Control of Australia’s environmental policies, including climate change, AG21 and sustainability is increasingly being exported to foreign countries, especially through the UN. Since this is all part of globalisation however, control of other policies, even including our human rights, is also being exported to the UN.
This exporting of control typically occurs gradually and involves various stages. Firstly, our government, on our behalf, signs various international treaties or agreements, which the instigators always rush to say are ‘soft law’ and ‘non-binding’. In reality however, although having no basis in law (and no justification democratically), our politicians, in their eagerness to invite the UN to interfere in Australian domestic affairs, effectively get around the law and democratic impediments by using the following means of ‘enforcement’.
International moral obligations and economic, or market mechanisms
Building reporting requirements and need for compliance reports into the agreement – Australia has agreed to send regular compliance reports to the UN to prove compliance with UN directives, not only in regard to AG21, but also human rights.
In reality there are many non-legal mechanisms to ensure compliance. These international agreements are however only the first step in a gradual process.
The next step in the process is to incorporate the UN’s directives into domestic laws. This process is ongoing, but already it is well advanced with hundreds of UN directives incorporated into local laws.
The end game in this process, is to incorporate UN requirements into enforceable international laws. This process is intended to be accelerated in Paris this year.
The point must be made abundantly clear, that those who have been actively involved in this process, or those whose philosophy or ideology supports an abandonment of national sovereignty and democracy in support of globalisation, can be expected to strongly defend these changes.
For instance, In a personal communication Greg Hunt advised me that AG21 is a ‘non-binding’ international agreement which is therefore irrelevant. Similarly, Tim Wilson recently advised me, in regard to the exporting of control of human rights to the UN:
“UN treaties have no binding power. They are only binding to the extent that they are incorporated into Australian law. If it is not in law, it has no legal standing.”
The statements of both Greg and Tim are notable not for what they actually said, but rather for what they chose to exclude.
Greg of course, being both a politician and a lawyer, as well as having a background in the UN, is well aware of the international mechanisms which are used to ensure compliance with UN agreements. He is also aware that increasingly, Australian domestic legislation is based upon the dictates of the UN. He must also be aware that for two decades his political colleagues have been compiling expensive compliance reports to convince the UN we are complying with their requirements. And although he claimed the Commonwealth has nothing to do with local Councils, he must also be aware the Commonwealth has been funding AG21 implementation by Councils and has even produced a Local AG21 instruction manual.
Although he is aware of these facts he chose to exclude all this information when questioned. (bold added)
As noted above, Tim also tried to dismiss concerns about the UN controlling human rights on the basis that UN human rights agreements are non-binding. Like Greg though, Tim chose to exclude many pertinent facts from his answer.
But even as Tim was answering, the HRC hassubmitted a report to the UN alleging a violation of the UN Convention against Torture by the Australian government. Although this referral to the UN, and the response of the UN, are claimed by Tim to be irrelevant and inconsequential, Australia has been criticised by the UN for an alleged breach of the convention. Even worse though, the HRC also recommended, in their submission:
“That the government ensure domestic implementation of Australia’s international human rights obligations in law, policy and practice
So as Tim, a human rights Commissioner with the HRC, says there is no need to worry, UN human rights agreements are non-binding, at exactly the same time the HRC is lobbying the government to ensure UN human rights provisions are made even more enforceable by being enshrined into Australian law. Interestingly, according to Article 29(3) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights:
“These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
This is just one of the UN controlled human rights that the HRC is seeking to further enforce upon Australians, but when I questioned Tim to see if this is one of the ‘rights’ he supports for all Australians, he declined to answer.
One of the main human rights Australians need to protect our democracy is the right to make an informed vote for genuine alternatives. But the right to make a democratic vote, which includes the right to be correctly informed and the right to choose from genuine alternatives, is NOT protected in the Constitution. Clearly, a vote for bipartisan collusion, or a vote made in ignorance of the true covert agenda, is not a democratic vote. This right to make a democratic vote should surely receive top priority for Constitutional reform, but it seems it is not even part of the HRC’s agenda.
Interestingly, Tim Wilson would also be aware that, rather than consolidate our human rights as birthright or god given constitutionalised rights, the Australian government announced in 2010 that they will continue to export the control of the human rights of all Australians to the UN, requiring all legislation to be consistent with UN requirements. According to the Australian Human Rights Framework:
“Since its election, the Australian Government has acted to reinvigorate Australia’s engagement with the United Nations. We have issued a standing invitation to the UN to visit Australia to examine the protection of human rights here, sending a clear message that we are committed to our international obligations and relationship with the United Nations. The Government is committed to restoring Australia’s reputation as a good international citizen………
The Government will introduce legislation requiring that each new Bill introduced into Parliament, and delegated legislation subject to disallowance, be accompanied by a statement which outlines its compatibility with the seven core UN human rights treaties to which Australia is a party.”
While this change was announced by the previous government, such changes are continuing, and are not reversed by successive governments. The general direction remains the same.
Interestingly, while the right to make an informed democratic vote is not part of the HRC’s agenda, recommended constitutional changes to support one particular race (aborigines) are part of the HRC report to government.
Now, as the OIC assumes the largest voting bloc in the UN, and attempts to control freedom of speech by outlawing criticism of Islam, we need to extremely vigilant about who we are placing in charge of our human rights.
When fellow Australians, who we assume are on our side, glibly dismiss concerns by stating international agreements are non-binding, it is pertinent to request a more proactive response in support of Australia, and Australian values.
The direction in which Australia is going is perfectly clear. Australians deserve the truth, a genuine democratic choice. It is simply not the Aussie way to sell your friends and neighbours out behind their backs.
Any system built upon deception, disloyalty, and abandonment of democracy, will have dire consequences. (bold added)
The hackneyed myth that wind power “powers” millions of homes with wonderful “free” wind energy is taking a beating around the globe (seeour post here).
The idea that a wholly weather dependent power generation source can ever be – as is touted endlessly by the wind industry and it parasites – an “alternative” to conventional generation is, of course, patent nonsense.
If there wasn’t already a complete power generation system built around on-demand sources, such as gas, coal, nuclear or hydro – then a country trying to run on wind power would – unless it was keen to revisit (or remain in) the stone age – inevitably need to build one (see our post here). So far, so insanely costly, and utterly pointless.
At STT the term “powering” means exactly what it says: that when someone – at any time of the day or night – in any and all of the thousands of homes claimed to be “powered” by wind power – flicks theswitch the lights go on or the kettle starts boiling.
The wind industry never qualifies its we’re “powering thousands of homes” mantra by saying what it really means: that wind power might be throwing a little illumination or sparking up the kettle in those homes every now and again – and that the rest of time their owners will be tapping into a system of generation that operates quite happily 24 x 7, rain, hail or shine – without which they’d be eating tins of cold baked beans, while sitting freezing (or boiling) in the dark.
Glenn R. Schleede spent more than 35 years dealing with energy related matters in the government and private sector in the US. He’s put pen to paper numerous times on energy policy, and hammered the patent nonsense that is the great wind power fraud, just once or twice.
In this piece from 2009, Glenn belts the wind farms are “powering millions of homes” myth clean over the long boundary for an easy 6 – although in the US, wind power outfits apparently use the term “homes served” instead of “powered”. But, whatever the moniker, the bogus claim just hasn’t got the legs to withstand even the mildest scrutiny.
False Claims about “homes served” by electricity from wind Glenn Schleede
4 February 2009
Anyone using the phrase “homes served” to describe the potential output from one or more wind turbines is demonstrating that he or she (a) doesn’t understand the facts about wind turbines, (b) believes false claims from the wind industry, or (c) is trying to mislead their reader or listener.
False statements about “homes served” by wind turbines are not the only – and certainly not the most important – false claims regularly made by wind industry developers and lobbyists. But they are annoying when politicians, naïve reporters, and others adopt and regurgitate them.
The concept of “homes served”
The concept of “homes served” has long been used in the electric industry as a way to give some idea of the amount of electricity that would be produced by a proposed generating plant without using such terms as megawatt or kilowatt-hours that mean little to most people. The concept is always misleading since residential users of electricity (i.e., “homes served”) account for only 37% of all US electricity use. [i]
Claims about “homes served” by a proposed “wind farm” or other generating unit are usually based on a three step calculation. Specifically:
Start with an assumption (i.e., a guess) about the amount of electricity that would be produced annually by a “wind farm” or other generating unit, in kilowatt-hours (kWh) or megawatt-hours (MWh). [ii]
Use an estimate of the amount of electricity used annually (in kWh) by an average residential customer in the area or state where their “wind farm” is located. [iii]
Divide the assumed annual production of electricity by the estimated annual average residential electricity use.
Concept can be useful when talking about reliable generating units
While misleading, the concept, “homes served” has some validity when used to describe the output from a reliable, “dispatchable” electric generating unit; i.e., one that can be called upon to produce electricity whenever it is needed. Such generating units are the ones that are counted on by the electric industry to provide a reliable supply of electricity for customers every day, at all hours of the day, year around.
“Homes served” is NOT a valid concept when referring to wind turbines and “wind farms”
Using “homes served” when talking about wind turbines and “wind farms” is both false and misleading for several reasons; specifically:
No homes are really served by wind . In fact, NO homes are served by wind energy because wind turbines produce electricity only when wind speeds are in the right speed range (see below). Homes using electricity from wind must always have some reliable energy source immediately available to provide electricity when there is insufficient wind unless the residents are content to have electricity only when the wind is blowing in the right speed range – a condition that few in America are willing to tolerate.
Electricity from wind turbines is inherently intermittent, volatile, and unreliable. Wind turbines produce electricity only when the wind is blowing within the right speed range. Wind turbines typically start producing electricity at around 6 mph, reach rated capacity about 32 mph, and cut out about 56 mph. Unless a home owner has an expensive battery storage system, such volatile and unreliable output wouldn’t be suitable for lights, heating,computers, appliances, or many other purposes.
Electricity from “wind farms” is seldom available when most needed by home users. Again, the output of wind turbines is dependent on wind conditions. Depending on the specific area, winds tend to be strongest at night in cold months. However, electricity demand in most areas of the US is heavily concentrated during daytime and early evening hours. Even worse, wind turbines cannot be counted on to produce at the time of peak electricity demand which often occurs on hot weekday late afternoons in July and August. At the time of peak electricity demand, wind turbine output may be in the range of 0% to 5% of rated capacity.
The electricity produced by wind turbines is low in value compared to electricity from reliable generating units. That’s because it is inherently intermittent, volatile, unreliable, and not available when most needed – as described in paragraphs 2 and 3, above.
Not all the electricity produced by a wind turbine actually reaches customers or serves a useful purpose. Some electricity is lost as it is moved over transmission and distribution lines that carry the electricity from generating units to homes, offices, stores, factories and other users. The amount of electricity that is lost depends on distance and condition of lines and transformers.“Line losses” are a significant issue for wind energy because huge, obtrusive wind turbines (often 40+ stories tall) and “wind farms” are not welcome near metropolitan areas that account for most electricity demand. Instead, they often are located distant from the areas where electricity is needed and require expensive transmission line capacity which they use inefficiently. (Ironically, the lucrative federal tax credits provided to “wind farm” owners are based on electricity produced, not the lesser amount that actually reaches customers and serves a useful purpose.)
Claims of “homes served” by wind energy are additionally misleading because of the high true cost of electricity from wind turbines. Claims that the cost of electricity from wind turbines is “competitive” with the cost of electricity from traditional sources are false. Such claims typically do not include the cost of (a) the huge federal and state tax breaks available to “wind farm” owners, [iv] or (b) the cost of providing the generating capacity and generation that must always be immediately available to “back up” intermittent, unreliable wind turbine output and keep electric grids reliable and in balance.
Claims of “homes served” should always be challenged
Any use of the “homes served” assertion in connection with a “wind farm” should be challenged, whether the assertion is from a wind industry lobbyist, other wind energy advocate, political leader, other government official, or reporter. They should be required to explain each of their assumptions and calculations, and admit that industrial scale wind turbines are useless unless reliable generating units are immediately available to supply electricity when wind is not strong enough to produce significant electricity. Almost certainly, their assertions will be false.
What valid claim could wind industry officials make?
As explained above, wind industry developers, promoters, and lobbyists – and politicians and reporters – should never use the false and misleading “homes served” metric. In theory, they could justify an assertion that the estimated amount of electricity produced by a “wind farm” – once discounted for line losses which are likely to be in the range of 5% to 10% – may be roughly equal to the amount of electricity used annually by x homes – after doing a calculation such as that outlined earlier. However, as indicated above, even this assertion would be misleading because it ignores the fact that the output from wind turbines is intermittent, volatile, unreliable and unlikely to be available when electricity is most needed.
Other false and misleading claims about wind energy
As shown above, “homes served” are not the only or the most important false claim made about wind energy. Other false claims about wind energy include the following:
It is low or competitive in cost when, in fact, its cost is high when all true costs are counted.
It is environmentally benign when, in fact, it has significant adverse environmental, ecological, scenic, and property value impacts.
It avoids significant emissions that would otherwise be produced when, in fact, it avoids few.
It provides big job and economic benefits when, in fact, there are few such benefits.
Reduces US dependence on imported oil when, in fact, it does not.
Reduces the need for building reliable generating units in areas experiencing growth in peak electricity demand or needing to replace old generating units, when the opposite is true.
Such claims as these have been made often during the past decade or more by the wind industry and other wind advocates. Only during the past 3-4 years have these claims begun to be demonstrated as false and misleading. The facts about wind energy are beginning to show up in the media but, unfortunately, have yet to be understood by most political leaders and regulators.
Endnotes
[i] According to EIA data, the percentage of total electricity use accounted for by residential customers in 2007 varied from lows of 16.3% in DC and 16.7% in WY to 44.6% in AZ and 51.0% in FL – with a nation-wide average of 37%. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/esr_sum.html
[ii] Assumptions about output from proposed “wind farms” start with the rated capacity of the wind turbine(s) in kWh, multiplied by the number of hours in a year (usually 8760) and multiplied by the wind turbine(s)’ assumed “capacity factor.” In fact, actual capacity factors can be known only on an after the fact basis. “Capacity factor” is calculated by dividing actual annual production in kWh by 8760 (hrs per year) times the rated capacity of the turbine(s) in kW.
[iii] Annual residential use of electricity varies widely. According to US EIA, average annual residential electricity use nationwide during 2007 averaged 11,232 kWh – varying from lows of 6,360 kWh in Maine and 6,960 in California to highs of 15,660 kWh in Alabama and 16,128 kWh in Tennessee. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/esr_sum.html
[iv] Wind industry officials have indicated that just two federal tax breaks account for about 2/3rds of the economic value of a “wind farm.”
Pacific Hydro is a name synonymous with wind industry skulduggery in Australia: the merciless treatment of its victims at Cape Bridgewater has been added to the annals of Australian corporate infamy, right up there with Aussie asbestos pedlar, James Hardie (see our post here).
Now, its slap-dash approach to management, and all-round corporate malfeasance, has caught up with it, with an almighty vengeance.
Pac Hydro is the bastard child of IFM Investors – born of the $billions that are collected from workers and thrown into what are called “Union Super Funds” – ie “superannuation”: compulsory retirement savings schemes – owned and controlled by union heavies, like Garry Weaven and/or Labor Party front men; like former Environment Minister, Greg Combet.
Combet, Weaven & Co are the driving force behind the great wind power fraud in Australia. It was Combet who lobbied for, and obtained, the massive increase in Australia’s Renewable Energy Target to 45,000 GWh (4,000 as “small-scale” solar; and 41,000 as “large-scale”, ie wind power).
But these boys set up the “rules” with only one real “target” in mind; and that was making fat piles of cash themselves, using bucket loads of other peoples’ money: being able to make massive profits without any personal risk is a rare and beautiful thing.
But the risk has just been realised; and it’s mums and dads who are paying, and will continue to pay, the ultimate price.
Pac Hydro has just clocked up one of the largest corporate losses ever seen in Australian corporate history: you need to think back to Alan Bond, Chris Skase and the massive corporate implosions that took place at the end of the crazy 80s, to find anything of the same scale.
Pac Hydro’s books apparently record a loss of $685 million – the Australian Financial Review says “$700 million” – but with losses of that magnitude a lazy $15 million is probably just a rounding error.
From what STT can glean, around half of that figure is attributable to losses incurred by Pac Hydro’s wind farm operations in Australia (it’s pretty hard to get a bead on the numbers when, as the AFR explains, the company is going to “extraordinary lengths to keep [its review into the losses] under wraps”.
Just how a wind power outfit enjoying the most ludicrously massive industry subsidies provided in the history of the Australian Commonwealth can “lose” $700 million of workers’ superannuation money is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, to which we shall return in a moment. Now, here’s a couple of wrap-ups on Pac Hydro’s Ponzi scheme implosion.
Governance scandal claims Garry Weaven and Brett Himbury
The Australian Financial Review
Tony Boyd
5 March 2015
Industry superannuation fund heavyweights Garry Weaven and Brett Himbury are under pressure to resign from the board of global fund manager IFM Investors after a secret report into $700 million in losses at Pacific Hydro was blamed on lapses in corporate governance.
Weaven and Himbury resigned from the board of Pacific Hydro on January 1 this year after a review of its corporate governance by an executive director of IFM Investors, Danny Elia made adverse findings in relation to corporate governance.
The pressure for Weaven and Himbury to also resign from the board of IFM Investors is coming from investors in the IFM Australia Infrastructure Fund, which owns 100 per cent of Pacific Hydro. The IFM Australia Infrastructure Fund is managed by IFM Investors.
Chanticleer understands several investors in the trust are angry about the lack of transparency about Elia’s review of governance at Pacific Hydro.
The losses incurred by Pacific Hydro have meant that its value in the IFM Australian Infrastructure Fund have shrunk from 40per cent of total assets to about 8 per cent.
IFM Investors said in October last year that it had taken a near $700 million write-down on Pacific Hydro due to the adverse impact of the Abbott government’s review into renewable energy, weaker electricity demand in Australia, and tax changes in Chile.
The Chilean investment, the $US450 million ($575 million) Chacayes run-of-river power plant halved in value as a result of the regulatory and tax changes.
However, IFM has said nothing about Elia’s review of the governance of Pacific Hydro.
His review, code named Project Primavera, has not only been kept secret, IFM Investors has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep it under wraps.
Any investors in the IFM Australia Infrastructure Fund or asset consultants wanted to look at the 200-page Project Primavera report must sign a confidentiality agreement.
No copies of the report are allowed to leave the IFM premises, no photocopies of the report are allowed and anyone reading the report must surrender their smartphones before entering a room where the report is available.
The findings of the report and the resignations of Weaven and Himbury from Pacific Hydro have not been reported either on the websites of IFM Investors or Pacific Hydro. Also, the story has not been reported by The New Daily, an online news site owned by industry super funds.
Pacific Hydro’s website does show that the company appointed three new directors this year.
John Harvey replaced Weaven as chairman of Pacific Hydro on February 15. He is a director of Australia Pacific Airports Corporation.
Peter Berry was appointed a director of Pacific Hydro on January 16. He is chairman of the state owned venture capital business, Victorian Clean Technology Fund.
Michael Hanna was appointed a director of Pacific Hydro on February 10. He is responsible for managing the IFM Australian Infrastructure Fund.
Those appointments are significant because it means that there are now more people on the board of Pacific Hydro with operational experience. There was clearly a lack of hands on infrastructure management experience before.
Apart from Weaven and Himbury, two other directors have resigned in the past few months. Anita Roper resigned on January 1 this year and Geoffrey Coffey resigned on December 31, 2014, according to records with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
The angst among investors about the governance failings at Pacific Hydro have prompted IFM Investors to launch its own internal review of governance, according to industry sources.
It is not known who is conducting this review or whether it will have the power to recommend changes in governance at IFM.
The departure of Weaven from the board of Pacific Hydro would have been deeply felt as he was one of the driving forces behind the industry super fund sector’s push into renewable energy.
The Pacific Hydro write-downs and subsequent board resignations draw attention to the conflicts of interest which can occur when shareholders of a funds management company are also investors in its various products.
The fact that an employee of IFM, Elia, was called on to conduct a review of an IFM managed entity suggests it was not a completely independent arm’s length project.
The $700 million in losses at Pacific Hydro raises questions about the quality of advice received by IFM Investors from its extensive team of global infrastructure advisers which includes former chief executives at global companies.
Weaven and Himbury did not respond to email requests for comment and a spokesperson for Pacific Hydro said all comment about corporate governance at the company should come from IFM Investors. The spokesperson failed to call back. The Australian Financial Review
****
Pair step down after Hydro’s $685m loss
The Australian
Andrew White
6 March 2015
INDUSTRY superannuation fund godfather Garry Weaven and the chief executive of IFM Investors, Brett Himbury, resigned from the board of renewable energy investor Pacific Hydro last October following a $685 million loss.
Mr Weaven said he and Mr Himbury had resigned as directors to take responsibility for heavy writedowns on investments in Chilean and Australian energy assets that should have been anticipated.
“It was done on the basis that when you have a writedown like that there should be consequences. We should show that we take this very, very seriously.”
But he denied a report that there had been any pressure on him or Mr Himbury to resign from the IFM Investors board.
Mr Weaven said there had been no votes against him when he stood for re-election at the IFM Investors annual meeting in November. “There was absolutely no pressure on me or Brett Himbury to resign, none, zero.”
Pacific Hydro announced the $685m loss in October after the government abandoned its support for the Renewable Energy Target, which supported the value of wind and solar energy projects owned by the company, and changes to tax laws in Chile that halved the value of its investment in a hydro-electricity project. Mr Weaven said the Australian investments had also been cut in value following changes to the pricing rules from the Australian Energy Regulator at the end of June.
Mr Weaven “completely rejects” a report in a newspaper yesterday that there were any corporate governance issues that resulted in the losses. The Australian
****
Hmmm. Losing $685 million of mums’ and dads’ superannuation money would, in most peoples’ eyes, involve some deliberate effort, beyond being simply “asleep at the corporate wheel”.
While Weaven protests his corporate “innocence”, just imagine the size of Pac Hydro’s losses if there had been “any corporate governance issues”!!
And it’s not just mum and dads with their hard-earned retirement savings being thrown to the wind by Weaven & Co. Oh no, all Australian taxpayers are going to take a whopping financial hit on this one. Pac Hydro pocketed over $70 million in taxpayer underwritten “loans” from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (a $10 billion “renewable” scam slush fund set up by the Green/Labor Alliance) for its non-compliant Cape Bridgewater operation. Now that pile of taxpayers’ cash is at risk, along with hundreds of $millions more (see our post here).
The standard response from these corporate cowboys – that it was “uncertainty surrounding the Renewable Energy Target” that drove one of the largest losses in Australian corporate history – falls a little flat when it is understood that there has been NO change at all to the legislation underpinning the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET), despite wind industry whingeing and wailing, as if it had been torched altogether.
The derisory list of “excuses” used by wind power outfits to explain their mounting losses grows by the day: near-bankrupt wind power outfit, Infigen (aka Babcock & Brown) continues to blame the vagaries of the weather on its abysmally poor financial performance – an $8.9 million loss for 2013/14, which follows a $55 million loss in 2011/12 and an $80 million loss for 2012/13 (see our posts here and here). After another laughable performance in the last half of 2014, it took to pointing the finger at – wait for it – “THE WIND” – for yet another failure to get anywhere near its “projected” revenues (see this lament from the eco-facists over at ruin-economy). Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
And it’s a theme used around the globe in a “hey, quick look over there” approach to avoid any scrutiny of the real hard numbers (or, rather, the lack of them) that continue to show the woeful reality of wind power outfits’ overblown revenue projections – and the mounting losses being suffered by duped investors when those breezy projections fail to materialize (see our post here).
STT always likes to plunge its cynical spade just a little deeper into the mire than most; and, in relation to the great wind power fraud, always relishes the opportunity to do so. Even a cursory dig reveals the parallels with some of the greatest scams in history.
In recent times, Australia has seen gullible (and, perhaps, “greedy”) mum and dad investors fleeced to the tune of $billions in Managed Investment Schemes. Back in the late 1980s, the Commonwealth government amended tax legislation to provide huge tax benefits for investments in “Managed Investment Schemes”. During the late 1990s and 2000s, the tax change saw a flood of money pour into industrial scale vineyards; timber, olive and almond plantations. The MIS tax breaks were rightly considered a monstrous tax rort that allowed companies running Managed Investment Schemes to make obscene profits upfront at investors’ ultimate expense. In 2007, the government scrapped the tax breaks – a decision which led to enormous corporate collapses of MIS outfits – like Timbercorp and Great Southern Plantations – with MIS investors collectively losing 100s of $millions.
The common theme in all of these rorts, is that those filching the money always tend to blame somebody else as the scam turns sour; and the investors’ money goes “missing”: albeit that in the case of the great wind power fraud, mum and dads’ “missing” $millions can be readily located in the form of Sydney Harbour-side mansions and fleets of Aston Martins, Beamers and Mercs – snapped up by the managers of super funds and wind power outfits, as fitting symbols of their financial “finesse”.
***
So, how do wind power outfits routinely end up with results that show their revenue projections to be little more than financial fantasy?
Wind power outfits routinely base their expected returns on pumped up wind forecasts – thereby way overstating their anticipated gross returns (see our posts here and here and here and here).
While, at the same time, lying about their true operating costs (see ourposthere), which start to tack up pretty quickly when it’s revealed that turbines last less than half the time claimed: with an ‘economic’ lifespan of 10-12 years, as opposed to the 25 years wildly claimed by fan makers and wind power outfits (see our posts here and here).
Or, in the case of top-flight German manufacturer, Siemens – less than 2 years – one of it’s latest batches required wholesale blade and bearing replacement, starting almost as soon as they cranked them into gear (seeour post here) – Siemens blaming “harsh weather conditions both onshore and offshore” – as if its fans had been designed to run inside aircraft hangars ….
In the Californian desert – where salty-sea-air is unlikely to be the “problem” often complained about for rusty off-shore turbines, as they grind to early “retirement” – an entire fleet of 2 year old Siemens fans are throwing their blades to the four-winds, spewing out oil like Saudi Arabia and spontaneously combusting – making a mockery of wind industry claims that turbines run on the smell of an oily rag for 25 years or more (see our post here).
The other key factor in the fraud, is the overly optimistic expectation that the value and longevity of government mandated subsidy schemes – like the LRET and the REC Tax/Subsidy drawn from retail power consumers’ bills and directed to wind power outfits – hold the same degree of permanence as the Egyptian Pyramids.
****
However, while they’re no guide to the permanence of taxpayer’ and power consumers’ (forced) largesse, the shape of the Pharaohs’ tombs informs another aspect of the great wind power fraud: the fact that, when it all boils down, this is a monumental pyramid scheme, that would have made Charles Ponzi green with envy.
Some might call it “high hopes”, others, “hubris”, but either way, when the corporate puff evaporates, it’s the investors that take the beating.
The dreadful “uncertainty” about the willingness of governments to continue fleecing power consumers and taxpayers – in order to keep throwing massive subsidies at the greatest rort of all time (which, on the wind industry’s pitch will be needed until kingdom come) – has resulted in the collapse of more than 120 wind industry suppliers in the past two years, “including 88 from Asia, 23 from Europe and 18 from North America” (see our post here).
In Germany – despite the fact the the wind industry there has pocketed the lion’s share of at “least half a trillion € in subsidies” – German investors are taking a flogging: “37 percent of wind farms are losing investors’ money” and “two thirds are in deficit or just about cover their running costs” (see our post here).
And American “farmer investors” have been fleeced for $millions, as breezy optimism hits revenue reality (see our post here).
Around the world, wind farm investors are being fleeced by the same types of hucksters and weasels that run outfits like Infigen and Pac Hydro; and the smarmy gits that set up so-called “community wind farms” – praying on greed and gullibility in their efforts to pocket $billions in REC Tax/Subsidies.
The scam is the same the world over: pitch numbers that show returns that are too good to be true (they are) and watch the suckers beat a path to your door: greed trumps common sense often enough.
As PT Barnum said: “every crowd has a silver lining” – an adage put to great effect by wholesale fraudsters like Bernie Madoff in scams often tagged “Ponzi” schemes; named after Charles Ponzi – who would have taken to the wind industry like a duck to water.
Madoff – who ended up with a 150 year stretch in stir for his share-market shenanigans – would, no doubt, be pleased to know that the wind industry has followed his “model” and is keeping the Ponzi “dream” alive.
For one of Australia’s biggest wind power outfits to lose $700 million in a single financial year is no small thing – it takes real effort. To rack up that kind of loss when the subsidy rules haven’t changed, simply begs the question: “what happens when those rules inevitably get changed, and result in the (currently) massive subsidies paid to wind power outfits being cut or scrapped?”
As STT has pointed out, just once or twice, the LRET is both politically and economically unsustainable (see our posts here and here and here). The LRET will implode: it’s a matter of when, not if.
And the wind industry will collapse along with it; scorching $billions of gullible investors’ money as it does: Pac Hydro’s $700 million loss is just the beginning; and that occurred when the subsidy rules were all in its favour.
If you think you’ve got any of your hard-earned anywhere near wind power outfits, like Pac Hydro and Infigen – in the form of superannuation or shares – then grab it, and get out now.
Of course, if you’re a union member – and one of those whose super contributions get automatically channelled into a super fund “chosen” by your union leaders – it might be time to quiz them on just how safe your retirement nest egg is. With their trotters firmly in the great wind power fraud trough, we doubt you’ll get any straight answers; in which event, you might like to start howling for a Royal Commission.
Around the world, rural communities are fighting back hard against the great wind power fraud.
Wherever wind farms have appeared – or have been threatened – big numbers of locals take a set against the monsters being speared into their previously peaceful – and often idyllic – rural communities.
Their anger extends to the goons that lied their way to development approval – and the bent officials that rubber-stamped their applications and who, thereafter, help the operators ride roughshod over locals’ rights to live in and enjoy the peace and comfort of their own homes and properties (see our post here).
Australians are in there fighting hard – with the numbers solidly against wind power outfits that cause nothing more than community division and open hostility wherever they go (see our posts here and here and hereand here). In Australia, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers have completely lost their grip on the ‘game’ (see our post here).
The Irish have already hit the streets to bring an end to the fraud: some 10,000 stormed Dublin back in April last year. The sense of anger in Ireland – as elsewhere – is palpable (see our post here).
Rural Ontario is seething, with locals taking the law into their own hands – sabotaging turbines and construction equipment in order to defend their (once) peaceful and prosperous communities (see our post here).
And the Scots have joined in – tearing down MET masts in order to prevent wind power outfits from gaining a foothold and, thereafter, violating their right to live free from turbine terror (see our post here).
The back-lash against wind power outfits has been mirrored in the US – with communities rallying to shut down projects before they begin; and a raft of litigation launched by neighbours (see our post here) – as well as 23 Texan turbine hosts suing the wind farm outfit they contracted with for turbine noise impacts and loss of property value, etc (see our post here).
As community and political opposition to the great wind power fraud rolls and builds across the world, the charge that opponents are red-necked climate change deniers, infected with a dose of Not In My Backyard syndrome, starts to ring hollow.
Back to the mounting fury in Ontario. Community opposition there continues to mount and, with the vast majority of those set upon by the great wind power fraud opposed, has reached boiling point, as this Bay Today story details.
Mattawa wind farm opposition gaining momentum
Bay Today
6 March 2015
Liam Berti
Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli was one of 12 representatives opposing the proposed Mattawa-area wind farm who spoke to a standing-room only audience at Mike Rodden Arena on Friday night.
Some used humour, others were brought to tears.
But the message from three First Nation Chiefs, various Mayors and federal and provincial leaders was the same: the proposed wind farm for the Mattawa region will be fought to the end.
Area residents packed the second floor of Mattawa’s Mike Rodden Arena on Friday night to listen to the opposition leaders rally against Innergex Renewable Energy Inc.’s tentative plans for a 150-megawatt wind farm in the area.
Their respective arguments ranged from the Algonquin Land Claim agreement, the environmental toll, and the true economic impact, among many others.
The Nodinosi Project, as Innergex and the partnering Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation have named it, calls for anywhere between 50-60 wind turbines on crown land just north of the Mattawa River in the Olrig and Mattawan Townships.
Some of the turbines in the project are expected to tower at 80-120 metres in height, which would be some of the largest of their kind.
The Mattawa/North Bay Algonquin First Nation, Antoine First Nation and Shabot Obaadjiwan leaders took precedence on the evening, defending their land that they feel the government is destroying and exploiting.
“If you want to develop our lands, our consent is required,” said Dave Joanisse, Chief for the Antoine First Nation. “Going to court and fighting for title is one way the that the Algonquin Communities have to settle long outstanding Claims.
“The other way is for the government to conduct negotiation in good faith with Aboriginal Communities,” he continued.
Innergex has promoted the project in partnership with the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, who are situated over 200 kilometres from the proposed project site, near Pembroke, Ont.
But Joanisse continued to send his strong message to the fellow First Nation, whose integrity he questioned for entering the agreement and potentially jeopardizing the Algonquin Land Claim agreement-in-principle in the first public consultation.
“I am truly disappointed in the leadership from Pikwàkanagàn,” he said on Friday. “This unilateral decision made by them truly undermines the process we have all supported for the last 20 years.”
Nipissing Member of Provincial Parliament Vic Fedeli encapsulated the crowd with his arguments against the province’s wind power plans and, more specifically, the Mattawa proposal.
Fedeli, who was Ontario’s energy critic for two years, argued that the province’s Green Energy Act has been ideologically driven and lacks substance, which he said the new Innergex proposal is a prime example of.
He said the provincial government has spent $50 billion on green energy and paid $2.6 billion to Quebec and the United States between 2006 and 2013 to take the surplus energy made exclusively from wind.
“We got into this thing in Ontario by a mistake, forced into it by ideology, it caused your hydro rates to triple and cost 300,000 manufacturing jobs in Ontario so far,” Fedeli said.
But François Morin, senior advisor of public affairs for the Quebec-based company, said that isn’t the whole story.
“In the energy sector, you have to plan 20-25 years ahead,” he added. “Maybe you have a surplus of energy now, but in a few years it could be very different. In Ontario, the projection calls for a deficit of energy in the next 3-4 years.”
The intermittent power source, Fedeli argued, is being forced on Ontario after the province stripped municipalities the ability to object to the farms and that they continue to unfairly incentivize their development to the private companies.
The crowd also heard from North Bay Mayor Al McDonald, Nipissing-Timiskaming MP Jay Aspin, John Kelsall of the Lake Talon Conservation Authority, and other area mayors.
Many in attendance said the standing room-only session was the biggest turnout they have ever seen for an event like that in Mattawa.
Mattawa Mayor Dean Backer brought the evening to a climax, rallying the crowd to their feet in his brief but powerful statements.
“Innergex, we mean no ill will, but you’re coming into our back yard and it’s not going to happen in our back yard, I can promise you that,” he said to a standing ovation. “Our municipality is 100 per cent against this stupid proposal.”
And it appears that, for now, those strong messages have gotten through to Innergex.
Morin said the responsibility is now on Innergex to redevelop the proposal around the concerns they have heard.
“Social acceptability is a cornerstone of our development and a vital part of any project, so for now, I can tell you, no we don’t have a project because we don’t have that social acceptability,” he said after the meeting.
“For now, the responsibility is with us to find a way to make a better project,” he concluded.
Morin said the company will now go back to the drawing board and redevelop new ideas for the Nodinosi Project. Bay Today
Can you imagine that people are still straining to make renewables work–when they are such colossal failures.
Solar and the renewable idiocy are the focus of this essay by Marita
Link to: Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world
Greetings!
You know I have written on extensively on what I call Obama’s green-energycrony-corruption. I’ve addressed news stories such as the near-certain death of Cape Wind and exposed the criminal activity of the solar panel Abengoa. In December, based on a thorough report someone else produced, I wrote a column about the German renewable energy experiment. It got me thinking, what if I pulled all of my research, and others, together and produced a report like the German one on which I’d based my Germany’s “energy transformation” — unsustainable subsidies and an unstable system column?
For the past couple of months, I have been quietly working behind the scenes to put together my first “white paper:” Solar Power in the U.S.—intended to provide a comprehensive look at the impacts of solar power on the nation’s consumers. It has been planned to be released today! I know when we released it, a review of the content would be the topic of this week’s column. I just didn’t know how it was going to take shape. But then, someone on my newsletter distribution list sent me a link to a U.S. News and World Report blog. As I read it, I kept finding discrepancies, omissions and flat-out untruths. While the Blog posttitle is: Keystone isn’t about jobs, the author was really writing about solar. He has obviously bought into the talking points; the propaganda—but didn’t know (or chose to ignore) the real world implementation of solar power in the U.S. As I read it, I knew I had the structure for this week’s column: Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world.
I had fun writing Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world—especially since I’d just completed the report and had the content top-of-mind. I hope you enjoy reading it and will post it and/or pass it on. It introduces the new report.
Thanks to Solar Power in the U.S., there is now a handy (15 page) guide that offers the real view, rather than the fantasy version, of what solar power can and cannot do, how effective it is, and the impact its rapid implementation is having on consumers. It is my hope that both consumers and policymakers will read Solar Power in the U.S. before making decisions with long-term implications.
Because I already have the 900-word version ready, I am offer you both the full-length and the shorter version. Please use whichever is better for your readers. The full-length version is pasted-in-below.
Marita Noon
Executive Director, Energy Makes America Great, inc.
PO Box 52103, Albuquerque, NM 87181
505.239.8998
For immediate release: March 9, 2015.
Commentary by Marita Noon
Executive Director, Energy Makes America Great Inc.
When a former “senior communications official at the White House” writes a blog post for U.S. News and World Report, you should be able to trust it. But when the author states that the Keystone pipeline (should it be approved) would create only 19 weeks of temporary jobs, everything else he says must be suspect—including the claim that our “energy infrastructure will be 100 percent solar by 2030.”
I contacted both a union representative and one from TransCanada—the company behind the Keystone pipeline. Each affirmed that the 19-week timeframe was total fantasy. The portion of the Keystone pipeline that remains to be built is 1179 miles long—the vast majority of that within the U.S.—with construction expected to take two years.
TransCanada’s spokesperson Mark Cooper responded to my query: “While some people belittle these jobs as temporary, we know that without temporaryconstruction jobs—and the hard work of the men and women who do them—we wouldn’t have roads, highways, schools or hospitals. We wouldn’t have the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Hoover Dam. So, I would say to these detractors: ‘It is OK if you don’t like or support Keystone XL. But let’s stop putting down the very people who have helped build America.’”
The premise of the On the Edge blog post is that we shouldn’t look at Keystone as a jobs creator. Instead, the author claims, the jobs are in “solar energy disruption.” He is frustrated that “GOP leaders almost universally ignore or disdain this emerging energy economy.”
He states: “A third of all new electric generation in 2014 came from solar. A new solar installation or project now occurs somewhere in the U.S.—built by a team of American workers employed in the fastest growing energy sector in the world—every three minutes.”
This may be true but, as you’ll see, it belies several important details. Plenty of cause exists for Republican lawmakers to “disdain” the growth in renewable energy.
If “a third of all new electric generation in 2014 came from solar,” there is reason for it—and it does not include sound economics.
First, efficient and effective base-load, coal-fueled electricity that has provided the bulk of America’s power is being prematurely shut down by regulations prompted by environmental lobbyists and promulgated by the Obama administration. It is virtually impossible to get a new coal-fueled power plant permitted in the U.S. Even natural gas-powered plants, such as the one planned to replace the Salem Harbor coal-fueled plant, meet with resistance from groups such as Grassroots Against Another Salem Plant, which “has pledged to use peaceful civil disobedience to block construction of the gas plant.” And, of course, just try to build a nuclear power plant and all the fear-mongers come out.
What’s left? Renewables, such as wind and solar, receive favorable treatment through a combination of mandates and subsidies. Even industrial wind and solar have their own opposition within the environmental lobby groups because they chop up and fry birds and bats— including protected bald and golden eagles.
The brand new report, Solar Power in the U.S. (SPUS), presents a comprehensive look at the impacts of solar power on the nation’s consumers.
Clearly, without the mandates and subsidies, this “solar energy disruption” would go dark.
We’ve seen companies, such as Solyndra, Abound Solar, and Evergreen Solar, gobankrupt even with millions of dollars in state and federal (taxpayer) assistance. I’ve written extensively on these stories and that of Abengoa—which received the largest federal loan guarantee ($2.8 billion) and has resorted to questionable business practices to keep the doors open (Abengoa is currently under investigation from several federal agencies).
SPUS shows that without the subsidies and mandates these renewable projects can’t survive. For example, in Australia, sales of solar systems “fell as soon as the incentives were cut back.” Since the Australian government announced that it was reconsidering its Renewable Energy Targets, “investments have started to dry up.”
Knowing the importance of the “incentives,” the solar industry has now become a major campaign donor, providing political pressure and money to candidates, who will bring on more mandates, subsidies, and tax credits. Those candidates are generally Democrats, as one of the key differences between the two parties is that Democrats tend to support government involvement. By contrast, Republicans lean toward limited government and the free market. The GOP doesn’t “disdain” solar, but they know it only survives because of government mandates that require a certain percentage of renewables, and specifically solar, in the energy mix, plus the subsidies and tax credits that make it attractive. Therefore, they can’t get excited about the jobs being created as a result of taxpayers’ involuntary investment, nor higher energy costs. There is a big difference between disdaining solar power and disdaining the government involvement that gives it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.
The blog post compares the “solar energy disruption” to what “occurred when direcTV and Dish started to compete with cable television. More choices emerged and a whole lot of new jobs were created.” However, those jobs were created through private investment and the free market—a fact that, along with solar’s dependence on incentives, he never mentions. Likewise, the jobs supported by building the Keystone pipeline would be through private funding.
The blog’s author touts this claim, from the book Clean Disruption: “Should solar continue on its exponential trajectory, the energy infrastructure will be 100 percent solar by 2030”—15 years from now. Even if state and federal governments were to continue to pour money into solar energy—which, as is pointed out in SPUS, subsidies are already being dialed back on a variety of fronts, there is no currently available solution to solar’s intermittency.
SPUS draws upon the example of Germany, which has led the way globally in solar and other renewables. Over time the high renewable penetration has contributed to residential electricity prices more than doubling. Renewables received favored status, called “priority dispatch,” which means that, when renewable electricity becomes available, the utilities must dispatch it first, thereby changing the merit order for thermal plants. Now many modern natural gas-fueled plants, as well as coal, couldn’t operate profitably. As a result, many were shut down, while several plants were provided “capacity payments” by the government (a double subsidy) in order to stay online as back-up—which maintains system stability. In Germany’s push for 80 percent renewable energy by 2050, it has found that despite the high penetration of renewables, given their inherent intermittency, a large amount of redundancy of coal- and natural-gas-fueled electricity (nuclear being decommissioned) is necessary to maintain the reliability of the grid.
As the German experience makes clear, without a major technological breakthrough to store electricity generated through solar systems, “100 percent solar by 2030” is just one more fantasy.
The blog post ends with this: “the GOP congressional leadership ignores these new jobs inside an innovative, disruptive energy sector that is about to sweep across the country it leads—in favor of a vanishingly small number of mythical Keystone ‘jobs’ that may never materialize. It makes you wonder. Why?”
The answers can be found in SPUS, which addresses the policy, regulatory, and consumer protection issues that have manifested themselves through the rapid rise of solar power and deals with many more elements than covered here. It concludes: “Solar is an important part of our energy future, but there must be forethought, taking into account future costs, jobs, energy reliability and the overall energy infrastructure already in place. This technology must come online with the needs of the taxpayer, consumer and ratepayer in mind instead of giving the solar industry priority.”
The author of Energy Freedom, Marita Noon serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE). She hosts a weekly radio program: America’s Voice for Energy—which expands on the content of her weekly column.
Australia’s Energy Minister, Ian “Macca” Macfarlane and his youthful ward, Environment Minister, Greg Hunt are the flies in the Coalition’s political ointment, when it comes to engineering anything like a sensible policy on energy. Both Macfarlane’s and Hunt’s offices are filled with wind industry plants and stooges, like Hunt’s senior adviser, Patrick Gibbons. Patrick is best mates with Vesta’s former head – and now full-time wind industry lobbyist – Ken McAlpine.
Both Macca and Hunt are still working flat-out at the minute trying to salvage the wreckage of the (completely unsustainable) Large-ScaleRenewable Energy Target (LRET).
For months now, Macca has been trying to cut a deal with Labor in an effort to help his mates over at the near-bankrupt wind power outfit, Infigen (aka Babcock and Brown) stay afloat.
Meanwhile, Macca’s side-kick, Greg Hunt has been trying to woo the cross-bench Senators, as part of the same last-ditch, salvage and rescue mission: back in December, Greg jetted down to Hobart to try and convince newly independent Tasmanian Senator, Jacqui Lambie about the “wonders” of wind power (see our post here).
And his office has pulled out all stops to prevent anyone with the first clue about the scale of the great wind power fraud from having any directcontact with Hunt, to avoid the Minister being confronted and embarrassed by the facts of an unmitigated policy fiasco (see our post here).
For more than just a little while, STT has been pointing out that the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) is simply unsustainable – be that as a matter of simple economics; or as a cold, hard political fact.
STT provided a very detailed analysis as to just why the LRET is all set to implode, in this post:
As part of STT’s analysis we drew the parallels between the collapse of the government backed, wool Reserve Price Scheme (RPS) back in 1991, and the inevitable collapse of the LRET.
Both effectively involved government (read “taxpayer”) underwritten floor prices, aimed at protecting the prices received by producers. The RPS collapsed because wool buyers simply refused to buy wool at the mandated floor price. The LRET will collapse because electricity retailers are refusing to enter Power Purchase Agreements with wind power outfits: PPAs are only entered in order to buy Renewable Energy Certificates, which are used by retailers to satisfy the LRET target.
Australia’s commercial power retailers have downed pens – having refused to enter any PPAs for over two years – they have no intention of doing so now; and will simply pay the shortfall charge, and collect it as a Federal tax from struggling power consumers (a theme to which we will return below). In the absence of long-term PPAs, wind power outfits will never obtain finance to build any new wind farms, which means that there will be no new wind power capacity built from here on (see our post here).
So, all the talk from Hunt and Macfarlane about “adjusting” targets under the LRET is little more than meaningless political twaddle. Despite all their smooth talk and conciliatory tones over reaching a “reasonable” deal with Labor on a “new” target, neither Hunt, nor Macfarlane can force Origin’s Grant King – or any other retailer – to enter PPAs; purchase RECs; or otherwise play ball, to save either the LRET, their mates at Infigen, or their political skins.
First, we’ll tune into some political gobbledygook dished up by Macfarlane on Sky News a couple of weeks back.
Sky News
Ian Macfarlane Interview with Sky News
26 February 2015
JOURNALIST: How are your negotiations going with the Opposition and others when it comes to the Renewable Energy Target? Any progress?
IAN MACFARLANE: Well we have put a position to the industry. We are waiting for the industry to consider it. The reality is that we have a gross oversupply of electricity generation in Australia and the biggest obstacle to the renewable energy industry building new capacity at the moment is that they can’t get anyone to buy the electricity because there is so much electricity generation around.
Now I’ve offered them a process of certainty, I’ve offered them a number and I’ve offered them a guarantee that this will be the last review before 2020 so that we change the legislation that requires a review every two years. I’ve offered them a scheme where we will deal with the overhang of credits in the market, so the industry can get on and build, particularly those wind farms that have already been given an approval and have gone to final investment decision, so we can continue to see the amount of renewable energy generated in Australia grow.
That is still happening. I mean, we’re still seeing an exponential growth in rooftop solar in Australia and we are on track to very significantly exceed the rooftop solar target which was 4,000 gigawatt hours and we’re already at about 7,000 gigawatt hours. So it is happening. The industry will have to understand that we are not going to build way more generation capacity then we need. There has to be some rationality in this. The other problem they’ve got is that if the scheme stays as it is, and that’s the alternative – that we just walk away and leave it – the renewable energy industry will be the one that pays the cost of that.
JOURNALIST: Is that offer that you have extended to the industry, above 30,000 gigawatt hours?
IAN MACFARLANE: I’m not going to get involved in that discussion, but look, yes it is. The industry knows what it is, I’m sure the Labor Party knows what it is because they seem to work in lockstep with the Clean Energy Council. The offer that’s been made is based not only on sound policy, but on the reality of where renewable energy is in Australia and that is that we are seeing a significant growth in rooftop and small scale solar which has to be taken into consideration. We don’t want to do it in a way which impinges on the large scale renewable energy scheme.
So they’ve got an offer, they can think about it for as long as they like, because until they come to an agreement, the scheme will continue untouched. So the scheme that has been agreed to by Penny Wong and I back in 2009 will continue as it is. We’re not going to touch it.
JOURNALIST: It’s been a somewhat messy process hasn’t it, and it has delivered a whole lot of uncertainty for the industry?
IAN MACFARLANE: No well I don’t think it has. I mean the situation is we’ve got a scheme that everyone agrees is going to go into default, is not going to be sustainable, is going to basically do something that in the end is not good for the renewable energy industry. I’ve offered them a compromise, an alternative, a logical solution to the issue, or they can keep the scheme they’ve got. That’s their choice.
If they don’t want compromise, if they don’t want to come to a point where we can actually have a sustainable renewable energy scheme, one which I’ve been involved in since day one since 2001 when I was the Resources Minister, if they don’t want to do that, then I’ll give them what they’ve got. I’ll give them what they asked for. That is the current scheme.
But I know that is going to end in tears and I know the people that will lose out of that will actually be the renewable energy industry.
JOURNALIST: Industry and Science Minister Ian Macfarlane, thanks for your time. Sky News
Macfarlane would have been better off saving his breath. The “conversation” above was little more than a besieged Minister, thinking out loud in a stream of consciousness session, in the presence of a bemused observer.
For Mcfarlane – and his wind industry backers – the “elephant in the room” is the fact that retailers have NO reason to enter PPAs – and every reason not to. In the result, Australian power consumers will inevitably end up paying $30 billion in a stealth tax under the LRET. Which brings us to Mcfarlane’s little throwaways that:
“[T]the renewable energy industry will be the one that pays the cost of that”. “But I know that is going to end in tears and I know the people that will lose out of that will actually be the renewable energy industry”.
Er, not quite, Ian. The biggest losers will be REAL Australian businesses, and hard-pressed households, who will end up paying for the costliest and most pointless policy debacle in the Commonwealth’s history.
At this point, we’ll pick up a little more twaddle from the “dynamic duo”, as young Greg Hunt ties himself in knots on ABC radio.
Renewable Energy Target
ABC Radio (The World Today)
Interview with David Mark
5 March 2015
DAVID MARK: Greg Hunt, the issue of the Renewable Energy Target, where it should be set, has been running for some time. You’ve been holding talks with the various industry representatives as well as the Labor Party. What is the progress of those talks?
GREG HUNT: Good. We are making real and significant and important progress. My view is that we are within reach of an agreement which will effectively double the renewable energy that has been installed over the last fifteen years within the next five years. Real progress on a constructive basis, but in a way which will manage people’s power prices and take any risk of additional pressure off them.
DAVID MARK: You talk about doubling the amount of renewable energy; the sticking point has been over this target. Should it be 41,000 gigawatt hours, which was the target set back when the RET first was set up, or the 26,000 that you were originally proposing. What’s the number?
GREG HUNT: Sure, you can understand that I won’t put any particular figure on the table but I think what matters to the Australian public is that we are making real progress, we are within sight of an agreement, we’re working constructively with the sector and I really appreciate their work.
We are also working constructively with the ALP and the manufacturing sector and so the critical part here is the potential for doubling what’s been installed over the last 15 years within half a decade and that’s a very good outcome for the environment, it’s a good outcome for the sector, but it means it will be done in a way that it can actually build rather than the risk of not achieving and then falling into a de-facto, massive penalty carbon tax of $93 per tonne which nobody wants to see.
DAVID MARK: Will the doubling of that renewable power, that renewable electricity be as a result of the RET? Or are you talking about other programmes?
GREG HUNT: No this is exclusively through the Renewable Energy Target. So the way the Renewable Energy Target works – for the listeners – is a benchmark is set. It has to be achieved by law and therefore the renewable energy has to be built and supplied to that level. If we reach an agreement which is an effective doubling then that is very, very significant.
It means that the renewable energy will have to be constructed, but it will be done in a way which ensures that it’s real renewable energy that is actually generated rather than a figure created but which is never actually built, which is then paid for by a penalty in the form of a $93 per tonne carbon tax and that’s been our concern.
I think we are very close, very close to a constructive outcome both for emissions, for solar, for renewable energy and for putting a cap in terms of removing any risk of a jump in power prices which was the legacy of the flaw in the pre-existing system.
DAVID MARK: As you know there are a large number of projects – wind projects and other projects – that are on the shelf now because of the uncertainty over the RET. If you get the deal that you’re talking about now, that you say you’re close to negotiating, are those projects going to be taken off the shelf? Will they be built?
GREG HUNT: Well I think this will allow additional renewable energy. Whether it’s solar or geothermal, whether it is small hydro or other forms of renewable energy, to proceed. We are of course…
DAVID MARK: But what about those projects that have been shelved will they come into play again?
GREG HUNT: Well of course, by definition, the projects that are most ready to go are those that are most likely to advance immediately. We are still increasing our renewable energy. I saw a list of many, many projects that have been commenced over the course of the last year.
I think that that’s been a tremendous step forward, but the risk that we all faced was failing to achieve the target because realistically the build just wasn’t possible and as a consequence, facing a massive $93 a tonne carbon tax penalty equivalent, whereas we can avoid that dead-weight cost, we can protect people’s power prices, but we can get the prospect of solar and wind and hydro and geothermal – these are real and significant steps forward.
DAVID MARK: You’re not talking about numbers but can you give us an indication? Obviously that number is going to somewhere between 26,000 gigawatt hours and 41. Is that correct?
GREG HUNT: That’s correct. And I’m not being…
DAVID MARK: In the upper 30s, in the lower 40s?
GREG HUNT: No, look, I have always said that we need to achieve a modest, sensible, balanced outcome. We’re being very reasonable. To be frank, I’ve found a very different position from the ALP in the last week and I respect and appreciate that, it’s been encouraging and constructive. And similarly we’ve found an extremely constructive approach from the Clean Energy Council and many members.
People have decided they want a deal and so I understandably won’t speculate on a number, but the order of magnitude for the Australian public is an approximate or near doubling of renewable energy in the ground and being generated.
DAVID MARK: Greg Hunt, how much has this period of uncertainty cost the renewables industry?
GREG HUNT: Well, I think that if we head towards a realistic target, that is the best long term sustainable outcome and it actually will advantage the sector in the medium term.
DAVID MARK: When do you expect to sign off on a deal?
GREG HUNT: I won’t put a timeframe on it but I would like to do it early and soon. We, of course, inherited the statutory review. It was a review enshrined in law by the ALP when they set up the Renewable Energy Target.
People can agree or disagree – it was inherited, we’ve done it, but I think we can get an outcome here which good for clean energy production, good for consumers – that has been an extremely important issue to make sure that the risk of a massive spike and penalty and burden for consumers is avoided.
DAVID MARK: You say want to do a deal soon – what are the sticking points?
GREG HUNT: Look I think that obviously the number and the means of calculation, but we’re close on that. Then something that’s been very important to the renewable sector has been soaking up some of the 24 million surplus credits which were created largely as a result of the phantom credit scheme where people were paid for renewable energy which was never actually produced.
Extraordinary, amazing, incredible. A bizarre Labor initiative, but we’ve had to deal with the consequences of that and there is a way through that I think we have largely agreed upon with the Clean Energy Council and those are the two most important things.
DAVID MARK: Greg Hunt, thanks very much for your time.
GREG HUNT: It’s a pleasure. ABC, The World Today
Let’s start by throwing a spotlight on some of Hunt’s little musings – we’ve highlighted the important bits above, but we’ll set them out again:
We are also working constructively with the ALP and the manufacturing sector and so the critical part here is the potential for doubling what’s been installed over the last 15 years within half a decade and that’s a very good outcome for the environment, it’s a good outcome for the sector, but it means it will be done in a way that it can actually build rather than the risk of not achieving and then falling into a de-facto, massive penalty carbon tax of $93 per tonne which nobody wants to see.
It means that the renewable energy will have to be constructed, but it will be done in a way which ensures that it’s real renewable energy that is actually generated rather than a figure created but which is never actually built, which is then paid for by a penalty in the form of a $93 per tonne carbon tax and that’s been our concern.
I think that that’s been a tremendous step forward, but the risk that we all faced was failing to achieve the target because realistically the build just wasn’t possible and as a consequence, facing a massive $93 a tonne carbon tax penalty equivalent, whereas we can avoid that dead-weight cost, we can protect people’s power prices, but we can get the prospect of solar and wind and hydro and geothermal – these are real and significant steps forward.
What Greg is referring to – but can’t quite bring himself to mention – is the $65 per MWh shortfall charge (read “fine”) mandated under the LRET; which is destined to add $30 billion to Australian power bills over the life of the scheme (see below and our post here).
What Greg must surely know – but can’t bear revealing – is that there is no way any new wind power capacity is going to be added to satisfy the current (or any “amended”) target under the LRET.
With retailers refusing to enter PPAs; and, instead, deciding to pay the shortfall charge, the full cost of that penalty will simply be recovered as aFederal tax on all Australian electricity consumers. In an effort to bring the LRET rort to an end, retailers aim to make that politically unpalatable fact plain on their power bills, by adding the words “Federal Tax on Electricity Consumers”.
But, it’s Greg’s confusing claim that building new wind power capacity will, by avoiding the shortfall penalty, somehow “protect people’s power prices” – that has STT’s attention. According to young Greg’s take on things, rolling out thousands of giant fans will, magically, result in lower retail power prices.
Time to look at some numbers; and put Greg’s wild claims to the sword.
The LRET target is set by s40 of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 (here).
At the present time, the total annual contribution to the LRET from eligible renewable energy generation sources is 16,000 GWh; and, because retailers will not enter PPAs, is stuck there now and forever.
In the table below, the “Shortfall in MWh (millions)” is based on a total contribution to the LRET from eligible renewable sources of 16,000,000 MWh (1GWh = 1,000MWh). The LRET target is, likewise, set out in MWh (millions). As set out below, this means that the shortfall charge will kick in this calendar year; insiders say later this month.
Between now and 2031 the total target could be satisfied by the issue and surrender of 587 million RECs. However, with only 16 million RECs available annually there will be a total shortfall of 331 million. That means that only 256 million RECs will be available to satisfy the remaining 587 million MWh target, over the life of the LRET.
The REC price is, due to the impact of the shortfall charge, expected to hit $94, and, due to the taxation treatment of RECs versus the shortfall charge, the full cost of the shortfall charge to retailers is also $94.
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 – which combines the annual cost to retailers of 16 million RECs at $94 (ie $1,504,000,000) and the shortfall penalty, as it applies each year from now until 2031, at the same ultimate cost to power consumers of $94.
Year
Target in MWh (millions)
Shortfall in MWh (millions)
Shortfall Charge Recovered by Retailers @ $94
Total Recovered by Retailers as RECs & Shortfall Charge @ $94
2015
18
2
$188,000,000
$1,692,000,000
2016
22.6
6.6
$620,400,000
$2,124,400,000
2017
27.2
11.2
$1,052,800,000
$2,556,800,000
2018
31.8
15.8
$1,485,200,000
$2,989,200,000
2019
36.4
20.4
$1,917,600,000
$3,421,600,000
2020
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2021
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2022
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2023
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2024
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2025
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2026
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2027
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2028
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2029
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
2030
41
25
$2,350,000,000
$3,854,000,000
Total
587
331
$31,114,000,000
$55,178,000,000
So, once regard is had to the legislation on which the LRET is based, and the fact that retailers will be recovering BOTH the cost of the shortfall charge AND the cost of purchasing whatever RECs might be available, it’s hard to see how building new wind power capacity will “protect people’s power prices” – as young Gregory claims.
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” any of it.
As our simple little exercise in arithmetic makes plain, over $55 billion will be added to all Australian power consumers’ bills; irrespective of whether young Greg is able to satisfy the desires of his mates at Infigen & 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 $55 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 calls it, a: “massive penalty carbon tax.”
Which leaves us wondering whether Greg Hunt simply doesn’t know his onions – and is simply a bumbling incompetent, unfit to be left anywhere near Australia’s energy policy?
Or, if Greg has got a grip on the facts relevant to the operation and cost of the LRET, whether he’s just playing “dumb”; telling “porkies”; and taking the Australian public for fools?
But, behind Greg’s fluffing, there is a little paradox, wrapped up in an energy irony; in this unfolding policy fiasco.
It seems difficult to suggest that Australian power consumers will be better off being hit with a $30 billion stealth tax (in the form of the shortfall charge under the LRET), but that, indeed, is the practical result. Yes, that’s right; Australian power consumers will be financially better off if left to simply pay $30 billion in a pointless electricity tax.
If Greg Hunt was able to realise the dreams of his benefactors at Infigen & Co, not only would Australians be hit with the combined $55 billion cost of REC Tax/Subsidy and the shortfall charge (as set out above), any substantial increase in wind power generation capacity brings with it a number of totally unnecessary, additional and phenomenal costs – all of which will be borne by Australian power consumers.
Let’s start with just a few of them.
“Investment” in wind power generation capacity
The wind industry has been bleating about uncertainty over the LRET that will “prevent” some $17 billion worth of “investment” in new wind power generation capacity. That amount is, apparently, said to be what’s needed to install the turbines needed to satisfy the ultimate 41,000 GWh target from 2020 and beyond.
The wind industry throws around the term “investment”, as if wind power outfits are lining up to make an outright, “no-strings-attached” gift of $17 billion to Australian power consumers. What the wind industry and its parasites don’t say is that – like any capital investment – the investors stumping up the cash will be looking for a juicy return in exchange.
Any investor naturally looks for a return on a capital investment. Ideally, that return exceeds bank interest and – if there is any risk involved – accounts for that risk by way of higher returns. Investors in wind farm projects – due to the massive REC Subsidy – aim for a gross return on the capital invested in the order of 20% per annum.
That means that the investors stumping up $17 billion to install new turbines will be looking to recover $3.4 billion from power consumers each and every year to achieve that level of return: returns on wind power investments can only be recouped via income received from power sales – there is NO other source of revenue.
So, rather than being the objects of $17 billion in wind industry largesse, power consumers are being lined up for an enormous, additional and – because there is already ample generating capacity to meet (declining) demand well into the future – completely unnecessary $3.4 billion hit in the hip pocket each and every year.
Further unnecessary capital costs and “investment” in a duplicated electricity grid
For a little history of the LRET and a great summary of its likely total costs – see this detailed article by Ray Evans and Tom Quirk.
Back in 2009 Tom and Ray predicted with chilling accuracy (in this paper) the escalation of power prices due to increasing wind power generation.
Ray and Tom concluded that the total capital cost of installing an extra 26,000 MW of wind power capacity to reach the 2020 target is in the order of $52 billion.
On their figures, adding to that cost will be the need to have backup generation capacity of at least 23,400 MW – from base-load sources such as coal or gas – to ensure continuity of supply. In addition, this will also bring with it the need to pay the cost of having conventional generators on standby to meet demand during routine and unpredictable collapses in wind power output, through what are called “capacity payments” (see our post here).
And to absorb the intermittent and unpredictable wind power generated by wind turbines dispersed over Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland – all feeding into the Eastern grid – there will need to be at least $30 billion invested in a duplicated transmission network.
The wind industry and its parasites try to deflect the true cost of the LRET and wind power by attributing escalating power prices to the cost of “poles and wires” – when they talk about “gold plated networks” (for a detailed rebuttal to that furphy, see our post here). To carry 26,000 MW of new wind power generating capacity, scattered all over South-Eastern Australia, will require the network to be “platinum plated”.
The $30 billion talked about by Ray and Tom in their papers is the cost of duplicating the network just to take wind power – on the few occasions it actually delivers (see our posts here and here and here and here).
What Tom Evans and Ray Quirk mean by duplicating the transmission network to accommodate wind power includes $107 million for an interconnector for no other purpose than to send South Australian generated wind power to Victoria at night-time – as reported by The Age.
A network exclusively devoted to sending wind power output from remote, rural locations to urban population centres (where the demand is) 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 26,000 MW of new wind power capacity that Ray and Tom suggest would be built to meet the 41,000 GWh target would see turbines spread far and wide over rural NSW, SA, Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania (which would be all connected to the Eastern grid). For that to happen, a network will need to be built that runs in the reverse direction to the existing grid.
Most major capitals have substantial generating capacity within relatively close proximity and existing networks radiate out from there – sending power out to rural and regional towns and farms. With wind farms being spread over huge geographical areas their output has to be chanelled back to where the markets are. The coasts and coastal cities are where the populations are – rural and regional Australia is relatively sparsely populated and the further you go inland the sparser it gets.
To specifically cater for a huge increase in wind power capacity will necessarily require an enormous investment in dedicated high capacity transmission lines (and all the other associated infrastructure) running from remote, regional and rural Australia back to the population centres – rather than the other way round.
We haven’t even got to the costs of installing and operating highly inefficient peaking power plants needed to backup wind power capacity when it disappears each day and for days on end, but we’ve made our point (for the impact of peaking power on power prices, see our postshere and here).
As our little table shows, the operation of the LRET means that retailers will be recovering $55 billion; as either REC Tax/Subsidy; or as the shortfall charge – and, either way, it’s Australian power consumers that will be paying for the lot.
In the event that there is any further increase in wind power generation capacity that equation does not alter, except that a greater proportion will be recovered as REC Tax/Subsidy, rather than as the shortfall charge.
However, if there is any increase in wind power generation capacity it will simply result in increased capital costs needed to install turbines; build a duplicated transmission grid; build additional peaking power generation capacity; and/or to pay “capacity payments” to conventional generators, etc, etc.
And, on top of that, comes the return on all of that capital “investment”: at least $52 billion to install 26,000 MW of further wind power capacity; and a further $30 billion in setting up a network to get it to market. Power consumers will end up paying for all of that “investment” through their power bills – think of a 20% gross annual return being recovered from power consumers on an $82 billion investment.
The potential cost to power consumers can only be described as colossal.
Which is why STT says that power consumers will, in fact, the better off by simply paying $30 billion to satisfy the shortfall charge under the LRET from here on.
Retailers, like Origin’s Grant King are perfectly aware that fully satisfying the LRET target by way of new wind power generation capacity will drive retail power prices through the roof over the next four years.
As we have pointed out, electricity retailers have a choice: enter PPAs to purchase RECs, or pay the shortfall charge; and they’ve decided to be hit with the latter, and to recover it via retail power bills. So, for retailers, whatever the LRET target might end up at is a matter of utter commercial indifference.
In the LRET wash up, retailers are aware that retail power prices will actually be substantially lower if there is no new wind power generation capacity built, because it avoids the need for added network costs etc – massive costs which retailers will be bound to recover from power consumers.
For retailers, power consumers aren’t just voters who might take out their anger at a ballot box every few years; these are a power retailers’ only customers: and these customers are already struggling to pay their power bills – tens of thousands of Australian households can’t afford their power bills now (see our posts here and here).
So, despite young Gregory’s weaselly efforts to deflect attention from the ultimate costs of the LRET to Australian power consumers, his little subterfuge is unlikely to slip under the guard of Australia’s power retailers: these boys are no fools.
And, soon enough, Australia’s power consumers will work out that they are being lined up to pay the obscene costs of an unmitigated power policy debacle.
The only question remaining is whether their Energy and Environment Ministers are just plain dumb, or whether they’re bare-faced liars?
Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council has long since disqualified itself as a body fit, willing, or even able to investigate and report on the known and obvious consequences to human health and well-being caused by incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.
From the get go, it’s been infiltrated by wind industry consultants, such as Norm Broner and wind industry advocates like Liz Hanna, who continue to direct traffic at, what is supposed to be, an independent medical research body, designed to protect public health at enormous taxpayer expense (see our post here).
A few weeks back, the NHMRC pumped out another politically inspired piece of propaganda, asserting that there was “no consistent evidence” of wind farms causing adverse health effects.
The inclusion of the weasel word “consistent” in the NHMRC’s puffy press piece is telling; and it’s a theme we’ll return to a moment, when we revisit the concept of basic science, in the general, and hypothesis testing, in the particular.
But first to a recent performance by the NHMRC’s chair, Warwick Anderson before the Senate Estimates Committee.
Community Affairs Legislation Committee – 25/02/2015 – Estimates – HEALTH PORTFOLIO – National Health and Medical Research Council
****
****
Senator MADIGAN: Thank you, gentlemen. I note that the NHMRC was aware of Steven Cooper’s research at Cape Bridgewater commissioned by Pacific Hydro. Given the endorsement of Mr Cooper’s acoustic investigation by senior acousticians internationally, such as Dr Paul Schomer and Dr George Hessler, both of whom worked for the wind industry, I would like to know what your acoustic expert Dr Norm Broner thought of Mr Cooper’s report.
Prof. Anderson: Thank you to the chair and Senator McLucas for those very kind words. It is actually a great privilege to be able to serve the people of Australia in this job and, I hope, use the taxpayers’ money as effectively as possible, so thank you.
Senator Madigan, thank you for your question. Specifically on Dr Broner’s membership of the reference group, the reference group has finished its work now, so I am not sure whether I can specifically answer your question. I could ask Dr Broner, I suppose. We are of course aware of that particular study. We are not aware that it has been published in peer review papers at this moment.
I suppose the general point is that, when we do rigorous scientific analysis of the literature, we try and take all the literature into account. Of course, any individual piece of research will have its own place and its own finding, but I am sure you will understand that one piece does not wipe out previous pieces of research. Of course, we are pleased to see that more research is being done in this topic as time goes by, but, with us and our expert reference committee and so on, we always have to have a line at some stage and make the conclusions at that time.
Senator MADIGAN: I am aware that the NHMRC insist on strict confidentiality clauses in their contracts with some parties involved in this process, such as Emeritus Professor Colin Hansen, who refused to sign such an agreement. How does this requirement help ensure transparency and accountability to the Australian people and robust and open scientific debate in such a difficult area?
Prof. Anderson: We have many committees on many topics from ethics through to science, health advice and public health advice. We always ask people to sign confidentiality so that other members of the committee can engage in robust conversation with confidence that their views will not be represented or perhaps misrepresented externally. So there would be nothing unique about that particular matter, and certainly we are aware of Professor Hansen’s work.
Senator MADIGAN: I have been advised that the NHMRC is refusing to make the independent expert peer reviewers’ reports public, despite indicating to some of the peer reviewers that it would do so. Could the NHMRC make all expert peer review reports public immediately? If you will not do so, could you please explain to the committee why you are refusing to do so and how that is open and transparent?
Prof. Anderson: To make a person’s opinion available, we have to ask them whether they consent to that. We are in the process of doing that. I believe – although I am subject to correction – that the reports are already in the public domain, and there have been some questions around the individual ownership of those. That is a matter of privacy for those people, but we are, right at the moment – in fact, I gather, quite close to – getting permission, with those who do consent, to make it available. I think things are moving along there.
Senator MADIGAN: Why were the public comments made by key spokespeople for the NHMRC – you and Professor Armstrong – prioritising research for residents in homes within 1.5 kilometres of wind turbines, when Mr Cooper’s acoustic survey included one home which is unliveable at 1.6 kilometres because of the infrasound from Pacific Hydro’s wind turbines, and also when Professor Colin Hansen has measured excessive levels of low-frequency noise out to 8.7 kilometres, in the case of Waterloo, which would cause sleep disturbance at that distance?
Prof. Anderson: Quite a lot of research was accessed that has been done on noise and distance as part of the report. You have mentioned a couple of studies, but there are quite a lot of others documented in our report as so-called parallel evidence. The overwhelming bulk of the evidence shows that, up to 500 metres, there are indeed effects on health of noise at the level that wind turbines do. From 500 to 1,500, the evidence is that there probably are, although they are probably modest. And the bulk of evidence shows that, after 1,500 metres, although some people may indeed individually attribute their sleep to the wind turbine noise, the likelihood is low. I want to assure you that the research we are going to call for is not going to restrict people from any of those conclusions. We will be looking for the very best research we can.
Senator MADIGAN: Miss Mary Morris’s research at Waterloo demonstrated that rural residents were reporting impacts on their sleep out to 10 kilometres at Waterloo, which is consistent with Professor Hansen’s acoustic data. Miss Morris’s research was one of the very few studies included by the NHMRC in its very selective literature review. Why is this acoustic and population survey information out to 10 kilometres being ignored by the NHMRC, which has a responsibility to adopt a precautionary approach in order to protect the health of the public?
Prof. Anderson: With respect, Senator, we did not ignore it. If you look at our documentation, it has been taken into account. What it did not do was fulfil the criteria we set up at the beginning. This is the way you properly do systematic reviews. You set the criteria at the beginning, and then you look at the evidence. What the group found was really only seven studies, 13 publications, that fell within the criteria of adequate scientific validity and relevance to health, because not all the studies were relevant to health. But, having said that, nothing else was ignored. The committee went over thousands of submissions from all sorts of bodies. There were two calls in the public for submissions, and the committee looked at all of that. So I would not accept your suggestion that those studies were ignored.
****
****
Senator DI NATALE: Let me also go to the statements made earlier by colleagues. I want to thank you for your many years of great service. It is with a bit of a heavy heart that I have to finish on this note, and I think we both know where this is going to go.
Prof. Anderson: You flagged it in the press.
Senator DI NATALE: I wanted you to be prepared! I am going to ask about the statement made by the NHMRC which says:
After careful consideration and deliberation of the body of evidence, NHMRC concludes that there is currently no consistent evidence that wind farms cause adverse health effects …
However, the statement then also says:
Given the poor quality of current direct evidence and the concern expressed by some members of the community, high quality research into possible health effects of wind farms, particularly within 1500 metres, is warranted.
Let me go firstly to some concerns expressed by some of the people who were involved in helping to formulate those findings. Did the NHMRC receive correspondence from any of the New South Wales Director of Health Protection, Jeremy McAnulty; Wayne Smith, the director of the Environmental Health Branch at New South Wales Health; or Rosemary Lester, the Chief Health Officer of Victoria? If so, can you tell me what the content of those emails was?
Prof. Anderson: I am not aware of the first names, so I would have to take that on notice. Wayne Smith of course was a member of the reference group, not a member of council. The reference group delivered a signed off version to the NHMRC – our information paper – which was released at the time. I am assuming that Professor Smith had agreed to that document. I am aware that, since then, he has had some disagreement with the wording, but it is not the reference group that agrees to the wording; it is the CEO of the NHMRC on the advice of the council. I have been around academics a long time. Hardly any of them ever agree about anything. I respect different views that people might have had, but we did get formal advice, agreed in the information paper, from a committee that included Professor Smith. That is that issue.
As you would be aware, the chief medical officers of all the states and territories and of the Commonwealth are members of council. In the usual way, when members of council are sent something to discuss, they often discuss it inside their department. I do not know if those conversations went in, but of course the Department of Health have a different view to us, because they might be involved in state regulations. We are not involved in that at all. We just try to make comments on the basis of the evidence and the conversation that occurs at council. There certainly were some comments back from a couple of the chief medical officers when we were finalising this, including from Dr Lester. But, at the end of the day, Dr Lester and the other CHOs and CMOs signed off and agreed with the statement.
Senator DI NATALE: What was the basis of their concerns?
Prof. Anderson: You had better ask them. My understanding of it was that, for some reason, they disagreed with us mentioning that there was community concern. I do not understand that. You are about to have a third Senate committee on windfarms. I would have thought that the Senate would not go to three committees unless it – the Senate—recognised this community concern around it. I have been terribly aware, because we have been involved in all three of these Senate committees, of the many comments that have been made about this area. So I do not resile at all from the position that, when you are a body that advises in public health, you base it on two things – the science primarily and then the second thing is the community concern. On the science, the expert committee said, ‘The science is not good; there is not much of it and it is all poor quality’. If you get that from a scientific body, what are you going to do, dismiss it? Then, as I said, the second thing is the community concern, particularly as exemplified by the Senate itself.
Senator DI NATALE: There are so many things that I would like to go to there, but we will go to a couple of them. The basis of their concern, as far as I understand it, was that any recommendation from you to suggest that there may be a link has the potential to cause harm.
Prof. Anderson: Yes, and –
Senator DI NATALE: Do you accept that?
Prof. Anderson: I think there is harm both ways.
Senator DI NATALE: No, specifically about a recommendation to suggest there may be a link when there is no evidence to suggest there is one – that such a recommendation has the potential to cause harm.
Prof. Anderson: I am sorry; I do not agree with your comment that there is no evidence there is a link. That is what I am saying. The evidence is not strong enough to say that, especially on the annoyance side, the social-cultural side and the implications of that. So I do not accept the premise on which you are asking me the question, with respect.
Senator DI NATALE: Okay, so annoyance. On the basis of annoyance, are we going to recommend having studies done into people who live next to busy motorways because they are annoying, or tall buildings?
Prof. Anderson: Many such studies have been done.
Senator DI NATALE: Are you suggesting that we do that on the basis of annoyance?
Prof. Anderson: We are going to call for research. If the research community, which I guess is where you are coming from, feel that this is not worth studying then we will not get applications that are worth doing.
Senator DI NATALE: You are offering money to do research, in a pretty fiscally constrained environment.
Prof. Anderson: We are also going to peer-review it at our usual high quality, and we are not going to spend that money, let me tell you, unless there is high-quality research. But can I come back. Put yourself – sorry, I should not say that. If you were in my place –
Senator DI NATALE: I know exactly what I would do if I were in your place, and it would not have been to make those recommendations. It would have been consistent with the advice from Rosemary Lester and the other chief health officers.
Prof. Anderson: It was not the other chief health officers, with respect again.
Senator DI NATALE: With one of the chief health officers
Prof. Anderson: There are two that expressed some concern and then eventually agreed with the statement.
Senator DI NATALE: I have the email, and the email was very clear about their concerns.
Prof. Anderson: If you like, we can share with you the final comments by both those chief medical officers.
Senator DI NATALE: How much are we talking about in terms of the amount that is going to come from the NHMRC budget? Is it half a million?
Prof. Anderson: We will, hopefully, release it soon; we are just going through the last bureaucratic processes. May I interpolate that you are talking about the statement. The council signed off 100 per cent on the targeted call for research, and that happened before.
Senator DI NATALE: Surprise, surprise!
Prof. Anderson: The council members are not going to get any benefit out of that. So the call will be up to $2.5 million over five years.
Senator DI NATALE: Is that additional money? Is that new money?
Prof. Anderson: No, that is part of our –
Senator DI NATALE: From the existing money?
Prof. Anderson: That is part of the Medical Research Endowment Account.
Senator DI NATALE: So that is money that would have gone to cancer research or diabetes research or ischemic heart disease research or research for eye disease or research for –
Prof. Anderson: Or a fellowship or a partnership project. But that will be $5 million over five years when our total expenditure –
Senator DI NATALE: Sorry, $2½ million?
Prof. Anderson: Sorry, $2.5 million – $500,000 a year – while, according to our forward estimates, we will spend about $4¼ billion on cancer and diabetes in those –
Senator DI NATALE: Yes, but it is still $2½ million not going into any of those areas and being diverted into an area that is highly questionable.
Prof. Anderson: Yes. It is out of a small group that we keep for targeted calls for research which are driven by the council and the principal committees of the NHMRC.
Senator DI NATALE: I suppose getting to this –
CHAIR: This will have to be the last question.
Senator DI NATALE: I actually have a few questions here, and I made it really clear. You said we would have half an hour for this. We convened at quarter past –
CHAIR: Sorry, Senator Di Natale. I did not say. I said we would have about 20 minutes and we would have about 25 minutes left. Senator McLucas says she will come if there is time. So, if she is going to yield her time, we have till 25 to, if we are still cooperating. If you want to keep going, we will not get to –
Senator DI NATALE: Till when, sorry?
CHAIR: Till 25 to. We were initially going to go till half past, but we are going to –
Senator DI NATALE: I have been waiting all day for these.
CHAIR: Senator Di Natale, you have had no shortage of opportunities to ask questions. I said I would split the time roughly evenly. You have had more time than Senator Madigan had, so I am not sure what part of that is not fair.
Mr Bowles: I have my sports people, who have been waiting all night.
Senator DI NATALE: There is $2½ million going towards questionable research.
CHAIR: There is a lot of money in sport as well.
Senator DI NATALE: What is the macro policy environment that dictated this decision? What is the macro policy environment? Samantha Robertson, who is the executive director of evidence, advice and governance, said that, when making this decision, they took into consideration ‘the macro policy environment’.
Prof. Anderson: I do not think I should be held responsible for what some of my staff said. It is what I said previously: we have spent a lot of time at the NHMRC working with Senate select committees over that period of time. I may be wrong, but I thought it was disrespectful to the Senate to think that that amount of focus on this issue – and I know there are different views around the Senate – but the fact that there have been three or will be three Senate select committees meant that as a responsible –
Senator DI NATALE: But aren’t you a scientific body? Don’t you make your decision on the basis of science, and not on the basis of some whim of parliamentarians, who might have an axe to grind. I thought that was the whole point of the NHMRC: you are at arm’s length from government.
CHAIR: So a decision of the Senate is now a whim when the Greens don’t agree with it?
Senator DI NATALE: This is the whole point of the NHMRC.
Prof. Anderson: It was available –
Senator DI NATALE: That is right. It is a Senate committee. You are a scientific body –
CHAIR: It was a majority of the Senate; it was not a whim of some. It was not a couple of Greens getting together –
Mr Bowles: We have heard different views tonight. I think that is a little unfair on Professor Anderson.
Senator DI NATALE: You either think science is a thing that exists or it does not. You are a scientific organisation and you are saying you are making a decision on the basis of what the Senate has decided. That is a disconnect.
Prof. Anderson: With respect, I do not think I said that. What I said was that as a scientific body an expert group gave us a report that said, ‘We are going to make conclusions on this but there is not much research and it is poor.’ The scientific committee also said, ‘Here is what needs to be done in research.’ It is in the reports in the public domain and I could read it out. Think about the situation where an expert group you have set up gives you a report and says, ‘There is not the evidence here and it needs a lot more work, and here is the research that needs to be done.’ That is the main thing –
Senator DI NATALE: Based on the macro policy environment.
Prof. Anderson: Please, I have not said that. I made the decision –
Senator DI NATALE: Your staff members said it. The executive director for evidence, advice and government has said that we are making this decision on the basis of the macro policy environment. The report says that ‘we are going to make the decision on the basis of community concern’. You are a scientific body. I do not understand how –
Prof. Anderson: You seem to be implying that we have made all the decisions on community concerns. I am saying that we made almost the majority of the decisions on the scientific feedback we got – that evidence is not very good. I think there is another issue here that I will put to the committee. With a lot of new technology – and I assume this is the sort of new technology that is supported by some people here – health issues often arise, and health issues can sometimes be used to try to stop a new technology. So, surely if you are a supporter of the new technology you want the best evidence there is so that if such ideas come up they can be brushed aside. We commission the best research in Australia. That is an issue. It is not the issue that we decided, but it is an issue others have put to us.
Senator DI NATALE: It is an argument to persist indefinitely with this sort of research, because you can continue to maintain this argument that we do not have strong evidence in this area, so we are going to continue researching the area.
Hansard 25/02/2015
Before we get to Warwick Anderson’s efforts to deflect, downplay and otherwise diminish the seriousness of the harm caused to wind farm victims in Australia and, indeed, around the world, we can’t help but notice the shrill and rampant hypocrisy dished up by so-called “Green”, Richard “Die Nasty”.
When he sneers about neighbours’ health complaints being the result of “annoyance”, he’s engaged in a deliberately misleading use of that term.
In acoustics, and in the context of industrial noise sources, the term “annoyance” does not involve emotional responses – ie “antipathy” to the “look” of wind turbines – a fallacious argument on which the nonsense “nocebo” theory is based. And it’s most certainly got nothing to do with whether people like the look of “tall buildings”, as he squeals.
In the NASA research done during the 1980s into health effects caused by wind turbine noise, the “annoyance” being reported by neighbours was defined to include numerous physiological responses, which were described as “sensations”. These “sensations”, which they felt rather than heard, were sensations of “pressure”, “a sense of uneasiness”, “booming or thumping pulsations”. These sensations were at their worst in the bedrooms where they were trying to sleep (see our post here).
Sleep deprivation – defined by the WHO as in itself an adverse health effect – is the most common of the adverse health effects caused by turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound (see our post here): it too is included in the term “annoyance”.
But, quite apart from misusing, abusing and otherwise giving our mother tongue a desperate flogging, there is Die Nasty’s hysterical hypocrisy, as he attempts to assert that the Greens are (suddenly) paragons of fiscal rectitude.
As part of their political pact with Labor, the Greens demanded that the previous government set up the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, to dole out $10 billion to “renewable” scams; including hundreds of $millions in high-risk loans to wind power outfits. Loans – using money borrowed at taxpayers’ expense, and taxpayers’ risk – to outfits like Pacific Hydro, that runs non-compliant wind farms, and which is losing money hand over fist – a situation that arose because commercial lenders rightly consider wind power outfits to be toxic lending bets (seeour post here).
The unrecoverable costs (ie losses) that the CEFC has and will incur, at taxpayers’ expense, will run into hundreds of $millions, which makes the piddling $2½ million earmarked by the NHMRC for wind turbine health research look like chump change.
Throwing other people’s money around has never really troubled the Greens – indeed, when it comes to chipping into the Commonwealth’s pot, a few of them have trouble stumping up with their share of the tax burden at all, and are happy to leave the revenue side of the government’s coffers to everybody else.
South Australian Green, Tammy Franks couldn’t be bothered with paying her tax for over a decade, and eventually got whacked with $14,000 in fines and court costs for failing to play the game the Greens expect of everyone else (see this article).
No, Die Nasty’s sneering little rant is just an extension of his wind industry paymasters’ instructions (see our post here): to prevent any further study being carried out by the NHMRC, or anybody else for that matter, into the harm known to be caused by giant fans to human health and well-being.
The shills that front the Greens, and the wind industry that pays them, work in lockstep when it comes to preventing multidisciplinary, independent health studies.
When faced with the prospect of further studies along the lines of Steven Cooper’s ground breaking Cape Bridgewater study being carried out in Australia, wind industry spruikers, the Clean Energy Council ranted that it “would not support further research” into Cooper’s findings; findings which linked the “sensations” felt by residents to low-frequency noise below the threshold of hearing (ie infrasound); and at levels well below those considered to be a problem for humans (see our posts here andhere).
Die Nasty’s disingenuous wailing is simply “set-piece” stuff drawn from the same hypocrite’s handbook.
You see, his “argument” – and that of his wind industry paymasters – is fairly easily tested: if wind turbine noise and vibration doesn’t cause health effects (like sleep deprivation, say) then the industry should welcome a full-blown study, along the lines of what Steven Cooper did at Cape Bridgewater (with medicos involved to look at the physiological effects in detail; and matched controls to support the findings).
That way it could clear its name as the cause of untold human misery; and, having been found innocent of that charge, could then simply focus on defrauding power consumers and taxpayers of $billions in subsidies; leaving tens of thousands of households no longer able to afford power at all, as the inevitable result (see our posts here and here).
But, actions belie words, most every time.
Big tobacco did it, the asbestos industry did it and the wind industry has taken to it like a duck to water: lie, cover up the facts and when the facts get out – run and hide (see our post here).
Now, to the NHMRC, and its pitched battle with the fundamentals of science.
STT has already covered the manner in which the NHMRC rejected high quality, peer-reviewed and published work done by Prof Colin Hansen and his team from the University of Adelaide at Waterloo because it was “too late”. While Prof Anderson says the NHMRC “is aware” of that work, and the work done by Steven Cooper, it has steadfastly chosen to ignore it. Precisely as it continues to ignore a decade’s worth of top level research performed by NASA in the 1980s, the substance of which has been confirmed by the work done by Prof Hansen and Steven Cooper, as well as America’s top acoustic experts at Shirley, Wisconsin (see our post here).
But it’s this little statement, in response to Senator Madigan’s reference to Steven Cooper’s study, that’s attracted STT’s attention:
Prof Anderson: I simply suppose the general point is that, when we do rigorous scientific analysis of the literature, we try and take all the literature into account. Of course, any individual piece of research will have its own place and its own finding, but I am sure you will understand that one piece does not wipe out previous pieces of research. Of course, we are pleased to see that more research is being done in this topic as time goes by, but, with us and our expert reference committee and so on, we always have to have a line at some stage and make the conclusions at that time.
Any true scientist worth his salt will recognise the highlighted statement for what it is: utter scientific bunkum.
In science, ONE piece of research, ONE piece of evidence, indeed, ONE sliver of data, will most certainly, absolutely and forever wipe out EVERY piece of research that ever existed up to that point in time.
That’s precisely how (real) science has worked since we began the organised and disciplined investigation into human and natural affairs, that we call “science”, around 300 years ago.
Which brings us to “falsifiability” and hypothesis testing; the central tool in dealing with scientific theory.
In our earlier post on the results from Cape Bridgewater we set out the basics as follows.
In science, some hypothesis directed at a particular relationship is put forward; evidence is gathered in relation to that hypothesis; and then that evidence is thrown firmly against the hypothesis, in an effort to disprove it. What Karl Popper called “falsifiability”, which he defined as the essential feature of science; summed up by Wikipedia as:
Falsifiability or refutability of a statement, hypothesis, or theory is an inherent possibility to prove it to be false. A statement is called falsifiable if it is possible to conceive an observation or an argument which proves the statement in question to be false. In this sense, falsify is synonymous with nullify, meaning not “to commit fraud” but “show to be false”. Some philosophers argue that science must be falsifiable.
For example, by the problem of induction, no number of confirming observations can verify a universal generalization, such as “all swans are white”, yet it is logically possible to falsify it by observing a single black swan. Thus, the term falsifiability is sometimes synonymous to testability.
The black swan example is routinely used to help explain “hypothesis testing”; as to which, the stats boys tell us that:
A statistical hypothesis is an assumption about a population parameter. This assumption may or may not be true. Hypothesis testing refers to the formal procedures used by statisticians to accept or reject statistical hypotheses.
Statistical Hypotheses
The best way to determine whether a statistical hypothesis is true would be to examine the entire population. Since that is often impractical, researchers typically examine a random sample from the population. If sample data are not consistent with the statistical hypothesis, the hypothesis is rejected.
There are two types of statistical hypotheses.
Null hypothesis. The null hypothesis, denoted by H0, is usually the hypothesis that sample observations result purely from chance.
Alternative hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis, denoted by H1 or Ha, is the hypothesis that sample observations are influenced by some non-random cause.
Can We Accept the Null Hypothesis?
Some researchers say that a hypothesis test can have one of two outcomes: you accept the null hypothesis or you reject the null hypothesis. Many statisticians, however, take issue with the notion of “accepting the null hypothesis.” Instead, they say: you reject the null hypothesis or you fail to reject the null hypothesis.
Why the distinction between “acceptance” and “failure to reject?” Acceptance implies that the null hypothesis is true. Failure to reject implies that the data are not sufficiently persuasive for us to prefer the alternative hypothesis over the null hypothesis.
The process of hypothesis testing, starts with stating the hypotheses:
This involves stating the null and alternative hypotheses. The hypotheses are stated in such a way that they are mutually exclusive. That is, if one is true, the other must be false. (for more detail and examples, see the link here)
The white swan example is picked up in this analysis of the same point:
Although the null hypothesis cannot be proven true, it can be proven false. This is because science and hypothesis testing are based on the logic of falsification. If someone claims that all swans are white, confirmatory evidence (in the form of lots of white swans) cannot prove the assertion to be true. However, contradictory evidence (in the form of a single black swan) makes it clear that the claim is invalid.
The observation of one black swan is sufficient to falsify the claim that all swans are white. That single black swan proves that the claim is wrong. (for more detail and examples, see the link here)
From its press releases, public statements and the guff pitched up before the Senate, the NHMRC’s null hypothesis reduces to this:
All humans are safe from wind turbine generated noise and vibration.
The alternative hypothesis, is the mutually exclusive statement that:
Not all humans are safe from wind turbine generated noise and vibration.
That set of statements is, in scientific terms, precisely the same as the white swan/black swan example, used to describe and illustrate hypothesis testing above.
And it’s precisely what occurred at Cape Bridgewater, with Steven Cooper’s study, and the very point that America’s top acoustic experts, Dr Paul Schomer and George Hessler were making with their observation, in relation to the data gathered by Cooper, that:
This study proves that there are other pathways that affect some people,at least 6. The windfarm operator simply cannot say there are no known effects and no known people affected. One person affected is a lot more than none; the existence of just one cause-and-effect pathway is a lot more than none. It only takes one example to prove that a broad assertion is not true, and that is the case here.
In science, all it takes is a single observation and the null hypothesis (here, the NHMRC’s continued public assertion that “all humans are safe from wind turbine generated noise and vibration”) must simply be rejected: it is no longer valid.
Moreover, the alternative hypothesis – being the mutually exclusive statement that: “not all humans are safe from wind turbine generated noise and vibration” cannot be rejected: the null hypothesis, having been rightly rejected, leaves the alternative hypothesis standing.
With half-a-dozen “black swans” popping up in Cooper’s Cape Bridgewater study, the NHMRC, and its mates in the wind industry, as Schomer and Hessler put it: “cannot say there are no known effects and no known people affected”.
So, with a few basic scientific principles in mind, quite to the contrary of Prof Anderson’s line “that one piece [of research] does not wipe out previous pieces of research“, that’s precisely what scientific endeavour does; indeed, anything less is not science at all. It’s simply advocacy for a cause.
And that is exactly what the NHMRC’s well-rehearsed mantra on the adverse health effects caused by wind farms is all about, a position that jumps out of this rather curious statement:
Prof Anderson: … With a lot of new technology – and I assume this is the sort of new technology that is supported by some people here – health issues often arise, and health issues can sometimes be used to try to stop a new technology. So, surely if you are a supporter of the new technology you want the best evidence there is so that if such ideas come up they can be brushed aside.
Hmmm.
STT’s not sure that a “scientific” research organisation – paid for by taxpayers, and charged with looking after the health and well-being of Australian citizens – is meant to be looking at the evidence of “health issues” caused by wind turbines, simply because that evidence might be used to “stop a new technology”.
But we’re pretty confident that the NHMRC isn’t paid for by us to generate the “best evidence” it can muster, in order that adverse health effects related to that “new technology” can simply be “brushed aside”.
The NHMRC has shown itself, time and time again, to be nothing more than a group of wind industry apologists and advocates – that defers to the “expertise” of a tobacco advertising guru, who calls wind farm victims “wind farm wing nuts” (see our post here). It’s been infiltrated, co-opted and corrupted by an industry which exhibits a callous disregard for human health and well-being (see our post here); and which does everything in its power to prevent any proper investigation into the harm known to be caused by its uncontrolled operations (see our post here).
Those unfortunates forced to live with turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound can only look on in disgust and dismay.
Those of our political betters in Canberra who fail to take on the cronyism and institutional corruption within the NHMRC, should hang their heads in shame.
The great wind farm farce
The Telegraph
James Delingpole
22 February 2015
Ed Davey’s plan for 400 turbines to be erected off the Yorkshire coast will be a heinous burden on the taxpayer
If ever there’s a competition for the most spectacularly pointless and wasteful project in engineering history, you’d be hard pressed to find amore promising candidate than the one announced this week, with great fanfare, by Energy Secretary Ed Davey.
Dogger Bank Creyke Beck is its name – and though it may seem a bit of an unfamiliar mouthful now, in future years it will trip off the tongue very nicely as the answer to any number of trivia questions.
As well as being the world’s largest offshore wind farm (covering 430 square miles), it will be the most expensive to build (£6-£8 billion), the most heavily subsidised (by as much as £900 million a year) and the one that does the most lasting damage to the UK economy.
But before we examine the downsides in more detail, let’s first see how Davey’s Department of Energy and Climate Change is trying to spin this misbegotten venture.
It will, according to DECC, generate enough electricity to power almost two million homes; it is expected to support “up to 900 green jobs in Yorkshire and Humberside and millions of pounds’ worth of investment to the UK’s economy”; and it will, of course, make a key contribution to Britain’s EU-mandated carbon emissions reduction target, whereby 32 per cent of all the electricity we need must come from renewable sources by 2020.
All this sounds superficially impressive. You can understand why a spokesman for industry lobbyist RenewableUK describes it as an “awesome” project. Each of its 400 turbines, when completed will be 600ft tall – one and a half times the height of Salisbury Cathedral spire.
The area they cover, 80 miles off the Yorkshire coast, will be bigger than Dartmoor National Park. And as a profit-maximising exercise it is almost without peer: the consortium building it, Forewind, will probably have covered its costs within the first 10 years. After that it can expect to generate well over £1 billion a year in profit.
These financial details, according to John Constable, director of wind industry analysts the Renewable Energy Foundation, are the project’s most troubling aspect.
“Not since British Leyland has the government awarded this much public subsidy to a single industry – and look how badly that ended,” he says. “It represents an experiment on such a scale that it could seriously disrupt the UK economy.”
To appreciate his concerns, you first need to understand the fundamental flaw of wind energy: being intermittent and unreliable (obviously, because it’s only available when the wind is blowing), it is a poor substitute for those other forms of energy (derived from fossil fuel or nuclear), which can be generated on demand according to consumer need.
This is why wind energy has to be so heavily subsidised. In a free market, no business would want to invest in a wind farm because no customer would want to buy its unreliable produce. So to make wind (and other renewables, like solar) more attractive to big business, the Government has rigged the market with a number of incentives.
Not only are renewables companies paid significantly above the going rate for what little energy they manage to produce when the wind is blowing, but also customers are forced to buy their product whether they like it or not.
Hence the involvement of Forewind (an international consortium ofenergy companies SSE, RWE, Statkraft and Statoil) in this massive capital project. Like sharks to blood, they have been lured by the eye-wateringly generous sweetener being offered by the Government.
For every megawatt (MW) of electricity their turbines produce, they will be paid the special offshore wind rate of £155 – more than three times what generators of fossil fuel electricity receive. In other words, a third of that money represents the market rate; the other two thirds is guaranteed, index-linked subsidy, created by government fiat and slapped on the bills of the hapless consumer.
If you asked DECC to justify this extraordinary £105 per MW surcharge it would give two main reasons. First, like all EU member states, Britain is obliged to fulfil its carbon emissions reduction targets. Second, it is a vital measure in the war to “combat climate change”.
Neither argument, unfortunately, holds much water. So many wind projects have either been built or approved by DECC that Britain has already overshot its carbon emissions reduction target. And, increasingly, most of the evidence suggests that the “climate change” threat is both woefully misunderstood and dangerously overstated.
And even if we take at face value official claims that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to dangerous and unprecedented “global warming” there is little evidence that giant wind farms like the one proposed at Dogger Bank Creyke Beck could prevent it.
This is because, owing to its unreliable nature, wind power doesn’t actually displace any of the fossil fuel stations that need to remain on standby, continuing to supply the vast bulk of Britain’s energy needs. And also because, since wind turbines are so painfully inefficient it’s quite likely that in their brief lifetime what little “carbon” they save is more than offset by the greater quantities of “carbon” that have been exhausted manufacturing the turbines in the first place.
There are other problems, too. For a supposedly green, clean source of energy, turbines are remarkably eco-unfriendly. They are known to destroy wildlife on an industrial scale: according to the Spanish conservation charity SEO/Birdlife, a typical wind turbine kills between 110 and 330 birds per year. (Taking the lower estimate, that would see Creyke Beck slicing and dicing over 40,000 migratory and sea birds a year.)
On land, especially, they are also notorious for blighting cherished views, and for causing noise pollution, which research suggests can cause not just sleep disturbance but also a range of serious health issues in vulnerable people.
It’s because onshore wind farms are so unpopular with voters that Cameron’s “greenest government ever” now prefers to champion offshore wind. But in many ways, this is even more disastrous. It simply transfers all the environmental damage to equally sensitive marine environments (with wind projects being proposed off Dorset’s beautiful Jurassic Coast and the nature reserve off Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel). And it means ramping up costs to even more prohibitive levels because the sea, by nature, is such a hostile environment in which to erect 600ft-tall towers with bases big enough to anchor them to the seabed.
Research for the Renewable Energy Foundation by Prof Gordon Hughes, a former senior energy adviser for the World Bank, has shown that these structures have a working life considerably shorter than the optimistic official estimates.
Over 15 years, he calculated, the effects of weather and salt corrosion reduce their output from 45 per cent of capacity to barely 12 per cent. So inevitably, they will have to be expensively refitted much sooner than anticipated – or, more likely, left to rot.
Nor can supporters of Dogger Bank Creyke Beck draw much comfort from the experience of Germany where a similar but smaller offshore wind farm has been delayed for well over year with massive, unresolved technical difficulties which have cost it millions in lost revenue.
Given that these issues are in the public domain you might wonder why Davey gave the go-ahead to such a risky, costly and entirely unnecessary experiment. The answer is that for Davey – and the environmental zealots who dominate DECC – the interests of energy users (ie all of us) must always take second place to green ideology.
No doubt when David Cameron first handed the Liberal Democrats the keys to DECC as part of his Coalition sweetener deal, he imagined it was a harmless gesture that would burnish his eco credentials. But in reality, by granting green ideologues such as Davey (and his predecessor Chris Huhne) the power to authorise projects like Creyke Beck, he has caused untold damage to the UK economy.
If and when it is completed, Creyke Beck will cost energy users around £900 million a year in subsidies that will serve no purpose other to enrich shareholders in the Forewind consortium – among them the company’s chairman Charles Hendry who, as a former energy minister, appears to have done very well out of DECC’s ongoing close relationship with the renewables industry.
But this is a drop in the ocean, when you consider how much, in total, we are all being forced to pay to indulge DECC’s renewable energy fantasy. Between 2002 and 2040, the total cost to the UK economy of renewables (subsidies and system costs) will amount to £250 billion.
This expenditure – roughly a third of the Government’s total annual spending – will not have made one iota of difference to “climate change” or the health of the environment generally, let alone made any meaningful contribution to the UK economy. It will simply have enabled a few misguided green ideologues to feel smug; and an even smaller number of cynical, crony capitalists disgustingly rich. The Telegraph
Ontario families fighting massive legal bill from wind-farm companies
COLIN PERKEL
TORONTO — The Canadian Press
A demand that four Ontario families pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs to billion-dollar companies is a thinly disguised warning to anyone pondering a challenge to industrial wind farms in Ontario, the families say.
In asking the courts to set the legal bill aside, the citizens say the award would cripple them financially and undermine access to justice, even in important public-interest cases.
Court documents show the companies – K2 Wind, Armow, and St. Columban – are seeking $340,000 in costs from the Drennans, Ryans, Dixons and Kroeplins, who lost their bid to scuttle three wind-farm projects.
The families, who worry wind turbines near their homes could harm their health, had challenged the constitutionality of Ontario’s approvals process before Divisional Court. They are now hoping the province’s top court will hear the case, potentially adding more litigation costs.
Shawn Drennan said his $240,000 bill was excessive given that he was only looking to protect his rights.
“We will have to go to the bank and beg and ask if we can borrow more money to pay their costs and it will be a significant burden on my wife and I,” Shawn Drennan told The Canadian Press. “My wife already works two jobs.”
Lawyer Julian Falconer, who represents the families, called the wind companies “blood-sucking, intimidating bullies.”
“It’s not just a bar to justice, it’s actually a terror tactic,” Falconer said in an interview.
“This is not about money. The idea is to send a message: ‘We will wipe you out if you challenge us.’”
The companies say the high-stakes court challenge forced them to deploy considerable legal resources to defend projects they say are safe.
“While the appellants were entitled to bring their litigation, their decision to do so had significant consequences,” St. Columban argues in its court filing.
“There must be an appreciation of the real disruption, and real cost, suffered by the adverse party.”
Generally speaking and as a matter of fairness, the losing side in civil proceedings has to pay the legal bills incurred by the winning side.
K2, which is putting up 140 turbines, some of which are about 750 metres from the Drennans’ home near Goderich, Ont., says the families knew the risks of losing.
In addition, the failed bid to halt construction pending outcome of their court battle was unnecessary and should “never have been brought,” K2 says in its submissions.
The families argue they raised an important and novel constitutional issue that is squarely in the public interest given the reasonable prospect of serious harm to the health of citizens. They also say they did not stand to benefit financially.
The companies reject that argument. They maintain the families were indeed fighting a personal battle, do have the means to pay, and say the case was in fact contrary to the public interest because the challenge delayed government-approved green-energy projects.
For the families, it’s become a case of “lose your home to save your home,” they say.
“By simply exercising their right to access to the courts, the appellant families now face the disheartening prospect of financial ruin,” their submission states.
“When, as in this particular case, the consequence of that access becomes crippling financial loss, ‘access to justice’ becomes a meaningless platitude.”
The Australian Senate is about to rip into the greatest fraud of all time, with a Select Committee Inquiry into wind farms. Chaired by Victorian Senator, John Madigan, and set to kick off in March, it will operate under wide-ranging terms of reference, as its brief says:
(1) That a select committee, to be known as the Select Committee onWind Turbines be established to inquire into and report on the application of regulatory governance and economic impact of wind turbines by 24 June 2015, with particular reference to:
(a) the effect on household power prices, particularly households which receive no benefit from rooftop solar panels, and the merits of consumer subsidies for operators;
(b) how effective the Clean Energy Regulator is in performing its legislative responsibilities and whether there is a need to broaden those responsibilities;
(c) the role and capacity of the National Health and MedicalResearch Council in providing guidance to state and territory authorities;
(d) the implementation of planning processes in relation to wind farms, including the level of information available to prospective wind farm hosts;
(e) the adequacy of monitoring and compliance governance of wind farms;
(f) the application and integrity of national wind farm guidelines;
(g) the effect that wind towers have on fauna and aerial operations around turbines, including firefighting and crop management;
(h) the energy and emission input and output equations from whole-of-life operation of wind turbines; and
(i) any related matter.
Last week, the deadline for submissions to the Inquiry was extended to 23 March 2015 (for more information see Parliament’s website here).
So, if you’re still working on your submissions, take your time to polish them up; if you have already submitted, but have something to add, drop in a supplementary submission; and, if you haven’t started, then there’s no time like the present to get cracking.
Their fast-filling ranks include those with turbines which have been operating (in some cases, for many years), as well as those desperately hoping to avoid that prospect altogether.
STT hears that these people – many from New South Wales, South Australia, as well as Victoria – have had, as Australians say “a gutful” of the deception, thuggery and bullying dished out by the goons employed by wind power outfits, such as Infigen (see our post here) and RATCH (see our posts here and here and here). No surprises there.
After years of being shunned by former friends and neighbours for introducing turbines into their communities (or signing up for that to happen in future), many turbine hosts are keen to wind the clock back and make amends. Community division, angry former friends and hostile neighbours are just one aspect of what’s encouraging actual and potential turbine hosts to speak to the Senators involved in the Inquiry. For a taste of what real farmers, from real communities, think about wind farms, check out this cracking little video:
****
****
One of the constant threats made by wind power outfits, is that if their actual or potential turbine hosts were to utter so much as a “peep” about the company’s malfeasance and misconduct, they will be breaching the Draconian confidentiality provisions of their contracts.
These threats have, until now, fuelled fears by turbine hosts that have usually prevented them from speaking to anyone; let alone in a public forum, such as a Senate Inquiry.
Fortunately, there can be no right of action for a breach of confidentiality agreements against anybody giving evidence (whether in the form of documents or oral evidence) to their Parliament. Indeed, it’s been that way since 1688. In relation to a previous Senate Inquiry into wind farms and confidentiality agreements, the Clerk of the Senate, Rosemary Laing gave this advice:
I understand that there have been inquiries from potential witnesses who have signed confidentiality agreements with the wind farm operators and who are concerned to establish whether their evidence to the committee would be protected by parliamentary privilege.
The short answer to this question is yes. Section 16 of the Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987 reasserts the application of Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1688 to parliamentary proceedings and then goes on to explain what those proceedings include. Article 9 provides that the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place outside Parliament. The effect of this protection is that no action can be taken against any person on the basis of proceedings in Parliament and their participation in such proceedings is immune from suit in any court or tribunal. Examples are protected proceedings under section 16(2) of the Privileges Act include:
the giving of evidence to a committee, and the evidence so given;
the presentation or submission of a document to a committee; and
the preparation of a document for the purposes of or incidental to the transacting of any such business.
If a person who is covered by a confidentiality provision in an agreement gave evidence to a parliamentary committee about the contents of that agreement, they could not be sued for breaching the confidentiality agreement. Furthermore, if they were subject to any penalty, threat or intimidation as a consequence of their having given evidence to a committee, Privilege Resolution 1(18) provides that a committee must enquire into the circumstances, ascertain the facts and, if those facts disclosed that a person may have been improperly influenced or subject to or threatened with penalty or injury in respect of the evidence, the committee shall report the matter to the Senate. The Senate may then deal with the matter as a potential contempt which may attract penalties including fines and imprisonment. The action may also be prosecuted as an offence under section 12 of the Privileges Act.
So, for those farmers keen to help put things right in this fine Country of ours, you can feel assured that your Senators will protect you. Not only are you completely free to tell your Parliament about how you have been mistreated, lied to etc; if you face any further thuggery, threats or bullying (whether from lawyers or otherwise), those dishing it out will be squarely in the gun for prosecution for contempt of Parliament.
If you have any questions then STT suggests that you speak direct to the offices of Senators John Madigan, Chris Back, or David Leyonhjelm, whose friendly staff will happily guide you through the process. To contact their offices direct call: (03) 5331 2321 (for Senator Madigan); (089) 414 7288 (for Senator Back); and (02) 9719 1078 (for Senator Leyonhjelm).
No-one has to put up with the wind industry’s lies, treachery and deceit. Last time we looked, Australia was a place where people could speak openly and freely to anyone they liked; our elected representatives included.
For turbine hosts (actual and potential), this Inquiry may be the first and last time you will be able to speak openly in public; and with complete immunity.
As a disgruntled host, you will, however, not only be keen to tip a bucket on just how rotten this industry is, you will also be looking to extricate yourself from contracts that will well and truly outlive you; and continue to vex your children and grandchildren, for a generation or more.
Contracts will be set aside in precisely the circumstances in which you were misled by the developer into entering your contract in the first place.
A representation of a material fact made by a party offering a contract to another party in order to induce them to enter into that contract, which has that effect, and is a false statement, is a misrepresentation. To be actionable, the misrepresentation need only to have induced the contract and does not have to be a central or even important inducement.
Under section 52 of the Trade Practices Act (now see Chapter 2, Part 2-1 of the Australian Consumer Law) contracts will be set aside for misleading and deceptive conduct. This includes the situation where a person offering a contract makes representations (which are untrue at the time they are made) to the other party, which are relied on, and induce that party to enter a contract.
Under both the common law and the TPA and ACL the failure to disclose important facts will amount to a misrepresentation and/or misleading conduct; especially where the facts, if disclosed, would have resulted in a reasonable person in your position refusing to enter the contract being offered. And even more so, where you have asked specific questions about important facts and the developer has said nothing: eg, “are wind turbines noisy?”; or simply lied, by answering “no”. (click here for a discussion of what amounts to misleading and decepetive conduct by silence).
Pursuing your lawful right to have your contract set aside for misrepresentation and/or misleading and deceptive conduct will require some competent legal advice from hard-hitting commercial lawyers, with litigation experience; and, perhaps, a trip to a court of competent jurisdiction.
As to actions against developers pursued by turbine hosts, see our post here.
For friends and neighbours of turbine hosts, this is an opportunity to help people who were duped by a pack of lying hounds into entering contracts which will last for 75 years; destroy everybody’s ability to live in, use and enjoy their homes for miles around – including the hosts and their families; and, under which, the turbine hosts receive a piddling $10,000-$15,000 a year, for a turbine that will receive upwards of $800,000 a year in REC subsidies, alone (see our post here).
As the nervous preacher (always in fear of an actual response) says at weddings, “speak now, or forever hold your peace”.
"Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" Phoenix Rising... 