FAIL: Busted Wind Turbines Give College Whopping Negative 99.14% Return On Investment
Watts up with that?
Anthony Watts
27 April 2016

From the “it’s OK, we used other people’s money” department and Andrew Follet at The Daily Caller:

Two wind turbines on the Lake Land College Campus in Mattoon, IL

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Lake Land College recently announced plans to tear down broken wind turbines on campus, after the school got $987,697.20 in taxpayer support for wind power.

The turbines were funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, but the turbines lasted for less than four years and were incredibly costly to maintain.

“Since the installation in 2012, the college has spent $240,000 in parts and labor to maintain the turbines,” Kelly Allee, Director of Public Relations at Lake Land College, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The college estimates it would take another $100,000 in repairs to make the turbines…

Gravity at work, Fintona County Tyrone, Ireland.

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The number of cases involving collapsing turbines and flying blades (aka “component liberation”) has become so common that, if we were a tad cynical, we would go so far to suggest the possibility of some kind of pattern, along the lines proffered by Mr Bond’s nemesis, Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times it’s enemy action”.

Turbines keep crashing back to earth in frightening numbers – from Brazil – to Kansas – Pennsylvania – Germany and Scotland – Devon and everywhere in between: Ireland has been ‘luckier’ than most (see our posts here and here) and their luck is being enjoyed in Sweden too (see our post here).

A couple of months back, Swedes had the pleasure of waking up to the sound of a vertically-challenged 290 tonne, whirling Danish Dervish splattering itself across a country road, fortunately…

Electricity Bill Shorten: Certified Economy Killer

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In the cutting British satire, Extras, the hapless Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) is always foiled by his gormless but lovable side-kick, Maggie Jacobs (Ashley Jensen).

Maggie, when she’s not inadvertently ruining Andy’s romantic hopes and/or acting career prospects, poses puzzling rhetoricals such as “would you rather be trampled by elephants or eaten by lions?”

Following Maggie’s lead, STT poses the following:

“would you rather have your economic future destroyed by a $45 billion electricity tax, designed to subsidise the construction of another 6,000 of these things; or a $90 billion electricity tax, designed to subsidise the construction of another 12,000 of them?”

Unfortunately, unlike Maggie’s death by elephant or lion conundrum, with STT’s poser there isn’t any way of avoiding one or the other.  Here, it’s the ‘choice’ that Australians face at the upcoming Federal election: or as Maggie might put it…

As it goes in Falmouth, the wind industry goes everywhere: lying, bullying, bribery and good old fashioned fraud is the order of the day.

Local boy, Frank Haggerty digs the dirt where the popular press fear to tread.

Falmouth wind turbines corruption blows out of control
Wind Action
Frank Haggerty
1 May 2016

The Falmouth “Land Court deal” is so corrupt the news media won’t even print a story. The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation over the poor placement of wind turbines taking health and property rights. Folks, this story happened April 28 and not one peep from the news media.

In Falmouth, corruption is the province of small men, not political giants. And sometimes the corruption is so ordinary that the corrupt don’t recognize it.

Falmouth today has a very important topic: Is corruption the price you pay…

Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

When your power generation ‘system’ depends on the whim of the Wind Gods, results can differ from the operators’ professed claims.

In the US, the Gods haven’t blessed the wind industry with much fortune of late: despite a rapid increase in (massively subsidised) wind power capacity, wind power output has slumped (and babies nesting in treetops can sleep easy).

States subsidized for wind power saw decline in production
Andrew Follett
The Daily Caller
21 April 2016

States with lucrative subsidies for wind power such as California, Oregon and Washington saw huge decreases in the amount of wind power generated during 2015, according to a Thursday report by the Energy Information Administration.

The only major state to see large increases in its wind…

As it was 700 million years ago: good job things warmed up a little.

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When we see the term ‘AGW’, we understand those that propound it to hold “global warming” as an irrefutable fact. It is, however, a theory with which there is only one problem: and that’s the evidence.

Even the most hysterical have been forced to accept the fact that global surface temperatures have not budged for 18 years, despite human generated CO2 emissions increasing at a rollicking rate: generally referred to as “the pause”. One recent piece STT read on the topic takes us back to our childhood with warnings about, wait for it, another looming ice age:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/chances-of-little-ice-age-on-rise/story-e6frg6xf-1227415254811

And it’s the lack of evidence for global warming that appears to have shifted the terminology to “climate change”: a tautology if ever there was one.

Of course, the climate “changes” – change is endogenous…

Over-run by these things, faced with thousand of furious neighbours demanding an end to the onslaught, and spiralling power costs, Poland has mounted an enormous about face: where wind power was the flavour of the month for a year or two, it’s about to be targeted with an outright ban.

WARNING: in following this piece you’ll need to turn your volume down – the howling from the wind industry’s parasites and the eco-fascist cheer squad, Greenpeace soon becomes deafening.

Poland’s New Right-Wing Rulers Want To Effectively Ban Wind Power
Fastcoexist
Charlie Sorrel
21 April 2016

Every politician has a price, and the wind industry has the uncanny ability of naming it and, when the need arises, stumping it up.

Not necessarily in brown paper bags, though – so-called ‘political donations’ often do the ‘trick’. But there have been plenty of cases where outright bribery has been employed to put the wind industry where it needs to be, politically speaking (see our post here).

Now, it would remiss not to point out that corruption pervades the business/political world in general, but there’s something about the wind industry that makes political ‘grease’ an essential part of its existence. And which generates a particular kind of stench that will easily outlast religion.

The critical need for bribes and donations probably has something to do with the fact that what’s on sale has NO commercial value, save the massive and seemingly endless subsidies these things attract.

The…