not financially feasible

Wind Turbine Hosts Love the Money! but…..Hate the Wind Turbines!

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Macarthur Turbine Hosts Destroy Local Community & Bolt, as Hammering the Wind Industry becomes the “New Black”

June 27, 2015 by

turbine fire 6

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When STT cranked into gear in December 2012, hammering the wind industry was a fairly lonely occupation: hardly fashionable; a bit like wearing yellow to a funeral, really.

Back then, openly questioning the “wonders” of wind power was a guaranteed dinner party showstopper. Nervous hosts – choking on their organic pinot gris – would seek to segue to another less contentious topic – the joys of dancing cat videos, say; tempers might flare, among raised voices one of the more passionate would shout something about: “the science is settled man”. The protagonist asserting that dreaded CO2 gas was an obvious planet killing “problem”; to which the only “solution” was carpeting the world in an endless sea of bat-chomping, bird slicing,blade-chucking, pyrotechnic, sonic-torture devices – not that the wound-up wind power advocate would have ever presented, let alone dealt with, minor issues like those, as part of his “we’ve gotta save the planet” manifesto.

But that was then, this is now.

Now, people with a modicum of intelligence – anything like an inquisitive nature; and gifted with a shred of logic – are able to unpick the fraud in several easy steps. Indeed, in discourse among those with an adult’s mental capacity it’s no longer a mortal sin these days to express the bleeding obvious: THESE THINGS DON’T WORK.

On the contrary, calling the great wind power fraud for what it is has become fashionable: for want of a better phrase it’s “the new black”.

For a look at the latest fashion trend, we’ll start off with this cracking article from STT Champion, Graham Lloyd, which struts the catwalk with the self-assured style of Claudia Schiffer.

Real concerns about turbines left blowing in the wind
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
27 June 2015

Each morning fine-wool grower Ann Gardner broadcasts her wind farm woes to an unreceptive world.

Politicians, shock jocks, journalists and anyone Gardner hopes will listen are included as recipients of uncomfortable missives that outline the “torture” of living next door to Australia’s biggest wind farm at Macarthur, Victoria.

Gardner is used to being ignored, unlike her neighbours, Hamish and Anna Officer, who routinely are quoted as model wind farm devotees.

Last week, as the deadline counted down for the revised renewable energy target agreement to be finally approved in federal parliament, the Officers again were displayed prominently on the front page of Fairfax newspapers rebutting the comments of Tony Abbott that wind farms were noisy.

As the Officers’ immediate neighbour, Gardner thinks she, too, should have been asked by Fairfax papers about the noise.

If she had been, the Fairfax reports could have disclosed that the Officers receive an estimated $480,000 a year for 25 years for hosting 48 turbines.

And, a Senate inquiry has been told, after spending lavishly on renovating their Macarthur homestead the Officers will soon be moving on and leaving their wind turbines behind.

The Officers, no doubt, have good reasons for moving. And the facts can easily be construed to suggest Gardner is simply jealous about the good financial fortune of her neighbours thanks to big wind.

But other evidence to the Senate inquiry from wind turbine hosts Clive and Trina Gare, who say they bitterly regret their decision to host turbines because of noise, undermine the widespread claims that only jealous neighbours have a problem with wind farm noise and health.

Gardner contends the failure to report the plight of the Gares or the full picture for the Officers is typical of the one-sided treatment the wind turbine issue has received.

She says much of the media has shown itself willing to misconstrue findings from the National Health and Medical Research Council and suggest research had cleared wind turbines of ill effects.

In fact, the NHMRC said only limited, poor-quality research was available and the issue of wind farms and health remained an open scientific question.

The NHMRC has called for tenders for targeted research with a particular focus on low-frequency noise and infrasound.

After receiving evidence from more than 500 people, the Senate inquiry, chaired by John Madigan, this month released an interim report recommending urgent steps to improve scientific knowledge about the health effects of wind turbines. This includes the creation of an independent expert scientific committee on industrial sound to provide research and advice to the Environment Minister on the impact on human health of audible noise (including low frequency) and infrasound from wind turbines.

The Senate committee also calls for a national environment protection (wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise) measure.

It says to get access to the billions of dollars’ worth of renewable energy certificates, wind farm projects would have to adhere not only to the national wind farm guidelines but also with the National Environment Protection Measures.

In its deal to secure passage of the revised RET through the Senate, the federal government agreed to some of the Senate committee’s key interim demands.

Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt says the agreement with the crossbench senators includes the appointment of a wind farm commissioner to receive complaints, make inquiries and to make appropriate findings.

The Clean Energy Council says it is “disappointed about moves to introduce further red tape on the wind sector, given the stringent and robust regulatory framework already in place for wind energy in Australia”.

However, CEC chief executive Kane Thornton says the industry will “work closely with the government to ensure these measures genuinely improve the regulatory framework and are developed based on credible scientific research by independent expert bodies”.

The issue of wind farms and health is not confined to Australia. The executive board of the German Medical Association is considering a motion from this year’s national congress calling for research on infrasound and low-frequency noise-related health effects of wind farms.

Like the NHMRC, the German Medical Association congress motion says there are no reliable and independent studies.

“Consequently, there is no proof that these emissions are safe from a health perspective,” it says.

Japanese researchers who have measured the brain waves of people exposed to noise from wind turbines have found “the infrasound was considered to be an annoyance to the technicians who work in close proximity to a modern large-scale wind turbine”.

And a new study by researchers from Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine have found “the odds of being annoyed appear significantly increased by wind turbine noise”.

The research, published in Environment International, has found wind turbine noise significantly increases the odds of experiencing sleep disturbance, and results in lower quality of life scores.

The evidence flies in the face of wind industry claims that complaints have been confined largely to Australia and English-speaking countries where vocal lobby groups have reinforced each other’s dissatisfaction.

In fact, as Australia prepares to ramp up construction of thousands of new wind turbines to satisfy the RET, governments elsewhere are cutting back because of concerns about the cost and social cohesion.

The Finnish Energy Industries Association says the incoming government there effectively has “shut the door” on new wind farms.

Britain’s conservative government has pulled the brake on the UK’s onshore wind industry by closing its subsidy scheme a year early.

The move reportedly will stop about 2500 proposed turbines in 250 projects from being built.

Family First senator Bob Day, deputy chairman of the Senate committee that is undertaking public hearings, says in at least 15 countries people from all walks of life have come forward complaining about the health effects of wind turbines.

The complaints include nausea, blurred vision, vertigo, tachycardia, high blood pressure, ear pressure, tinnitus, headache, exacerbated migraine disorders, sleep deprivation, motion sensitivity and inner ear damage.

Current thinking is that the low-frequency noise impact from wind turbines is felt most acutely by people who are susceptible to motion sickness.

Publicly, the wind industry has an army of supporters ever ready to rubbish claims that wind farms can have any effect on health. But there is evidence the wind industry has known about the impact of infra­sound for more than two decades.

The first documented complaints were made in 1979 by residents living 3.5km from an old model wind turbine in the US.

The residents described a “feeling” or “presence” that was felt rather than heard, accompanied by sensations of uneasiness and personal disturbance. The “sounds” were louder and more annoying inside the affected homes, they said.

NASA researchers found the wind turbine operation created enormous sound pressure waves and the turbine was redesigned from downwind to upwind, swapping the blade location on the tower.

The author of the NASA research, Neil Kelley, tells Inquirer modern turbines could have the same issues under certain conditions.

In September 1982, the results of NASA research on human impacts was provided to the wind industry. In 1985 the hypothesis was developed for infrasound-induced motion sickness and major NASA research on community annoyance from wind turbines was released.

But over the following decade wind farm noise regulations were developed that specifically avoided measuring low frequency noise.

This is despite the NASA research and the fact the harmful effects of low-frequency noise from other industrial sources have been firmly established and are well understood.

A federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism report into airborne contaminants, noise and vibration, published in October 2009, says “sound in the frequency range below 20 hertz is normally defined as ‘infrasound’ and can be heard (or felt) as a pulsating sensation and/or pressure on the ears or chest”.

The common sources of low-frequency noise and infrasound are large pumps, motors or fans and crushing circuits and screens.

The report says low-frequency noise can be particularly annoying and result in complaints many kilometres away from the source.

And because low-frequency noises between 20Hz and 200Hz propagate with minimal attenuation across large distances and transmit easily through building fabric, “it can be quite prominent inside residences”.

The report does not refer to wind turbines but it accurately describes many of the complaints that are being made.

Hunt says the federal government will act in good faith on the Senate inquiry recommendations when the final report is made public in August.

Done properly, the Senate committee recommendations should go to the heart of complaints being made by wind farm neighbours such as Gardner.

They want real-time monitoring of noise, including low frequency and infrasound. And if limits are exceeded they want the turbines shut down, particularly at night.

One thing is certain: when the wind farm commissioner takes up the position there is a good chance they will be receiving plenty of correspondence from Gardner.
The Australian

graham-lloyd

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Nice work, Graham! Typically hard-hitting stuff, focusing on the sort of things that STT dishes up on a daily basis, like the damning evidence given by Clive and Trina Gare:

SA Farmers Paid $1 Million to Host 19 Turbines Tell Senate they “Would Never Do it Again” due to “Unbearable” Sleep-Destroying Noise

And the fact that the wind industry has known about – and sought to cover up – the devastating impacts of incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound for over 30 years:

Three Decades of Wind Industry Deception: A Chronology of a Global Conspiracy of Silence and Subterfuge

That Graham Lloyd has the temerity to present those kind of facts – against the run of the drivel dished up by the struggling Fairfax stable and the ABC’s “Ministry of Truth” (see our post here) – might be seen by some as “controversial”; and, by the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers, as an “outrage”: STT, however, simply calls it journalism.

And it’s that kind of journalism that has started to educate the dinner party dimwits referred to above.

In the last couple of months there has been a monumental shift in the attitudes and responses among those commenting on newspaper websites, blog forums and the like.

No longer do eco-fascist fantasists get a free run. Instead, they’re rounded up with what they hate most: FACTS. Quite often the ‘debates’ on comments pages and web forums about the ‘merits’ of wind power get pulled to a conclusive halt with links from STT, used in a “put-that-in-your-pipe and smoke it” moment.

Call it an “awakening”; call it a “fashion trend” – or whatever takes your fancy – but it’s real, and irreversible. As we’ve pointed out before, in our travels we’ve met plenty of people that started out in favour of wind power and turned against it. But we’ve yet to meet anyone who started out opposed to wind power, who later became a supporter.

As STT was putting this post together there were only three comments on The Australian’s website and all of them directed at hammering the great wind power fraud:

Roger

$10,000 per turbine per year. Now that’s what I call easy money. Largely provided by the gullible taxpayer.

Bernie

The whole wind energy thing is a complete farce – that will eventually turn into a disaster.

The only way these monstrosities make money is because of government subsidies – on their own, they can never generate sufficient income to be profitable.

It is therefore blindingly obvious what will eventually and inevitably happen: one day the government subsidies will stop, because future governments will logically decide that this folly can no longer continue and that the pointless expenditure of public funds must cease.

That is when things will get interesting.

As soon as the government subsidies cease – all the companies that own the wind turbines will immediately go out of business. So what then happens to the thousands of wind turbines scattered across the country side? Well, the first thing to determine will be this: who owns them? The company that has gone out of business? The banks and other financiers? The farmer whose land the wind turbine is on? The State? That question in itself will keep legions of lawyers well fed for years.

But the next thing to determine is even more important: who is responsible for their maintenance? Because an unmaintained wind turbine is a disaster waiting to happen – eventually a strong wind will make it turn at the speed of an aircraft propeller – and if it hasn’t been maintained for a couple of years, it will suffer from terminal friction and burst into flames.

Which is not what you want on a scorching Victorian summer day with a temperature of 45C and with a 50 knot wind.

Just one of those wind turbines, on such a day and in such a condition, spewing flames, molten plastic and molten metal on to the long, dry grass below, could be responsible for the next Black Saturday. Who will be sued for hundreds of millions? The banks? The farmer? The state?

All of these questions and issues are just a-blowin’ in the wind.

Terence

Wind energy – “works” SEVEN hours a day with a capital cost of FOUR times base load power is now considered to be unsafe.

Reminds me of Victoria’s State Electricity Commission business model which was to provide Safe, Cheap and Reliable energy. Wind energy promoted by the Renewable Energy industry, politicians and the MSM is quite obviously Unsafe, Expensive and Unreliable.

Yep we got rid of those who understood the energy business like the SECV which planned 20 years into the future whereas today planning only extends to the next election creating industry uncertainty as politics discard our previous safe, cheap reliable power and for what? A few Green preferences.

Hmmmm…. Not a lot of support for “wonderful, free wind energy” being expressed there. And no apparent hesitance amongst the correspondents in hammering the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.

Now, back to Graham Lloyd’s article. Graham raises the story of Hamish and Anna Officer – who are pitched up by the wind industry as the happiest turbine hosts on earth. Well ….  not quite.

As Graham points out, the Officers have – with all the personal integrity of Judas Iscariot – pocketed their 30 pieces of silver; destroyed their community into the bargain; and are all set to leave their long-suffering neighbours for dead. Here’s some more detail on the Officer’s fine community spirit and moral integrity in this letter from Annie Gardner to 2GB’s Alan Jones.

2GB, Alan Jones Breakfast

Dear Alan,

Our neighbour, turbine host of around 40 turbines (this is an approximate number as we are not sure of exact figures) Mr Hamish Officer, who gave evidence at the Portland Senate Inquiry hearing on 30th March – omitted to inform the Senators in this hearing that he and his family will no doubt soon be moving off their property Brandon, where they host turbines to a new property which they purchased quite some time ago and on which they are building a new, very substantial home.

During the Planning Panel for the Macarthur wind farm in 2006, the Officer family denigrated the many neighbouring families objecting to their proposal, claiming they would be happy to build their new dream home and live amongst the turbines. We were described as “mad” by the locals for objecting and were told there would be “not as much noise from the turbines as an ordinary working farm”.

Several years ago, we heard that the Officers had purchased several hundred acres about 30 kilometres from the Macarthur wind farm where they host around 40 turbines. This is where they planned to build their new “dream home” …..

Officer house at Pierrepoint

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Officer horse fence, house and shed in background

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From the pictures above you will observe that this magnificent new home is not far from completion yet Mr. Officer, during his presentation to the panel on 30th March 2015, and in his submission where he extremely sarcastically told the story that he was disappointed he couldn’t open his bakery specialising in pavlovas, as his eggs, alas were not yolkless – FORGOT to tell the Senate Inquiry he and his family were intending to MOVE AWAY FROM THE WIND FARM ……

However, in recent years, the Officers have spent megabucks, renovating their homestead on the wind farm – this home is absolutely beautiful now – and also have, I’m informed, spent around $1 million on an equestrian horse complex.

The new property which I think is a few hundred acres – it’s five minutes out of Hamilton at least 30 km if not 35 km from the wind farm at “Brandon”.

I drove past the new property some weeks ago and the house is nearly finished. They’ve begun building a horse complex close to the road, and the new house which they’ll move into very soon I’m told, is quite close to the road, which surprised me. It’s relatively large, maybe 35 squares, but I had expected it to be more grand….   After all, we’d heard for years they were going to build their dream home, possibly $1-$2 million worth and whilst very nice and quite substantial, this didn’t quite fit the picture.

BUT, recently we were told this new house into which they’ll move soon, is only where they’ll live whilst their far grander “dream home” is being built further back into the property!!!!

In his evidence to the Senate Inquiry on 30th March in Portland, Mr. Officer claimed “There are not a lot of people who actually live and work in amongst turbines so that is why I am here today …. My experiences so far have been very positive”.

If that is the case, then why are the Officer family moving 30 kilometres away from the turbines?

People have heard that their two young daughters have admitted that the turbines are “terribly noisy”. We’ve also heard their move is to be closer to education, but the truth is that there are most convenient school bus services to Hamilton College, a very fine private school in Hamilton and after all, it is most likely that the Officer children will be sent away to boarding school in keeping with the tradition on both sides of the family for several generations.

In the opinion of the local people of this district Mr. Officer is guilty of misleading the Senators, by not divulging the information that he and his family will soon be moving away from their turbine host property.

With the inevitable relocation of the Officer family from the Macarthur wind farm, the absentee ownership of one other host (they live full-time in Hamilton 35 kms away) and the situation whereby the principal host, the Robertson family own properties in Port Fairy and Melbourne which they visit regularly, and to where they could easily relocate if necessary. It appears that in reality NOT ONE of the turbine hosts, once the Officers have moved into their new home near Hamilton, live permanently on their turbine host properties.

Ann Gardner

Annie Gardner

Pointman has a Way of Making Things Clear. Love this Guy’s Blog! >>>Anti-Climate Scam!

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Points of Divergence.

by Pointman

Like most people, I’m diplomatic in my everyday dealings with others since it’s only common politeness and makes obvious sense after all. You say whatever but sometimes what you’re actually thinking might be slightly different. Their bum may actually look a bit bigger in that new outfit but you can see they’re really chuffed with it and they’re looking pretty fetching anyway. Once in a blue moon, you’re obliged to be more direct because the particular circumstances won’t allow the latitude for any dissembling.

One of the few luxuries of writing a blog anonymously, but also one that’s temptingly easy to abuse, is that you can speak your mind. Some of the articles here are a bit too full on for some people’s tastes and for a variety of reasons. Possibly they don’t agree with my take on things, the manner in which it’s being expressed or they simply find me objectionable on general principles – all of which are fair enough as far as I’m concerned. Blogging on the skeptic side is after all an unpaid and voluntary activity, despite what the alarmist propagandists say, so don’t start bitching on about it when you start taking some flak. Just lash it back and anyway, you always know where the exit door is.

I started blogging a number of years ago and in that noble skeptic tradition of upsetting people, no doubt upset people. The sensitivities of the alarmists, I couldn’t give a damn about not only because they’re on a permanent victimhood hair-trigger but also they’re irrelevant to why I blog. As they’re impervious to reason or appeals to any vague notion of simple human compassion, I have no interest in interacting with them publically because quite simply it would be a waste of effort. The only use I have for them is ruthlessly utilising their excesses to the detriment of the “cause”. Degüello will always be the bugle call in any of my dealings with them.

They are not and have never been the target demographic of this blog. That has always been what I categorised as persuadable people. I’m looking to snag the passive believers who always assumed the science was as legitimate as one would expect, but have of late begun to entertain some doubts for whatever reason. By the time the might get to here, they’ve usually found the more technical sites and are perhaps looking for a bit more context.

It’s a peculiarity of the climate wars that the road to Damascus and a conversion to climate skepticism appears to be one-way. All the conversions appear to be from passive belief to some degree of climate scepticism, and seemingly never the other way around. Look around the bios of the major skeptics – every man Jack, and the Janes as well, all travelled that road. That’s why aiming at that particular audience demographic is a reasonable use of blogging effort.

If you’re going to be a blogger, and a campaigning one on an issue that isn’t feather weight, you need to think about two things before every putting quill to parchment; who you’re talking to and why are you talking to them. The first one is your target audience. Get a clear image in your head of who they are and then talk to them. Talking to people who already share your viewpoint has a certain egomania about it. The reality cold shower is that almost nobody reads blogs except people with very specialist interests, so you gotta aim to snag the ones you’ve decided to go after – anything else is vanity blogging.

The second one, the why, means you feel you’ve something to say to them that all the other two hundred bloggers of a sort of similar attitude aren’t, otherwise why are you doing it? They are what I call the points of divergence. Depending on how far those points are from the mainstream or the centre of the little fishy pool you’re dealing with, it’s going to be a solitary business. You’ll be on your own with lots of people standing around doing nothing. A few pals may help out but it can be a lot to ask of any friendship. It’s a long game.

This blog is designed, written and aimed at that ordinary person looking for a plain English discussion of not so much the science, but the politics and I say it unashamedly, the ethics over the very real human impact involved in changing our primary allegiance from humanity to some new-age Earth goddess.

In the beginning I feel I made some sections of the skeptic community uneasy, because I was addressing aspects of the thing they were not really comfortable with. Five years ago, making the moral argument for a realistic approach to environmentalism that didn’t involve killing the poor was too alien an argument that nobody wanted to touch. People were happy as Larry with their evening hobby of squabbling over science papers. The murderous collateral damage of environmental politics on the developing world – which the alarmists would never acknowledge – was also out of the skeptic comfort zone. It was all a bit too close to real-world for the skeptics hygienically ensconced behind their keyboards. There’s never any blood spray on a keyboard.

If you’ve read the about me here, you’ll know it’s why I blog and I also happen to think it’s by far the most powerful argument we can make to the ordinary person, because it’s all about real people suffering preventable hardship and death this very day, not some nebulous century in the future. Anybody can relate to that. However, I soon decided to steer clear of any such arguments for a variety of very practical reasons.

The first one was that at the time nobody was actually interested in it, because it was an obsessively inward-looking community. You may disagree with that assessment but that was the reality at the time. The second one is that the community was comfortable with the quantitative arguments against environmentalism in the form of discussing the science, but the qualitative arguments, no matter at what level they were pitched, had absolutely no traction. The third reason was it’d be too easy to get pigeon-holed as some moral supremacist pontificating from atop his blogging holier-than-thou pulpit, and that’s a suit of clothes a Rufus Roughcut like myself wouldn’t get away with for very long.

In short, the time just wasn’t ripe to advance that type of argument. In the last year, I’ve seen the emergence from obscurity of the ethical arguments against environmentalism become mainstream in the sceptic blogosphere. I think that’s a sign of several things; its growing maturity, it’s wider base of representation and the community’s readiness to engage with the real world rather than stay safely embedded in the cyber one.

A very subtle factor that’s concentrated people’s mind on the damage being done to vulnerable people is the growing scourge of fuel poverty on our own poor. Nobody saw that one coming but looking back, it was inevitable. Finding an elderly person fully clothed in bed for the winter in a house they can no longer afford to heat is a real bloody attitude adjuster. All those people raking in their wind farm and solar panel subsidies are freezing the very life blood out of our most vulnerable. I can only hope they one day end up in the same situation.

I bitterly resented being forced off that ball, especially as the skeptic community seemed to have thrown up their hands and ceded without even a decent fight any moral authority to the alarmists, who to my mind were the ones actually rearranging macro-economics in such a way as to bring about the slowmo genocide in the developing world, which would pander to their Malthusian over-population concerns.

A less controversial argument was that the climate wars had little or nothing to do with science – it was all about politics, which is to say power and money. That was never a minority viewpoint but I think it’s a journey that a lot of newly converted skeptics go on. Some skeptics are welded to the “point out the flaws in the science” approach and they’ll do a few mea culpas and amend their ways, as well as retracting all those crap papers. That’s never once happened. Not once, not ever, and it never will either. Yes, they’ve occasionally been forced to do it but it was always against their will.

There is obviously a place for keeping the science honest but by now most skeptics have noticed that slightly OCD aspects of a lot of skeptic activity. Yes, it’s great ripping the ass out of the weird paper by that rather obscure Prof. Okie from the University of Muskogee, or Dr. Oongo of U of Wallawoora or Phil Witless of the University of Easy Access, but seriously, how many years of that loop are we going to do? Like Richard Lindzen said, they’re all third raters – easy meat. Occasionally I do get the feeling that they’re just cannon fodder being fed to the skeptic blogosphere just to keep it busy, rather than doing something effective in the real world.

The last point of divergence, and the one I think hasn’t really budged in the last five years, is the opinion that alarmist climate science is essentially a criminal enterprise.

Now that I’ve got your attention, just hang on to that adjective “alarmist”.

Every time the make some doom-laden claim, they get given more money. As each prediction fails, it gets pushed on twenty years and nobody cares, because everyone knows you can’t go up against the la cosa nostra verdi. Every time they get caught out saying one thing in public but exactly the opposite in private, they weasel out of it. They do a criminal things like identity theft, and appear to be above the law. They intimidate anyone who stands up to them and get away with it too, and if they can’t get you, they’ll go after your family.

Attempt to speak out about them in the media, all the strings get pulled and whatever platform you were silly enough to imagine you had just disappears beneath your feet. You can kiss goodbye to ever getting anything published again. Stand up to them, you’ll lose not only your reputation, career but your livelihood.

Every time we find a flaw in the science, it somehow always seems to err towards a warmer Earth. That could be an honest error but seriously Boys and Girls, we don’t need to be experts in the bell curve to realise something is up. On any reasonable balance of probability, you’d expect something a bit roughly fifty-fifty. You don’t need to be Descartes to see that one. You sit down at a poker table with someone who is crushing all opposition with every hand all night and there’s one thing you know – they’re cheating.

It’s premeditated, deliberate and totally cynical. Science is their whore, they’ll ride her as they see fit.

We’re into end of days with climate science and a few incidents of late should have disabused you of any lingering hope of any fig-leaf attempt at practising anything vaguely recognisable as serious science. The Karl et al paper was quite frankly a reversion to pulling the entrails out of some small animal and reading the portents for the planet. It’s the new paradigm, theory now mugs the facts. How anyone could have put their name to such an abomination is beyond me. Just to top that depth of degradation, the Royal Society on being challenged on why no global warming for nearly two decades, finally conceded but smugly replied the pause would have to extend to fifty years before they started to entertain a doubt.

Get your head straight about these people, they’re nothing better than just cheap hoods in thousand dollar suits pretending to be respectable.

©Pointman

If you Host a Wind Turbine, You’re Part of the Problem! Stop the Wind Scam!

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Wind Turbines: The Evil Seed

June 26, 2015 by

They came in like a soft silent breeze
Hushing the naïve
Speaking with forked tongues
Proclaiming black is green
Maiming thinkers with corrupt words
Casting a thick cloud of concern
Residing with hidden evils
Leaving a trail of trash
Forever scarred
The stench you see
Smells of decay

What appears above and below is a plea from Michigan. The author quite rightly sees the roll out of giant industrial wind turbines akin to an evil seed – that, like an errant tumour, takes root, multiplies and ends up totally consuming once productive, healthy and happy rural communities.

It all starts with a host – no host, no turbines.

That host may start with good intentions, hoping to be ‘green’, and accepting what they have been told. But the reality is so profoundly different. Many hosts are gagged by the slick and cunning lawyers and can not share their suffering – but some can and do:

SA Farmers Paid 1 Million to host 19 turbines tell Senate they would never do it again due to unbearable sleep destroying noise 

Turbine hosts lament: Hammered by wind power outfits, hated by former friends, relatives, and neighbours

David Mortimer, Turbine Host: An “Inconvenient” Wind Industry Fact

Once turbines are allowed in a community, it becomes easier for the system to bring in more – chasing the stream of subsidies that have caused this perversion in the first place.

This story comes from Tuscola County, in Michigan, in the US, where with no more than a week of notice, the first turbines were approved.

This area, called the Thumb (the shape of the State resembles a mitten protruding into the Great Lakes of North America) is considered the third most fertile agricultural land on earth – the naturally blackened dirt fields are ‘bars of gold’ for farming.

thumb

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It intersects key bird migration pathways.

flyway

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Now turbines are everywhere. The views of the Northern lights are replaced with an industrialised red light district.

Red lights

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And the community is ruined. Community cohesion is gone. All those years of built community friendships are gone.

But the aggressive cancer of turbines progresses unabated. A further 2,700 turbines are planned for the area, with a new transmission line now completed. That number is more than twice the total number of wind turbines in Australia.

And it all starts with a host, who signs away so much, for a tiny sack of silver.

Don’t let the evil seed settle where you live. Please stop these things before they start.

tuscola2

When the Truth is Told, Wind Turbines Are a Wast of Time, Space & Money!

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Larry Pickering: on the Quixotic Calamity of Wind

June 25, 2015 by

pickering

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Larry Pickering is a four-time Walkley Award winning political commentator and Churchill Fellow, whose life’s work has been irritating the loopy-left. Here he is slaying the great wind power fraud.

It’s more than a Quixotic Calamity
Larry Pickering
The Pickering Post
20 June 2015

wind3.png

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The European Renewable Energy Foundation, a Green body supportive of all forms of renewable energy, has carried out research at Edinburgh University involving a look at years of wind farm performance data from the UK and Denmark.

Their conclusion is this:

“Put bluntly, wind turbines onshore and offshore still cost too much and wear out far too quickly to offer the developing world a realistic alternative to coal.”

And these guys are Green renewable energy nuts!

The good news for Australia is that this highly subsidised and ineffective form of Green inspired visual pollution will be non-existent within ten years.

The report [available here] found that by 10 years of age, the output of an average wind turbine will have declined by a third … and by 12 years of age it will be uneconomic to recondition the moving parts.

The bad news for Australia, if they intend to persist with this windmill madness, is that they will all reach their maximum life span at the same time!

Bloody thousands and thousands of these hideous, noisy monstrosities will all need to be replaced at once, and guess what? Investors will have headed for the hills because all those delicious subsidies will have disappeared like Christine Milne and it will cost governments (again you and me) a motza to dismantle and dump the things in the ocean as fish reefs.

They will become worthless bits of metal and plastic no other industry can possibly use. The government of the day will no doubt keep one turbine in a museum somewhere as an artifact so schoolchildren can be shown just how stupid the Greens really are.

South Australia, which has the highest cost of electricity in the nation and the most wind turbines per capita, has saved 4% of their rated capacity in fossil fuels at a cost of $1,484 per ton. That’s roughly $1,474 per ton more expensive than Europe’s current carbon credit price.

The cost of these commercial white elephants, that must eventually be destroyed, is between a highly subsidised $350,000 and $1.3 million each…and the temperature of the globe hasn’t shifted one thousandth of a degree.

Stand underneath a wind turbine that is typically 120 metres tall and try to imagine how our beautiful countryside once looked.

But that’s a visual and noise pollution that will never disadvantage the Greens, oh no, they’ll be happily sipping their lattes in leafy green inner suburbs.

Only two forms of energy can replace the Greens’ hated coal, and neither is wind or solar.

The only freely available clean forms of energy are hydro and nuclear but the Greens refuse to allow dams to be built while frogs need protecting and uranium evokes Green paranoia. Funny eh?
The Pickering Post

Hawaii rusting turbines

The Wind Industry Lies, and Then Pays Their Useful Idiots to Back Them Up!

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Fairfax & the ABC: the Wind Industry’s Useful Idiots; or How “Mantras” Killed Journalism

June 23, 2015 by 4 Comments

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Ron and Chris Jelbart, and their son, Peter have come to prominence on these pages once or twice; for all the wrong reasons.

Ron and Peter have given evidence about the debilitating impacts of incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound on their ability to sleep and function as a farmer and heavy-vehicle driver:

Tide Turns as Senate Inquiry hears from the Wind Industry’s “Road-Kill”

Peter went on to detail how incessant night-time noise from AGL’s non-compliant Macarthur disaster impacts on his ability to operate safely behind the wheel:

Wind Turbine Noise Deprives Farmers and Truckers of Essential Sleep & Creates Unnecessary Danger for All

Now, Peter has penned a simple but cutting riposte to the useful idiots at Fairfax and the ABC (aka the ‘Ministry of Truth’) that parrot wind industry lies and myths in blind deference to their Overlords. The letter got a run in the local rag, but STT thinks it worthy of much wider distribution.

TO THE EDITOR
Dear Sir,

I am writing in response to the latest media bombardment from the Clean Energy Council, formerly known as the Australian Wind Energy Alliance. This was in response to Tony Abbott’s interview where he said in no uncertain terms that he finds wind turbines visually awful and very noisy.

My radio station of choice is triple j. I listen to this daily at work and on weekends, and enjoy the musical content and lack of commercialisation.

Whilst listening to Dr Karl with Zan Rowe last week a person rang in with a question concerning health impacts from living in the vicinity of wind turbines. The answer that followed by the somewhat funny, often likeable doctor raised questions in my mind. There wasn’t a mutter or stumble, a tangent or a hesitation, no tweets from the audience and no need to refer to google scholar, just a torrent of denial of any sort of health impacts from wind turbines, all in all a very unscientific answer.

The definite nature of the response, although not surprised by his slant, aroused my suspicion. It all clicked after talking to my father on Friday night. This was a posed question with an already written answer, as was “Ian” from Macarthur who spoke to Neil Mitchell Friday morning. “Dennis” from Woodhouse who spoke to 774 ABC was also a suspect caller, again on Friday morning.

The ABC 7:30 report Thursday evening spoke to Mark Butler, the Federal Shadow Minister for Environment, obviously pro Wind Farm. Hamish and Anna Officer appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Standard, over the course of a couple of days.

What we have seen is the full force of the wind energy sectors Media and HR departments trying to turn the tide after Tony Abbott’s interview, well helped by the heavily Left leaning and gutless Media. The ABC is well known for its allegiance to the Labour side of politics and the Fairfax run Standard is obviously nailing its colours to the mast in no uncertain terms, after the last few days’ stories and editorials.

Whilst the Fairfax Warrnambool Standard does a great job on covering local news, such as school fetes and country football and netball, their coverage on the issue of wind farms has been pathetic. No journalist has sought deeper answers or asked proper questions. It seems they get all they need to cover a story straight from the huge Media departments of the wind farm operators, the same rhetoric always. Any complainant is just a jealous neighbour suffering from Nocebo.

There is a reason that there is a senate inquiry happening at the moment. I spoke briefly at the Portland hearing about the effects of sleep disturbance and deprivation that I suffer as a neighbour of Industrial Wind Turbines, a consequence of being stimulated by low frequency noise and infrasound. Steven Cooper’s research at Cape Bridgewater along with NASA’s research done years ago by Neil Kelley, confirm that infrasound has been known, and hidden by wind farm companies for a very long time.

The noise testing done at home pre and post windfarm is farcical, designed and financed by the wind farm companies to give them the answers they seek, lost data, flat batteries and setting up testing equipment under trees etc to distort and manipulate the truth all part of the game. Low frequency noise and infrasound is not part of the testing.

No one who has not had to live beside a windfarm for an extended period, and who isn’t subject to strict “gag” clauses, such as hosts and other neighbours who receive money for tree screening etc. is qualified to speak on the subject of windfarm noise. The sheer stupidity of the comments from people who pull up under them and say “I can hardly hear them” shows a complete lack of understanding of the infrasound problem and can only be put down to absolute ignorance or complete arrogance.

These visually awful, or “somewhat graceful and beautiful towers of man’s going to save mankind from himself” windmills, depending on your persuasion, apparently blend in a little too well to the landscape for our avian friends. As reported in 2014 “conservative estimates of bird deaths are at 10 per tower per year” and during official searches at AGL’s Macarthur wind farm 64 carcasses were found including falcons, kestrels, shrouded kites and a spotted harrier, as well as 6 Wedge Tailed Eagles. For an individual this bird kill would be disastrous, resulting in prison, fines and (rightly deserved) bad publicity but for a wind farm it’s all in a “day’s work”.

The people who are writing in weekly to papers such as the Standard are not political activists. They are farmers, teachers, secretaries, retirees, Salt of the Earth people. People with far better things to do, but impacted to such a degree that they will fight, they will tell their story and they will pursue the truth. The only thing that keeps them motivated is the fact that they know they have a problem and it’s not just “in their heads”.

They are not the liars, the villains, the cheats, the greedy, or the soft of heart or will.

Peter Jelbart
Hawkesdale

Nice work, Peter.

Although we think him too fair on the wind industry shills that people the struggling Fairfax stable and the ABC.

Pig ignorance, among children and the uninitiated, can be excused for a while, but in the face of insurmountable facts, not forever.

STT has repeatedly clobbered the myth perpetuated by the lunatics of the hard-‘green’-left that wind power is capable of not only displacing, but wholly replacing, conventional generation sources, such as coal, gas and hydro:

Wind Power Myths BUSTED

SA – Australia’s ‘Wind Power Capital’ – Pays the World’s Highest Power Prices and Wonders Why it’s an Economic Basket Case

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

May 2015 SA

Either our current crop of journos can’t interpret simple graphs or understand basic economics? Or their eyes simply glaze over while they mutter “no, it can’t be true?”

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And the same horror and disbelief must grip them when faced with buckets of splattered bats and ute-loads of slaughtered birds:

Bird Carcass Count proves AGL’s Macarthur Wind Farm is an Avian Slaughterhouse

Faced with a few pics of Eagles sliced in two, shaken, they’re reduced to stuttering something about its “all okay because their cat once killed a bird too”.

Then there’s the classic wind industry spin – highlighted by Peter – that: “Any complainant is just a jealous neighbour suffering from Nocebo”.

It’s a wind industry line that was always specious and self-serving, but – in the light of the evidence given by Clive and Trina Gare to the Senate Inquiry – it’s downright dishonest.

Clive and Trina have hosted 19 2.1 MW Suzlon s88 turbines for five years, pocketing over $1 million along the way; and, yet, gave solemn evidence that the incessant low-frequency noise that’s generated at night-time has ruined their ability to sleep in their own home; and that they wouldn’t live within 20 km of a wind farm if they had their choice over again:

SA Farmers Paid $1 Million to Host 19 Turbines Tell Senate they “Would Never Do it Again” due to “Unbearable” Sleep-Killing Noise

While Graham Lloyd from The Australian gave that story a run, don’t expect the ABC or Fairfax to do likewise.

And a little journalistic nouse would have uncovered what the wind industry has known, and worked like demons to cover up, for around 30 years:

Three Decades of Wind Industry Deception: A Chronology of a Global Conspiracy of Silence and Subterfuge

But, no, those kind of facts would never do.

You see, as with any cult, even so much as questioning the mantra is tantamount to heresy – which leads to exclusion, if not expulsion, from the warmth and safety of the compound.

Instead, the chants from acolytes have grown louder, and more shrill, in an effort to maintain their own confidence in their increasingly shaky beliefs.

And so it was, in the last week, that hitherto hard-core heathens started quoting that world renowned long-range weather forecaster, the Pope – as the answer to their apocalyptic prayers and need for self-validation.

Now, with all due respect to His Holiness, directing his congregation in prayer for the poor and needy is a far more sensible use of his time, than prophesying about the temperature in 50 years time.

As that great philosopher, Yogi Berra warned: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Notwithstanding that sage advice, STT is happy to predict that the Pope will end up with the same level of credibility as Australia’s own long-range weather forecaster, and ABC favourite, Tim Flannery (for a rundown on Tim’s prodigious prognostic skills see our post here).

flummery

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Not only is the current crop, claiming to call themselves journalists, gullible, they’re nasty too. The ABC’s political cutie pie, Annabel Crabb scooped the gold medal when she called long-suffering wind farm victims “Dick Brains” on ABC radio:

Pacific Hydro Orders ABC’s “Ministry of Truth” to hound Steven Cooper, Graham Lloyd and Channel 7 Over Wind Farm Study

And the same outlets cite, with veneration, a former tobacco advertising guru as their “high priest” on the question of adverse health effects. Notwithstanding that his qualifications are limited to the effect ofadvertising on rates of smoking. The fact that he ridicules and demeans people he’s never met as “wind farm wing-nuts” doesn’t seem to trouble the ABC at all. What’s that stuff in its Charter about “balance” and “objectivity”?

No, what’s dished up from Fairfax and the National Broadcaster can’t be explained by simple, seasoned ignorance. As Ben Franklin put it:

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid”.

At Fairfax and the ABC they’re clearly working very hard.

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Our “Bonnie” Friends in Scotland, Have Scrapped Wind Subsidies! Congratulations in Order!~

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Subsidies Scrapped: Scots Rejoice at Wind Industry’s Demise – Time for a Wee Highland Fling

June 22, 2015 by

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The Scots are a tenacious bunch; and their history is a pungent mix of romance and tragedy.

Legendary characters like William Wallace – who – single-handed – raised a fearsome Highland revolt – muscled up against the English invaders, time and time again.

Wallace, with Andrew Moray gave a well-trained and drilled English army a drubbing at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297. However, Wallace, by then Guardian of Scotland, suffered an ignominious defeat in July 1298 at the Battle of Falkirk. Disunity was Wallace’s undoing: his Norman cavalry did a bunk as the battle began; the hero escaping by the skin of his teeth. Seven years later, and the Scots’ great defender was in English chains awaiting a fate worse than simple death.

With Wallace’s mortal remains carved up and spread across the English Realm, Robert de Bruce took up the mantle – giving his internal and external enemies hell, all over the Highlands, from Buchan to Galloway. De Bruce, like Wallace before him, was often a victim of internal intrigues and diabolical disunity. Quarrels with his archrival, John Comyn and his backers, and a defeat at the hands of the English, saw de Bruce relinquish his title as Guardian, flee to the Hebrides and later Ireland.

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Reacting to more betrayal by his brethren led to the murder of Comyn by de Bruce, who, having regrouped, went on to hammer Edward II in the battle for Stirling Castle, in June 1314. At the Battle of Bannockburn, de Bruce pulled off the defeat of an English army led by Edward – a force that heavily outnumbered his own: some 7,000 Scots (with a mere 500 mounted) faced 17,000 English troops: 2,000 heavy cavalry and 15,000 infantryman, bristling with longbows.

Victory for de Bruce at Bannockburn became his, and Scottish, legend.

For Scotland, the next four centuries brought a cycle of victories and defeats, as English monarchs variously sought to beguile or crush the Scots at their whim. The last romantic hoorah echoed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, where Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rebellion was ground into the heather and peat, near Inverness.

Through their history, in battle, the Scots were usually outnumbered, but rarely outwitted. However, the tragedy and the romance of that history was always tinged with double-dealing and betrayal. Wind the clock forward, and the same elements came to bear in the battle to keep the Highlands free of bat-chomping, bird slicing, blade-chucking, pyrotechnic,sonic-torture devices.

Sometime back, we likened the efforts to carpet the Highlands in tens of thousands of giant fans with the first waves of the Croft Clearances:

Giant Fans: the new Scottish “Croft Clearers”

Now, thanks to the Tories thumping election win, those North of the Border have won the prospect of respite.

David Cameron – a Scot in name and ancestry – has made it very clear that his government has no intention of advancing a single penny in subsidies to wind power outfits from here on:

Brits’ Wind Power Nightmare to End Soon: Tories Set to Take the Axe to Subsidies

The question is, how Cameron’s election manifesto will play out for Highlanders? Here’s The Telegraph heralding an age of deliverance, if not outright victory.

Rural Scotland’s delight at wind farm subsidy axe
The Telegraph
Simon Johnson
18 Jun 2015

Rural communities have reacted with relief and delight after David Cameron called time on the SNP’s wind farm march across Scotland’s countryside.

Anti-turbine campaigners praised the UK Government’s decision to exclude new onshore wind farms from claiming a key subsidy from April next year, 12 months earlier than expected.

They said the move, which is expected to stop the construction of many developments not yet given planning permission, was a welcome respite for communities “besieged by subsidy chasers” taking advantage of the SNP’s “open door” policy.

But they said it was to the “eternal shame” of the Scottish Government that it was only the Conservatives who had heeded the concerns of rural Scots, with one prominent campaigner stating: “Thank God for Westminster.”

SNP ministers were furious with the decision, even claiming they may challenge it in the courts, with Nicola Sturgeon describing it as “wrong-headed”, “perverse” and “downright outrageous”.

In a letter to Mr Cameron, she warned the wind farm companies may sue the taxpayer for compensation for planned schemes “rendered useless by this decision.” The industry claimed the move would cost consumers up to £3 billion.

However, the John Muir Trust, the eminent environmental protection group, said it was the “right time” to work out an energy mix that is affordable “without damaging our wild and natural landscapes.”

The funding for the subsidy comes from the Renewable Obligation (RO), which is funded by levies added to household bills. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said there will be grace period for projects already with planning permission.

Although energy policy is reserved to Westminster, the SNP government in Edinburgh has used its control over the planning system in Scotland to encourage the construction of thousands of turbines across the countryside.

Alex Salmond, the former First Minister, set a target of generating the equivalent of all Scotland’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020, with the vast majority coming from onshore wind.

Amid growing opposition from local communities, Scotland’s most senior planning officials even warned that the countryside risked becoming a “wind farm landscape”.

But the Scottish Government told council planners they had set aside too little land for wind farms and Scotland now hosts more than half the UK’s onshore turbines.

Scotland Against Spin, a national alliance of groups and individuals which campaigns against turbines being built in unsuitable locations, said it was “delighted” the Tories had honoured an election manifesto promise to “end the ludicrously generous subsidies for onshore wind farms.”

Graham Lang, the group’s chairman, said: “Speculative developers from across the world have flocked to Scotland because of the SNP’s open door policy to the wind industry. Scottish communities besieged by subsidy-chasers can at last look forward to some respite.

“Yet to its eternal shame the Scottish Government has ignored the clamour for reform from its own people. There is a terrible irony that the Conservatives at Westminster, not the nationalists at Holyrood, have finally stood up to the wind speculators and put the interests of communities and consumers first.”

Lyndsey Ward said she hoped the decision would stop the construction of 25 turbines near her home just outside of Beauly, in the Scottish Highlands.

She said she was “fairly disgusted” with the Scottish Government as Fergus Ewing, the SNP Energy Minister, had “parroted wind industry propaganda”. She added: “They should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Thank God for Westminster.”

Campaigners against a plan to erect 18 410ft-tall turbines in rural Angus, above the Blackwater Reservoir, also welcomed the announcement.

Sue Smith, a spokesman for the Friends of Backwater and Glenisla Against Turbines group, whose husband Maj Gen Martin Smith is Commandant General of the Royal Marines, said: “The removal of obscene levels of financial gain which these subsidies offer should discourage land owners and turbine developers from exploiting irresistible opportunities to make a fast buck, at the expense of local communities and their environments.”

She also praised the UK Government plans to give communities the final say on large wind farm developments south of the Border and attacked the SNP for failing to introduce this in Scotland.

But, speaking at First Minister’s Questions, Ms Sturgeon said the decision was “utterly wrong-headed” and her government would “do everything in our power” to get it changed.

Mr Ewing said repeated the wind farm companies’ claims the move could cost consumers £3 billion, adding: “We have warned the UK Government that the decision, which appears irrational, may well be the subject of a judicial review.”

But Murdo Fraser, Scottish Tory energy spokesman, said: “This is a Conservative Government standing up for communities that the central belt SNP couldn’t care less about.”

He added: “The latest figures show that, with all the wind projects already constructed, those under construction or given consent, we have already met the SNPs 100 per cent target for renewable electricity.”

A DECC spokesman said: “If we’d allowed the RO to stay open longer, we could have ended up with more projects than we can afford – which would have led to either higher bills, or other renewable technologies losing out on support.”
The Telegraph

As with our in-a-nutshell overview of Scottish history above, it will be internal forces, disunity and betrayal that stand as the only obstacle to outright victory for the Scots.

Claims by wind power outfits about suing the government, in order to ensure their ability to obtain massive subsidies until kingdom come, involve little more than the petulant rattling of Claymores.

Hopeful developers are not in any contractual relationship with the government; and have little more than an expectation that government (read taxpayer and power consumer, in their guise as voters) largesse is endless and immutable. Unfortunately for wind power outfits, mere “expectations” based on policy “promises” don’t provide the soundest basis to sue for “damages”.

And Nicola Sturgeon’s huffing and puffing is little more than, well, hot air.

STT’s Highland operatives have previously pointed out that there is absolutely no market for any more intermittent and unreliable wind power in Scotland: that ‘market’ is saturated.

The only hope for Sturgeon and her wind industry backers is to send Scottish sparks south of the Border – in huge volumes – whenever the wind is blowing. However, through quirks of history – some of which we’ve touched on – that’s an area still controlled by David Cameron.

Given Cameron’s resolve, and Sturgeon’s policy and legislative impotence, STT suggests that it would be far from premature for Highlanders to don their kilts and celebrate their victory with a wee Highland fling.

highland fling

Wind Turbines Will Destroy the Economic Success of the Countries that have Them…

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Germany’s Wind Power Debacle: Economic Destruction on an “Astronomical Scale”

June 21, 2015 by

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STT keeps a close eye on Germany. It’s held up by eco-fascist nut jobs around the globe as the wind power “Super Model” – although, as we pointed out in this recent post, their “pin-up girl” is looking a little worse for wear:

Germany’s Wind Power ‘Dream’ Becomes a Living Nightmare

Last week – with the announcement that South Australians can look forward to skyrocketing power prices with the closure of its cheapest conventional generation source, the Port Augusta power station – we made it pretty clear that wind power is nothing but fantastic nonsense:

SA – Australia’s ‘Wind Power Capital’ – Pays the Highest Power Prices in the World and Wonders Why it’s an Economic Basket Case

South Australians are well down the track to an economic disaster – with its unemployment rate of 7.6% (and rising fast) it’s easily the worst performing State in the Nation, apparently keen as mustard to get whacked with the tag “rust-belt”. Rising power prices are punishing struggling families – 50,000 homes do without power altogether – and a raft of power hungry businesses and industries are shutting up shop for good (see this article).

STT usually wears its optimism on its sleeve, but holds grave fears, not only for South Australia, but for the Country as a whole.

For a taste of what we’re in for – in a cooking show “here’s one we’ve prepared earlier” moment – we’ll cut to Germany for another look at how its ludicrous efforts to rely upon wind power have sent power markets into chaos, and, with electricity prices skyrocketing, has left 800,000 German homes without power. Here’s Germany’s leading renewable energy expert and climate science critic Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt on the unfolding calamity.

Energy Expert Issues Warning On “Carbon-Free Society”: “Destruction On An Astronomical Scale” … “Cost Avalanche”
NoTricksZone
6 June 2015

Germany’s leading renewable energy expert and climate science critic Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt warns of an irrational and panicked rush into renewable energies.

In a penned opinion piece in Germany’s Manager Magazin titled: “Why a Phase Out of Coal Would Be Damaging”, the German professor believes the movement to divest from fossil fuels is seriously misguided and that the move to a completely carbon-free global society would lead to “destruction on an astronomical scale”. He writes:

“In order to produce the same amount of power with wind, we would see a surface area consumption and corresponding destruction of natural habitat on an astronomical scale.”

Fritz Vahrenholt was formerly responsible for the renewable energies arm of European power giant RWE, RWE Innogy GmbH. No one has overseen the installation of as much renewable energy in Europe as Vahrenholt has. In the field of wind energy he is a leading expert. He has since become a leading critic of renewable energy and climate science.

Vahrenholt, a professor of chemistry and former Environment Senator for the City of Hamburg in the SPD socialist party, asks:

“How realistic is it really to produce not only electricity but also heat and fuels for transportation worldwide from China to Brazil over the coming decades without fossil fuels? As before in China a coal power plant goes online every 14 days, and India is well on the way to do the same as its neighbor.”

“Cost avalanche of 1000 billion euros”

Vahrenholt sharply criticizes Germany’s transistion away from coal and nuclear power and over to renewables because of the enormous cost burdens that citzens will have to bear in the years ahead. He writes that German Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel knows that “if the brakes on renewable are not applied, a cost avalanche of 1000 billion euros is headed our way”.

Uncontrollable supply

And as exorbitant quantities of wind and solar power are added to the power grid, Vahrenholt warns that during windy and sunny periods, large quantities of power will have to be “disposed of” on foreign markets.

“We will have to dispose of the power in foreign countries more often than we do today and even pay money to Austria, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic to take the power.”

Excess power of course would be ruinous to foreign markets. Vahrenholt reminds that sun and wind energy are fraught with technical problems because they work a minimal part time. Storage technology remains nowhere in sight.

Will have near zero impact

And even if Germany were able to solve the unsolvable technical problems, the CO2 emissions savings that Germany would achieve through a shut-down of its coal power plants would be offset by growth in China in a matter of just 2 months. The result would be no “climate protection” at all and Germans would only be able to boast over a flickering mess of a power supply.

In Vahrenholt’s view, the German green energy model is so costly that “no country in the world is going to follow it”.

Exaggerated science, flawed models

He also calls the climate science “wildly exaggerated” and maintains the climate models have been false:

“There are more and more scientific findings showing that the climate effect by CO2 has been wildly exaggerated by the IPCC. There has not been any significant warming in 16 years even though one third of the historical CO2 emissions occurred in the same time period and the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is rising year after year.”

Vahrenholt describes the climate models as a joke as they do not even take the long-known ocean and solar cycles into account.

Leaping before looking

He tells us that Germany is rushing unnecessarily into renewable energies and that the natural cycles mean we have lots of time and that we should take that time and do the transition in a sensible manner. He asks:

“Why the frenzied go-it-alone approach that is putting so much at risk? No nation on the planet is going to follow us when they see their own industrial base being destroyed and citizens financially overwhelmed.”

Vahrenholt adds:

“In addition to the destruction of capital, there is also a grand destruction of many thousands of jobs.”

But none of this seems to impress Germany’s green government authorities, who continue to overzealously pursue shutting down fossil fuels and pushing for large-scale installation of an piece-meal energy infrastructure that has been proven to be technically flawed.

Consequences “close to insurmountable”

The German energy folly is already taking its toll, Vahrenholt writes. He claims that the “insidious process of deindustrialization has already begun” in Germany because of skyrocketing energy prices and growing uncertainty.

Consequently Vahrenholt is calling for a “fundamental reform” of the country’s energy policy and a return to a more market-oriented approach. He calls Germany’s famous EEG renewable energy feed-in act an obsolete model that is “bringing no reduction in CO2 emissions” and one that is “eroding Germany as a place for industry” and whose “consequences will be close to insurmountable”.
NoTricksZone

fritz vahrenholt

Pope’s New Position: “Shill for Government-induced Climaphobia!”

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A pile of filth?

Posted on June 20, 2015 by  

The Pope’s encyclical makes that comment.  The Scottish Skeptic has the best response I’ve read.  From the Scottish Skeptic, We live in luxury that even kings a few centuries ago could only dream of.

June 18, 2015

As a result of the industrial revolution – to which I’m proud to say a lot of Scots contributed. The world is now living in luxury, we are healthier, better educated and safer than at any time in history. Our rivers and clean, the clean air acts have cleaned up the air. You only have to look at the filth and squalor in which previous generations lived to know that most people in the past would have given anything to be born now.

OK, there’s still a lot of people living in squalor, but there’s been a noticeable improvement so that whereas the images of the “third world” used to be filled with people without clothes or any other modern convenience, now they all seem to carry mobile phones.

Only in a sick delusional mind, could anyone describe the present time as a “pile of filth” – but that is what the headlines are now reporting the Pope as saying. That flies in the face of history, reason and more or less redefines the best of all possible times as some stinking hell-hole.

And that is the fundamental tactic of the eco-fascist. To take something good like the essential plant food CO2 without which there would be no life on earth and try to make people believe it is poison. To take a world of abundant clean healthy food produced by fossil fuel powered farm equipment, fossil fuel derived fertilisers, sent around the world in fossil fuel powered transport and then to make people believe that fossil fuel – the one thing that created the fantastic modern world we live in – is some how evil.

That is the tactics of ISIS. To make people believe that the best of times, is the worst of times, to make people hate the society, technology and culture that has given us so much much good, and make people want the utter filth depravity and backwardness of those like ISIS.

In short we should all be proud of the modern world and thank our forefathers (and mothers) for giving us this fantastic world that does give most of us our daily bread.

h/t Paul Homewood

Wind Turbines Bring Down Value of Surrounding Property~!

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Aussies Have Windweasels in Panic Mode!

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Wind Farm Senate Inquiry Fallout Continues

June 19, 2015 by

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When the Senate Inquiry into the great wind power fraud kicked off in Portland, Victoria on 30 March, STT predicted that the wind industry was headed for a world of pain, misery and woe (see our post here). Well, not to say we told you so, but things are going from disastrous to catastrophic. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

To say the wind industry is in a state of panic-filled hysteria is to put it mildly: this week has its parasites and spruikers turning up the dial to apoplectic.

The Senate Inquiry has just issued its Interim Report (available here) – which hasn’t helped calm their thread-bare nerves.

And the shenanigans in Canberra over moves by the Cross-Bench Senators (which includes Senators Madigan, Leyonhjelm, Day and Xenophon who sit on the Inquiry) to extract concessions from the Coalition on a better deal for all Australians – especially those currently affected and/or threatened by the incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound – has the usual bunch of Twitter jockeys working over-time, ranting about coal-fuelled conspiracies.

Added to which is fact that two South Australian turbine hosts – who – despite pocketing over $1 million for hosting 19 turbines – gave evidence to the Senate that the “unbearable” noise has ruined their ability to sleep in their own home; so much so that they would never do it again; and that they wouldn’t live within 20km of a wind farm.

That set of damning facts has completely up-ended the rubbish about “nocebo” effects; and all the other drivel pedaled by former tobacco advertising gurus and the like.

While STT had the scoop on that story, it didn’t take long for Australia’s National Daily to pick it up. Over to STT Champion, Graham Lloyd.

Tougher scrutiny on wind farming after crossbench talks
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
18 June 2015

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Mary Morris, at the Waterloo windfarm north of Adelaide, conducted one of the only studies accepted by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Wind farms could face greater federal government scrutiny after a last-minute intervention by Tony Abbott ahead of the Senate vote on the revised ­renewable energy target today.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister met four crossbench senators concerned about the cost and possible health impacts of the renewable energy technology.

After the meeting, Environment Minister Greg Hunt was asked to write to senators David Leyonhjelm, John Madigan, Bob Day and Jacqui Lambie setting out the new protections.

A spokesman for Mr Hunt confirmed last night that a letter was being prepared.

The government is hoping a written pledge will avoid amendments to the RET legislation, which is expected to be voted on in the Senate today.

The crossbench senators have raised concerns about a range of issues regarding wind-farm developments and the fact that the revised RET will strongly favour wind.

Mr Abbott has said the reduced RET was designed to limit the number of wind farms built.

A Senate inquiry into wind farms will today release an inte­rim report into its hearings, which have taken evidence from the wind industry, acoustics experts and residents who claim to have been affected.

The wind industry maintains claims that the technology is inefficient or poten­tially harmful to nearby residents have been thoroughly investigated and discounted. But one farm couple who has been paid $1 million to host 19 wind turbines over five years told the Senate inquiry that the noise had been unbearable.

South Australian cattle grazier Clive Gare told a hearing in Adelaide he was initially excited about hosting renewable energy, but now believed “towers should not be any closer than 5km to a dwelling”.

“If we had to buy another property it would not be within a 20km distance to a wind farm. I think that says it all,” Mr Gare said.

The wind industry has said complaints about noise impacts had not been made by people who received lucrative contracts to host them. Wind farm company AGL has paid thousands to insulate the Gare property from the noise of the wind turbines, which are as close as 800m from the house, but Mr Gare and his wife, Trina, told the inquiry they were still impacted.

Mary Morris, who conducted one of the only studies accepted by the National Health and Medical Research Council, said she would welcome any undertakings by the federal government to increase supervision.

Ms Morris became involved in the wind farms initially to support people who claimed to be affected by the Waterloo wind farm in South Australia.

In a speech to the Senate on the federal government’s compromise RET bill, Senator Leyonhjelm said the revised RET would be “no more than a wind industry support fund”.

Jacqui Lambie received support from Coalition senators for a speech in which she criticised reliance on renewable energy.

“Apart from hydro, the only way to de-carbonise energy is to move very quickly to nuclear,” she said. “And it’s about time we move to that option.”
The Australian

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