not financially feasible

Energy Poverty Killing Thousands in Europe…

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Europe’s Wind Power Suicide Pact Killing 40,000 a Year

April 10, 2016 by

europe power prices 2

Green Europe is killing 40,000 poor a year
Breitbart
Jame Delingpole
30 March 2016

Europe’s suicidal green energy policies are killing at least 40,000 people a year.

That’s just the number estimated to have died in the winter of 2014 because they were unable to afford fuel bills driven artificially high by renewable energy tariffs.

But the real death toll will certainly be much higher when you take into account the air pollution caused when Germany decided to abandon nuclear power after Fukushima and ramp up its coal-burning instead; and also when you consider the massive increase in diesel pollution –  the result of EU-driven anti-CO2 policies – which may be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year.

But even that 40,000 figure is disgraceful enough, given that greenies are always trying to take the moral high ground and tell us that people who oppose their policies are uncaring and selfish.

It comes from an article in the German online magazine FOCUS aboutEnergiewende (Energy Transition) – the disastrous policy I mentioned earlier this week whereby Germany is committed to abandoning cheap, effective fossil fuel power and converting its economy to expensive, inefficient renewables (aka unreliables) instead.

According to FOCUS around ten percent of the European population are now living in ‘energy poverty’ because electricity prices have risen, on average, by 42 percent in the last eight years. In Germany alone this amounts to seven million households.

The article is titled: The grand electricity lie: why electricity is becoming a luxury.

The reason, of course, is that green energy policies have made it that way. Many of these have emanated from the European Union, which in turn has taken its cue from the most Green-infested nation in Europe – Germany.

Germany has long been obsessed with all things environmental. Besides having invented the dodgy ‘science’ of ecology in the 1880s it was also, of course, between 1933 and 1945 the home of Europe’s official “Greenest government ever” – the first to ban smoking on public transport, an enthusiastic supporter of organic food, national parks and population control.

The Greens have also since the early Eighties been arguably the most influential party in Germany. Though their percentage of the vote has rarely risen above the 10 percent mark, they have punched above their weight either as a coalition partner in government or as a pressure group outside it.

For example, the reason that after Fukushima, Chancellor Angela Merkel completely changed Germany’s policy on nuclear power was her terror of the Greens who were suddenly polling 25 percent of the national vote.

It was the Greens too who were responsible for Energiewende – the policy which is turning Germany into the opposite of what most of us imagine it to be: not the economic powerhouse we’ve been taught to admire all these years, but a gibbering basket case.

This becomes clear in an investigation by the German newspaperHandelsblatt, which reports the horrendous industrial decline brought about by green energy policies.

Hit hardest, of course, are the traditional utilities. After all, the energy transition was designed to seal their coffin. Once the proverbial investment for widows and orphans because their revenue streams were considered rock-solid — these companies have been nothing short of decimated. With 77 nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants taken off the grid in recent years, Germany’s four big utilities — E.ON, RWE, Vattenfall and EnBW — have had to write off a total of €46.2 billion since 2011.

RWE and E.ON alone have debt piles of €28.2 billion and €25.8 billion, respectively, according to the latest company data. Losses at Düsseldorf-based E.ON rose to €6.1 billion for the first three quarters of 2015. Both companies have slashed the dividends on their shares, which have lost up to 76 percent of their value. Regional municipalities, which hold 24 percent of RWE’s shares, are scrambling to plug the holes left in their budgets by the missing dividends.

Thousands of workers have already been let go, disproportionately hitting communities in Germany‘s rust belt that are already struggling with blight. RWE has cut 7,000 jobs since 2011. At E.ON, the work force has shrunk by a third, a loss of over 25,000 jobs. Just as banks spun off their toxic assets and unprofitable operations into “bad banks” during the financial crisis, Germany’s utilities are reorganizing to cut their losses.

Why are the Germans enacting such lunacy? Aren’t they supposed to be the sensible ones?

Well yes, up to a point.

As a seasoned German-watcher explains to me, it’s with good reason that one of Germany’s greatest contributions to the world’s vocabulary is the word Angst.

The Germans are absolutely riddled with it – always have been – and it explains the two otherwise inexplicable policies with which Germany is currently destroying itself.

One, of course, is Energiewende caused by a misplaced, but deeply-held neurosis about stuff like diminishing scarce resources and “global warming” and the evils of Atomkraft (Nuclear power).

The other are its similarly insane immigration policies – the result of the neurosis that if it doesn’t replace its declining population with a supposedly healthy influx of immigrant workers, then it will wither and cease to be the great force it was under people like Frederick the Great, Bismarck and that chap in the 1930s and that no one will know or care where Germany is any more.

Ironically, though, if national decline is what the Germans most fear then the two policies they are pursuing to avoid it happening to be the ones most likely to hasten it.

This is sad. Sad for Germany which, for all its faults, has produced some pretty impressive things over the years: Beethoven; Kraftwerk; Goethe; Porsche; autobahns; those two girls on Deutschland 83.

And even sadder for those of us who, through absolutely no fault of our own happen to be shackled politically and economically to a socialistic superstate called the European Union, most of whose rules are decided by Germans over whom we have no democratic control.

Oh and by the way, Greenies: as I never tire of reminding you, you insufferable tossers, not a single one of the “future generations” you constantly cite in your mantras as justification for your disgusting, immoral and anti-free-market environmental policies actually exists.

But the people you’re killing now as a result of those environmental policies DO exist.

Or rather they did, till you choked or froze them to death, you vile, evil, eco-Nazi scumbags.
Breitbart

Fuel-poverty-activi-005

Wind Scam Always Results in “Energy Poverty”….Heat, or Eat!

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Wind Power Costs Crush the Poor

April 9, 2016 by

German power prices

The rush to ‘power’ modern economies with a Medieval ‘technology’, abandoned Centuries ago for pretty obvious reasons, has brought with it a banquet of consequences: not least, ‘energy poverty’.

That term is one that has only come into common parlance with the soaring cost of electricity, caused by throwing $billions at a wholly weather dependent power source which, but for those massive subsidies, has NO commercial value whatsoever: wind power operators in Australia’s wind power capital, South Australia, literally pay the grid operator to take their chaotically produced power, andmake a profitfrom the RECs they receive.

There’s an irony in there somewhere, as the ‘policies’ that have wrecked power markets and left grids on the brink of collapse, have been pedalled by so-called political ‘progressives’. However, the only ‘progress’ is towards thoroughly avoidable social and economic misery.

The graph above tells of Germany’s self-inflicted catastrophe, the graph below shows the cause as the wind rushes that broke out, not only in Germany, but in Denmark too.

400fig 1europeelectricprice

Now, here’s a piece from Andrew Follett that tallies up the cost for those who can least afford it.

How the poor bear the brunt of Europe’s obsession with global warming
The Daily Caller
Andrew Follett
25 March 2016

European global warming policies are hurting the continent’s poor, according to a Manhattan Institute study published Thursday.

Europe has tried to fight global warming with cap-and-trade schemes and lucrative financial support to green power since 2005. Though well-meaning, the continent’s environmental efforts have only made life harder for Europe’s poor.

“The European Union’s renewable-energy policies have had one very clear result: they’ve dramatically raised electricity prices,” Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who authored the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Between 2005, when Europe adopted these policies, and 2014, residential electricity rates on the continent increased by 63 percent according to the study. Over the same period, residential rates in the U.S. rose by 32 percent. Germany, Spain and the U.K, which intervened the most in their energy markets, saw their electricity bills rise the fastest,according to the study.

The poor tend to spend a higher proportion of their incomes on electricity, gasoline, food and other basic needs. Furthermore, when the price of electricity increases, the cost of producing goods and services that use electricity increases too. Thus, high electricity prices effectively increase the price of most basic goods.

European-style global warming policies hurt the poor 1.4 to 4 times more than they hurt the rich, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Environmental advocates like to claim that Germany is the role model we should emulate, even though Germany’s residential customers are now paying about 40 cents per kilowatt-hour for their electricity,” Bryce continued. “That’s more than three times the average cost of electricity here in the US.”

Brits alone paid a whopping 54 percent more for electricity than Americans in 2014 while energy taxes cost residents roughly $6.6 billion every year. Green energy subsidies in the U.K regularly exceed spending caps and account for roughly 7 percent of British energy bills, according to government study released last July.

Polling indicates that 38 percent of British households are cutting back essential purchases, like food, to pay for high energy bills. Another 59 percent of homes are worried about how they are going to pay energy bills.

“Policymakers in New York and California, as well as more recently, Oregon, have decided to emulate the EU’s mandates,” Bryce concluded. “If they are concerned about poor and low-income constituents, they should be rethinking those mandates.

The study also illustrates that between 2005 and 2014, Europe reduced its carbon-dioxide emissions by 600 million tons per year. Over that same period, the combined emissions of China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil increased by 4.7 billion tons per year, or nearly eight times the reduction achieved in Europe.
Daily Caller

bread and water for dinner

Definition of “Wind Turbines”….from an “Honest Encyclopedia”

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Wind turbine:

Wind turbine.jpg

Wind turbine is the modern day windmill which is marketed as a clean energy solution to replace power from fossil fuel plants. The addition of multiple wind turbines in the same geographical location is referred to as a wind farm. The sales pitch…wind turbines power millions of homes with wonderful “free” energy. The truth is a much different story. “The wind power industry claims switching from conventional power to wind power will save consumers money and spur the economy. However, data from the top 10 wind power states show just the opposite.” [1]

Cost breakdown

Wind energy from turbines are power generating losers when compared to other technologies such as coal, hydro, gas and nuclear. One giant downside is no wind, no power generation. Sources say you need at least 10MPH wind speed to generate power and speeds in excess of 50MPH will shut down turbines to prevent damage. [2] Industry promoters often paint a rosy picture of the benefits of wind power when other sources claim as little as 8% of usable generation.

Not widely known but wind turbines actually use electricity from the grid (coal/gas/hydro/nuclear) to power their hydraulic systems that keep the blades facing in the same direction as the wind. In freezing weather conditions, electricity from the grid is used to keep the bladesspinning at low speeds as a method of de-icing.

The misconception is that youinstall a wind turbine and it will pay itself off within a decade. From that point out, it is a net energy gain at a fraction of a cost. Nothing can be further from the truth. Constant costs are involved to maintain these mechanical structures; Overheating bearings, plastic that melts, gallons of brake oil leaking, gallons of hydraulic fluid leaking, [3] blades that fall off, towers that collapse, replacement of yaw gear drives, bearings, gearboxes, and generators. The cost to put out wind turbine fires, some self-extinguish themselves out but others need fire departments to extinguish turbines and put out the brush fires below.

The cost to manufacture wind turbines prevents any offset gained transitioning to a ‘clean’ energy environment. [4]

“ A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tonnes of steel requiring 170 tonnes of coking coal and 300 tonnes of iron ore, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons. ”

Landscape, seascape wildlife costs are a major downside to power from wind. Eagles, bats, birds of all kinds are killed in the thousands by wind blades. Their rotting carcasses litter the ground below. Estimates place the number of birds killed by wind turbines at 30 million per year. [5]

In Ontario Canada, every turbine destroys 3 acres of land, roughly 21,000 acres of farmland. [6]

Wind Turbine Syndrome

Many people living within 2 km (1.25 miles) of thesespinning giants get sick says a peer-reviewed study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. [7] Low frequency noise and infrasound appear to be the chief disease-causing culprit according to Dr. Nina Pierpont. In Wisconsin, a study showed noise emanating from the turbines was detectable inside homes within a 6.2-mile radius of the industrial wind plant and declared wind turbines a health hazard. [8]

Government Subsidies and Crony Capitalists

Billions of taxpayer dollars are being shoveled into this inefficient scheme in order to promote Global Warming agendas at the expense of real power sources and the tens of thousands of jobs they replace. Government subsidies keep the growth of wind turbine construction alive and keep this technology running afterinstalled. Without government financial involvement, wind turbines become to costly to operate, go idle and start rusting the landscape. Without government funding, investors sell theirinvestments and shelve plans to expand.[9] The UK’s Labour party insists that wind turbines can’tmake a profit without subsidies. [10] Tax credits are given to companies that manufacture, to companies thatinstall/maintain, to municipalities that own the property. The IRS is giving away $13 Billion per year in wind energy subsidies.[11]

The world’s biggest billion dollar corporations, such as General Electric and Siemens, are reaping the investments made in subsidized wind turbine construction. The U.S. government has laid the groundwork for an endless welfare system devoted to big wind companies. [12]

See also

External links

References

  1. Jump up↑ Electricity Prices Soaring In Top Wind Power States, Forbes, October 17, 2014
  2. Jump up↑ AS BRITAIN FREEZES, WIND FARMS TAKE POWER FROM GRID TO PREVENT ICING, Breitbart.com. January 2, 2015
  3. Jump up↑ 2 Year Old Siemens Turbines Falling Apart: Wind Farm Investors, Get Out While You Can, Stopthesethings.com, Febuary 1, 2015
  4. Jump up↑ Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives), Author Thomas Homer-Dixon, 2010
  5. Jump up↑ RIP STEFAN THE STORK – ONE OF 30 MILLION BIRDS KILLED BY WIND FARMS EVERY YEAR, Breitbart, August 17, 2015
  6. Jump up↑ Wind Ontario
  7. Jump up↑ Wind Turbine Syndrome
  8. Jump up↑ Wisconsin Wind Turbines Declared Health Hazard, Michigan Capitol Confidential, November 8, 2014
  9. Jump up↑ Wind Energy’s Ghosts, American Thinker, February 15, 2010
  10. Jump up↑ Tories to end onshore windfarm subsidies in 2016, The Guardian,June 18, 2015
  11. Jump up↑ The IRS Is Giving Away $13 Billion A Year In Wind Energy Subsidies, Without Congressional Authorization, Forbes
  12. Jump up↑ What do we have to show for government subsidies of wind power?, TheHill, February 24,2015

It Should Never Have Taken This Long, to Stop the Windscam!

/ 1957chev / 2 Comments

08/04/16

German Government ‘Plans To Stop

And Reverse Wind Power’

China Plans To Export

Cheap Energy To Europe

If the green energy plans by the German Federal Government are implemented, the expansion of onshore wind energy will soon come to a standstill and then go into reverse. In early March, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel presented a draft for the amendment of the Renewable Energies Act (EEG). The new rules regulate the subsidy levels for renewable energy. The new regulations are to be adopted in coming months. A study by consultants ERA on behalf of the Green Party’s parliamentary group concludes that under these provisions the development of wind energy will collapse fairly soon. –Frank-Thomas Wenzel, Berliner Zeitung, 7 April 2016

China’s proposed investments in long-distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) power transmission lines will pave the way for power exports as far as Germany, the head of the national power grid said on Tuesday as he launched an initiative for cross-border power connections. Talk of exporting power is a reversal for China, which as recently as 2004 suffered rolling blackouts across its manufacturing heartland. But huge investments in power in the decade since, and the construction of a number of dams, nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants due to begin operating in the next 10 years, mean the country faces a growing surplus. –Lucy Hornby, Financial Times, 31 March 2016

Renewables….Never More than “Novelty Energy”!

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Renewables are useless: The Evidence is Overwhelming

/  March 29, 2016

de-icing-wind-turbine

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Al Gore has a problem. He seems to want people to believe that only climate skeptics oppose renewables. The truth is, a small but growing number of prominent greens, openly acknowledge that renewables in their current form are not a scalable replacement for fossil fuels.

In Al Gore’s announcement of a climate witch hunt, titled “AGs United for Clean Power”, Al Gore said the following;

I really believe that years from now, this convening by attorney general Eric Schneiderman and his colleagues today, may well be looked back upon as a real turning point, in the effort to hold to account those commercial interests that have been, according to the best available evidence, deceiving the American people, communicating in a fraudulent way, both about the reality of the climate crisis and the dangers it poses to all of us, and committing fraud in their communications about the viability of renewable energy and efficiency, and energy storage, that together are posing this great competitive challenge to the long reliance on carbon based fuels.

Does Al Gore plan to prosecute James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley for Fraud?

To solve the climate problem, policy must be based on facts and not on prejudice. The climate system cares about greenhouse gas emissions – not about whether energy comes from renewable power or abundant nuclear power. Some have argued that it is feasible to meet all of our energy needs with renewables. The 100% renewable scenarios downplay or ignore the intermittency issue by making unrealistic technical assumptions, and can contain high levels of biomass and hydroelectric power at the expense of true sustainability. Large amounts of nuclear power would make it much easier for solar and wind to close the energy gap.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/03/nuclear-power-paves-the-only-viable-path-forward-on-climate-change

Will the green believers at Google Corporation join James Hansen in the dock, when Al Gore prosecutes people who think renewables are not up to the job?

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope … Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Read more: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/

Will Al Gore prosecute Rob Parker, president of the Australian Nuclear Association, for claiming renewables aren’t up to the job?

“My concern is that renewables won’t get us across the line in terms of emissions reduction,” said Rob Parker, the president of the ANA. “Nuclear is more reliable and it has a smaller resources footprint than renewables.

Read more: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/29/aussie-nuclear-industry-renewables-wont-get-us-across-the-line/

How about the British Government, whose relentless pursuit of renewables has utterly messed up the British energy market?

The second phase of modern energy policy began when Tony Blair signed the Renewable Energy Target in 2007.

What has this left us with?

We now have an electricity system where no form of power generation, not even gas-fired power stations, can be built without government intervention.

And a legacy of ageing, often unreliable plant.

Perversely, even with the huge growth in renewables, our dependence on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, hasn’t been reduced.

Read more: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amber-rudds-speech-on-a-new-direction-for-uk-energy-policy

If Al Gore succeeds in using government bullying, to silence critics of renewables, the same disaster could easily occur in the United States.

Perhaps Al Gore’s real target are the practitioners of the “strange new form of denial”, the growing green schism which opposes the push for 100% renewables, as vigorously as any climate skeptic.

There is no evidence that renewables in their current form are a viable replacement for fossil fuels. But there is plenty of evidence that nuclear power delivers results. Nuclear power, the zero emission alternative to renewables, has been economically supplying 75% of France’s power since the 1970s. Nuclear power works, and works well. France demonstrated by doing, that mass production and economies of scale makes nuclear power affordable.

If the whole world copied what France did in the 1970s, by 2030 the world could cut billions of tons of CO2 emissions, without destroying the global economy.

If you are someone who cares about CO2 reductions, you should listen to scientists like James Hansen, who plausibly claim that nuclear power is the route to decarbonisation, not to scientific illiterates like Al Gore.

Windscam Fighters Achieve Success!

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If You’re Going through Wind Farm Hell, Then Keep Going

March 24, 2016 by

west pinchbeck

****

What impresses STT most is the tenacity and perseverance of community defenders, all over the Globe.

Pro-farming (REAL farming, that is), pro-community and pro-real power groups are better informed and organised, and more vocal and hostile, than ever before.

Hard-working, decent, rural people throughout the world are fighting back – to obtain sensible energy policies that support growth, development and vibrant, prosperous rural communities – against an industry with all the natural respect for property rights of Genghis Khan; and the moral fibre of Judas Iscariot.

These are entirely reasonable people who have tumbled to the fact that they have been lined up as “road-kill” by their political betters to suffer the consequences of a policy built around an insanely expensive, utterly unreliable, intermittent power source – that can only survive on a raft of massive subsidies; kills millions of birds and bats; destroys communities;drives people from their homes; and otherwise makes life misery for thousands around the world.

These people are out to smash a “policy” that – in a few years time, when it all inevitably collapses – will be revealed for what it is: an enormous government-backed Ponzi scheme, the foundations for which are greed and stupidity; and the “justification” for which can only be described as a circus of the bizarre.

STT would like to think that we’ve helped these dedicated individuals and groups a little, by providing them with the kind of factual ammunition that cuts directly across the treachery, lies and deceit – which are the tools-in-trade for the wind industry, its goons and parasites.

But, whatever the source of information, pro-community groups are in earnest when it comes to protecting all that they’ve toiled for.

These days, whenever a wind farm is proposed; or the developer is out in the field – literally ‘thumping’ its message home (see our post here) – the term most employed to cover the community’s response is ‘OUTRAGE’.

However, occupying the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, is the infectious, fun-filled term: ‘REJOICE’ – which is the only word powerful enough to capture the sense of victory and relief, for those who have spent thousands of relentless, unpaid hours dedicated to the defence of their communities, their homes, their farms, their businesses and their families.

In Britain, dogged community defenders are winning the Battle for Britain; skirmish by skirmish; village by village; town by town.

The wind industry is being pummelled by an environment in which the massive and endless subsidies upon which the scam essentially depends have been slashed – never to return.

And in which community defenders have been finally (and quite rightly) given a say about the protection and preservation of their common law rights – little rights, like the right to own and enjoy property; free from the unlawful interference of sleep-killing, incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Here’s yet another example of how perseverance and tenacity trumps the subsidy-soaked malice exhibited by an industry peopled with career criminals, chancers and second-hand car salesman.

West Pinchbeck campaigners win four-year campaign to defeat wind farm
Spalding Guardian
17 March 2016

Campaigners have won their four-year battle to stop a wind farm being built at West Pinchbeck.

The words “We Have Won!” next to a picture of two filled champagne glasses appeared on the Stop West Pinchbeck Wind Farm website after South Holland District Council (SHDC) ruled the Wind Ventures Ltd application had run out of time for an appeal against non-determination.

“I think the fact that our overwhelming emotion is relief is probably an indication of how much we have been affected just by the threat of this terrible development, and over a prolonged period.”
Campaigner Sue Blake

This means the application is dead in the water.

Leading campaigner Tony Fear said: “We are of course delighted even though it does feel a little bit odd that it just fizzled out in this way.

“The real good news is that there can be no appeal so it is genuine closure.”

The wind farm, with its nine turbines measuring 126m to the tip, would have been sited on Fen Farm, South Fen – a site known as The Delph – and sandwiched between two nature reserves.

Sue Blake, from the campaign group, said: “I think the fact that our overwhelming emotion is relief is probably an indication of how much we have been affected just by the threat of this terrible development, and over a prolonged period.”

South Holland and The Deepings MP John Hayes joined the battle at West Pinchbeck and in April, 2014 he said the Conservatives were devising a policy to scrap subsidies for onshore wind farms.

The former energy minister said then that “the threat of onshore wind will be removed with the subsidies”.

Mr Hayes also said residents would get the final say on wind farm applications.

Wind farm victim Jane Davis, who was forced to quit her Deeping St Nicholas home through turbine noise, this week highlighted the timing of the news on The Delph application as the Bill honouring the pledges to end public subsidies and to give residents the final say had its third reading in the House of Commons.

Mrs Davis said: “The end of this application removes a severe threat to residential amenity, health and wildlife in the surrounding area.

“My husband (Julian) and I are very pleased with the decision by SHDC to ‘time out’ the application.

“This was a correct decision given the wishes of the local people in the area, and the emerging knowledge of the significant ways that noise pollution, particularly low frequency industrial noise pollution can impact on people’s health.

“From a personal perspective we ran a very high risk of having a relative’s home significantly impacted upon, something we were dreading, and it would also have impacted on many friends as well. There is perhaps an irony that this application has been terminated ten years exactly after Deeping St Nicholas Wind farm started construction.

“Given the proximity to Willow Tree Fen nature reserve this application would have caused immeasurable harm to birdlife in particular.

“Visually the development would have further impacted on the locality which already has windfarms visible at Bicker, Deeping St Nicholas, Thorney and other small projects, with the likelihood of ever larger turbines being placed at Heckington Fen in the foreseeable future. The area is known for its cloudscapes and wide skies and this would have been damaged irreparably.

“Finally the proposed project was insignificant in terms of national energy production and would not have helped keep the lights on.”

By 2014, Stop West Pinchbeck Wind Farm campaigners had already spent £5,000 fighting the proposal for The Delph.

One strand of the fight involved demanding Wind Ventures carry out a new birdsurvey after the campaigners’ expert found flaws in the way data was collected.

Sue Blake said this week it is more than four years since residents heard of the proposal.

She said: “Believe it or not the developer failed to identify that the proposed site was adjacent to two nature reserves and therefore wholly inappropriate for an industrial scale wind farm, which is why it received vehement objections from Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust.

“At a ‘standing room only’ community meeting in July 2012 the developer was faced with unanimous objections from the local community. They chose to ignore all of this opposition, refusing to see that the there was no way to satisfactorily address the negative impacts, not least the impact of things like noise on nearby residents.

“We are delighted that recent changes in Government policy means that it is now much more difficult for developers to get planning permission for onshore wind farms not least because the concerns of the local community must be taken seriously, something which Wind Ventures failed to do from the outset. If they had they could have saved everyone, including themselves, a huge amount of needless stress, time and money.”
Spalding Guardian

Julian and Jane Davis, referred to above, successfully obtained a £2million out of court settlement from a wind farm operator, for noise nuisance; and the resultant loss of property value (the home became uninhabitable due to low-frequency noise, infrasound and vibration).

The Particulars of Julian and Jane Davis’ Claim are available here: Davis Complaint Particulars of Claim

And Jane Davis’ Statement (detailing their unsettling experiences and entirely unnecessary suffering) is available here: davis-noise-statement

The Davis claim was made under the common law tort of nuisance: for more on the law of nuisance, and the ability to launch a pre-emptive strike to stop these things from being built: Injunction Sought to Protect Neighbours’ Health from Wind Farm Noise

Don’t let the task daunt; don’t give up; and never give in.

winston-churchill-quotes

Windpushers Destroying Economies World-Wide…Energy Poverty!

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How Massively Subsidised Wind Power Destroys Power Markets & Economies

March 22, 2016 by

economics101

Wind and solar have destroyed the ability of the market to signal price
The Telegraph
Rupert Darwall
7 March 2016

Before the election, high electricity prices made the Big Six energy companies everyone’s favourite whipping boys. A report by the competition watchdog exonerated them. Government-driven social, environmental and network costs were the main drivers of rising electricity bills, the Competition and Markets Authority found. Now the Big Six have put themselves squarely back in the frame.

A 125-page report by the electricity industry lobby group, Energy UK, supports phasing out cheap coal power and demands more subsidies for wind and solar.

It is a high-risk strategy. In capitulating to “Big wind” and solar, the Big Six energy companies have no one to blame but themselves for the heightened political risk caused by rising electricity prices and theinevitable consumer backlash.

Weather-dependent wind and solar power is inherently unreliable and high cost. In addition to subsidies, wind and solar need more grid infrastructure. When the wind blows and the sun shines, they swamp the grid with zero marginal cost electricity, forcing gas, coal and nuclear to reduce their output.

Lower prices and lower output demolish the investment case for building the gas-fired power stations the Government says are vital. These hidden costs are the real killer.

As Amber Rudd, the energy and climate secretary, observed in her “smell the coffee speech” last November, “we now have an electricity system where no form of power generation, not even gas-fired power stations, can be built without government intervention”.

Advocates of wind and solar claim falling costs mean renewables will soon reach “grid parity”. Anyone who knows anything about electricity understands this is highly misleading.

To its great discredit, the Big Six report peddles the grid-parity fib, which ignores the hidden costs imposed on the rest of the system. Rather lamely, the report calls for government and industry to conduct further analysis on the whole-system costs of weather-dependent renewables, something it very well could have done itself.

While the Government insulates wind and solar investors from the damaging effect their output has on the market, the report admits that wind and solar have destroyed the ability of the wholesale market to provide price signals to guide investment decisions.

It envisages more wind and solar on the grid, leading to more electricity priced as garbage that consumers are forced to pay someone else to take away during periods of negative prices.

Since last summer, almost 8.5 gigawatts of conventional capacity has closed or faces closure. In 2014, the Big Six made £556m from renewables and lost £1,615m on their gas and coal-fired power stations.

Without cheap electrical storage, wind and solar can’t keep the lights on. The report foresees storage as the “single most important technological breakthrough” likely in the next 15 years. One thing’s for sure. It hasn’t happened yet.

Thanks to government policies deliberately distorting the market, wehave over-invested in wind and solar. It has blighted investment in reliable capacity that can keep the lights on.

This is the crux of Britain’s energy crunch. Clearly it was a colossal mistake to have embarked on renewables with storage unsolved.

The Big Six could have drawn attention to a situation where, in a world awash with hydrocarbons, Britain has an increasing shortage of generating capacity. There is no shortage of energy in the world. Oil prices have been falling. Last month, the US started exporting natural gas for the first time. In the first decade of electricity privatisation, around half Britain’s generating capacity was renewed. The market worked.

Now that the market has been destroyed, the real choice is between finding a path back to the market or accepting the Government is running the show. Private ownership and state control is the worst of all worlds.

Political risk is borne by the private sector, which in turn means higher electricity bills. Financial efficiency would see new investment being funded off the Government’s balance sheet and reinstating the Central Electricity Generating Board. Instead, the Big Six report calls for more honesty about the impact of more renewables on electricity bills without providing any itself. For the industry, higher bills are primarily a PR problem to be solved by better communication.

Energy UK’s chief, Lawrence Slade, goes out on a limb in advocating a British equivalent of Germany’s disastrous Energiewende (Energy Transition). In 2004, the Green energy minister, Jürgen Trittin, claimed that the extra cost of renewable energy on monthly bills was equivalent to the cost of a scoop of ice cream.

Nine years later, CDU minister Peter Altmaier said Energiewende could cost around €1 trillion by the end of the 2030s. The cost of feed-in tariffs and other subsidies is currently €21.8bn a year; €20bn is being spent on a new north-south high voltage line and investment in other grid infrastructure is likely to double that number.

Thanks to the high volatility of wind and solar output, 25pc of Germany’s green energy is dumped on other countries at low or negative prices, destabilising the grid of Germany’s neighbours. At home, the situation is just as serious.

In 2013, 345,000 households could not pay their electricity bills. In January 2014, Deutsche Bank warned that Germany’s energy cost penalty was already eroding its industrial base.

In a 2013 survey by the German Chambers of Commerce, over half of industrial companies reported that Energiewende was having a negative or very negative impact on their competitiveness.

To see a successful energy transformation, you have to look across the Atlantic. In the most telling indication of the Big Six surrender to the green lobby, there is not a single mention of fracking and the US shale revolution. But, as the report states, it is assumed that the UK remains part of the European Union and continues to try to meet its legally binding renewable energy targets for 2020 under the 2009 renewable energy directive. The underlying message from the Big Six is clear: if you want lower electricity bills, vote leave.

Rupert Darwall is the author of The Age of Global Warming: A History (Quartet, 2013)
The Telegraph

Rupert Darwall

Faux-green crowd making a Killing from Carbon/Climate Scams!

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Canada may already be carbon neutral, so why are we keeping it a secret?

F. Larry Martin, Special to Financial Post | March 2, 2016 

Not all CO2 emitted by people stays in the atmosphere. Much of it returns to the earth, mainly through the carbon absorption and sequestration power of plants, soil, and trees.

Clement Sabourin/AFP/Getty Images
Not all CO2 emitted by people stays in the atmosphere. Much of it returns to the earth, mainly through the carbon absorption and sequestration power of plants, soil, and trees.

Here’s a seemingly simple question: Is Canada a net carbon dioxide emitter? You would think so from reading news headlines. We’ve earned the scorn of environmentalists, NGOs, and media outlets galore, labelled with such juvenile epithets as “fossil of the year” or “corrupt petro-state.”

Sadly, lost in all the hyperbole is the actual science. There is nothing quantitative about the vague idea that, as a “progressive nation,” Canada should be expected to “do more” to fight climate change.

But therein lies the rub; Canada is poised to immediately do more to combat climate change than almost every other country in the world. How, you ask? Well, by doing more of the same. If that sounds ludicrous, let me explain.

Most Canadians would agree that our response to climate change needs to be scientifically sound, environmentally sustainable and financially realistic, as well as global, comprehensive, and holistic. Right now, our approach is none of those things; the public discourse is driven by a myopic, ideological obsession with carbon emissions alone. What else is there, you ask?

The answer comes from the most recent report (2014) of the Global Carbon Project, which states that global human-induced CO2 emissions were 36 billion tonnes. Of that, 36 per cent stayed in the atmosphere, 27 per cent was absorbed by water, and 37 per cent was absorbed by land.

That’s right — absorbed by land! Not all CO2 emitted by people stays in the atmosphere. Much of it returns to the earth, mainly through the carbon absorption and sequestration power of plants, soil, and trees.

Wind & Solar….Not More than “Novelty Energy”!

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Wind & Solar Power can NEVER Replace Conventional Power Generation

March 9, 2016 by

turbine collapse michigan3

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The death of the wind industry didn’t come about because BIG Coal felt ‘threatened‘ and set out in some kind of John Grisham conspiracy to wreck it by fair means or foul. No. What kills it is the fact that a growing band of ‘eco-travellers’ – of the kind who once placed their faith in the Wind Gods – have woken up to the scale and scope of the great wind power fraud.

For the climate change Chicken Littles, their quest to rid the planet of dreaded CO2 gas (query how plants and every other living thing survive without it?) has seen the more sensible of their number turn their backs on the wind; and to nuzzle up to nukes, instead.

Dr. Alan Carlin has, despite his background with America’s top environmental lobby, the Sierra Club, not only reached the obvious conclusion (viz, that wind power will never replace conventional generation sources), but has repeatedly determined to put pen to paper, to make sure his peers know all about it.

Alan received an undergraduate degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He then entered the PhD program in economics at MIT, with two summers spent at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. His MIT major was in economic development; his thesis research was carried out in India under a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship. He then took a position as an economist at RAND, where he pursued primarily economic development and transportation economics.

In the mid-1960s he became active in the environmental movement as a result of his outdoor interests, and co-authored economic analyses of proposed dams proposed for the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The dams were turned down by the Federal Government in 1968 after a nationwide campaign by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. In 1970 he was elected Chairman of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, then the Club’s second largest Chapter.

Soon after Richard Nixon created the US Environmental Protection Agency in late 1970, he followed his increasing environmental interest by taking a position as a manager in their new Office of Research and Development in Washington, DC, for multidisciplinary research on implementation of environmental pollution control. In the late 1970s he worked for about 7 years primarily as a physical scientist managing the development of criteria documents assessing pollutants for possible regulation by EPA. After Reagan institutionalized the economic analysis of Federal regulations in 1981, he transferred to the EPA Policy Office, where he was a senior analyst and economic research manager.

In the mid-2000s he realized that climate would become the major environmental issue of the decade, and undertook a voyage of personal discovery to understand the issue, including both its economic and scientific aspects. With the advent of the strongly environmentalist Obama Administration in 2009 he found himself at odds with EPA’s misguided attempts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which led to considerable media attention and his retirement in early 2010.

He has authored or co-authored over 35 professional publications in his career to date, mostly in economics and energy/climate. Seventeen of these have been published in journals and 8 as part of books.

Now, here’s Alan’s message to the dwindling band of wind-cultists.

The Total Unreality of Substituting Wind and Solar for Fossil Fuel Electricity
Carlin Economics and Science
Alan Carlin
26 February 2016

One of the crucial unrealistic assumptions of the climate alarmist narrative is the belief that non-hydro renewable sources of energy can be easily substituted for fossil fuels for the generation of electricity.

Proponents pretend that this substitution is simple and mainly involves political will for governments to impose the changes, and occasionally that subsidies must also be provided to encourage it. But the technical problems are actually very daunting for extensive substitution as well as expensive.

As substitution increases, the technical problems become increasingly difficult and with attempted full substitution they become impossible except under special circumstances. This has not prevented advocates from pursuing their campaigns against the use of fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydro power at all levels of American government.

Electric Grids Must Balance Supply and Demand

Electricity grids collapse if supply does not exactly balance demand at all times. Using intermittent and largely unpredictable sources of supply such as wind and solar to meet demand is very difficult, particularly at a modest cost that users can afford.

Grid collapse can be monumentally expensive, as can arbitrary reductions in demand known as load shedding which force users to halt all electricity use, usually on an arbitrary rolling basis between various regional areas. Traffic lights, hospitals, and manufacturing cannot do their jobs without reliable, continuous electric power.

Solar and Wind Cannot Provide Power During Some Periods

There are periods when both solar and wind provide little or no useful electric power because the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. These periods can and have lasted for as much as a week in Germany.

Without other sources of supply the grid will collapse during these periods unless demand is arbitrarily reduced–even if the periods are only for a few minutes. Rapid response fossil fuel or hydro backup is required in order to meet demand during these periods.

Many regions have little hydroelectric capacity and the abundant water required to make it productive. In the US only the Pacific Northwest has abundant hydroelectric resources.

Attempts to build enough wind/solar capacity to meet demand during these periods is not practicable and would be extremely expensive if it were practical. During these periods of little sunlight and low wind, solar and wind will produce little power no matter how large or how numerous these facilities may be.

Meeting demand during such periods without huge load shedding would require building huge wind/solar capacity which would almost never be used in order to slightly reduce the chances of grid collapse. And even then full assurance would never actually be achieved because of the high probability that there will be periods when there will be very little or no wind and solar generation.

Alternatives Require Rapid Response Fossil Fuel or Abundant Hydro Capabilities

The alternative is to build and maintain enough fossil fuel capacity which must be in “spinning reserve” in order to respond instantly to fluctuations in demand and wind/solar supplies.

This effectively doubles the cost of supplying electricity since two generating and even transmission fleets must be built and maintained rather than only one–fossil fuel and nuclear generation–except where abundant hydro capacity is available.

In areas where abundant hydro capacity and water to power it are not available, the only way to solve this problem is to build very extensive pumped storage facilities to generate “artificial” hydro power. This is very expensive since power must be used to pump water uphill during off peak periods and the construction of artificial lakes that is often required at two different elevations is quite expensive and is usually opposed by environmental groups.

Adding unreliable, unpredictable electricity sources such as wind and solar will inevitably decrease system reliability–which means increased risks of system collapse with its monumental costs even if every practical safeguard is used.

These problems are not just theoretical. Germany and Great Britain have experienced them in recent years as their percentage of wind/solar has increased, and they have responded by increasing their investment in fossil fueled plants, just the opposite of what they have tried to do.

Like Germany and Great Britain, Denmark also has increasing electricity costs but has solved the wind/solar substitution problem by entering into very high cost arrangements with their Nordic neighbors to supply hydro power when needed.

Despite all these very real problems, the Climate-Industrial Complex (as explained in my book Environmentalism Gone Mad) continues to promote wind and solar, sometimes with the active support of some prominent politicians.
Carlin Economics and Science

Alan Carlin

Wind Energy will always be “Novelty Energy”.

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The Fantasy of Storing Wind Power: No Commercial System Exists & None is Likely

March 7, 2016 by

unicorn

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The wind industry is the perpetual infant of power generation: always looking for the subsidies to last that little bit longer; always promising to improve its performance; always claiming it will outdo hydro, coal and gas – provided, of course, that the subsidies keep flowing.

STT for one thinks the wind industry has had ample time to grow up and stand on its own two feet.

Like the brat that it is, the wind industry can’t be told what to do and, especially, won’t ever respond to demands from power users about when its product should be delivered.

output vs demand

It’s quite happy to produce plenty of power when it’s not needed at night time; and much less during the day, when it is (as seen in the graph above); and, often, none at all during periods of peak demand: as set out in dozens of our posts, including these:

The Wind Power Fraud (in pictures): Part 1 – the South Australian Wind Farm Fiasco

The Wind Power Fraud (in pictures): Part 2 – The Whole Eastern Grid Debacle

When challenged about its consistent failures to match output with demand, the wind industry and its parasites respond by mumbling about “battery technology improving”.

The pitch is that – one day “soon” – there will batteries big enough and cheap enough to allow huge volumes of wind power produced when it’s not needed, to be stored for the occasions when it is. That way, the “variable” output (as their spruikers put it) from wind farms could be delivered when there might just be a market for it.

As covered in yesterday’s post, Australia’s ‘wind power capital’, South Australia is being crippled by rocketing power prices – a 90% rise in power prices for businesses within 12 months, leaving prices in SA double those of Victoria, is fairly called ‘astronomic’ – rolling wind power blackouts and a grid on the brink of collapse.

Notwithstanding the urgency of the calamity, the limp, pipe-dream responses to its unfolding power supply crisis and market chaos are limited to “an unfunded proposal by [renewable power generator and retailer] AGL to build grid-scale battery storage, and a smart grid proposal from [wind and gas turbine maker] Siemens of Germany to store surplus renewable energy in hydrogen fuel cells”: thought bubbles like massive batteries and hydrogen production, storage and use have never been shown to technically feasible, let alone economic.

The wind industry’s pitch is, of course, made so the subsidies keep flowing to allow an endless sea of these things to be erected now – in order to take advantage of the (so far, elusive) storage technology that’s just over the “horizon”. Except that the “soon” is more like light-years and the “horizon” is a mirage.

Even if a technology was invented (STT likens it to the chances of finding a perpetual motion machine or alchemy turning lead into gold) to store large volumes of the electricity output (in bulk) from all of the wind farms connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid, say (with a notional capacity of 3,669 MW) – the economic cost would be astronomical – and readily eclipse the value of the power produced. Not that the wind industry has ever made any economic sense. We visited the topic a while ago:

The Economic Storage of Wind Power is a Pipe-Dream

And, with the wind industry’s PR spinners becoming more desperate and silly by the day – in a ‘we love kicking a mangy dog when it’s down’ kind of way, we thought it high time to revisit – and launch a final assault on – the wind-cults’ last redoubt.

Their pitch is that cost effective, ‘grid scale’ electricity storage will overcome the chaotic and occasional delivery of wind power, to have it stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘big boys’ – coal, gas, hydro and nuclear.

Here’s a neat little wrap up by Engineer, John Curtis that puts the “we’ll fix it with batteries” line to bed once and for all.

An Engineer Speaks
Wind Farm Action
John Curtis
7 February 2016

A brief consideration of renewable energy production and storage.

As anybody who looks at current wind output figures will know, we are presently blessed with less than 0.2 Gigglewatts of wind power from the total UK wind fleet, the rated capacity of which is close to 8 Gigawatts. For the last 10 days, output has been under 1 Gigglewatt and this means that the actual wind power is probably negative because each machine requires around 200 kilowatts of power just for its life support systems.

It is often claimed that wind and solar will be valuable if only they can have effective storage systems. This set me thinking and I append below a summary of my current thoughts. I would be very pleased to have any comments that can make this case stronger.

Japan has decided to triple the amount of wind-generated power that it will install in future. Traditionally, Japan has relied mainly on nuclear and gas power for its electricity supplies but, post Fukushima, it is shutting down almost all of its nuclear facilities.

Whilst one may criticise the construction of nuclear power stations in a country that is famous for its earthquakes and tsunamis, the fact is that, unlike UK, that small country has very little natural energy reserves and was thus forced into their construction. However, even with this increase, the wind power generation will be under 0.3% of total power requirements.

With such a low penetration it is not to be expected that Japan will encounter the problems in other countries, such as UK and Europe, where high penetrations from wind and solar are causing very significant problems for distribution and in increasing costs.

The report by the Adam Smith Institute – “The Limits of Wind Power”, shows that any amount of wind penetration beyond 20% is prohibitively expensive and that the ‘sweet spot’ is between 10% and 15%. Beyond that point, the cost of having to have standby facilities on line and ready to carry full load becomes very high.

The problem with wind power and many other renewables is that they are inherently unstable and largely unpredictable and are thus quite unsuitable for any form of base load energy supply. Wind, in particular, is very variable and can change from high output to almost zero output and back again on a very short time scale, often on a basis of minutes.

If we are to avoid the very serious consequences of such variability then we must have either a constantly available back up from conventional power sources, or some form of energy storage that would provide a constant and smooth output from the original wind power generation.

In order to overcome the inherent generation instability of wind and some other renewables (such as solar) it is necessary to have the capacity to store energy on large scale for protracted supply times. This, so far, has proved to be either very difficult or very expensive.

There are many possible methods of energy storage, all of which require a change of state from, say, wind to electrical to another form of energy and then a return to electrical energy. Each change of state involves an unavoidable loss of efficiency in that it is impossible to get out all the energy that was originally developed. This is a basic fact of physics that we cannot overcome. All that we can do is to try to minimise losses, often at considerable expense for meagre gains.

In one sense, we all rely totally on energy storage. All our food is actually solar energy that is converted into chemical states in plants, which are then converted again by chemical changes into the energy that keeps us alive. Fossil fuels, biomass and wood are simply ancient solar energy that has been stored as coal and oil and from which the energy is again released chemically into other forms of energy.

However, the immediate problem is to find ways in which we can store electrical energy from renewables in such a way that it can later be released in a controlled manner that is convenient to us. Thereby hangs the problem, for which there are currently few solutions that are operable economically on the large scale that we need.

There are many types of energy storage available to us, of which the main ones are as follows: –

a. Pumped hydro.
b. Pumped air.
c. Chemical conversion.
d. Mechanical.
e. Thermal.

Pumped Hydro

Pumped Hydro is in practical use in many countries. It involves the use of cheap electrical power during off peak times to pump water from a low to a high level. The water can then be released as required to meet sudden peak demands and can respond very quickly. The higher you can raise the water, the less water you will need for a given power output. Therefore, countries such as Norway, which are very mountainous, can install such a system fairly easily.

In UK, we have limited ability to do this and have used most of the readily available sites already. Low lying countries have very little opportunity to do so because the system would require huge land areas to accommodate all the water.

The biggest pumped hydro installation in UK is Dinorwig, in Wales. However, the total installed pumped capacity is equal, to only 1.2 GigaWatt hours of electricity and can deliver approximately 500 Megawatts for 13 to 15 hours until it is exhausted. The total installed capacity of pumped hydro in UK would produce at this level for not more than 22 hours. This means that it is just not capable of covering the capacity shortfall when our UK wind fleet can be producing almost zero power for several days at a time.

We can also look at this system from the point of view of energy losses. Let us ignore any inefficiency from production of power from wind factories and just assume that our electricity is from conventional sources.

When we pump up water for energy storage we have electrical losses to drive the pumps, then there are pumping losses and to this we must add the pipeline energy losses. The end result is that the stored energy loss costs us about 20% to 25% of the input electricity.

When we release the water to generate power we have pipeline losses, water turbine losses and further electrical losses. These may easily be as much as 20% to 25% in total and possibly more at peak powers due to pipeline losses.

Overall, therefore, we would be fortunate to get back as much as 60% of the input power, and would probably not see more than 50%. This is OK as long as we use very cheap, off peak electrical power, but if it is to be supplied by wind turbines we would not have cheap power because of the various incentives that are applied to wind power generation.

One can conclude, therefore, that the use of pumped hydro is only useful in very specific instances for peak power coverage and that it is not suitable for the longer term smoothing that is needed for wind power. Furthermore, any significant extension of pumped hydro installations can only be done at the expense of damming and flooding high level mountain valleys. This may be a problem because people tend to live in valleys rather than mountaintops and there are few available unoccupied mountainous valleys.

Pumped air

This is a very common method of power storage and is widely used for driving pneumatic tools. It simply involves the use of a motor to drive a compressor that supplies compressed air to a reservoir. The compressed air can then be released to drive a suitable machine that may be used to drive a generator to produce electricity.

It is all known technology for which most of the sums have been done and experience gained. The problem is that it has many efficiency losses and is currently used only on small-scale applications where the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. There are very few larger scale systems in operation and these are only experimental at present. In order to operate in the huge scale needed to support renewable energy variability, we need to go very big indeed.

The basic problem of compressing the air is relatively easily solved and could well involve such means as serial axial flow compressors such as are used for pumping on gas pipelines. However, we need to have very big facilities to store the compressed air and to deal with the heat exchange problems when compressing the air and when expending it for power generation. Of these, the storage is the most demanding.

One solution that has been proposed is the use of what are basically very big inflatable balloons that would be moored offshore in very deep water. The compressed air would be supplied to them and then sent back as power is required. There are many problems here, not least of which is the idea of having very large numbers of these devices moored in deep water, together with connecting pipe work and subjected to tidal flows etc. Condensation would be a problem also. For the GigaWatt scales that are needed, this just does not seem to be a sensible solution.

In order to obtain the huge volumes that are needed for air storage we need to think of underground storage in old mine workings, disused salt mines, oil wells etc. This requires that there are sufficient huge underground storage facilities that are easily accessible and reasonably close to the point of use of the power.

Even if we can find suitable storage, we still have the problems of inefficiency in the process. Compressing air is far less efficient than increasing water pressure and the same applies to its expansion to produce power. Even if we ignore possible losses of air due to leakage, it is very doubtful if we could expect more than a 40% overall efficiency.

Chemical conversion

As has been previously said, we rely on chemical conversion for almost all of our energy. However, in this context, we are looking at using renewably generated electricity to cause a chemical change of state to store energy so that it can later be released.

First off are storage batteries, as used in cars, for example. There is a whole range of batteries now available, including some exotics such as LI-on types. All of them rely on a chemical change caused by the incoming electricity so that a reversal of the change will produce electricity.

The amount of storage capacity is a function of its construction and size and construction influences the discharge rate and hence the output capacity. Batteries use all sorts of special and possibly toxic materials and many of these materials cause great environmental problems during extraction. Battery malfunctions are not unknown (such as those currently affecting the LI-on batteries in the Boeing Dreamliner aircraft) and can cause serious fire and chemical risks. There is also the problem of limited life, as we all know from our cars.

There is, as yet, no battery system that can cope with long-term charge and discharge rates that are needed for the huge electrical loads that are required for back up to renewable generation. In any case, there are still the inefficiencies involved in taking a high voltage supply from the grid, reducing it to a lower DC voltage for the batteries and then reversing the process to give a mains output. Whilst this is common on small scales, it has yet to be shown to be viable on very large scales.

Another scheme that is being considered is to use surplus electricity to produce hydrogen by electrolysis. Quite easy, actually, and was a common experiment in my school days. Take water and a pair of electrical contacts in the water and, hey Presto, you get hydrogen and oxygen emitted. Collect the hydrogen and you have a good clean fuel ready to be stored for future use, either in cars or as a fuel for generators to resupply electricity. If the hydrogen is combined with CO2 we can get synthetic methane, another good fuel gas.

The big problems are of storage and efficiency. To be useful, hydrogen storage must be very large capacity, sufficient to run a generator for several days during lack of wind and/or solar power. That is a very big ask when we are dealing in Gigawatts and it has not been achieved so far. As for efficiency, we have to face the age-old problem that, whenever you do something, there is an energy loss. Each stage of producing hydrogen, compressing it, storing it and then releasing it for combustion will involve an energy loss so the end output will be considerably less than the energy input. The system would only be economical if the original input electricity is very cheap and even then, the output power will only be as clean as the source of the energy input.

There are several other possible chemical energy storage systems, but they all suffer from the same problem of storage capacity and process losses.

Mechanical storage

This simply means using various mechanisms to store energy for later release. It is actually quite common and in every day use.

For example, we can use a spring to store energy, as in a clock. Or we can use a weight, as in pendulum clocks. Very easy to use and understand, but quite incapable of storing large amounts of energy.

Another method could be to use a flywheel, which can absorb energy for later release. However, it is very unlikely that we can see any form of flywheel that can absorb the energy needed for compensation of power outages over days. Anybody who has seen an old internal combustion or steam engine running will have noted the huge flywheels that they need to keep a constant speed during power fluctuations for each stroke. These machines, big as they are physically, run only at kilowatt power levels. It us easy to see that a flywheel system to operate at GigaWatt levels for hours or days would have to be absolutely enormous. It is simply not feasible.

Thermal storage

This is a system that uses heat from a power source or direct from solar energy to heat a material so that the heat can be stored. The heat is then used to heat water to provide steam, which will then drive turbines to produce electricity.

The most famous of these systems is the Gemsolar Array in Andalucia, in Spain. This has an enormous array of steerable mirrors that focus solar energy on to a tower. The tower contains molten salts, which are heated and circulated to insulated storage vessels. The hot salts are used, via a heat exchanger, to produce steam, which then drives turbines that produce electrical power. The system has been operational and can produce up to 19.9 megawatts of electrical power. Because there is a large storage capacity of thermal salts, the system can continue operation even during the night, thus overcoming the most difficult problem of using solar energy.

It is theoretically possible to use wind-powered electricity to heat a salt in a similar manner and is not a huge technical problem (think of immersion heaters in hot water cylinders and kettles). However, the actual problems are very big indeed. The Gemsolar array can carry sufficient heat capacity to provide about 18 hours of electrical power before it literally runs out of steam. For any gigawatts scale system the heat storage would have to be enormous and would almost certainly involve substantial underground storage facilities.

Even if such storage were available, we would still have the ever-present losses to accommodate. Just consider this sequence of using a wind turbine to power a system using thermal storage.

Turbine > electricity > electrical converter > heat exchanger > thermal storage > pipelines > heat exchanger > steam generator > steam turbine > electrical generator > electrical grid.

Each (>) represents a stage at which energy will be lost through inefficiencies. If we assume no other losses and that each stage operates at something like 90% to 95% efficiency, which is high, it is easy to see that overall losses will be around 50% at best. This is hardly the basis for an efficient energy storage system and it could only be viable if the initial energy were to be very cheap, which is not the case with wind turbines in the present economic environment.

CONCLUSIONS

From the above it can be seen that there is currently no viable energy storage system that can allow us to use variable renewable energy sources to simulate base load electricity systems with controllable, economic, deliverable power over long periods of time.

The only possible exception is pumped power storage, as at Dinorwig, but this is limited in availability and would require huge extensions of land usage in order for it to be useful. It also requires that the initial supply of energy should be at a low, economic cost.

Absent any new developments of efficient and cheap energy storage, it seems to be impossible for us to have renewable and variable power sources as part of our energy grid at levels beyond, at maximum, 20% penetration. The idea, therefore, of having any country with 100% of its energy supplied from renewable sources, is not tenable.
Wind Farm Action

giant battery 2