carbon, the actual fuel burnt –

Senator LEYONHJELM: The actual fuel burnt?

Mr Cumming: The actual fuel burnt. If you have actual fuel burnt for a half-hour period and then you use the AEMO data for the same half-hour period, you can see exactly what is happening.

And this was highlighted in my submission on 4 July 2013, when Macarthur, Lake Bonney and another one went off line at the same time. The power was instantly picked up, without a flicker of a light bulb, without down time of any industry. It was picked up by New South Wales and Queensland coal-fired power stations – 450 megawatts. That is a massive amount of power. It is bigger than the largest Victorian single generating plant, and it was picked up instantly. The only way they can do that is if they are burning the coal already and venting for steam as backup. None of that is covered in the reports that are used officially by government.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Do you have a view on how effectively the Clean Energy Regulator is performing its legislated responsibilities?

Mr Cumming: My personal belief is that they cannot perform their responsibilities if they are not using facts. If they are using reverse calculated data estimates, they cannot perform their responsibilities. They have got to get the facts.

Senator LEYONHJELM: What would you do? Would you broaden their responsibilities or change the way they calculate what they are supposed to calculate already?

Mr Cumming: I would change the rules so that they have to use base data from the entire power industry. That will force the generators to provide the hourly coal feed, gas feed, fuel feed data.

At the moment there is no regulation to enforce those companies to provide the data – and it is not in their interests to because it affects how they get paid. If they tell the truth about what they are doing then the investors are not going to allow AGL to buy more wind farms or build more wind farms when AGL owns Loy Yang A. It is the same with the other power stations. They all own wind farms, power stations and coal seam gas. It is in none of their interests to tell the truth.

Hansard, 30 March 2015

Hamish hits the bulls-eye! The actual fuel use data needed to make any definitive statement on the purported ability of wind power to reduce CO2 emissions just simply isn’t made available, in order to protect the commercial interests of all parties involved. However, getting at that data is very much on the Senate Inquiry’s radar.

No wonder the wind industry and its spruikers, like the CEC’s Rusty Marsh are working in a pool of cold sweat, as they try to deflect, diminish, deny and otherwise attempt to throw cold water on the work of ARREA; and the likes of Jo Wheatley and Hamish Cumming.

STT predicts that this week will see the wind industry, its parasites, spruikers and their institutional aiders and abetters enter a new world of pain, as the Senators on the Inquiry start smacking into the lies, treachery and deceit, that defines the greatest fraud of all time, with an unparalleled zeal for the task.

STT will bring you blow-by-blow descriptions of the carnage; it won’t be pretty, but, in a “let’s get it over with”, kind of way, it will be fun.

“Bring it on”, as the REAL contenders say.

Human-hating Eco-fascists Want to Send Us Back to the Dark Ages!

May 16, 2015May 16, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Fossil Fuel-Free Fantasy: Robert Bryce Hammers Harvard’s Human-Hating Ecofascist Hit Squad

May 16, 2015 by stopthesethings

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Robert Bryce picked the wind power fraud for what it is from the very beginning.

In his 2010 book “Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future” (Public Affairs), Bryce skewered every one of the myths relied upon by the wind industry to peddle its wares; and went on to predict the massive benefits of the US shale gas revolution – in terms of both cheap energy – operating as a boost to a flagging economy – and as a method of reducing CO2 emissions in the electricity sector.

We’ve covered some of his recent writings on US energy policy and the wind power fraud (see our posts here and here and here).

Bryce recently published another cracking book “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong” (Public Affairs) that loads up on the nonsense that is US energy policy today: we covered a review of Bryce’s latest by the New York Timesin this post.

Robert also gave a brilliant lecture here last year, which is worth revisiting, as the lunatics from Getup! & Co work themselves into an astroturfing eco-frenzy selling (at a handsome mark-up – worth over $1 million, so far) the myth that the world can happily run on millions of giant fans and a lot of ‘luck’ (such as the wind Gods agreeing to blow at a constant 11m/s 24 x 365, say):

Robert Bryce: Want to live in Stone-Age Poverty? Then tie your future to Wind Power

In the post above, Robert lays out the key arguments as to why cheap, reliable sparks are critical to the growth, wealth and development of Nations.

While access to power is something we – in the developed world – smugly take for granted, for the billion or so at the bottom of the development heap it is the ONLY path out of poverty. And for those struggling to escape deprivation and darkness, the answer is most certainly not insanely expensive and unreliable wind power. To the contrary, reliable and affordable power is a guarantee of both wealth and freedom.

Energy policy has been over-run by “green” ideologues who are determined to ensure that the poorest remain that way by wedding the world to the fiction that wind power provides a meaningful answer to growing energy demand, while “solving” the climate change “problem”.

Robert picks up the theme in this piece from the National Review in response to the fantasy that the world could operate, as it does, on the strength of a friendly (occasional) breeze – and goes on to hammer the misanthropy of an intellectually dishonest elite, who would – on the strength of little more than an ideological whim – deprive the poorest on the planet that, which they happily take for granted.

The Environmentalists’ Civil War
National Review
Robert Bryce
17 April 2015

It’s a manifesto smackdown, a fight among the members of the green Left for the intellectual and moral high ground. It’s also a fight that reflects the growing schism within American environmentalism. On one side are the pro-energy, pro-density humanists. They call themselves ecomodernists and are led by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist, Oakland-based environmental group. On Wednesday, it released what it describes as an “ecomodernist manifesto,” a document that, at root, states the obvious: Economic development is essential for environmental protection.

On the opposite side are the anti-energy, pro-sprawl absolutists. Their views are evident in the ongoing protests this week in Harvard Yard. A group called Divest Harvard is pushing the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, to divest the school’s $36 billion endowment of any investments in companies that provide coal, oil, and natural gas to consumers. This group’s manifesto, issued in February, demonizes energy use.

The absolutists like to use the squishy term “climate justice.” They believe that the threat of climate change trumps all other concerns, including the welfare of people living in energy poverty. For the absolutists, the only path to salvation is through the exclusive use of renewable energy. And in that regard, Divest Harvard falls smack in the middle of mainstream liberal-left environmentalism in America.

The anti-energy, pro-sprawl absolutists — a designation that, in my view, fits the Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, and Natural Resources Defense Council — are anti-nuclear, anti-hydrocarbon, and anti-hydraulic fracturing. They routinely peddle slogans such as “fossil-free” and continually claim that we can rely solely on increased efficiency and renewable energy.

They push these claims despite overwhelming evidence from Germany and Japan that shuttering nuclear power plants and relying too much on renewables results in higher electricity prices and decreased reliability. (For more on that, see this April 13 Reuters piece about the potential shuttering of dozens of conventional power plants in Germany.)

The absolutists are anti-energy. In a Divest Harvard video posted on YouTube, the group stated that its goal is to “stigmatize the fossil fuel industry.” The absolutists try to do that all the time. Just last week, the Sierra Club announced the expansion of its “beyond coal” campaign.

The group’s backers — who include former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg — have pledged some $60 million in funding for the effort, which aims to shutter half of U.S. coal plants by 2017.

Celebrating the fundraising effort, the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, declared, “Dirty, outdated, deadly coal is a thing of the past.” Never mind that coal remains the world’s fastest-growing source of energy and that it has been the fastest-growing source of energy since 1973. Never mind that countries from Germany to Bangladesh are building hundreds of gigawatts of coal-fired power plants. Never mind that the United States has more coal reserves than any other country does. Coal must be stigmatized.

Based on the logic that the Sierra Club and Divest Harvard put forward, companies such as Coal India Limited must be stigmatized. Coal India is deemed untouchable because it provides coal to generation stations in a poverty-stricken country that gets about 70 percent of its power from coal. Coal India provides fuel to 82 of India’s 86 coal-fired generators. Therefore, it must be stigmatized. Never mind that more than 300 million Indians — a group approximately equal to the entire population of the United States — lack access to electricity.

To be clear, the absolutists at Divest Harvard don’t mention Coal India in their manifesto. But the open letter published in mid-February and signed by about three dozen Harvard graduates — including 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author Susan Faludi, former U.S. senator Tim Wirth, and actress Natalie Portman — condemns investment in what it calls the “dirtiest energy companies on the planet.”

The manifesto lays bare Divest Harvard’s anti-human outlook. They write: “Global warming is the greatest threat the planet faces . . . . This issue demands we all make changes to business as usual — especially those of us who have prospered from the systems driving climate change.”

Who might be included in “those of us who have prospered” from the use of coal, oil, and natural gas — fuels that, when burned, emit carbon dioxide and therefore contribute to climate change? My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it would include nearly every person in America, (approximately 319 million), as well as anyone who has ever made money by taking a car, bus, plane, or ship to work, baked a loaf of bread, or delivered a piano. In all, the number of who’ve prospered thanks to the availability of hydrocarbons probably totals 3 billion to 4 billion people.

Despite energy poverty that afflicts hundreds of millions of people in countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia (all of which, by the way, are in the process of adding huge amounts of new coal-fired generation capacity), the absolutists equate energy use with evil.

In their February manifesto, the absolutists claim that selling the Harvard’s investments in hydrocarbon producers will make the school “accountable for the future” and that the school should divest because “Harvard eventually divested from apartheid, from tobacco, and from the genocide in Darfur.”

By comparing energy producers (and therefore, energy consumers) with the people involved in racist repression and mass murder, the absolutists are, in effect, saying that consumers who use gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity are as morally bankrupt as those who aided racial repression and mass murder.

This is nonsense on stilts. Even if the divestment push at Harvard were to succeed — and dozens of other institutions were to follow suit — it wouldn’t halt the consumption of any hydrocarbons. It won’t give us a “safe climate.” The investments that Harvard sells will simply be purchased by another entity.

To argue that divestment of companies that produce coal, oil, and natural gas will make a difference on climate change is akin to arguing that if investors sell their equity in a McDonalds or Burger King franchise, hungry people will quit buying cheeseburgers.

The divestment movement is predicated on the fantastical assumption that we humans can, as the organizers of 350.org have repeatedly claimed, live “fossil free.” And they continue to claim, wrongly, that the world can be run on nothing more than solar panels and wind turbines.

The absolutists claim that we only need to “do the math” to understand their position. Okay. Let’s do some math. And by doing so, we will show how the absolutists favor sprawl and therefore the destruction of the very environment they say they want to protect.

To make it easy on the Harvard grads, let’s focus solely on Massachusetts, which consumes about 56 terawatt-hours (1 terawatt-hour is equal to 1 trillion watt-hours) of electricity per year. To create that much electricity solely with wind energy would require, in rough terms, about 31 gigawatts of wind-energy capacity. (The annual productivity of wind energy, based on the BP Statistical Review 2014, is 1.8 terawatt-hours per gigawatt of capacity. That’s the average over nine years, from 2005 to 2013.)

The power density of wind energy — as I have repeatedly proven — is 1 watt per square meter. Therefore, the land area needed to produce that much renewable electricity would total about 31 billion square meters or 31,000 square kilometers, which is about 12,000 square miles. Put another way, just to meet electricity demand in Massachusetts with wind energy would require an area larger than the state itself, which, including water area, covers about 27,000 square kilometers, or 10,500 square miles.

And remember, these calculations ignore the essentiality of oil for transportation and home heating. The latter is important because about 30 percent of all Bay State residents rely on heating oil to stay warm in the winter. Staying warm can be a challenge in the Boston area, which got about 100 inches of snow this past winter.

The absolutist, pro-sprawl outlook touted by McKibben and his allies provides a stark contrast to the pro-human outlook the ecomodernists support. Perhaps the key line of their manifesto is in the concluding sentence, which says they want to “achieve universal human dignity on a biodiverse and thriving planet.”

Toward that end, the 18 signers of the manifesto — a group that includes Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, as well as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, and the University of Tasmania’s Barry Brook — support increased energy use. They note, rightly: “Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world’s people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives.” That’s it exactly.

While the absolutists want one of America’s most prestigious universities to sell some of its investments — with the only goal being to stigmatize the world’s biggest and single most important business — the ecomodernists are arguing not only that greater global energy consumption is inevitable, but that it’s good, that more energy use will allow more people in the developing world to live fuller, freer lives.

As part of that, they are adding, rightly, that nuclear energy must be a central element of climate policy if we are going to reduce the rate of growth in global carbon dioxide emissions. The ecomodernists oppose sprawl. Their manifesto talks of the need to intensify “many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”

Increasing density, they continue, “is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts.” The absolutists don’t have any credible plans for producing the vast quantities of energy the world demands. They not only ignore energy poverty in the developing world, they also have worked to block the American government from providing any financing for coal-fired power plants in developing counties. (See my 2013 piece on that issue here.)

At the same time, they promote landscape and wildlife-destroying schemes such as wind energy that will result in unprecedented sprawl. That’s the very same energy sprawl that property owners all over the world are objecting to. (Among the property owners who don’t want wind turbines near their property, of course, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Divest Harvard proponent vociferously objected to the Cape Wind project, the now-dead proposal to install more than a hundred 440-foot-high turbines in Nantucket Sound, near the Kennedy family’s vacation compound at Hyannisport.)

The manifesto smackdown exposes our need to rethink what it means to be an environmentalist. The ecomodernists have laid out a thoughtful position paper that dares the absolutists to go beyond sloganeering and stigmatizing. I will be pleasantly surprised if Divest Harvard, 350.org, Sierra Club, and their allies respond to that dare. But I’m not holding my breath.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong.
National Review

A solid analysis from go to whoa, as we’ve come to expect from Robert. What he does better than most is to throw the spotlight on the malign aspects of an ideology that has all the hallmarks of an insidious, quasi-religious cult.

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The concept that one can – by ticking a box, or signing up to an outfit like GetUp! etc – become “fossil-fuel-free”, is up there with belief in the tooth fairy or Father Christmas; which requires an intellect so soggy that it hasn’t got the ability to connect the creation and production of things – like the steel and aluminium in their hipster, urban commuting devices – with the fuel and resources incorporated in them, or needed to make them.

It’s a point well made by Ian Plimer in his book, Not For Greens, available from News Weekly Books (see our post here).

The worship of wind power also runs into the same paradox, for the “faithful”.

Far from being an antidote to the fossil fuels they dread, and are at pains to publicly eschew, fossil fuel producers are delighted with the opportunity to make wild profits, on the back of a meaningless power source, that requires 100% of its capacity to be backed up 100% of the time with conventional generation sources, which, in practical effect, means coal, gas and diesel:

Why Coal Miners, Oil and Gas Producers Simply Love Wind Power

What people like Plimer and Bryce do so well is throw a little reality back at the fantasists, who are happy to live with every modern convenience, product and device made possible by oil, gas and coal. But, in the same breath, are quick to deny the lifestyle, they take for granted, to anyone, anywhere in the world with the simple human ambition to live just a little better than their parents did. “Green” hypocrisy is hardly a crime (more a symptom of intellectual infancy, really); but when its energy impoverished victims run into the millions, it gets mighty close; and becomes even harder to defend, on any level.

Advice that Inspired me, To Fight The Windpushers, With Everything I Have In me!

May 14, 2015 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

How to Fight the Big Wind Onslaught

Calvin Luther Martin, January 2009

Yesterday I turned 61. I’ve been fighting the wind bastards well over 4 years. Four years devoted to almost nothing else. Put a big book on hold with Yale Univ. Press for this. In those years I’ve answered thousands of emails from people around the world. Japan. Cyprus. Norway. Sweden. Czechoslovakia. Australia. New Zealand. Ireland. England. Wales. France. Canada. Many states of the Union. On and on.

In those years (which included years of fighting the wind thugs in three or four different iterations) in my backyard and beating the sons of bitches (at least for now), I’ve learned some valuable lessons. I oughta write a book. Consider this the first installment of that book.

I am no longer an academic. I’m a writer. Writers write to convey something in the most appropriate language for the matter at hand. For wind energy the most appropriate language is profanity, vulgarity, and obscenity. The louder the better. These are not honorable people. Wind energy is not an honorable enterprise.

Big Wind is obscene, profane, and vulgar.

Okay, rough draft of book:

Chapter 1. Courtesy doesn’t work.

Chapter 2. Questions don’t work. Stop going to meetings and asking questions. Problem is, you’re asking questions of the wind sharks. This is akin to the hens asking questions of the foxes who are about to pounce on the henhouse. Wake up!

Second, stop expressing your concerns at meetings. Weenie word. Your biggest rhetorical enemy in this fight is this word, concerns. Drop it! The media (see below) loves to describe you as concerned. (“The hens expressed some concerns to the foxes.”) Screw concerned and start getting angry and defiant. And stop asking the windies questions and start informing them of the fact they and their goddam monster turbines and substations are not welcome in town. This is the your conversation with them: Get the hell out of Dodge!

Chapter 3. Real evidence doesn’t work. The wind sharks fabricate their own, using whorish little companies to perform noise measurements and do environmental impact studies, including bird and bat studies. Companies often consisting of four guys with sweaty balls and BS degrees from nondescript bullshit state colleges, from which they graduated three years ago. But they’ve got a website and stationery and PO Box — and they’re rarin’ to get those permits for Big Wind. Give me a break!

Chapter 4. Meetings with state senators, governors, premiers, department heads, county commissioners, the media, other various and assorted lawmakers — don’t work.

Chapter 5. Following the rules at public meetings does not work. The meetings are (a) a charade, (b) a farce, (c) a hoax, and (d) altogether a mockery of public participation. The fix has already been made, the deal bought and paid for. Refuse to be silenced by Robert’s Rules of Order. Screw Roberts! Major Henry Martyn Robert never had to abandon his home to a wind turbine!

Chapter 6. Lawsuits don’t work. They might appear to initially, but ultimately, at some level of court, they fail. With very few exceptions, lawyers and lawsuits are a waste of time, money, and mostly strategic advantage. You’re barking up the wrong tree with a lawyer. Your town board and county commissioners are poised and prepared for you to take them on legally; they’ve got attorneys on retainer and they can swallow you whole in the byzantine legal process.

Don’t bother going down that road. Dr. Martin Luther King (see below) didn’t use lawyers. Neither did Gandhi, who was a trained lawyer. Wrong strategy. If you think the Big Wind Onslaught is not on the scale of a Gandhi and King, but just a minor issue — think again. I suggest you do some reading on the English Enclosure Movement. Look for parallels. The Big Wind Onslaught is a big deal. Stop imagining otherwise. This from a (retired) professional historian (see attached c.v.).

Chapter 7. Wind energy is bullshit. Nitwits who begin their case by telling the local newspaper, “Well, Gee, we fully support renewable energy, including wind energy, and we feel wind turbines are marvelous so long as they’re placed in the right spot” — nitwits who start off their campaign with this are doomed. Wind energy, folks, is horseshit. From beginning to end. Fairy Godmother economics. Right up there with the Easter Bunny. This is 4.5 years of reading thousands of documents, yes, much of it on the physics and economics of wind energy. (By the way, my BA is in science and I did several years of graduate training in hard core science. Science doesn’t scare me.) Wind energy, when subjected to Physics 101, falls apart. It’s laughable. Buy a textbook in introductory physics. Start reading.

Chapter 8. Wind energy works because of (a) carbon credits (an unspeakable scam), (b) federal and state subsidies of various sorts, (c) a slow bleed from your monthly energy bill (check it out), (d) PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) arrangements with communities, and (e) huge tax write-offs for wind investors, including big Wall Street banks. It does not work because it is economically feasible — it’s not — or because it produces meaningful electricity — it does not. And if I hear that it “gets us off foreign oil” I’m gonna scream. For that statement, you need not a beginning physics text, you need your head examined.

Chapter 9. Wind energy companies are bullshit. I guarantee you, you know virtually nothing about that wind company that’s been schmoozing your town board. You know nothing about their financial records, background, credit, or trustworthiness. Nothing. In fact, you know nothing about 98% of their personnel, including what they like to call the Principals. (You will love the pretentious names they bestow on themselves.) These people just drop out of the sky — like snake oil salesmen in the Old West. No different. They’re carnies, carpet baggers, grifters, and cons. All of ’em. Including more than a few Enron re-treads. Amazing, in fact, how many are from Ireland. (I’m Irish.) To treat these people with respect is hilarious. Like treating the Three Stooges-who-turn-out-to-be-your executioner with respect. One more thing: most of these companies are 200% leveraged (no money of their own).

Chapter 10. Most of the jerks who sign wind leases either (a) don’t live there, or (b) if they do, their property’s big enough they make sure those turbines are next to your house, not theirs, or (c) they’re so stupid and such losers and so desperate for money they’d sell their first-born for several grand a year. Successful, smart farmers don’t sign wind leases. Except for a slight modification. It’s called the Domino Principle. It’s insidious. Consider Farmer Brown. He’s smart, he’s successful. But he’s surrounded by Farmers Jones, Smith, and Martin — all of whom are losers and pikers. Jones, Smith, and Martin have signed on with the windies. Brown realizes he’s gonna be looking at these damn things and listening to them whether he “hosts” them or not. So he turns to Hortense, the wife, “Jeez honey, we might as well have a couple and make some money, too, since we’re gonna have to be dealing with these friggin things anyhow.” Nasty, yes. Remember, it’s called the Domino Principle. Windies play this game every day. It’s their favorite strategy for winning the hearts and minds of the community.

Chapter 11. We need to take a look at Economics 101. This is a long one. I apologize. America (insert any nation here, as you wish) is in a profound recession. Profound in the sense it has exposed a systemic, structural flaw within the nation’s economy. A strong argument can be made that America’s economy has for decades (probably since WWII) run on “bubbles.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the “bubble” ratio in the overall economy has grown since WWII.

The most recent bubble, the housing bubble, accounted for a surprisingly large part of the nation’s economy. To wit, people used their homes as piggy banks, and Wall Street rode this bubble (mixing metaphors, but we’ll let it pass).

My point is for you to notice that at the bottom of a bubble is something which appears to have real value. Your house. Or that house you’re thinking of buying over there and which you know will increase dramatically in value, real quick. (Remember, the USA no longer has a gold standard, so gold ain’t it.) There was a whole financial sand castle built on the back of your house. But, alas, the sea inexorably came in and washed away the sand castle (Wall Street, mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial), and your house has gone back to being worth far less than you dreamed it was. (Or your house is on its way to readjusting to its more realistic value. May not have reached that level yet.)

Now listen. We need another thing that gives the appearance of value. That seems tangible, solid, ubiquitous, and can somehow enter the nation’s financial account, funny numbers, Enron-esque imagination, and bizarre Wall Street lingo. And, on the back of this New Basis of Bubble we will build the Next Big Bubble.

I’m here to strongly suggest that your property value has become, and is becoming, the basis of the Next Big Bubble.

Consider Barbara Ashbee, in rural Ontario. You can read about her plight on the windturbinesyndrome.com website. Barbara’s a realtor, which makes this story even more poignant. Barbara and husband Dennis are just like you and me: our major investment is in our home and property. Notice this: she just had her property value stolen from her. Bam, just like that. Her property, to her, is now nearly worthless. Same with Daniel d’Entremont (Nova Scotia), Gerry Meyer (Wisconsin), Jane and Julian Davis (England), Charlie Porter (Missouri), Cheryl LeClair (New York State), and so on. Hundreds of people? Nope, thousands. Or more.

Now, think: Who just gained from Barbara Ashbee’s loss? The wind developer. Worthless wind power and worthless turbines have now acquired something worthwhile and real, something tangible, something that gives the appearance of value — the value of your property (even though you are not “hosting” turbines) and, even more so, the value of “host” properties.

More than this, wind companies now control the value of whole communities. Churubusco, NY (next door to me), Chateaugay, NY (next door to me), Bellmont, NY (next door to me), Ellenburg, NY (next door to me), Altona, NY (next door to me). All these communities have become (or are becoming) industrial wastelands — in my eyes and yours. But not so for wind developers and their stockholders and the banks that own them: this is now financially controlled and financially-manipulable land. Read those lease contracts.

Even without a contract your property value plunges when turbines go up in your community. Land use has now changed from “lovely rural bucolic I want to live here and raise my kids it’s so quiet and nights are dark and magical we’ve farmed this land for eight generations and I want to pass it on to my kids” to “I can’t stand living here I hate these turbines the noise drives me nuts and the spinning blades are horrible and the whole landscape looks surreal and nobody in his right mind would move here and my kids won’t live here when they grow up and dear God I pray the developer buys me out.”

In Enron and Wall Street economics, the value of your community — a value that has now shifted to Enron-spawned wind companies and Wall Street banker control — is something that can be traded, bought and sold, reassigned, financially speculated in, financially gambled with, sold as hedge funds, investments, preferred stock.

I’ll stop with this, since it gives you the gist of what I believe is happening. I admit I don’t have the details worked out fully, and one can certainly make corrections and additions and refinements to my argument, but I suspect you, dear reader, are creating the basis for the next bubble. The Renewable Energy Bubble (read, Wind Bubble), built on the stolen value of your land and your town’s value.

Anyhow, ponder this and consider that this forms yet another reason to stop being polite and cordial and reasonable with the wind/Wall Street sharks. Wall Street: You don’t believe me that big banks are heavily invested in that cutely-named wind company that’s moved into town? Better look harder, buddy.

Chapter 12. Given the last chapter, why on earth do you think any lawmaker or other government official or agency is going to listen to your pleas about not building wind turbines in your backyard? Are you nuts? Wind energy is the perfect storm, as I keep saying: it’s our solution to Global Warming, The Energy Crisis, Jobs, The Economy, The Recession, Environmentalism, Foreign Oil, General Electric’s Bottom Line, and Fill-in-the-Blank. (Note to Barbara Ashbee: Wind energy is the answer to Ontario Premier McGuinty’s most fervent wish and fantasy. Even Obama, clearly an intelligent man, has embraced Big Wind with the devotion of a Born Againer.)

One of the problems with nukes, by the way, is that they don’t provide a basis for a New Bubble: nuclear plants don’t rob millions of people of the value of their land, which land the wind developers in a weird sense now control (for trading and investment purposes).

I have been paying attention to the feverish activity of little wind companies going around and snapping up “wind leases” even as the bum economy prevents them from building “wind farms,” as yet, on those properties. One company in particular, whom I won’t name, has been working New England and the Midwest (now Minnesota) even as this company, to our eyes, appears to be bankrupt. Hmmm. Interesting.

(Here’s a tip to anyone unscrupulous reading this: Wanna get in on the ground floor of The Next Bubble? Form a bullshit wind energy company and start buying up wind leases which, I believe, also control underground rights. There you get into natural gas and fracking. Fracking? Look it up and be prepared to be horrified. Fracking is now about to move to the Marcellus Shale, NY State and indeed much of the Appalachian region, from the West and Southwest.)

Okay. What works, and the only thing that’s going to work, is . . .

Chapter 13. Civil disobedience. Use it imaginatively, floridly, boisterously, loudly, and as obnoxiously, extravagantly, creatively, and brilliantly as you possibly can. Start this weekend.

Here is exactly what I mean by civil disobedience. Signs, placards, banners, handbills, marches, demonstrations, picketing, shutting down public meetings both large and small and both high falutin’ and low falutin’, shouting matches, getting arrested for refusing to shut up and sit down. As Rosa Parks did, when she sparked the Civil Rights movement: you need to refuse to give up your seat to the wind bastard on the bus. Do this with the wind sharks and your town officers, all the way up to state and federal government.

Here is exactly what I don’t mean by civil disobedience: Breaking the law. Nor am I advocating violence. I detest violence. For me, violence is not only illegal; it’s abhorrent, it’s inelegant, and nothing can be stupider. It accomplishes nothing good. Ever. I say this as a former professor of history. I stand with Gandhi and M.L. King on this matter. My sympathies lie with Quakers, not jihadists.

I believe in working within the system, and the system includes the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

This is all you need. Add in the right to vote, by the way. Working within these parameters, apply what Martin Luther King in his letter from the Birmingham jail called direct action.

“The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation …. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action …. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored …. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

None of the public agencies and bureaucracies will take seriously any of your marvelous evidence about the follies and dangers of wind energy (including Nina Pierpont’s, or Rick James’s, or Glenn Schleede’s, or God’s for that matter) until — à la Martin Luther King — you demonstrate to them that they are going to have to take your evidence seriously.

The operative word is demonstrate. This is not done by reason or argument or a sense of fairness or justice. Sorry to disillusion you, and sorry to shoot down one of the cornerstones of academia: that “the truth will set you free” and “reason prevails over ignorance.” Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King all knew the vital word in their struggle was demonstrate.

Dr. King had plenty of sociological and economic and constitutional and statutory and even theological evidence in his briefcase — but it was going nowhere until he showed Alabama and the nation and the US Attorney General and Congress: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are all going to take my evidence of racism and Jim Crow and lynching and economic and political harassment and general disfranchisement very seriously, okay? And to drive home my point that you whities are gonna take the evidence seriously, we colored folks are gonna get in your face about it until you take us seriously.”

It’s precisely for this that he wound up in the Birmingham jail.

Let me rephrase. You can have all the Nina Pierponts and Rick James and Glenn Schleedes you want, yet they amount to nothing if you have failed to convince your audience (lawmakers) that they are going to have to take this seriously. This is the role of civil disobedience. Reason, meetings, arguments, fairness, justice: reliance on these will not and does not work. Civil disobedience. King’s “direct action.” Nonviolent tension that’s “so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door” to being listened to. This is the route to follow.

The wind developers and their shills? You will never convince them. They are not your audience. Don’t make the blunder of imagining them to be your audience, and don’t argue with them. Cut them out of the discourse! Don’t rise to them! The people whom you need to impress with your nonviolent tension are not the developers; it’s the lawmakers.

By the way, stop reading wind developer websites. These carpetbaggers are not your audience: I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s like reading the handbills distributed by snake oil salesmen at 19th-century carnivals. Why bother? For entertainment, yes. But for truth, use your brain. As in, “If it smells like a turd and looks like a turd and tastes like a turd, chances are it is.” Likewise, “if it sounds almost too good to be true: it is.”

The media? Simpering assholes who have all gone with the wind. (Don’t you love it when they interview the smilin’ smirkin’ salesman sayin’ “Them turbines, folks — why them turbines is gonna electrify 35,000 American homes” — except nobody mentions it’s only if the wind’s blowing 25-35 mph 24/7, 365 days a year. That’s my all-time favorite line, right after “Don’t you worry ’bout them turbines and noise. No louder than a hummin’ ‘frigerator, and God’s my witness!” Newspaper reporters always fall for this crap. Always. Everywhere.)

Anyhow, media. This is where you need to place large, costly, frequent ads in the local newspaper. And start your own website.

You’ve got your facts, your figures, your data. What you don’t have is civil disobedience. Till you do, your facts, including your Wind Turbine Syndrome facts, are valueless. Remember M.L. King. He knew his facts (Jesus, he even had the law on this side!) were worthless until he began marching and picketing and getting in their face.

Whether you call it civil disobedience or direct action, I suggest that before you begin, check with your local police department and find out the local regulations on peaceful demonstration. (Matters like not blocking public access, not blocking automobile traffic, etc.) If you need a permit, get one. Police and the courts are not your enemy. Police, the law, and the courts are not the issue; the issue is demonstrating to lawmakers that your evidence and your plight must be taken seriously.

Second, when elections come round in November, it is essential you run anti-Wind candidates for town board, county legislature, state senator, etc. But mostly town board. Work within the electoral process: it works! To elect these people means you’re going to have to do a lot of leg work and advertising. Lots of door to door. Pamphlets. Leaflets. Public meetings to meet the candidates. It works.

Many people seem to think the Big Wind Onslaught doesn’t call for such measures. People are being driven from their homes, and made ill besides — and they don’t seem to think these measures are appropriate. They write letters to bureaucrats. They speak politely at town meetings where the Wind Mafia are “presenting.” These thugs need to be shouted down. These meetings need to be legally obstructed to the point where they can’t function.

Best of all — ready for this? — get arrested. Before TV cameras: arrested. Hundreds of you. Old ladies, ministers, college professors and deans, doctors. Arrested. Little kids too. Then, watch to see how the county commissioners and the conniving lawyers — watch how they come around. It’s miraculous how they change.

Big Wind is being given a free pass to destroy communities and lives and homes and health. Pretend these assholes are Martians, with little antennae and a Mother Ship parked somewhere, and they’re taking over your community. (When you survey an operating windplant, the analogy is not far fetched.) What would you do then? Still discuss the matter politely with your county commissioners and health commissioner and department of environmental conservation and town board? Still “follow the usual channels”?

Hell no! You’d take to the barricades and the streets and shout to these commissioners, “Hey, wake up! We’ve been invaded!”

My apologies for being cranky. I’ve been playing games with wind bullshit for too many years. I’ve seen too many sheep led to the slaughter. Sheep now have to take up the instruments of civil disobedience. Otherwise sheep is toast. (Mixing metaphors again.)

One last time: What doesn’t work in this mass movement (which I’ve outlined above in caricature) is polite discourse. Nor do letters to politicians berating them for not doing “their job.” Their job! Their job? Their job, dear reader, is to promote big business and big ideas and panaceas. That’s their job. To think otherwise is naïve.

Politicians hate (make that HATE) public demonstrations. Nothing worse. They hate marches and banners and slogans and placards and picketing. The television crew arrives with cameras rolling, the klieg lights suddenly switch on, and the town board, minister of the environment, county commissioner, state senator — writhe.

Consider Barbara Ashbee’s home. It’s worthless. Toxic. She’s a realtor; she knows better than I that she could not give away her home. Nor can she bear to live in it. She’s now in the horrible world of the d’Entremonts: Abandonment.

Abandon your home: that’s really the only option for many people, isn’t it? Or get bought out by the so-called developer. (Isn’t there a more appropriate name for people who do this to you?)

Big Wind picks you off, one township at a time. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, what have you got left? You’ve got your pen, you’ve got your voice, your wits, and your anger. Use them effectively.

Calvin Luther Martin

Ph.D. (History) 1974 University of California, Santa Barbara

Author, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (California 1978). Winner of the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award 1979 for the “best book of the year in American History.” Subject of Shepard Krech, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (Georgia 1981).

Editor, The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford 1987)

Author, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time (Johns Hopkins 1992)

Author, The Way of the Human Being (Yale 1999). Winner of the Westchester County Library System’s Anne Izard Storyteller’s Choice Award 2000. See Calvin Luther Martin, Insanin Yolu, Turkish trans. by Ayse Sirin Okyayuz Yener (Phoenix 2002).

Author, The Language of Wildness (Yale, probably. Slowly forthcoming)

Hartwick College, assistant professor 1974

Rutgers University, assistant professor 1975, associate professor (with tenure) 1978

Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada), visiting professor 1978

Dartmouth College, visiting professor summer 1983

Alaska (Native) Moravian Seminary (Bethel, Alaska), visiting professor 1995-1996

Hartwick College, Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Humanities, 2000-2003

Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian 9/73-6/74

Henry E. Huntington Library, summer 1976

Henry E. Huntington Library, June 1980

National Endowment for the Humanities, July and August 1980

National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship 7/81-6/82

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship 7/82-6/83

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship 7/86-6/87

http://www.aweo.org/Martin.html

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Open Letter from Carmen Krogh, Re: Health Canada Presentation at Wind Turbine Noise Conferences

May 14, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper

Prime Minister of Canada

pm@pm.gc.ca

The Honourable Rona Ambrose

Minister of Health, Health Canada

minister_ministre@hc-sc.gc.ca

M.P. Ben Lobb

Chair

House of Commons Standing Committee on Health

ben.lobb.a2@parl.gc.ca

May 14, 2015

Dear Prime Minister Harper, Hon. Minister of Health, and MP Ben Lobb,

Re: Open Letter: Health Canada Presentation at Wind Turbine Noise Conferences

The purpose of this letter is that in the interests of openness and transparency, any additional results of the Health Canada Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study: Summary of Results be publicly disclosed.

Attached is a copy of the schedule relating to David Michaud, Principal Investigator of the Health Canada Study’s presentation entitled Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study: Summary of Results.[1]

The presentation took place Tuesday, April 21, 2015 during a Wind Turbine Noise Conference held in Scotland.[2]

I am aware that David Michaud will be presenting this paper during the Acoustical Society of America meeting scheduled Thursday, May 21, 2015.[3]

The paper being presented informs new information.

In addition, I am aware a copy of the paper was available during a recent Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal.[4]

To ensure openness and transparency I respectfully urged on two occasions that the Health Canada plenary session, the Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study: Summary of Results be publicly disclosed prior to its presentation.[5],[6]

Typically, Conference registrants receive a copy; however with respect to public disclosure, I have searched Health Canada’s and other websites and am unable to locate a link to the paper presented. It is possible the link is not easily located. If the paper and media release are available publicly, please direct me to the links and advise me of the date of the postings.

Based on previous participation in several Wind Turbine Noise Conferences[7],[8] the final papers disclose the contents of a presentation. Since the paper presented by David Michaud should have conformed to requirements for submitting the paper by January 31, 2015,[9] it is expected that members of the planning committee would have had the opportunity to be informed of its contents. I note that David Michaud is a member of the Scotland Conference planning committee.

The Health Canada Study is a 2.1 million dollar publicly funded study. An issue in Ontario and other venues is that those reporting adverse health effects have not been given the opportunity to participate on various initiatives such as the Health Canada Study team and the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) assessment. Affected neighbours, despite their appeals to the various government authorities feel they have been set aside and ignored. Industry and government is represented but not those affected.

To ensure openness and transparency I respectfully urge that the paper presented by Health Canada during the Conference be publicly disclosed.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Respectfully submitted,

Carmen Krogh, BScPharm

Cell 613 312 9663

Attachments

Open Letter_Health Canada transparency and disclosure May 14 2015.pdf

Tuesday.pdf

References

[1] Wind Turbine Noise (2015), Monday 20th April to Thursday 23^rd, April 2015, Glasgow, Scotland http://windturbinenoise.eu/

[2] Michaud D, PLENARY, Health Effects and Annoyance ,Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study: Summary of Results, Tuesday, April 21, 2015, http://windturbinenoise.eu/?page_id=973

[3] Acoustical Society of America, May 18 to 21, 2015, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Spring 2015 Meeting

Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania

[4] Dingeldein v. Director, Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal, Case No. 15-011

[5] Correspondence to Prime Minister, Minister of Justice and Minister of Health March 18, 2015

[6] Correspondence to Prime Minister, Minister of Justice and Minister of Health April 4, 2015

[7] Trading off human health: Wind turbine noise and government policy Carmen ME Krogh, Joan Morris, Murray May, George Papadopoulos, Brett Horner, Paper presented at the Wind Turbine Noise conference 2013, August 28 to 30, Denver, Colorado, USA

[8] Carmen ME Krogh, Roy D Jeffery, Jeff Aramini, Brett Horner, Wind turbines can harm humans: a case study, Paper presented at Inter-noise 2012, New York City, NY

[9] Wind Turbine Noise 2015, Deadlines, Final Papers, January 31, 2015 http://windturbinenoise.eu/?page_id=363

Wendy-Heiger-Bernays PhD talks About Sleep Disruption, from Wind Turbine Noise.

May 14, 2015 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

Wendy Heiger-Bernays PhD- Falmouth Wind Turbine Sleep Disruption

Massachusetts

Wendy Heiger-Bernays PhD of Boston University School of Public Health explained that “it is possible that living too close to wind turbines can cause annoyance and sleep disruption, but we don’t have measurements that can show levels that disrupt sleep.”

She agreed that sleep disruption can bring on a whole host of adverse health impacts.”

http://www.safesetbacks.com/page4/styled-23/page82.html

MA DEP/DPH Expert-Falmouth Wind Turbines “are too close”

Falmouth, MA – Last Wednesday eight Falmouth wind turbine neighbors traveled to Waltham to hear three Department of Environmental Protection [DEP] / Department of Public Health [DPH] expert health panel members present their Wind Turbine Health Impact Study report. That document, released only two weeks ago, caused great controversy not only in Falmouth but also across the Commonwealth. … [panel member] Wendy Heiger-Bernays PhD of Boston University School of Public Health explained that “it is possible that living too close to wind turbines can cause annoyance and sleep disruption, but we don’t have measurements that can show levels that disrupt sleep.” She agreed that sleep disruption can bring on a whole host of adverse health impacts.”

Dr. Heiger-Bernays is to be commended for her statements. It is a step in the right direction and acknowledges what the neighbors in Falmouth know. Sleep is being disturbed. Yet there is much more to be acknowledged which has nothing to do with sleep deprivation.

It is unfortunate that the Expert Panel was unable to acknowledge in their report a most compelling fact presented in the case-study Bruce McPherson Study reports [1,2]. From [2],

“The investigators were surprised to experience the same adverse health symptoms described by neighbors living at this house and near other large industrial wind turbine sites. The onset of adverse health effects was swift, within twenty minutes, and persisted for some time after leaving the study area. … This research revealed that persons without a pre-existing sleep deprivation condition, not tied to the location nor invested in the property, can experience within a few minutes the same debilitating health effects described and testified to by neighbors living near the wind turbines. The debilitating health effects were judged to be visceral (proceeding from instinct, not intellect) and related to as yet unidentified discordant physical inputs or stimulation to the vestibular system.”

I understand that what the investigators experienced in their case-study may inadvertently fall into a branch of analysis called “time-series”. Before they arrived at the study site, they felt fine. Soon after they arrived at the study site they soon felt debilitated. Later when they left the study site, they started to feel better. When they returned to continue work their health worsened. When the turbine stopped and they left, they started to feel better. It took some time for them to regain full health (days to weeks). The reports’ figures and tables illustrate the health changes experienced by the investigators with an unexpectedly clear correlation to wind turbine operations.

While the Bruce McPherson study was limited in time, the experiences of the two investigators will remain compelling.

The study confirms that large industrial wind turbines can produce real and adverse health impacts and suggests that this is due to acoustic pressure pulsations, not related to the audible frequency spectrum, by affecting the vestibular system especially at low ambient sound levels. The study results emphasize the need for epidemiological and laboratory research by medical health professionals and acousticians concerned with public health and well-being. This study underscores the need for more effective and precautionary setback distances for industrial wind turbines. It is especially important to include a margin of safety sufficient to prevent inaudible low-frequency wind turbine noise from being detected by the human vestibular system.

Sincerely,
Rob Rand, Member INCE

1. Peer-reviewed journal: Robert W. Rand, Stephen E. Ambrose, and Carmen M. E. Krogh, Occupational Health and Industrial Wind Turbines: A Case Study. Published online before print August 22, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0270467611417849, The Bulletin of Science Technology & Society, August 22, 2011.

2. Stephen Ambrose and Robert Rand, The Bruce McPherson Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise Study: Adverse Health Effects Produced By Large Industrial Wind Turbines Confirmed. December 14, 2011.

http://randacoustics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The-Bruce-McPherson-ILFN-Study.pdf

Whenever they Do a “Study” on Wind Turbine Emissions, It is Never Done Properly! Science Ignored!

May 13, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Massachusetts Wind Turbine Health Impact Study- Fraud, Hoax Sham,

http://patch.com/massachusetts/falmouth/bogus-mass-wind-turbine-noise-study-2012-update-0

Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, MD; MMSc
Assistant Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School Division Chief, Sleep Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

Sheryl Grace, PhD; MS Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University

Wendy J Heiger-Bernays, PhD
Associate Professor of Environmental Health, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health
Chair, Lexington Board of Health

James F. Manwell, PhD Mechanical Engineering;
MS Electrical & Computer Engineering; BA Biophysics
Professor and Director of the Wind Energy Center, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Dora Anne Mills, MD, MPH, FAAP
State Health Officer, Maine 1996–2011
Vice President for Clinical Affairs, University of New England

Kimberly A. Sullivan, PhD
Research Assistant Professor of Environmental Health, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health

Marc G. Weisskopf, ScD Epidemiology; PhD Neuroscience
Associate Professor of Environmental Health and Epidemiology Department of Environmental Health & Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health

Facilitative Support provided by Susan L. Santos, PhD, FOCUS GROUP Risk Communication and Environmental Management Consultants

Bogus Mass Wind Turbine Noise Study 2012 Update
Counter Points To The 2012 Massachusetts Wind Turbine Noise Study -110 Decibels Equal To A Loud Out Door Rock Band

Share CommentsBogus Mass Wind Turbine Noise Study 2012 Update

Bogus Mass Wind Turbine Noise Study 2012 Updated –May 2015

Counter Points To The Massachusetts Wind Turbine Noise Study. This study was done in 2012

Not One Victim Was Ever Interviewed or Examined

– Massachusetts has not installed a megawatt wind turbine since 2013.

First it has been found the Town of Falmouth had known three years prior to the Massachusetts DEP 2012 noise report in 2009 that the turbines being installed would produce noise levels over 110 Decibels of noise equivalent to a loud outdoor rock band .

The August 3, 2010 noise letter from Vestas wind company is at the link :
http://www.windaction.org/posts/41357-vestas-raises-concerns-about-turbine-noise-letter#.VVJlVflVikp
Since the installation of the Falmouth wind turbines the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has admitted the turbines were placed “Ad Hoc” and now looks at setbacks over 2000 feet and has changed their noise testing procedures.

Counter Points To The Massachusetts Wind Turbine Noise Study In Which Not One Victim Was Ever Interviewed or Examined

What the Study Says: On page 1: “…It should be noted that the scope of the Panel’s effort was focused on wind turbines and is not meant to be a comparative analysis of the relative merits of wind energy vs. non-renewable fossil fuel sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas.”

However: The second paragraph of Chapter 1 of the study discusses a significant decrease in the consumption of conventional fuels and a corresponding decrease in the production of carbon dioxide and nitrogen and sulfur oxides.

The second paragraph states that reductions in the production of these pollutants will have demonstrable and positive benefits on human and environmental health

Appendix A has a 28 page summary on the origin of wind energy, the mechanics and operation of wind turbines, and the reduction of emissions if more turbines were providing energy (Section 12 is titled“Wind Turbines and Avoided Pollutants”)

On page 1: “The overall context for this study is that the use of wind turbines results in positive effects on public health and environmental health…local impacts of wind turbines, whether anticipated or demonstrated, have resulted in fewer turbines being installed than might otherwise have been expected. To the extent that these impacts can be ameliorated, it should be possible to take advantage of the indigenous wind energy resource more effectively.”

This passage indicates the true purpose of the Massachusetts study—to create an expansion of the wind industry through a slanted interpretation of wind health study documents.

The Panel merely reviewed literature and public media sources and met only three times.

Stated that sleep disruption is the most commonly reported complaint by people and discusses this primarily as a result of “unwanted sound” and audible, amplitudemodulated noise (“whooshing”)

Writes off most self-reported “annoyance” as a combination of sound, sight of the turbine, and attitude towards the wind project (ES-5)

Therefore, according to the Panel, because they “found” no negative health effects to humans as a result of their literature research, it must necessarily follow that there are positive health effects.

Yet, these positive health effects are not the result of wind turbines being safe, but that the turbines’ “green” impact on the environment will result in a decrease of conventional sources of fuel.

This endorsement of safety is an admission that the Panel failed to strictly adhere to the scope of their charge.

Expert “Independent” Panel Members:Dr. James F. Manwell and Dora Anne Mills are extreme pro-wind advocates:

Manwell oversaw the first utility scale wind turbine and the largest wind turbine constructed in Massachusetts

Manwell has won several awards from American Wind Association and U.S. Department of Energy Mills has provided public testimony and “op-ed” newspaper pieces supporting wind turbines while a member of the Commission and before the findings were released Posted information on Maine’s CDC website as Maine’s public health director that wind turbines do not have negative health effects in 2009

Page 2 of the study states that 5 of the panel members “did not have any direct experience with wind turbines.”

While the other members had backgrounds in epidemiology, toxicology , neurology, and sleep medicine, they had no past direct experience with wind turbines

Massachusetts Study Cites Sources that Contain Information that Wind Turbines Cause Negative Health Effects:

The Panel used several articles by the same authors of other studies that Senator Lasee provided to the PSC

The Panel used several articles that Senator Lasee provided to the PSC that found that infrasound from wind turbines can have negative health effects, yet the Massachusetts panel comes to different conclusions than the study authors: Ambrose, S.E. & Rand R. W., (2011, December).

The Bruce McPherson Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise Study: Adverse Health Effects Produced By Large Industrial Wind Turbines Confirmed.

http://randacoustics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The-Bruce-McPherson-ILFN- Study.pdf
http://docs.wind-watch.org/Infrasound-Measurements-Falmouth-Wind-Turbines-NCE.pdf

http://legis.wisconsin.gov/eupdates/sen01/Massachusetts%20Wind%20Turbine%20Health%20Impact%20Study%20Talking%20Points.pdf

Infrasound Measurements of Falmouth Wind Turbines Wind #1 and Wind #2NoiseControl Engineering, LLC (NCE) – February 27, 2015 Impact on People Noise Massachusetts
This important study conducted at a home situated within 1300 feet of the Falmouth MA wind turbines identified infrasonic sound pressure levels inside the residence. These results are similar to results from other international researchers with references given in the report.
http://www.windaction.org/posts/42443-infrasound-measurements-of-falmouth-wind-turbines-wind-1-and-wind-2#.VVJmU_lViko

Bogus Mass Wind Turbine Noise Study 2012 Update

patch.com

Counter Points To The 2012 Massachusetts Wind Turbine Noise Study -110 Decibels Equal To A Loud Out Door Rock Band

Educated Consumers are the Wind Industry’s Worst Enemy! Knowledge is power!

May 13, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

America’s Worst Wind-Energy Project
Wind-energy proponents admit they need lots of spin to overwhelm the truly informed.

The more people know about the wind-energy business, the less they like it. And when it comes to lousy wind deals, General Electric’s Shepherds Flat project in northernOregon is a real stinker.

I’ll come back to the GE project momentarily. Before getting to that, please ponder that first sentence. It sounds like a claim made by an anti-renewable-energy campaigner. It’s not. Instead, that rather astounding admission was made by a communications strategist during a March 23 webinar sponsored by the American Council on Renewable Energy called “Speaking Out on Renewable Energy: Communications Strategies for the Renewable Energy Industry.”

During the webinar, Justin Rolfe-Redding, a doctoral student from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, discussed ways for wind-energy proponents to get their message out to the public.Rolfe-Redding said that polling data showed that “after reading arguments for and against wind, wind lost support.” He went on to say that concerns about wind energy’s cost and its effect on property values “crowded out climate change” among those surveyed.

The most astounding thing to come out of Rolfe-Redding’s mouth — and yes, I heard him say it myself — was this: “The things people are educated about are a real deficit for us.” After the briefings on the pros and cons of wind, said Rolfe-Redding, “enthusiasm decreased for wind. That’s a troubling finding.” The solution to these problems, said Rolfe-Redding, was to “weaken counterarguments” against wind as much as possible. He suggested using “inoculation theory” by telling people that “wind is a clean source, it provides jobs” and adding that “it’s an investment in the future.” He also said that proponents should weaken objections by “saying prices are coming down every day.”

It’s remarkable to see how similar the arguments being put forward by wind-energy proponents are to those that the Obama administration is using to justify its support of Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar company that got a $529 million loan guarantee from the federal government. But in some ways, the government support for the Shepherds Flat deal is worse than what happened with Solyndra.

The majority of the funding for the $1.9 billion, 845-megawatt Shepherds Flat wind project in Oregon is coming courtesy of federal taxpayers. And that largesse will provide a windfall for General Electric and its partners on the deal who include Google, Sumitomo, and Caithness Energy. Not only is the Energy Department giving GE and its partners a $1.06 billion loan guarantee, but as soon as GE’s 338 turbines start turning at Shepherds Flat, the Treasury Department will send the project developers a cash grant of $490 million.

The deal was so lucrative for the project developers that last October, some of Obama’s top advisers, including energy-policy czar Carol Browner and economic adviser Larry Summers, wrote a memo saying that the project’s backers had “little skin in the game” while the government would be providing “a significant subsidy (65+ percent).” The memo goes on to say that, while the project backers would only provide equity equal to about 11 percent of the total cost of the wind project, they would receive an “estimated return on equity of 30 percent.”

The memo continues, explaining that the carbon dioxide reductions associated with the project “would have to be valued at nearly $130 per ton for CO2 for the climate benefits to equal the subsidies.” The memo continues, saying that that per-ton cost is “more than 6 times the primary estimate used by the government in evaluating rules.”

The Obama administration’s loan guarantee for the now-bankrupt Solyndra has garnered lots of attention, but the Shepherds Flat deal is an even better example of corporate welfare. Several questions are immediately obvious:

First: Why, as Browner and Summers asked, is the federal government providing loan guarantees and subsidies for an energy project that could easily be financed by GE, which has a market capitalization of about $170 billion?

Second: Why is the Obama administration providing subsidies to GE, which paid little or no federal income taxes last year even though it generatedsome $5.1 billion in profits from its U.S. operations?

Third: How is it that GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, can be the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while his company is paying little or no federal income taxes? That question is particularly germane as the president never seems to tire of bashing the oil and gas industry for what he claims are the industry’s excessive tax breaks.

Over the past year, according to Yahoo! Finance, the average electric utility’s return on equity has been 7.1 percent. Thus, taxpayer money is helping GE and its partners earn more than four times the average return on equity in the electricity business.

A few months ago, I ran into Jim Rogers, the CEO of Duke Energy. I asked him why Duke — which has about 14,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation capacity — was investing in wind energy projects. The answer, said Rogers forthrightly, was simple: The subsidies available for wind projects allow Duke to earn returns on equity of 17 to 22 percent.

In other words, for all of the bragging by the wind-industry proponents about the rapid growth in wind-generation capacity, the main reason that capacity is growing is that companies such as GE and Duke are able to goose their profits by putting up turbines so they can collect subsidies from taxpayers.

There are other reasons to dislike the Shepherds Flat project: It’s being built in Oregon to supply electricity to customers in Southern California. That’s nothing new. According to the Energy Information Administration, “California imports more electricity from other states than any other state.” Heaven forbid that consumers in the Golden State would have to actually live near a power plant, refinery, or any other industrial facility. And by building the wind project in Oregon, electricity consumers inCalifornia are only adding to the electricity congestion problems that have been plaguing the region served by the Bonneville Power Authority. Earlier this year, the BPA was forced to curtail electricity generated by wind projects in the area because a near-record spring runoff had dramatically increased the amount of power generated by the BPA’s dams. In other words, Shepherds Flat is adding yet more wind turbines to a region that has been overwhelmed this year by excess electrical generation capacity from renewables. And that region will now have to spending huge sums of money building new transmission capacity to export its excess electricity.

Finally, there’s the question of the jobs being created by the new wind project. In 2009, when GE and Caithness announced the Shepherds Flat deal, CNN Money reported that the project would create 35 permanent jobs. And in an April 2011 press release issued by GE on the Shepherds Flat project, one of GE’s partners in the deal said they were pleased to be bringing “green energy jobs to our economy.”

How much will those “green energy” jobs cost? Well, if we ignore the value of the federal loan guarantee and only focus on the $490 million cash grant that will be given to GE and its partners when Shepherds Flat gets finished, the cost of those “green energy” jobs will be about $16.3 million each.

As Rolfe-Redding said, the more people know about the wind business, the less they like it.

— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, was recently issued in paperback.

Aussie Government Windpushers, Pushing Renewable Energy Target Tax. A Form of Extortion?

May 12, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Out to Save their Wind Industry Mates, Macfarlane & Hunt Lock-in $46 billion LRET Retail Power Tax

May 12, 2015 by stopthesethings

****

Wind industry front men, Ian “Macca” Macfarlane and, his youthful ward, young Gregory Hunt are out to defy all-comers: the Liberal’s core constituency (of conservative voters); their colleagues, Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann; boss, Tony Abbott; and political, economic and environmental common sense – as they pump up a deal with Labor to salvage the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target, and their mates at Infigen, Vestas & Co.

Over the last week or so, Macca’s last-ditch deal to get Labor to sign up to cut the LRET from 41,000 GWh to 33,000 GWh was hailed by economic dullards like The Australian’s Sid Maher as a “Breakthrough”, in a series of articles that included this piece of pure fantasy:

Mr Macfarlane has expressed concerns about the ability of the renewables industry to meet its RET targets after a collapse in investment in the sector. Failure to meet the target risks invoking a penalty clause that would double the cost of the scheme.

Anyone that follows these pages should spot the fiction within the fallacy; given that STT has been repeatedly pounding that kind of nonsense for some time now. And, like a dog with his favourite, well-gnawed bone, we won’t be letting go any time soon.

True, it is, that the wind industry will never meet the current target – and, as we’ve said before, it won’t meet the ‘new’ 33,000 GWh target, either. However, the claim that hitting the “penalty” will “double the cost of the scheme” is pure political twaddle; Macca knows it – and any journo who has bothered to do their homework – by reading the legislation, say, would have picked it in a heartbeat.

In short, Australia’s electricity retailers have closed ranks on wind power outfits by steadfastly refusing to enter Power Purchase Agreements, without which wind power outfits will never obtain the finance needed to build any new wind farms. The consequence being that retailers will be hit with the shortfall penalty (the ‘penalty clause’ referred to above), the full cost of which will be recovered from power consumers (a “stealth tax” that will add more than $20 billion to power bills). In addition, the cost of Renewable Energy Certificates will add a further $25 billion, taking the combined total of the REC Tax/Shortfall Charge added to retail power bills to a figure in the order of $46 billion.

At the risk of repeating ourselves (and we concede the point if challenged), in the balance of this post we’ll update our figures; and spell out just why this latest ‘deal’ is simply an effort to postpone the inevitable implosion of the most costly, and utterly pointless, Federal Government industry subsidy scheme ever devised. So, with that aside, on with the show.

The LRET is a policy debacle; it’s completely unsustainable, on every level: economic, social and political. It is not – as the likes of Macca and Hunt cynically pretend – and a gullible press naively reports – a warm and fuzzy, family and business friendly policy that won’t cost anyone a cent.

What journos like Sid Maher have either failed to appreciate – or are simply choosing to ignore – is the fact that the demise of the LRET has nothing to do with numerical targets, the death of the wind industry is a consequence of Australia’s electricity retailers’ commercially driven desire to destroy the LRET, and the wind industry along with it.

In the absence of the mandated subsidies (“the carrot”) directed to wind power outfits, and the mandated penalties (“the stick”) whacked on retailers under the LRET, there would simply be no market whatsoever for wind power (see our post here). Kill or cut the LRET, and the wind industry is completely finished – it’s mortally wounded now.

Commercial power retailers have not entered any Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) to purchase wind power (or, rather, to obtain RECs) since November 2012. The wind industry’s demise was laid out long before the RET Review panel got to work in April 2014 and the talk about ‘dreaded uncertainty’ is just that: wind farm construction in Australia has come to a grinding halt because it makes no commercial sense to purchase power from an intermittent and wholly weather dependent generation source, that costs 3-4 times the cost of conventional power.

The shortfall charge, set by the legislation at $65 per MWh, is not a deductible business expense (the shortfall charge is treated as a “fine”), the effective pre-tax penalty is, therefore, $92.86 ($65/(1-30%), assuming a 30% marginal tax rate. In the past, we’ve used $94 as the likely trading figure for RECs (as the shortfall charge starts to bite); but, as young Gregory Hunt uses the figure of $93 – when he refers to it as “a massive penalty carbon tax” – we’re happy to knock off the buck and run the numbers again.

Retailers, like Grant King from Origin Energy, have made it known that they have no intention of entering PPAs with wind power outfits – and, instead, will simply pay the shortfall charge, collect the full cost of it from their customers (ie $93 per MWh – compared with the average wholesale price of $35 per MWh) and declare the cost of the fines on their retail power bills as a “Federal Tax on Electricity Consumers”.

The cost of the shortfall charge at $65 per MWh compares with the average wholesale power price of between $35-40 per MWh. Therefore, at a minimum, retailers will be paying $100-105 per MWh for power, once the penalty hits (the average wholesale price plus the shortfall charge).

The Australian’s top economics writer, Judith Sloan has observed that the effect of the $65 per MWh shortfall charge “will be to triple the value of RECs and drive up electricity prices to a dramatic extent”; referring to the REC price in February this year – around $34 at that time – and the effect of the tax treatment of RECs versus the shortfall charge. As Judith notes, retailers will be looking to recover $93 in respect of every shortfall penalty charge they get hit with: ie, the $65 per MWh cost of the shortfall charge and the loss of the tax benefit that would otherwise be received were they to purchase RECs.

STT has likened the scenario to a “political time bomb”, where the government of the day will be belted at the ballot box for the utterly unjustified escalation in power prices, that will inevitably result from the LRET debacle.

And that brings us to Macca and Hunt’s latest efforts to salvage the wreckage of the LRET, their mates at near-bankrupt wind power outfit, Infigen (aka Babcock and Brown) and struggling Danish fan maker, Vestas, as well as their political skins.

Macca and Hunt are driving – with a lot of ‘help’ from the wind industry plants and stooges in their offices – a pitch whereby the ultimate annual LRET target gets pulled from 41,000 GWh to 33,000 GWh per year.

The LRET target is set by s40 of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 (here); and it’s the annual target set under that section that Macca and Hunt are hoping to pull in a deal with Labor, that, as we go to print, also appears to need help from 6 of the 8 Senate cross-benchers.

At the present time, the total annual contribution to the LRET from eligible renewable energy generation sources is 16,000 GWh; and, because retailers have not entered PPAs with wind power outfits for nearly 2½ years – and have no apparent intention of doing so from hereon – that’s where the figure will remain.

With no new wind power capacity being added – and none likely to be added – that leaves the shortfall at 17,000 GWh, or 17,000,000 MWh (1GWh = 1,000MWh); based on Macca and Hunt’s 33,000 GWh ultimate annual target.

So, as we’ve done before, we’ll put some numbers under what Macca and Hunt’s latest, last-ditch Infigen and Vestas salvage mission means – should they succeed – for Australian power punters and their retail power bills – assuming, of course, that they aren’t already among the tens of thousands that have been chopped from the grid, because they can’t pay their power bills now (see our posts here and here); or among those whose businesses are getting slammed against the wall, due to rocketing power prices (see our posts here and here).

In the table below, the “Shortfall in MWh (millions)” is based on the current, total contribution of 16,000,000 MWh, as against the 33,000 GWh target being pitched by Macca and Hunt, set out as the “Target in MWh (millions)”.

The target currently set for 2019 is 36.4 million MWhs, but we’ll assume that gets pulled to 33 million too, under Macca and Hunt’s ‘ingenious’ Infigen and Vestas rescue plan.

A REC is issued for every MWh of eligible renewable electricity dispatched to the grid; and a shortfall penalty applies to a retailer for every MWh that they fall short of the target – the target is meant to be met by retailers purchasing and surrendering RECs. As set out below, the shortfall charge kicks in this calendar year.

As set out above, given the impact of the shortfall charge, and the tax treatment of RECs versus the shortfall charge, the full cost of the shortfall charge to retailers is also $93. Using that figure applied to the 33,000 GWh ‘deal’, we’ll start with the cost of the shortfall penalty.

Year	Target in MWh (millions)	Shortfall in MWh (millions)	Penalty on Shortfall @ $65 per MWh	Minimum Retailers recover @ $93
2015	18	2	$130,000,000	$186,000,000
2016	22.6	6.6	$429,000,000	$613,800,000
2017	27.2	11.2	$728,000,000	$1,041,600,000
2018	31.8	15.8	$1,027,000,000	$1,469,400,000
2019	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2020	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2021	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2022	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2023	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2024	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2025	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2026	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2027	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2028	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2029	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
2030	33	17	$1,105,000,000	$1,581,000,000
Total	495.6	239.6	$15,574,000,000	$22,282,800,000

Between now and 2031, Macca and Hunt’s 33,000 GWh total target couldbe satisfied by the issue and surrender of 495,600,000 RECs. However, with only 16 million RECs available annually there will be a total shortfall of 239,600,000: only 256 million RECs will be available to satisfy the LRET’s remaining 495,600,000 MWh target, set under the ‘brilliant’ 33,000 GWh Infigen and Vestas rescue ‘plan’.

Under the latest ‘deal’, assuming that RECs hit $93, as the penalty begins to apply later this year, the total cost added to power consumers’ bills will top $46 billion (495,600,000 x $93), as set out in the table below.

Power consumers will end up paying for the shortfall penalty collected by the Federal government, and for the cost of the RECs issued to wind power outfits – in relation to collecting the cost of the REC Subsidy from power consumers, Origin Energy’s Grant King correctly puts it:

“[T]he subsidy is the REC, and the REC certificate is acquitted at the retail level and is included in the retail price of electricity”.

It’s power consumers that get lumped with the “retail price of electricity” and, therefore, the cost of the REC Subsidy paid to wind power outfits.

To give some idea of how ludicrously generous the REC Subsidy is, consider a single 3 MW turbine. If it operated 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – its owner would receive 26,280 RECs (24 x 365 x 3). Assuming, generously, a capacity factor of 35% (the cowboys from wind power outfits often wildly claim more than that) that single turbine will receive 9,198 RECs annually. At $93 per REC, that single turbine will, in 12 months, rake in $855,414 in REC Subsidy.

But wait, there’s more: that subsidy doesn’t last for a single year. Oh no. A turbine operating now will continue to receive the REC subsidy for 16 years, until 2031 – such that a single 3 MW turbine spinning today can pocket a total of $13,686,624 over the remaining life of the LRET. Not a bad little rort – considering the machine and its installation costs less than $3 million; and that being able to spear it into some dimwit’s back paddock under a landholder agreement costs a piddling $10-15,000 per year. State-sponsored theft never looked easier or more lucrative!

The REC Tax/Subsidy, including that associated with domestic solar under the original RET scheme, has already added $9 billion to Australian power bills, so far.

At the end of the day, retailers will have to recover the TOTAL cost of BOTH RECs AND the shortfall charge from Australian power consumers, via retail power bills.

And that’s the figure we’ve totted up in the right hand column in the table below – which combines the annual cost to retailers of 16 million RECs at $93 (ie $1,488,000,000) and the shortfall penalty, as it applies each year from now until 2031, at the same ultimate cost to power consumers of $93.

Year	Target in MWh (millions)	Shortfall in MWh (millions)	Shortfall Charge Recovered by Retailers @ $93	Total Recovered by Retailers as RECs & Shortfall Charge @ $93
2015	18	2	$186,000,000	$1,674,000,000
2016	22.6	6.6	$613,800,000	$2,101,800,000
2017	27.2	11.2	$1,041,600,000	$2,529,600,000
2018	31.8	15.8	$1,469,400,000	$2,957,400,000
2019	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2020	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2021	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2022	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2023	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2024	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2025	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2026	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2027	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2028	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2029	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
2030	33	17	$1,581,000,000	$3,069,000,000
Total	495.6	239.6	$22,282,800,000	$46,090,800,000

Under the current ultimate LRET target of 41,000 GWh, the figure tops out at $3,854,000,000 a year; and $55,178,000,000 in total, so Macca and Hunt’s BIG compromise drops the REC Tax/Shortfall Penalty impact on retail power prices by a piddling $785 million a year, or $9,087,200,000 over the life of the LRET rort.

Whether it’s RECs being generated by current (or additional) wind power generation, or the shortfall charge being applied, retailers will be recovering the combined costs of BOTH – and power consumers will not “avoid” or, as Macca’s youthful ward, Greg Hunt asserts, be “protected” from any of it under Macca and Hunt’s Infigen and Vestas rescue plan.

As our simple little exercise in arithmetic makes plain, over $46 billion will be added to all Australian power consumers’ bills; irrespective of whether Macca and Hunt are able to satisfy the desires of their mates at Infigen, Vestas & Co to carpet the country in giant fans.

Not that it matters much to Australian power consumers footing the bill, but the ONLY difference is where that $46 billion gets funnelled. In the case of the REC Tax, that gets directed as a subsidy to wind power outfits (like Infigen and Pac Hydro); in the case of the shortfall charge, that gets directed to the Federal government, and goes straight into general revenue – as we call it, a “stealth tax” – as young Greg Hunt calls it, a: “massive $93 per tonne penalty carbon tax.”

Under Macca and Hunt’s piece of energy market ‘magic’, the $46 billion cost to power consumers of the REC Tax/Shortfall Penalty is just the tip of the iceberg.

The wind power capacity that Macca and Hunt’s mates at Infigen & Co are so desperate to build (in order to keep their Ponzi scheme from collapsing, as it has with Pacific Hydro) – and which Macca and Hunt hope will satisfy their ‘new’ target – will cost at least a further $80-100 billion, in terms of extra turbines and the duplicated network costs needed to hook them up to the grid: all requiring fat returns to investors; costs and returns that can only be recouped through escalating power bills:

Ian Macfarlane, Greg Hunt & Australia’s Wind Power Debacle: is it Dumb and Dumber 2, or Liar Liar?

LRET “Stealth Tax” to Cost Australian Power Punters $30 BILLION

In the first of the posts above we looked at the additional costs of building the wind power capacity needed to avoid the shortfall penalty – including the $30 billion or so needed to build a duplicated transmission grid. That is, a network largely, if not exclusively, devoted to sending wind power output from remote, rural locations to urban population centres (where the demand is) that will only ever carry meaningful output 30-35% of the time, at best. The balance of the time, networks devoted to carrying wind power will carry nothing – for lengthy periods there will be no return on the capital cost – the lines will simply lay idle until the wind picks up.

The fact that there is no grid capacity available to take wind power from remote locations was pointed to by GE boss, Peter Cowling in this recent article, as one of the key reasons that there will be no new wind farms built in Australia:

GEreports: Can Australia now learn from any other country in how to encourage renewables?

Peter: Oh yeah, certainly. I mean, I think China’s perhaps an extreme example, but the point is that you put a firm policy in place, and you take it seriously, you unleash infrastructure bottlenecks to allow it to happen, and it will happen.

GEreports: What are Australia’s infrastructure bottlenecks?

Peter: Quite often there are concerns about grid stability if you have large numbers of renewable plants out there. You can fix all that if you really are honest about wanting to increase the level of renewables in the system. There are technical fixes to all of this.

GEreports: Can you give me an example?

Peter: Ultimately, what you might have to do is what they’ve done in Texas, which is get out there and build a new grid – big backbone powerlines – and then the wind turbines come. The problem in Australia is we look at a big windy area and say, “Oh, look, it hasn’t got any grid.” No individual developer can afford to build grid, so it doesn’t happen.

GEreports: The government should do that?

Peter: They could if they wanted to, or they could step up and put in place the mechanism to encourage someone else to do it.

Australia has stepped back from that sort of planning of the grid. The government used to own the grids, and we’re pulling back from that. And that’s fine. It’s not vital that you own it. But you do have to have a plan and send the right signals to investors that you’re serious about the plan for them to be able to risk investing. And that’s a critical question.

Let the private sector do it and I think you’d probably drive your best result, particularly in an economy like Australia. But, you do need the certainty, and the reason things have stalled in Australia is not because it’s too hard or because there’s planning issues or anything else.

It’s simply that people cannot be certain at the moment that the renewable energy target will still be binding on those liable under it, so people pull back from investing. Too risky.

Network owners have no incentive to build the whopping additional transmission capacity required to accommodate new wind power capacity; and nothing like the capacity needed to send a further 17,000 GWh into the grid to meet a 33,000 GWh target.

In many places, there are numerous wind farms planned, but the existing transmission lines are literally full to capacity. One example is the Hornsdale project north of Jamestown in South Australia, which Investec offloaded a year or so back (see our post here). The original plan was for 105, 3MW turbines (or 315MW of nameplate capacity), but the line they were targeting is only capable of taking a further 60-90MW when the wind is blowing (wind farms at Jamestown and Hallett all hook in to the same line). STT hears that the latest ‘plan’ involves 30 turbines, in recognition of the fact that the line has no room to take anything more.

Moreover, even if investors were prepared to – in a Field of Dreams, “build it and they will come” moment, of the kind suggested by GE – throw money at a duplicated grid, the returns demanded by those investors can only be recovered from retail power customers. Which is yet another reason why retailers are out to wreck the LRET and the wind industry with it.

This might sound obvious, if not a little silly: electricity retailers are NOT in the business of NOT selling power.

Adding a $46 billion electricity tax to retail power bills (the ‘modest’ figure under Macca and Hunt’s cunning Infigen and Vestas rescue plan) can only make power even less affordable to tens of thousands of households and struggling businesses, indeed whole industries, meaning fewer and fewer customers for retailers like Origin.

The strategy adopted by retailers of refusing to ‘play ball’ by signing up for PPAs will, ultimately, kill the LRET. It’s a strategy aimed at being able to sell more power, at affordable prices, to more households and businesses. It’s a strategy with a mercenary purpose; and has Hunt, Macca and their wind industry backers in a flat panic.

The continued public squabbling in Canberra over the ‘magic’ LRET number, is simply a signal that the retailers’ have already won. Once upon a time, the wind industry and its parasites used to cling to the idea that the RET “has bi-partisan support“, as a self-comforting mantra: but not anymore. And it’s the retailers that have thrown the spanner in the works.

Power retailers have no incentive to lock themselves into PPAs that run for 10-15 years (the time frame demanded by wind power outfits or, rather, the banks lending to build wind farms), at prices 3-4 times the wholesale price, where the demand for power has fallen, along with the wholesale price; and demand is unlikely to improve much from here.

Nor do they have any incentive to support a policy that will simply price their customers out of the market; leaving them sitting in their – soon to be, if not already, disconnected homes – freezing (or boiling) in the dark; or shutting the doors on power hungry enterprises, like mines and mineral processors, or manufacturing, for starters.

With the collapse in iron ore prices, Australia’s economic dream run is over.

Despite the economic punishment that’s coming, Macca and Hunt are working over-time to ensure the survival of their mates at Infigen and Vestas, via a $3 billion a year wind industry subsidy, that will simply result in further generating capacity (albeit of the kind that can only be delivered, if at all, at crazy, random intervals) – at a time when Australia has REAL power generating capacity coming out of its ears.

There is NO shortage of electricity in Australia: what there is, is a shortage of reliable and affordable power. With Macca and Hunt pulling out all-stops to throw $46 billion at a wholly weather dependent power source – that’s 3-4 times the cost of the reliable stuff – it simply begs the question: just who do these clowns pretend to represent?

It’s against that backdrop, that it’s necessary to be reminded that Hunt and Macfarlane are supposed to be on the conservative side of politics. Their fervent (and seemingly inexplicable) support for the wind industry stands in lamentable contrast with the approach being shown by the Conservatives in the UK, where David Cameron won an election promising to end all subsidies to on-shore wind power:

UK Elections: Brit’s Deliverance from its Wind Power Disaster

The US, where the ‘wind power’ states have cut their state based subsidies to wind power outfits (or are well on the path of doing so); and Republicans are out to prevent the extension of the Federal government’s PTC wind power subsidy:

2015: the Wind Industry’s ‘Annus Horribilis’; or Time to Sink the Boots In

US Republicans Line Up to Can Subsidies for Wind Power

Germany, where consumers and industry are fed up with escalating power prices:

German’s Top Daily – Bild – says Time to Chop Massive Subsidies for Wind Power

And Vesta’s home turf, Denmark, where the government’s brewing and massive legal liability to wind farm neighbours has resulted in a full-blown moratorium on planning permits for new wind farms:

Denmark Calls Halt to More Wind Farm Harm

While Hunt and Macfarlane might consider themselves smarter than the market, for power consumers – and the economy as a whole – salvation comes from the fact that power retailers do NOT have to follow the insane path set by the LRET: by refusing to sign PPAs with wind power outfits, they hopped off that commercially suicidal track nearly 2½ years ago; which has given them round one on points: markets usually win in the end – ask Australian motor manufacturers, General Motors Holden and Ford.

The fact that power consumers (read ‘voters’) will be walloped with a $46 billion electricity tax under the LRET is not so much a problem for retailers, as a brewing political nightmare for the Federal government.

That the bulk of that tax will be collected as fines by retailers, provides them with the perfect piece of political leverage. Once power punters work out that they’re being slugged with a fine that’s around 3 times the cost of the power being supplied to them (ie an additional $93 per MWh, on top of the average wholesale price of $35 per MWh), they won’t just be a little miffed, they’ll be furious.

With wind power outfits in a state of grief stricken panic and their political saviours, like Macca, and Hunt powerless to make retailers enter PPAs, retailers need only keep their nerve, keep their pens in their top pockets, and watch the whole LRET debacle implode.

Far from ‘saving’ the LRET, or avoiding the shortfall penalty, the latest ‘deal’ has simply guaranteed the demise of the former, by the certain imposition of the latter. Political punishment will follow, as night follows day.

More Proof of Harm, that Windpushers & Government Choose to Ignore!

May 11, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Systematic Review 2013: Association Between Wind Turbines and Human Distress

Ian Arra , Hazel Lynn, Kimberley Barker, Chiebere Ogbuneke, Sophie Regalado

Published: May 23, 2014 (see history)

DOI: 10.7759/cureus.183

Cite this article as: Arra I, Lynn H, Barker K, et al. (2014-05-23 11:51:41 UTC) Systematic Review 2013: Association Between Wind Turbines and Human Distress. Cureus 6(5): e183. doi:10.7759/cureus.183

Abstract

Background and Objectives: The proximity of wind turbines to residential areas has been associated with a higher level of complaints compared to the general population. The study objective was to search the literature investigating whether an association between wind turbines and human distress exists.

Methods: A systematic search of the following databases (EMBASE, PubMed, OvidMedline, PsycINFO, The Cochrane Library, SIGLE, and Scirus) and screening for duplication led to the identification of 154 studies. Abstract and full article reviews of these studies led to the identification of 18 studies that were eligible for inclusion as they examined the association of wind turbines and human distress published in peer-review journals in English between 2003-2013. Outcome measures, including First Author, Year of Publication, Journal Name, Country of Study, Study Design, Sample Size, Response Rate, Level of Evidence, Level of Potential Bias, and Outcome Measures of Study, were captured for all studies. After data extraction, each study was analyzed to identify the two primary outcomes: Quality of Study and Conclusion of Study Effect.

Results: All peer-reviewed studies captured in our review found an association between wind turbines and human distress. These studies had levels of evidence of four and five. Two studies showed a dose-response relationship between distance from wind turbines and distress, and none of them concluded no association.

Conclusions: In this review, we have demonstrated the presence of reasonable evidence (Level Four and Five) that an association exists between wind turbines and distress in humans. The existence of a dose-response relationship (between distance from wind turbines and distress) and the consistency of association across studies found in the scientific literature argues for the credibility of this association. Future research in this area is warranted as to whether or not a causal relationship exists.

Introduction

Unlike most industries, the global wind industry grows annually by 21% despite the recent economic challenges. Canada is the ninth largest producer of wind energy in the world with a 45-fold growth in the industry in the year 2012 relative to 2000 [1-2].

The invention of the wind turbine as an electricity generating machine dates back to 1887 by James Blyth, a Scottish academic, and it used to light his holiday home in Marykirk, Scotland[3]. Wind turbines were at first welcomed by the public as being a source of energy that is both renewable and carbon emission-free. The need to generate electrical power on a large scale was the main driver in establishing the industrial wind turbines (IWTs) [4].

Wind turbines can be located as solo wind or in groups called “Wind Farms”. In either form and for various reasons (e.g., minimizing transmission costs), wind turbines are usually positioned in close proximity to residential areas (farms, villages, towns, and cities). This proximity to residential areas has been associated with a higher level of complaints compared to the general population [5]. These complaints are coined in research conducted and articles written on the subject under different terms, such as “Extreme Annoyance”, “Wind Turbine Syndrome (WTS)”, and “Distress”, among others. In this article, the term “distress” will be used unless we are quoting other articles.

Complaints resulting from the proximity to wind turbines vary in their nature, and distress is often attributed to different mechanisms, such as noise, visual impact, sleep disturbance, infrasound, and others [5-7]. Noise is the complaint that has been studied most often, especially given that environmental noise has become one of the major public health concerns of the 21st century [8].

These complaints triggered the debate about possible mechanisms of effect. Several hypothetical mechanisms have been suggested to explain the possible link(s) between wind turbines and the reported distress; some of these hypotheses attribute distress to one or more of the following: chronic noise exposure, infrasound effect, visual impact, perceived lack of control over noise, attitudes, personality, and age [5-6].

To assess the possible effects of wind turbines on human health, different outcome measures have been suggested, including annoyance, sleep disturbance, and cortisol levels. An alternative approach to health assessment involves the subjective appraisal of health-related quality of life, a concept that measures general well-being in all domains, including physical, psychological, and social domains [8].

Although the focus on researching mechanisms of effect may very well be a good first step to identifying the cause, finding an association is a cornerstone of establishing any causality, according to Hill’s Criteria of Causality [9]. A key missing piece of the scientific literature is that of an up-to-date and thorough review that examines the possible existence of an association between wind turbine and human distress. Therefore, the objective of our study was to search the literature investigating whether or not an association between wind turbines and human distress exists.

Materials & Methods

Study design

A systematic review of the existing literature of published peer-reviewed studies investigating the association between wind turbines and human distress between January 2003 – January 2013 was undertaken. This study was conducted as a collaboration between the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), Sudbury, and Grey Bruce Health Unit, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.

Eligibility criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

– Peer-reviewed studies

– Studies examining association between wind turbines and distress

– Studies published in peer-review journals

– English language

– Studies involving humans

– Studies published between January 2003 – January 2013

Exclusion Criteria:

– Non-English language reports

– Investigations reporting interim analysis that did not result in stopping the study

– Secondary and long-term update reports

– Duplicate reports

– Cost effectiveness and economic studies

– Engineering studies

– Studies involving animals

Information sources

The following bibliographic databases were searched: EMBASE, PubMed, Ovid Medline, PsycINFO and The Cochrane Library, SIGLE, and Scirus, the last two of which deal with grey literature (materials that cannot be found easily through conventional channels, such as publishers; for example, thesis, dissertations, and unpublished peer-reviewed studies). Authors who published multiple studies included in our review were also contacted to identify any additional studies.

Search

Two search approaches were taken: subject heading and keyword searching. Electronic keyword searches were conducted in EMBASE, PubMed, PsycINFO, The Cochrane Library, SIGLE, and Scirus for published peer-reviewed studies according to the study inclusion criteria. All search strategies included the same search terms and combinations ([Wind power OR wind farm OR air turbine OR wind turbine] AND [Distress OR annoyance, sleep disturbance, noise OR sound OR infrasound OR sonic OR low-frequency OR acoustic OR hear OR ear OR wind turbine syndrome]).

Appropriate subject headings and limiters were identified in consultation with the corresponding author and were used to conduct electronic searches in the following bibliographic databases: EMBASE, PsycINFO, Ovid Medline, and PubMed. In order to retrieve all relevant published studies, subject headings were exploded; select subject headings were also chosen as the major focus of the search. Searches were refined by setting a publication restriction of 2003 to current and limiting results to humans.

Study selection

Study selection was performed in three stages (Figure 1):

Stage 1: Database Search

The studies that were identified through the database subject heading search (194 studies), the keyword search (142), and other sources (13 studies) were screened for duplication, yielding 154 studies.

Stage 2: Titles and Abstract Review

Screening of the titles and abstracts of the 154 retrieved studies was conducted by one qualified reviewer (the first author) in order to exclude any obvious non-eligible studies. Of these, 40 studies were deemed eligible for inclusion in a full article review.

Stage 3: Full Article Review

Two qualified reviewers conducted a full article review of the 40 studies. This review had two goals: first, to exclude any studies of non-eligible trials; second, to extract data on specific variables for further analyses. Of the 40 studies, 18 studies were deemed eligible for inclusion in our analysis.

Figure 1: Flowchart of the Review Screening Process

Eighteen peer-reviewed studies published between January 2003 – January 2013 investigating the association between wind turbines and human distress were eligible for inclusion in the analysis after full article review publications.

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Data collection process

Data extraction was conducted by a qualified reviewer (the first author) during the full article review of the 18 included studies. The source of data in the individual studies was confirmed by contacting investigators who authored multiple studies included in the review, due to the aggregated weight of these studies potentially affecting our conclusion. The confirmation aimed to verify whether the data examined in the individual studies were collected from a single population and used in more than one study, or from different independent populations.

Data items

Primary Outcomes:

– Quality of Study: The quality of the study was categorized into three groups (Low, Moderate, High) (categorical variable)

– Conclusion of Study Effect: (whether the study concluded association of wind turbines with the effect on human health that was under investigation) (binary variable)

Variables (Outcome Measures of Individual Studies):

– First Author: The name of the first author (nominal variable)

– Year of Publication: The year in which the study was published (ordinal variable)

– Journal Name: The name of the publishing journal (nominal variable)

– Country of Study: The name of the country where the trial was originated (nominal variable)

– Study Design: The design of the study (nominal variable)

– Sample Size: The study sample size (continuous variable)

– Response Rate: The response rate of subjects in the study (continuous variable)

– Level of Evidence: The Level of evidence of the study (nominal variable)

– Level of Potential Bias: The level of risk of bias. Categorized into three groups according to Cochrane’s recommendations [10]. (Low risk of bias: Plausible bias unlikely to seriously alter the results; Unclear risk of bias: Plausible bias that raises some doubt about the results; High risk of bias: Plausible bias that seriously weakens confidence in the results) (categorical variable)

– Outcome Measures of Study: The outcome measure under investigation in the study (nominal variable); these outcome measures are:

– Annoyance (Sensitivity to Noise)

– Sleep disturbance

– Visual impact

– Well-being (Quality of Life/Mental Effect)

– Dose-response (description of the change in distress caused by differing distances from a wind turbine)

– Infrasound effect

– Existing background noise (comparison of stress associated with wind turbines to stress associated with road traffic noise/quiet rural environment)

– Attitude to wind turbines (whether people who complain have negative personal opinions toward wind turbines)

– Economical benefit (whether people who benefit economically from wind turbines have a decreased risk of distress)

Risk of bias in individual studies

Assessing the risk of bias of individual studies was performed at both the study level (study design, sample size, response rate, direction and magnitude of any potential bias and how it was handled, limitations, and reporting quality) and the outcome level (a cautious overall interpretation was drawn of the study’s conclusions, whether effect of human distress exists, considering the specific study’s objectives).

Summary measures and synthesis of results

After data extraction, each study was analyzed to identify the two primary outcomes: First, quality of study, taking into account the study’s principle outcome measures; all outcomes, exposures, predictors, potential confounders, and effect modifiers; how the study size was arrived at; how quantitative variables were handled in the analyses; description of all statistical methods; and how loss to follow-up and missing data were addressed. Second, conclusion of study effect as a cautious overall interpretation of the study’s conclusions, taking into account the specific study’s objectives and how well these conclusions were supported by the study results.

Risk of bias across studies

To reduce potential sampling bias (for example, the quality of study could be confounded by journal name and name of first author), the reviewers blinded themselves to the name of the journal and authors until all data on the other variables of interest were collected. To reduce potential measurement bias, the following three measures were undertaken: The data were directly entered into the database instead of using collection forms, quality assurance on all steps of data collection and management was performed, and in any case of uncertainty in deciding the quality of study, the reviewer consulted one of our senior authors to confirm the decision. Furthermore, the source of data was confirmed by contacting investigators who authored multiple studies included in the review, due to the weight their aggregated studies would have in affecting our conclusions.

Ethics approval

This study used previously published data making it exempt from institutional ethics board approval.

Results

Study selection

Figure 1 presents a flowchart depicting the study screening process. The database searches produced 154 publications. From this group, 40 publications were eligible following screening the titles and abstracts. From this group, 18 publications were eligible for inclusion after full article review. These 18 studies, shown in Table 1, consist of six original studies and 12 non-original studies (secondary analyses and literature reviews based on some of these original studies). Only the six original studies were included in the final analysis shown in Table 2. The 12 non-original studies were excluded from the analysis to minimize potential bias associated with repeated results.

This review used previously published data; therefore, there was no missing data for any of the variables of interest.

Study Characteristics
1st Author, Year	Country	Design	Sample Size	Response Rate %	Level of Evidence	Risk Of Bias Within Studies	Quality of Study
Bakker [11]2012 ^	Netherlands	Cross-sectional	725	37	4	Unclear risk of bias	Moderate
Hanning [12]2012 ^	UK	Expert Opinion/Review	N/A	N/A	5	Unclear risk of bias	Moderate
Nissenbaum[13] 2012 ¥	USA	Cross-sectional	106	75	4	Low risk of bias	Moderate
Knopper [6]2011 ^	Canada	Review	15	N/A	4	Unclear risk of bias	High
Shepherd[14] 2011 ¥	New Zealand	Cross-sectional	39, 158	34, 32	3,4	Low risk of bias	High
Janssen [15]2011 ^	Netherlands	Secondary analysis	1820	68, 58, <30	4	Low risk of bias	High
Pedersen[16] 2011 ^	Sweden	Secondary analysis	1755	*	4	Low risk of bias	High
Bolin [17]2011 ^	Sweden	Review	N/A	N/A	4	Unclear risk of bias	Low
Pedersen[18] 2010 ^	Sweden	Secondary analysis	725	37	4	Low risk of bias	High
Salt [7] 2010 ¥	USA	Expert Opinion Report	N/A	N/A	5	Unclear risk of bias	High
Pedersen[19] 2009 ¥	Netherlands	Cross-sectional	1948	37	4	Low risk of bias	High
Keith [20]2008 ^	Canada	Expert Review	N/A	N/A	5	Unclear risk of bias	High
Pedersen[21] 2008 ^	Sweden	Secondary analysis	1095	N/A	4	Low risk of bias	High
Pedersen[22] 2008 ^	Sweden	Secondary analysis	1822	60	4	Low risk of bias	High
Pedersen[23] 2007 ^	Sweden	Qualitative Study	15	N/A	5	Low risk of bias	High
Pedersen [5]2007 ¥	Sweden	Cross-sectional	754	58	4	Low risk of bias	High
Leventhall[24] 2006 ^	UK	Report	N/A	N/A	5	Unclear risk of bias	High
Pedersen[25] 2004 ¥	Sweden	Cross-sectional	351	68	4	Low risk of bias	High

Table 1: Study Characteristics of 18 Peer-reviewed Studies Published between January 2003 – January 2013 Investigating the Association between Wind Turbines and Human Distress

N/A = Not applicable; ¥ = Original Study; ^ = Secondary Article (some studies have generated several articles, so the findings in these article were repeats of the findings in the original study) ; * = Data not available; High = Available data indicates high quality; Moderate = Available data indicates moderate quality; Low = Available data indicates low quality; High risk of bias: Plausible bias that seriously weakens confidence in the results; Unclear risk of bias: Plausible bias that raises some doubt about the results; Low risk of bias: Plausible bias unlikely to seriously alter the results.

1st Author, Year	Does-response	Road Traffic Noise / quiet rural environment	Sleep Disturbance	Annoyance/ sensitivity to noise	Visual impact	Attitude to wind turbines	Infrasound effect	Well-being (Quality of Life / mental effect)	Economical Benefit
Nissenbaum[13] 2012	p < 0.05		p = 0.03					p = 0.002
Shepherd[14] 2011			U-R = 0.43 p < 0.001	U-R = 0.44 p < 0.001				U-R = 0.20 p < 0.01
Salt [7] 2010				Exp			Exp
Pedersen[19] 2009	LRC = 0.50 p < 0.001	LRC = 1.07- p < 0.01		LRC = 0.35 p < 0.001	LRC = 1.04 p <0.001	LRC = 0.54 p < 0.001			LRC = -2.77 p < 0.001
Pedersen [5]2007		OR = 1.1 (95% CI 0.91 to 1.21)		OR = 1.1 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.25)	OR = 1.1 (95% CI 0.97 to 1.21)	OR = 1.1 (95% CI 1.00 to 1.25)
Pedersen[25] 2004			Rs = 0.35 p < 0.001	Rs = 0.42 p < 0.001	Rs = 0.52 p < 0.001	Rs = 0.33 p < 0.001

Table 2: Outcome Measures of Six Peer-reviewed Original Studies Published between January 2003 – January 2013 Investigating the Association between Wind Turbines and Human Distress

Rs = R-squared for the model; U-R: Unadjusted r; p=p-value; LRC = logistic regression coefficients; Exp = Expert Opinion Report

Study characteristics and risk of bias within studies

Table 1 shows data on the 18 peer-reviewed studies captured in our review, including individual study characteristics, level of potential bias, and quality of study.

Results of individual studies

Table 2 shows summary data on the six original studies’ objectives, p-values, and outcome measures.

Risk of bias across studies

One main source of potential bias across these studies was that 10 of them, listed below, were mainly based on three data sets. The first data set (SWE00) was collected in Sweden in the year 2000 in agricultural areas, the second (SWE05) was collected in different environments in Sweden 2005, and the third (NL07) was collected all over the Netherlands in 2007. This potential bias was eliminated by using only the three original studies that collected the data sets [5, 19, 25]. The rest of the 10 studies (non-original studies) were excluded from the analysis to avoid repeated results.

– Bakker [11] 2012 Science of the Total Environment (NL07)

– Pedersen [16] 2011 Noise Control Eng J (SWE00) + (SWE05) + (NL07)

– Janssen [15] 2011 Acoustical Society of America (SWE00) + (SWE05) + (NL07)

– Pedersen [18] 2010 Energy Policy (NL07)

– Pedersen [19] 2009 Acoustical Society of America (NL07)

– Pedersen [21] 2008 Journal of Environmental Psychology (SWE00) + (SWE05)

– Pedersen [22] 2008 Environ Res Lett (SWE00) + (SWE05)

– Pedersen [23] 2007 Qualitative Research in Psychology (SWE00)

– Pedersen [5] 2007 Occup Environ Med (SWE05)

– Pedersen [25] 2004 Acoustical Society of America (SWE00)

Another source of bias was that three of the studies were reviews of previous literature [6, 12, 17].

Key results

– All 18 peer-reviewed studies captured in our review found an association between wind turbines and one or more types of human distress. These studies had a level of evidence of four and five.

– None of the studies captured in our review found any association (potential publication bias).

– These studies were published in a variety of journals (representative sample).

– Two of these studies showed a dose-response relationship between distance from wind turbines and distress (Table 2).

– There is still no evidence of whether or not a causal relationship between distance from wind turbines and distress exists.

Discussion

Summary of evidence

The peer-reviewed studies we reviewed provide reasonable evidence (Levels Four and Five) that an association exists between wind turbines and distress in humans.

Two of these studies showed a dose-response relationship between distance from wind turbines and distress, and none of the 18 studies concluded no association (consistency of association). The existence of a dose-response relationship and consistency, two of the Hill’s Criteria of Causality, argues for the credibility of the association.

All the evidence comes from expert opinion, case studies, and cross-sectional studies. No higher level of evidence observational studies, namely case-control and cohort studies, were utilized to investigate the subject. For example, although Shepherd, et al’s study [14] had a sound design and was well conducted and reported, it is considered at a lower level of evidence as a cross-sectional study has an increased potential for bias of its results.

Although three of the studies [6-7, 24] suggested that low-frequency sound energy wind turbines (i.e., infrasound below 20 Hz) may directly and negatively affect health, the level of evidence for these studies is also weak (expert opinions [7, 24] and a review [6] citing these two studies).

Economic benefit found in two of the studies [15, 19] could be intuitively and prematurely viewed as a factor lowering the credibility of the complaint. However, in our opinion, compensation would have lowered the credibility of the complaint only if these people had no distress following compensation. People in the studies who benefited economically from wind turbines had a decreased risk of distress but not a complete elimination of distress. Furthermore, the fact that the level of distress could be altered with financial compensation only speaks to the existence of distress.

It is worth pointing out that no causality has been established. The distress could be due to factors other than actual noise exposure. For example, the distress experienced by the participants in the original studies may have been generated or exaggerated by exposure to negative opinions on wind turbine.

Limitations

This study has a number of limitations and sources of bias. One source of bias is the exclusion of non-English studies. For example, China is the world’s leading country in the number of wind turbines [1]. The exclusion of non-English studies might have affected the overall conclusions of our review.

Another source of bias is the fact that the reviewer could not be completely blinded to the journals’ or authors’ names. There might be a theoretical incline to give studies in high impact journals higher quality because of their reputation (potential sampling bias). Nevertheless, if this bias took place, it would have an effect on the magnitude of evidence and not on the existence of the association due to the dichotomous nature of this variable (the number of studies that speaks for an association will not change).

Publication bias could be the reason for the finding that none of the 18 peer-reviewed studies captured in our review found no association. However, potential publication bias was decreased by conducting a search in two major grey literature databases (SIGLE, and Scirus).

Generalizability

The 18 studies were published in a variety of journals, making the captured studies a representative sample, which in turn increases our results’ generalizability (external validity).

The fact that the data in two of the three mentioned data sets were collected in Sweden may decrease the external validity, but simultaneously may increase the internal validity following the above logic. Furthermore, although these data were collected from one country, it still would be a safe assumption that the people and their experience with wind turbines, on which these data were collected, are not fundamentally different from people and experiences in other countries.

Future research

Further research in the area of exposure assessment and measurement is needed. The mechanism and physiology of harm needs to be confirmed. There is a need to identify the actual risk of harm and the health outcomes in people exposed. Until research can separate out specific sets of significant factors for the exposure with higher-level evidence than is available now, our ability to mitigate the harm is limited. Possible future research could be conducting longitudinal studies, performing measurements before wind turbines and after, and observing what happens to people over time.

Conclusions

We have demonstrated in our review the presence of reasonable evidence (Levels Four and Five) supporting the existence of an association between wind turbines and distress in humans. The existence of a dose-response relationship between distance from wind turbines and distress as well as the consistency of association across studies found in the scientific literature argues for the credibility of this association. Future research in this area is warranted.

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