The Truth About Wind Turbine Noise… Waubra Foundation

August 7, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Turbine Noise: a simple statement of facts

Emission of Sound and Vibration

Note: ILFN = infrasound and low-frequency noise.

1. Wind turbine blades produce airborne pressure waves (correctly called sound but which, when unwanted, is called noise) and ground-borne surface motion (vibration).

2. Recent measurements have indicated that turbines generate vibrations even when shut down,[1] presumably from the wind causing the flexing of large blades and the tower structure, and that this vibration (when turbines are shut down) can be measured at significant distances.

3. The airborne energy manifests as sound across a range of frequencies from infrasonic (0–20 Hertz [Hz]) up through low-frequency sound (generally said to be below 200 Hz), and into the higher audible frequency range above 200 Hz. (Hertz is the variation in a particular changing level of sound pressure, as the rate of cycles [or period] per second).

4. Sound at 100 Hz is audible at sound levels of around 27dB (decibels) for an average person, whilst the level of sound required for average audibility rises quite quickly below frequencies of, say, 25 Hz. Sensation, being non-auditory but bodily recognition of airborne pressure waves, occurs at lower pressure levels of infrasonic frequencies than can be heard. At infrasonic frequencies the “sounds,” i.e., pressure waves, exist and may be detected by the body and brain as pressure pulses or sensations, but via different mechanisms than the perception of audible noise.

5. Periodic pressure pulses are created by each turbine blade passing the supporting pylon. This is an inherent consequence of the design of horizontal axis wind turbines. These energy pulses increase with increasing blade length, as does the power generating capacity. People living near turbines have described the effect of these pulses on their homes as “like living inside a drum”.

6. Larger turbines produce a greater percentage of their total sound emissions as low-frequency noise and infrasound than do smaller turbines.[2] Therefore replacing a number of small turbines with a lesser number of larger turbines, whilst keeping the total power output of a wind project constant, will increase the total ILFN emitted by the development. This effect will be compounded by increased wake interference, unless the turbines have also been repositioned further apart in accordance with the spacing specifications for the larger turbines. Wake interference results in turbulent air flow into adjacent turbines, with a consequent loss of efficiency, and increased ILFN generation.

7. If estimated sound contours have been used in seeking planning permits, then replacing the permitted turbines with larger turbines will significantly increase the persistence of the wake turbulence, and thereby the sound emitted by adjacent turbines (and the proportion of ILFN emitted) will be significantly above the predicted contours. This is what occurred at the Waubra development, and will occur when a lesser number of larger turbines are used to maintain the generating capacity of the development, as occurred at Macarthur (both projects being in Western Victoria).

Infrasound

1. Infrasound is common in our world, but most natural infrasound is irregular and random, or is caused by a transient event (e.g. earthquakes). Some frequency bands below 20 Hz have been shown experimentally to cause a physiological stress response in humans at below audible levels.[3] Industrial machinery noises are often regular and repetitive, as is the case with wind farm noise emissions, across the audible and infrasonic frequency spectrum.

2. Infrasonic pulsations travel much larger distances than audible noise and easily penetrate normal building materials, and once inside can resonate building elements (i.e., increase in impact inside rooms).[4]

3. Infrasonic pulsations from a single 4 MW wind turbine were measured 10km from their source by NASA researcher William Willshire in 1985.[5] Recent data collected by acoustician Les Huson in Australia and in the United Kingdom at onshore and offshore wind developments has shown that attenuation (reduction in sound level with increasing distance from the source) can be much less than the 3dB per doubling of distance found by Willshire in 1985.[6]

4. Some acoustic pressure pulsations are relatively harmless and indeed even pleasant to the body, including waves on a beach. Organ music at frequencies just below 20 Hz generates “feelings” in people that can be either pleasant or unpleasant, and has been designed to produce emotive effects.[7] Once it is understood that different frequencies can have very different effects on humans, it is easy to understand the importance of accurate acoustic measurement.

5. Dr Neil Kelley and his colleagues from NASA demonstrated in the 1980’s that wind turbine–generated energy pulses and noise in the infrasonic and low-frequency bands, which then penetrated and resonated inside the residents’ living structures, directly caused the range of symptoms described as “annoyance” by acousticians and some researchers.[8] A more accurate general descriptor would be mild, serious or intolerable “impacts”.

6. Residents and their treating medical practitioners know these symptoms and sensations include repetitive sleep disturbance, feelings of intense anxiety, nausea, vertigo, headaches, and other distressing symptoms including body vibration. American Paediatrician Dr Nina Pierpont gave this constellation of symptoms the name “wind turbine syndrome” in 2009.[9] Dr Geoff Leventhall, a British acoustician who was one of two peer reviewers of the NHMRC’s 2010 Rapid Review, has accepted these symptoms and sensations as “annoyance” symptoms, which he attributes to a stress effect, known to him to be caused by exposure to environmental noise, one source of which is wind turbine noise.[10]

Wake Interference and Turbulence

1. Historically it was accepted that wind turbines should be no less than 5–8 rotor diameters apart, depending on the direction and consistency of the prevailing wind, with the higher separation being for turbines in line with the major wind direction. This was accepted industry practice and, as an example, was explicitly specified in the 2002 NSW SEDA handbook.[11] The purpose of this specification is to minimise turbulent air entering the blades of an adjacent turbine. As noted above, turbulent air is associated with increased sound levels and infrasonic pulsations.[12]

2. If a significant proportion of the wind blows at a right angle (90°) from the major direction used for turbine layout it follows that turbine spacing should be 7 or 8 rotor diameters in both directions. It should be noted that the 7–8 rotor diameters number is a compromise between ensuring smooth air inflow to all turbines (and hence less noise and vibration) and packing as many turbines as possible into the project area. Research conducted at Johns Hopkins University in 2012 showed that the best design for efficient energy extraction suggests wind turbines should be 15 rotor diameters apart.[13]

3. It is increasingly evident that some projects are not laid out in accordance with accepted specifications to reduce turbulence, which in turn significantly increases acoustic emissions including audible noise and infrasonic pressure pulses. The consequences of increased turbulent air entering upwind-bladed wind turbines resulting in increased generation of impulsive infrasonic pressure waves and low-frequency noise were known to the industry in 1989.[14] Recent projects with turbines positioned inappropriately too close together should not have been given final approval by the responsible authorities.

4. Yawing (side to side movement of the blades caused by minor wind direction changes) is also known to increase wake interference.

Transmission of Energy Pulses

1. Information on the different attenuative and penetrative properties of infrasound and audible sound are discussed above.

2. Topography, wind speed, wind direction, wind shear, and ambient temperature will also have an impact on noise emissions and how that sound travels.

Noise Guidelines for Turbines

1. Many acoustic consultants and senior acousticians have known that wind turbines produce pulsatile ILFN as the blades pass the tower. It was common knowledge in the 1980’s, from research conducted by Dr Neil Kelley [15] and NASA researchers such as Harvey Hubbard,[16] that the pulsatile infrasound generated by a single downwind-bladed wind turbine and other sources of ILFN such as military aircraft and gas fired turbines penetrated buildings, amplified and resonated inside the building structures, and directly caused “annoyance” symptoms including repetitive sleep disturbance.[17]

2. Long-term sleep disturbance and chronic stress symptoms (accepted as “annoyance” symptoms), are well known to medical practitioners and clinical researchers to damage human health. Dr Kelley was quoted in 2013 as advising that the conclusions from his research in the 1980’s were equally relevant to modern turbine designs,[18] and this seems to have been confirmed in the preliminary results of acoustic measurements commissioned by Pacific Hydro and conducted by acoustician Steven Cooper at the Cape Bridgewater (Victoria) development.[19]

3. The New Zealand and Australian Noise Standards for wind projects were written by the then uninformed planning authorities. They were based on the UK ETSU 97 standard, also an uninformed document.[20,21]

4. Despite information being available from the Kelley research in 1985 specifying recommended exposure levels of ILFN which should not be exceeded,[22] the respective Australian guidelines only specified limits for audible, filtered, sound levels expressed as dBA outside homes; so there are no recommended limits or requirements to forecast, or to measure, ILFN levels or vibration inside homes neighbouring wind projects.

5. Permitted sound levels across most Australian States for all industrial equipment are background noise levels plus 5dBA or 35dBA whichever is less, whereas for wind turbines they are background plus 5dBA or 40dBA whichever is more. There is no scientific evidence or reason for this difference. An increase of 5dBA represents an approximate doubling of the sound level. Most rural environments have a background noise level of 18dBA to 25dBA, approximately averaging 22dBA at night. This represents a huge increase in audible sound. Increases of 10dBA at night are long known by acoustic consultants to raise complaints, and increases of 15–20dB are associated with widespread complaints and legal action. Averaging measured levels of sound across too-wide frequency bands also allows the hiding of sound pressure (level) peaks to which the ear responds, understating the true extent of facility noise emission levels.

6. World Health Organisation (WHO) Night Noise Guidelines for Europe quoted the 1999 WHO Community Noise Guidelines: “If negative effects on sleep are to be avoided the equivalent sound pressure level should not exceed 30 dBA indoors for continuous noise”.[23] Cities have a higher background noise than country areas. Denmark limits indoor noise from industrial sources, including wind turbines, to a maximum of 20 dBA at night.[24]

7. The currently permitted outdoor noise level in New Zealand and some Australian states has been ameliorated somewhat by the addition of a deduction of 5dBA from the 40dBA limit to allow for especially quiet environments.

8. History has shown that these Australian guidelines were based on ETSU 97 from the UK, and were expressly designed to encourage development of the wind industry, not to protect the health of rural residents from wind turbine noise. Predictably, because the Kelley criteria limiting exposure to impulsive ILFN were ignored,[25] these guidelines have turned out to be completely unsafe.

9. It is therefore necessary to predict and measure sound pressure levels across the full spectrum of frequencies in order to predict and control sound energy impacts on project neighbours.

Compliance with Permitted Noise Conditions

There are several problems associated with validating compliance.

1. Compliance is generally carried out by an acoustician or acoustics consultancy, paid directly by the owner or operator of the project. In one case a wind turbine manufacturer has contracted the acousticians directly, making the results even more questionable.

2. Compliance is of utmost importance to all parties with a financial interest in the development, but it is critical to families that neighbour the projects.

3. There are many ways that data measurements can be rigged (faux compliance): measuring instruments placed under trees or too close to buildings; waiting for optimum weather and wind conditions; not measuring for long enough continuously, recording in octave bands that are too broad and other averaging techniques. Operators may also reduce operational noise by reducing power output (with blade angle changes and slowed rotation) to reduce the noise during the monitoring period. Operators may also refuse to provide wind turbine facility operating data from test periods, claiming that it is “commercial in confidence”, thus making it impossible to verify actual operating conditions.

4. It would therefore be both appropriate and necessary for all projects to have their compliance independently audited.

5. Sufferers will not escape disturbance to their sleep and damage to their health even if a project is properly compliant with its permit conditions and noise guidelines, as preliminary findings of the acoustic survey commissioned by Pacific Hydro, conducted by Steven Cooper, have recently demonstrated.[26]

6. A compliant project may still cause damage to neighbours for numerous reasons. First, the standard refers to dBA only and thereby omits reference to ILFN; and second, even with regard to audible noise, the standard refers to a maximum of 40dBA outdoors, whereas every other form of industrial or other noise in country and city is limited to 35dBA maximum. There is no technical basis for such an aberration, and it is clearly (intended or not) discriminatory. Third, in quiet rural environments, even 35dBA will be intrusive and loud if the background level is below 25dBA, which is not uncommon. The ear responds to the peaks of sound levels, not the averages. The wind turbine noise standards all refer only to averages, and exclude ILFN, and do not account for the human response, so cannot protect people from predictable serious harm to their health.

Notes:

Climate Alarmists Stubbornly Refuse to Face Reality…

August 7, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

‘Hoodwinking the Nation’ on climate issues

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Anthony Watts

Guest essay by Charles Battig, M.D. VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment

American popular culture has scattered nuggets of perceived wisdom. In order to understand and perhaps explain our continuing frustration with getting more of the American public and politicians to accept the reality of climate issues, I invoke “Cool Hand Luke.” In that 1967 film the prison warden tells Luke: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach…”

Both short statements encapsulate the problem of getting out and accepted the scientifically validated climate information labored over by so many at this site and at other similar sites. Both the mainstream press and government officials are particular challenges. The public-at-large seems to be getting the message that our weather events are not deserving of prime-time concern.

The media loves an attention grabbing headline too much to concede the climate panic button re-set for any event, real or imagined. Our political ruling class and its corporate sycophants are entwined in a mad love and financial embrace that validates “love is blind.” They are blind to any facts of climate research that might threaten their profitable symbiotic relationship.

This conundrum of effective communication of validated scientific fact became of great concern and dismay to Julian Simon. “Hoodwinking the Nation” (1999) was Julian’s last published book, and is just 140 pages.

He was the eternal optimist which made him a rare bird amongst those of the “dismal profession.” Perhaps he is best remembered to the general public for his 1980 wager with Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich had insisted that a basket of commodities would become more expensive over the next ten years because they would become scarcer as increased global population depleted natural reserves. Simon bet the opposite. His inherent optimism reasoned that more people meant more opportunities for new discoveries which would result in cheaper costs of exploration and extraction. For him, people and their potential discoveries were the “Ultimate Resource.” Fortuitously, Simon won the bet.

In “Hoodwinking the Nation,” Julian describes his successful 1980’s effort to debunk the prevalent claim of the day that urbanization of U.S. farmland was creating a potential shortage of food for the U.S. and its food exports. By 1984, Julian’s analysis of the government’s own data showed that there was no such thing as a vanishing farmland crisis…it was all a scam. The Soil Conservation Service, the National Agricultural Lands Study, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture all reversed their earlier scarcity claims. Julian was proved correct, yet the press “did nothing to uncover the scam.” In the section, “A postmortem,” Julian describes his attempt to understand this lack of interest by the press to publicize the factual good news. His finding: “When shown the facts, these journalists usually say that even if cries of an environmental danger are somewhat overblown, they contain the germ of truth.” I think that this reality is still valid today. The media are pre-disposed to look for “false bad news” or to fabricate it to catch a headline.

The remainder of the book attempts to define and explain this whole phenomenon of good news being crowded out by false bad news. Why is the public pre-disposed to believe things are getting worse, even if facts prove otherwise? Some chapter headings identify the dilemma: “Chapter 1: What Do Americans Wrongly Believe about Environment, Resources, and Population,” “Chapter 4: Why Does the Public Not Hear Sound Environmental Thinkers?” “Chapter 9: How Psychology Affects the Evaluation of Trends,” and “Chapter 10: Why Do We Hear Prophecies of Doom from Every Side?”

These same questions and his answers are just as timely today as writers here and elsewhere lament the fact that they have won the scientific climate debates fairly at numerous climate conferences and conventions, yet the press and politicians, as well as competing academics, refuse to acknowledge their findings. In the contests of political propaganda, emotional appeals have an unfair, but proven advantage over scientific facts. Parents and politicians succumb to images of cute children waving “clean air’ banners. Do not think that arguments centered on climate sensitivity, relative risk, and negative feedback loops will prevail in that arena.

It is encouraging that the public-at-large has continued to rank “climate change issues” at the bottom of possible concerns, and so there is hope that persistent repetition of verifiable facts is finding receptive ears. The Internet was not yet prime-time in Julian’s day, but now it provides an end-run about a mainstream media intent on scares and not science.

So “Cool Hand Luke,” we have come a long way with the ability to communicate. However, we have yet to conquer the: “some men you just can’t reach…” Significant progress there rests upon voting out of office those we cannot reach by reason alone.

Climate Alarmism is a Threat to Modern Society!

August 7, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

THE IGNORANCE OF CLIMATE ALARMISM

Date: 07/08/14
Doug Hoffman, The Resilient Earth

There is no shortage of “experts” who gleefully back up claims of climate induced catastrophe—some with scholarly gravitas, others with fanatical shrillness. And the list of false and debunked claims goes on and on.

One of the sad side effects of the global warming climate scam is the way otherwise fairly intelligent people have been snookered into believing the dumbest things. An example in point: in a world where millions die each year due to malnutrition, US Secretary John Kerry lectured African leaders attending a summit in Washington that creating more farms in Africa causes too much carbon pollution. Can you imagine the response of any national leader, being told he must let his people starve because a bunch of rich nation, ivory tower science boffins have this unproven, wild idea that CO₂ might cause the world to warm by a degree or two a hundred years from now? This is the type of imbecility that comes from following a pernicious untruth down a rabbit hole of false assumptions. Yet around the globe people seem defenseless against the infectious ignorance that is climate alarmism.

According to reports, Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience that “8,000 children die every day” and in sub-Sahara Africa, one in four suffer from chronic hunger. Then a few minutes later, he stressed how creating new farms would cause too much carbon pollution so they need to discourage more farm land. What abject moron can truly believe that curing hunger in Africa today can be accomplished by fighting unproven global warming in the far future? At the same time Kerry revealed the administration’s top priority for Russia: reducing greenhouse gases, not the 8,000 additional Russian troops massing on the Ukraine border. At least he is a consistent fool.

Another example, not coincidentally from the Obama administration, was the release of a YouTube video linking the California wildfires to climate change. According to the Washington Post newspaper: “The administration released a video Tuesday aimed at clarifying the link between climate change and one of the most tangible products of climate change: wildfires. Wildfires have been an increasing topic of conversation on Capitol Hill, thanks both to the record wildfire years we’ve had this decade and to a strain on funding to fight them.”

The article then goes on to explain the situation in a graphic that shows the situation to not be as described by the administration. Both in terms of number of fires and total acres burned 2014 is far from a record year for wildfire. The graphics below are from the WaPo based on government statistics.

Another major piece of climate alarmist deception is the pronouncement that 2014 has given the world its hottest May and June on record. While California has had the hottest first half of the year in its recent history, North America has actually been colder than normal, and Canberra, Australia, has experienced its coldest stretch in 43 years with four consecutive mornings below -6°C (21°F). Indeed, a review of NASA satellite datarevealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in Antarctica on August 2010 when it hit -135.8°F. Then on July 31 of 2013, it came close again, registering -135.3°F. That is so cold researchers on the southernmost continent reported it hurt to breath.

The record cold has continued this year at the south pole. A report from Meteo France claims that June this year was the coldest Antarctic June ever recorded, at the French Antarctic Dumont d’Urville Station. According to thepress release, during June this year, the average temperature was -22.4c (-8.3F), 6.6c (11.9F) lower than normal. This is the coldest June ever recorded at the station, and almost the coldest monthly average ever – only September 1953 was colder, with a recorded average temperature of -23.5c (-10.3F). Not long ago, alarmists had Antarctica losing it ice-sheet, flooding the world’s oceans.

This has been accompanied by record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice. The ice encircling the southernmost continent is 2.074 million square kilometers as reported by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s The Cryosphere Today. This is shown in the graph below.

But what about those claims that 2014 had the warmist June on record? The answer is where and how you look at temperatures—surface temperature readings, atmospheric readings from balloons, satellite infrared from different atmospheric layers all give different readings and trends. One consistent set of high precision temperature data is Global Lower Atmosphere collection maintained at the University of Alabama Huntsville. The recent graph issued by Dr. Roy Spenser, shown below, shows that 2014 was far from the hottest summer in the northern hemisphere on record.

Still reports keep coming from the predictably climate alarmist organizations—NASA, NOAA, IPCC, etc.—that claim the world is still warming. Interestingly, even the US’s NOAA and the UK’s Met Office Hadly Centre have published data that document the 17+ year “pause” that has so vexed the global warming true believers. Here is the historical global temperature record as published by the two official sources from the US and the UK.

As can clearly be seen the records are in general agreement historically. Both show a recent halt and even decline in the warming trend. So why do certain groups report otherwise? It is a mater of faith, the triumph of global warming religion over true science. The all purpose cause for any climate or weather related clamity has become climate change. This can be seen every day in any news medium—TV, print, on the Internet. For example, the number of bad weather events reported by news services has gone up tremendously over the last century, supposedly due to climate change. But is this true? Resoundingly no.

Consider tornadoes in the US. If you listen to the reporters on the Weather Channel or any other 24 hour news service the US is suffering from a plague of twisters, chewing up the Midwest. Indeed the number of tornadoes has risen as has the damage they cause. Why this increase in reported events has taken place is made clear by NOAA:

One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.

In short, more people report more tornadoes, simply by being there. In actuality, there is no trend in tornado activity over the past 80 years or so. Neither the number of events nor their intensity have increased. Actual data from NOAA is shown below.

Storm damage has increased in absolute terms for similar reasons. Not only are there more people present to observe tornadoes there is now more property to be damage or destroyed by these violent weather events. As can be seen from the chart below, if the damage amounts are normalized the claimed rise in storm damage disappears.

The same is true of all the other climate induced catastrophes predicted by the alarmists. The US is in a historical hurricane drought that has lasted more than 8 years with no major storm making landfall. Such a streak is unprecedented going back to 1900. The previous longest span is about 2½ years shorter!

Reportedly, more of the US is in drought or sever drought that before in recorded history, but the record used is only 12 years old. If historical records are used the current drought is not unusual or even noteworthy. The residents of California may be complaining but they chose to live in a state that frequently experiences droughts (and wildfires, earthquakes and mudslides).

Also widely reported is the claim that islands in the far-flung corners of the world’s oceans are in imminent danger of sliding permanently beneath the waves like a bevy of modern day Atlantises. As reported in the journal Science:

Paul Kench, a geomorphologist who now heads the University of Auckland’s School of Environment in New Zealand, was the first to question the dire forecasts for Kiribati and similar island nations. In 1999, the World Bank asked him to evaluate the economic costs of sea-level rise and climate change to Pacific island nations. Kench, who had been studying how atoll islands evolve over time, says he had assumed that a rising ocean would engulf the islands, which consist of sand perched on reefs. “That’s what everyone thought, and nobody questioned it,” he says. But when he scoured the literature, he could not find a single study to support that scenario.

And the list of false and debunked claims goes on and on. Part of the blame for all these faux catastrophes rests squarely on the news media. Operating under the old adage, “if it bleeds it leads,” the mindless vultures of the world’s news agencies flock to report any calamity, more than happy to attributed the event to climate change. Instead of registering guns, governments should register cameras and microphones—they are truly dangerous weapons in the hands of the breathtakingly ignorant members of the fourth estate.

Without Their Lies & Exaggerations, No one Would Fall for The Wind Scam

August 7, 2014August 7, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Wind Industry is based on a Central, Endlessly Repeated Lie

August 7, 2014 by stopthesethings

Lunacy on sea: As Ministers agree to the world’s biggest wind farm off Brighton, has Britain ever succumbed to a more catastrophic folly?
The Daily Mail
Christopher Booker
2 August 2014

What should be our reaction to daft stories like the one recently reported in the Daily Mail about the 60ft wind turbine put up by the Welsh government outside its offices in Aberystwyth to proclaim to the world just how ‘green’ it is?

Erected at a cost of £50,000 to the taxpayer, it turned out that this turbine was so absurdly inefficient it was providing only £5 worth of electricity a month. It would take more than 750 years to make the money back.

In recent years, we have seen plenty of little tales like this, showing how often those who build these mini-turbines just to promote the wonders of wind power seem to get horribly caught out.

There was, for instance, the windmill put up next to a school in Portland, Dorset, which had to be switched off because it was killing so many seagulls that the headmaster had to come in early every morning to remove their corpses, so the children wouldn’t be upset.

There were the turbines built next to the playgrounds of 16 schools in the north of Scotland, which had be shut down for ‘health and safety’ reasons after the blades of one flew off in a mere 40 mph wind – when, fortunately, no children were in range.

Then, of course, there was that babyish little windmill David Cameron wanted to put on the roof of his £2.7million Notting Hill home in West London. It would have provided enough current to power four low-energy light bulbs – but, fortunately, it provoked such protests from his neighbours that it was never heard of again.

On one level, we may find stories like this darkly comical. But it is time we stood back to take a more grown-up look at the very much larger and more serious picture of just where we are being taken by this infatuation with wind turbines, which lie at the very centre of our national energy policy.

Today, we already have more than 5,000 giant turbines, with 25,000 smaller versions.

They are proliferating so fast that from Cornwall to Caithness, East Anglia to Cumbria, hundreds of local protest groups have sprung up to say ‘enough is enough’.

But the crucial objection to this obsession with wind farms is not just that they disfigure our beautiful countryside or kill shocking numbers of bird and bats.

In purely practical terms, the real issue must surely be that they are so astonishingly useless at achieving what they are supposed to do. Put all those 5,000 giant turbines together and their combined output still averages less than that of our single largest coal-fired power station.

The obvious reason for this – though our politicians will never admit it – is that the wind is the most inefficient means of producing electricity ever devised, because it blows so variably and unpredictably.

In fact, the whole case for wind farms is based on a central, endlessly repeated lie.

This is the way in which its propagandists invariably talk about them only in terms of their ‘capacity’, by which they mean the amount of electricity they could produce if the wind was blowing at optimal speed 24 hours a day.

We are told about ‘capacity’ all the time – by the wind industry, politicians such as Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, the BBC and even the pages of Wikipedia.

But the truth is that, thanks to the wind’s unreliability, they will produce on average only between a quarter and a third of their ‘capacity’.

Often, indeed, when we need electricity the most, on freezing, windless days in mid-winter, they produce virtually no electricity at all.

Furthermore, far from providing us, as we’re told, with unlimited clean, green, free, planet-saving energy, wind farms are not just inefficient. They are also so ludicrously impractical that if we weren’t all forced to subsidise them to the tune of billions of pounds through our electricity bills, no one would ever dream of building them.

A cursory glance at the economics of the ‘smaller’ 100 ft-plus windmills and the giant turbines in massive wind farms illustrates my point.

When I looked at one of these smaller ones the other day, near where I live in Somerset, I was astonished to discover that, though it is 120 ft and would have cost at least £250,000 to install, it only has the ‘capacity’ to generate a maximum of 50 kilowatts at any given moment.

But allowing for the vagaries of the wind, its actual output will average a mere 13 kilowatts – barely enough to boil four kettles – at any one time.

Yet, for this, the owners can expect to receive £24,000 a year, of which a staggering £17,500 will be subsidy, paid for by all of us through our electricity bills.

The sums for giant turbines are just as shocking. Earlier this month, Mr Davey gave the go-ahead to his latest monster project, to build the largest wind farm in the world just off the Sussex coast, right opposite Brighton.

Davey gave the German energy firm E.on the green light to spend £2 billion on building 100 or more colossal turbines up to 700 ft tall, nearly 200 ft higher than the Blackpool Tower.

The ‘Rampion’ wind farm (so named, in yet another propaganda exercise, by the children of a Sussex primary school) will cover more than 60 square miles of the English Channel.

As even its developers say on their website, it will be visible all the way from Beachy Head to the Isle of Wight.

This mighty forest of turbines, we are told, will supply to the national grid ‘700 megawatts’ of power, enough to heat and light ‘450,000 homes’.

Yet, in truth, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, their actual output – as E.on’s own website admits in very small print – will be lucky to reach 240 megawatts, a third of that figure.

Even for this, E.on can hope to earn £325 million a year. Yet, shockingly, more than two-thirds of that sum, £220 million a year, will be paid by all of us in subsidies.

To see just how crazy this is in money terms, we can compare E.on’s wind farm with our latest large gas-fired power station, opened two years ago by another German firm, RWE, at Pembroke in south Wales.

Its capital cost was £1billion, half that of the wind farm. But, in return for that, the gas-fired plant can be relied on to generate nearly ten times as much electricity, 2000 megawatts, 24 hours of every day.

For that constantly available supply of power, even taking into account the price of gas compared with wind power which is free, the cost is £50 per megawatt hour. While for the wildly unreliable supply we shall get from Mr Davey’s monster wind farm, it is £155 per megawatt hour, more than three times as much.

This is the kind of mad mathematics I come across all the time when taking a hard look at the price we are increasingly having to pay for what I have called the great wind scam.

It’s this weird delusion that we can base more and more of our national electricity supply on subsidising ever more grotesquely expensive wind farms.

It is a course we first seriously embarked on in 2003 under Tony Blair. In 2008, Gordon Brown boasted that he wanted us to spend £100billion on wind farms.

It was a claim echoed by Chris Huhne, Davey’s Coalition predecessor as Energy secretary, who talked of how we would need to build as many as 30,000 turbines to achieve a government target, six times as many as we have now.

The reason why all our politicians feel they must aim for such recklessly ambitious targets is that, in 2007, Tony Blair agreed with his EU colleagues that Britain would, by 2020, be producing 15 per cent of our energy from ‘renewables’, such as wind power.

But Blair was so technically illiterate in making this pledge that he did not realise what he was letting us in for.

Because much of our energy, such as the gas we use to cook and heat our buildings, cannot be sourced from renewables, he was committing us to produce nearly a third of our electricity – 32 per cent – from renewables. And most of it had to come from wind power.

This was a far greater jump than that required from other EU members, which were already producing much more of their power from renewables such as hydro-electric schemes.

In practice, there is no conceivable way we could hope to achieve Huhne’s plan for 30,000 turbines. It would mean building 11 giant ones every day for the next six years, which is completely out of the question.

But that has not prevented Mr Davey and his colleagues from trying. And, in doing so, they are offering the mainly foreign-owned firms that build those wind farms subsidies which are higher than those available anywhere else in the world.

For onshore turbines, Davey is prepared to give wind farm owners a subsidy of nearly 100 per cent on top of the market rate for electricity.

However, subsidies for electricity provided by offshore wind farms is now more than twice as much – which is why firms from Germany, France, Sweden and other countries have been rushing to cash in on Britain’s unique subsidy bonanza.

But all this creates yet another huge practical problem that Mr Davey does his best to keep from public view. This is the fact that the more wind farms those subsidies call into being, the more we must look to conventional power stations to provide back-up for whenever the wind speed varies.

At the moment, by far the cheapest source of electricity is coal, still providing more than a third of our power and costing six times less than what we get from Mr Davey’s subsidised offshore wind farms.

But Mr Davey and his predecessors have been steadily closing down what they see as those dreadful, polluting, CO2-emitting coal-fired power stations – and the ones that remain are not flexible enough to provide the instant back-up needed to keep our lights on whenever the wind drops.

The more wind farms we build, the more we will need gas-fired power stations to provide that instantly available back-up, not just to keep our lights on but to keep our computer-dependent economy running at all.

And guess who is going to have to pay to keep those gas-fired plants permanently and expensively running on stand-by for when they are needed, chucking out more of Mr Davey’s hated CO2 than is saved by all his wind farms? We are, of course, through our electricity bills.

We are looking here at the makings of a national catastrophe: one that will not just push our electricity bills through the roof, but could well lead to major power cuts and blackouts.

This will be the price we pay for a bout of collective insanity over renewable energy, for which it is hard to think of any historical parallel. It truly is time we woke up to the reality of where this crazed obsession with wind turbines is leading us.

Rather like the mammoth new Rampion offshore wind farm, when it comes to our policy on wind farms, Britain really is all at sea.
The Daily Mail

More Evidence That Global Warming is Not Caused by Humans….

August 6, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

A 3,000-Year Record of Solar Activity

Reference
Usoskin, I.G., Hulot, G., Gallet, Y., Roth, R., Licht, A., Joos, F., Kovaltsov, G.A., Thebault, E. and Khokhlov, A. 2014. Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity. Astronomy and Astrophysics 562: L10, doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201423391.

What was done
According to Usoskin et al. (2014), the Sun “shows strong variability in its magnetic activity, from Grand minima to Grand maxima, but the nature of the variability is not fully understood, mostly because of the insufficient length of the directly observed solar activity records and of uncertainties related to long-term reconstructions.” Now, however, in an attempt to overcome such uncertainties, in a Letter to the Editor published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, Usoskin et al. “present the first fully adjustment-free physical reconstruction of solar activity” covering the past 3,000 years, which record allowed them “to study different modes of solar activity at an unprecedented level of detail.”

What was learned
As illustrated in the figure below, the authors report there is “remarkable agreement” among the overlapping years of their reconstruction (solid black line) and the number of sunspots recorded from direct observations since 1610 (red line). Their reconstruction of solar activity also displays several “distinct features,” including several “well-defined Grand minima of solar activity, ca. 770 BC, 350 BC, 680 AD, 1050 AD, 1310 AD, 1470 AD, and 1680 AD,” as well as “the modern Grand maximum (which occurred during solar cycles 19-23, i.e., 1950-2009),” which they describe as “a rare or even unique event, in both magnitude and duration, in the past three millennia.”

Figure 1. Reconstructed decadal average of sunspot numbers for the period 1150 BC-1950 AD (black line). The 95% confidence interval is shown by the gray shading and directly measured sunspot numbers are shown in red. The horizontal dashed lines demark the bounds of the three suggested modes (Grand Minimum, Regular, and Grand Maximum) as defined by Usoskin et al.

Further statistical analysis of their reconstruction revealed the Sun operates in three distinct modes of activity – (1) a regular mode that “corresponds to moderate activity that varies in a relatively narrow band between sunspot numbers 20 and 67,” (2) a Grand minimum mode of reduced solar activity that “cannot be explained by random fluctuations of the regular mode” and which “is confirmed at a high confidence level,” and (3), a possible Grand maximum mode, but they say that “the low statistic does not allow us to firmly conclude on this, yet.”

What it means
Usoskin et al. (2014) write their results “provide important constraints for both dynamo models of Sun-like stars and investigations of possible solar influence on Earth’s climate.” They also illustrate the importance of improving the quality of such reconstructions, in light of the fact that previous reconstructions of this nature “did not reveal any clear signature of distinct modes” in solar activity.

Unfortunately, it was beyond the scope of this paper to address the potential impact of solar activity on climate. Yet the reconstruction leaves a very big question unanswered — What effect did the Grand maximum of solar activity that occurred between 1950 and 2009 have on Earth’s climate? As a “unique” and “rare” event in terms of both magnitude and duration, one would think a lot more time and effort would be spent by the IPCC and others in answering that question. Instead, IPCC scientists have conducted relatively few studies of the Sun’s influence on modern warming, assuming that the temperature influence of this rare and unique Grand maximum of solar activity, which has occurred only once in the past 3,000 years, is far inferior to the radiative power provided by the rising CO2 concentration of the Earth’s atmosphere.

More Proof that Wind Turbine Syndrome is REAL!

August 6, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Pac Hydro’s Cape Bridgewater Wind Farm Victims Vindicated

August 6, 2014 by stopthesethings

Headache for residents after monitoring reveals bad vibes
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
2 August 2014

FOR the past two months, Melissa Ware’s 150-year-old stone-foundation house in the shadow of the Cape Bridgewater wind farm in Victoria has been wired to monitor sounds that cannot be heard easily by the human ear.

Ware, who is partially deaf, and two nearby families have kept a diary of the physical sensations they were experiencing at regular intervals. A scorecard was developed ranking three factors — noise, vibration and sensation — on a scale of one to five.

The research has been funded by wind farm owner Pacific Hydro and undertaken by acoustics specialist Steven Cooper, who has had a long interest in why wind turbines have produced so many health complaints that defy easy explanation.

For six years, since the wind turbines started operating at Cape Bridgewater, Ware has complained of headaches and other “pressure” effects she can attribute only to the arrival of the renewable energy project she once had supported enthusiastically.

The early results from comparing the readings from Cooper’s highly sensitive microphones and Ware’s diary notes provide uncomfortable evidence for the wind industry and some relief for Ware, told for six years that her problems were all in her head.

During the eight-week trials at Cape Bridgewater, from inside her house, Ware has been able to express with 100 per cent accuracy what is happening with the wind turbines outside.

In a report-back meeting to residents and the company, Cooper posed the theory that high sensations, including headaches and chest pains, correlated to times when the turbine blades were not efficiently aligned to the wind.

The results from recordings and residents’ diaries show that a change in power output of more than 20 per cent leads to a change in sensation for the residents.

“The main thing I get from the study is that there is a direct correlation from the noise coming out of the wind farm and the response in my body to that noise,” Ware says. “I have a bilateral hearing impairment, and I don’t always hear from the wind farm, but I feel it from the ground, the floor or the furniture I am sitting on.”

Cooper has said the Pacific Hydro Cape Bridgewater development complies with existing noise guidelines. Issues of ambient noise from waves on surrounding cliffs and wind direction also are relevant in the data.

Pacific Hydro has published the minutes of the report-back meetings and Cooper’s preliminary findings but has drawn no public conclusions. Company spokesman Andrew Richards says Cooper’s work has “resulted in some interesting data” but “doesn’t necessarily provide any conclusions or outcomes”.

But Richards acknowledges there is a problem. “Whatever they are experiencing is real for them,” he says.

University of Sydney public health specialist Simon Chapman has used the term “nocebo” to argue that the complaints are psychosomatic and exacerbated by warnings from anti-wind farm groups.

In a new paper, Chapman says “The statement that ‘more than 40’ houses have been ‘abandoned’ because of wind turbines in Australia is a factoid promoted by wind farm opponents for dramatic, rhetorical impact.”

A review by the National Health and Medical Research Council says there is “no consistent evidence that adverse health effects are caused by exposure to wind turbine noise”.

However, it says: “While no research has directly addressed the association between infrasound from wind turbines and health effects, the possibility of such an association cannot be excluded on present evidence.”

Concerned residents in Australia want the federal government to use Cooper’s research methodology at Cape Bridgewater as the basis for an independent study that has been promised by Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane.
The Australian

Steven Cooper is yet to analyse the mountain of data he has collected, but a snapshot of his initial findings can be found in the presentation he gave Cape Bridgewater’s long-suffering residents a couple of weeks back: pdf available here. Here’s a summary of his preliminary findings:

Initial Findings

Discussions revealed different impacts on residents – broken down to noise, vibration and sensation to be reported on a 1 – 5 severity scale.
Developed a method of graphically displaying results where blue is noise, green is vibration and red is sensation
When plotting power output of wind farms the initial assessment could not correlate results with observations except for showing changes
Found residents were just reporting changes they noticed in their perceived impacts. MAJOR FINDING
Changed reporting to give regular (1 – 2 hr) observations not just changes.
Plotting the observations versus the power output of the wind farm found correlation with some of the various acoustic indices INSIDE the dwellings.
High sensation levels related to turbines just starting, change in power levels by say more than 20% (either up or down) and when wind exceeds maximum power output and blades are being de-powered.
Correlation of external background level versus power output but no correlation of observations with the external dB(A) level.
Issue of ambient noise from waves on cliff/ocean and wind direction is relevant in data.

Preliminary Findings to Date

The use of dB(A) noise levels external to a dwelling have no correlation with internal noise levels or impacts that residents identified as occurring as a result of the wind farm.
With the wind farm not in operation the residents indicate that noise, vibration and sensation are all at low severity ratings although there was one resident who clearly has a greater sensitivity than the other residents and is able to identify instances of noise, vibration and sensation that are above a threshold level.
However those instances are of short duration and are not of a constant impact.
There is a direct correlation with the external dB(A) level and the power output of the wind farm.
There is correlation between the power level of the wind farm versus the dB(A)LF level determined inside residential dwellings.
Where the dB(A)LF exceeds 20 dB there is a corresponding identification of noise in the diary observations.
Where the internal measurements reveal the dB(A) L95 is above 20 dB(A) together with the dB(A)LF above 20 and the same time dB(C) above 50dB and the 4 Hz 1/3 octave band above 50dB then there is a higher degree of noise and sensation which would be deemed by the residents as unacceptable.
The higher levels of sensation occur with the qualification of the above indices and also exhibit a noticeable drop in the dB(C) Leq minus dB(A) Leq together with an increase in dB(A) Leq minus dB(A) L95. This may provide a simple tool to identify the need for examination of modulation of characteristics. However it is noted that there are some limitations in normal noise loggers to provide accurate results of the dB(A) Leq and dB(A) L95, due to the noise floor of instrumentation used.
At none of the houses has the dB(G) been above 85 and therefore if that level has taken as the hearing threshold of infrasound then there is no audible infrasound in any of the houses
The presence of the wind turbine signature, which is related to the blade pass frequency and multiple harmonics of that frequency, is readily identified inside dwellings and at times outside dwellings.
The wind turbines signature does not exists when the turbines are not operational.
The use of 1/3 octave band information to compare infrasound generated by turbines and the infrasound in the natural environment does not contain the required information to identify any difference. When supplemented by narrow band analysis of the infrasound region the results clearly show that the natural environment of infrasound has no such periodic patterns.
Electrical interference/surges in mains + very strong winds has created problems with some data collection.
The significant amount of data that is available from the monitoring will require further time for detailed analysis in view of issues that have been raised by the residents during the course of the monitoring and the findings to date.
Analysis of vibration measurements around an inside houses is yet to be undertaken.
Basic material is to be presented looking at the pitch angles etc. during certain time periods for further analysis by Pacific Hydro and its turbine suppliers.
The resident’s observations and identification of sensation separately to vibration and noise indicates that the major source of complaint for the operation of the turbines would appear to be related to sensation rather than noise.

Steven Cooper July 2014

It’s clear then that what people like Melissa Ware are experiencing isn’t a figment of their imaginations; or the product of “scaremongering” by the Waubra Foundation.

The punishment being meted out to people like Melissa leaves them with a choice: stay and suffer; or pack up and leave. Plenty of Australian families have plumped for the latter.

For a rundown on Australian wind farm victims abandoning perfectly good homes see our post here – where Senator John Madigan details the scale of a perfectly avoidable disaster.

Among those who have decided that their long-term health is more important than their homes is another of Pac Hydro’s victims, Sonia Trist (see our post here).

All of this suffering is the direct product of the mandatory RET: no RET, no RECs, no wind farms. The misery being dealt up at Cape Bridgewater on a nightly basis is just another unjustified cost of the most costly and perverse industry welfare scheme ever devised (see our post here).

Almost graciously, Pac Hydro spin doctor Andrew Richards concedes in favour of its victims that: “Whatever they are experiencing is real for them.” Funny about that.

For a little taste of the “reality” of the life brought to Cape Bridgewater by Pac Hydro, cop an earful of the soundtrack to this video (and see our post here).

****

Wind Industry Interested in Saving Themselves, NOT the Birds or Bats!

August 6, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Cameras and radars won’t save the eagles

DTBird only 7% effective when it works, says Norwegian study

PRESS RELEASE
August 4th 2014

Avian radar and video systems are targeting the wind farm market, claiming they are the solution to the turbines’ lethal impact on birds and bats. Save the Eagles International (STEI) and the World Council for Nature (WCFN) wish to alert to the fact that these perceived “solutions” are in fact counterproductive. They will, on the contrary, expand the mortality to important bird habitats and other sensitive areas previously spared by windfarm developers.

The DTBird video system, to name one, consists of a sound-warning device linked to four daylight video-cameras installed on the tower of each wind turbine, covering in principle all angles up to 150 meters away, and 50% to 300 meters (1). This system works only during daylight hours, so it is of no use for saving bats, migrating songbirds (which travel by night to avoid over-heating), and other useful creatures like owls.

Yet, wind turbines kill owls by the thousand – e.g. about 270 a year at the Altamont Pass wind farm in California (2). Regarding song birds, these are butchered by the million by the fast moving blade tips (3). As for bats, which are attracted to insects that swarm around wind turbines, the massacre is even greater (4). All this killing, by the way, will have serious consequences for agriculture, because bats and owls help control insects and rodents, respectively.

Thus, DTBird is useless for stopping 75-85% of the mortality caused by wind turbines. And as we shall see from a study made at Smola, Norway, it is only effective for scaring away 7% of the birds that approach wind turbines during the day.

Let’s do the maths: 7% of 15-25% = 1 – 1.75%. This means that DTBird, during the periods when all its cameras and related equipment are working perfectly, can reduce total mortality at wind farms by 1.75% at best.

DTbird includes a software said to be able to recognize birds from insects, falling leaves and other unwanted visual effects. It is also said to automatically trigger a dissuading sound when signals identified as birds are getting too close to the turbine. But if we read the evaluation made by NINA (Norwegian Institute for Nature Research), which tested the system during 6 months for two wind turbines on the island of Smola, it so happens that the warning mechanism is sometimes triggered by raindrops, insects and shifting clouds (5). NINA warns that these “false positives” could cause habituation, reducing the effectiveness of the dissuasion (6).

In any event, habituation or not, the performance of the DTBird video-system is dismal: “In only 7% of all video sequences where warning/dissuasion was iniciated, was a visible flight response observed” (7). In other words, when it works, DTBird is INEFFECTIVE at scaring away 93% of the birds that approach its wind turbine in the daytime.

If this weren’t enough, breakdowns are frequent. During the 6-month trial at the hands of NINA technicians, in spring and summer, the 8 DTBird cameras malfunctioned 3 times, and the detection module for one of the two turbines was out of order for a month (5). One can imagine how difficult it would be to maintain in excellent working order, say 10 modules and 40 video-cameras installed on 10 wind turbines, during 25 years (including winters).

Thus, even if the system were effective at 100% instead of 7% (or 1.75%), an army of state inspectors would be needed. They would have to check daily on the wind farm assigned to them, to ensure that each turbine effectively emits dissuading sounds when birds come close, and that the creatures actually react by avoiding the turbine. For we must remember that, in most countries, certain birds are so rare that the death of a single individual could have a significant impact on the conservation status of its population – e.g. the Bonelli’s Eagle in France .

This gives an idea of how enormous the task would be, to ensure that the cameras and detection modules may be relied upon every day of the year. So much so that it would be unrealistic to consider mitigation by electronic devices, whichever the system or its maker.

Avian radars, which are supposed to detect birds and stop wind turbines in time to avoid collisions, are an equally unrealistic “solution”. Actually, once the wind turbines are installed, and as governments can’t afford an army of uncorruptible “windspectors”, the radar unit is quite simply left unused. At the Kennedy Ranch wind farm in Texas, it was found that the avian radar had not stopped a single wind turbine in 18 months of operation. Actually, a witness watched in horror as a pelican got whacked out of the sky (8).

It’s a fact that has to do with human nature: windfarm owners won’t cut into their profits willingly. Indeed, stopping wind turbines abruptly several times a day wears the brakes and lowers production. It is also costly to maintain in excellent working order, 365 days a year, dozens of cameras – half of them facing the sky (and the rain) – and associated sensitive electronic equipment.

In a nutshell, video and radar systems may look good on paper, but they are impractical. In fact,their only use is to help developers obtain planning approvals for wind turbines in protected bird flyways and other sensitive habitats. They are thus counterproductive, helping destroy our most valued wildlife. Logically, they should be banned altogether from windfarm projects, as officials often base their favourable decisions on mere plans to install such mitigation systems, whether or not these will prove effective in the end.

Mark Duchamp
Chairman, World Council for Nature
www.wcfn.org
President, Save the Eagles International
www.savetheeaglesinternational.org

References:

(1) – Page 25 of NINA’s evaluation report

(2) – Wind turbines kill an average of 270 burrowing owls per year at the Altamont Pass windfarm in California: 270 burrowing owls

(3) – WIND TURBINES IN SPAIN KILL 6 TO 18 MILLION BIRDS & BATS A YEAR

(4) – How much wildlife can USA afford to kill/

(5) – Page 14 of NINA’s evaluation report

(6) – Page 3 of NINA’s evaluation report

(7) – Page 18 of NINA’s evaluation report

(8) – The truth about avian radars

Wind Industry Tries To Silence Dissenters. No Truth Allowed!

August 5, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Top Professor Fired for Exposing Huge Wind Energy Scam

Written by John Droz, Jr on 05 August 2014.

wind-farm-land Henrik Møller, Denmark’s leading academic expert on noise research, has been fired by his university after exposing a far-reaching cover up by the Danish government of the health risks caused by wind turbine noise pollution.

Shock and outrage at this latest example of the heavey-handed cover up of government-backed junk science has brought strong condemnation from independent scientists. John Droz Jr, a respected critic of wind farms, has issued the following condemnatory response:

As you probably know, a passion of mine is defending my profession (Science) from assault.

This is approaching a full-time job, as those promoting political or economic agendas are painfully aware that real Science is a major threat to their aspirations — so they are aggressively attacking it on multiple fronts. (See ScienceUnderAssault.info.)

We now have yet another distressing example, where a leading scientist has lost his job — apparently for the crime of being a conscientious, competent academic, focused on quality research (instead of chasing grant money).

Dr. Henrik Møller, is an world-renown expert on infra-sound, and has published several high-quality studies on low-frequency acoustics (like here, here, here, and here). More recently, some of these have dealt with industrial wind energy noise (e.g. here — which was peer-reviewed).

He has been praised as Denmark’s “leading noise researcher.” What’s even more important is that he has been courageous enough to have publicly spoken out against poor government policies, as well as the misinformation disseminated from the wind energy cartel.

In Denmark there have been several newspaper reports about this surprising firing, but I’m sending this to the AWED list as such an event should have much wider coverage.Here are English translations of a few Danish articles (I have the originals as well). It seems to me that some of the key points made in them are:

— Dr. Møller has had thirty eight (38) years of distinguished service for Aalborg University.

— Ironically, this institution publicly prides itself as looking out for its professors: “At Aalborg University we focus intensively on staff welfare and job satisfaction.”

— He was the only one of 200± researchers at the Department of Electronic Systems in Aalborg who was let go…

— The purported reason for his firing, is that the professor is no longer “financially lucrative” for the university…

— Despite claiming that the termination was due to a shortage of funds, the university had recently hired two additional people in the same department…

— Dr. Møller’s reasoned responses were:

1) During the last year he may not have produced that much income, but in many other years his work resulted in substantial profit to the university.

2) Statistically, approximately half of the faculty would be operating at a loss — so why single him out?

3) In his prior 38 years of employment, and reviews, he was never informed that his job was solely dependent on outside funding.

4) Additionally, prior to the sacking, he had not been informed that his income production was a problem that need to be addressed — giving him a chance to do so.

— The Danish Society of Engineers, and the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs, have gone on record stating that it is unreasonable to dismiss researchers due to a lack of grants. Furthermore they reportedly said such a policy is contrary to the Danish University Act, which specifies that the purpose of research is to promote education, not to be a profit-making venture…

— The VP of the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations stated that it’s rare that a Danish professor is fired.

— It has been reported that the wind industry has frequently complained about Dr. Møller to his boss (Dean Eskild Holm Nielsen)…

— Consider this: the same Dean Nielsen was a keynote speaker at the Wind Industry Association’s meeting, the day after he fired Dr. Møller!

— As one article explains, this termination might have also come from the fact that the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has a very close association with the wind industry, and that Dr. Møller’s scientific research had resulted in embarrassing revelations.

— The same article states that with Dr. Møller out of the picture, wind industry friendly DTU will now take over responsibility for assessing acoustical impacts of industrial wind turbines on Danish citizens. (I wonder what conclusions they will reach?)

As one report accurately stated: it takes courage for academics to focus on scientific research, instead of pursuing outside funding.

Please consider writing a short, polite email to Dr. Møller’s boss (the person who fired him), Dean Nielsen (dekan-teknat@adm.aau.dk), objecting to this shameful termination. It would be helpful to cc a reporter at an important Danish newspaper: Axel Pihl-Andersen (axel.andersen@jp.dk), and bcc Dr. Møller (henrikmoeller2@gmail.com).

Regards,

John Droz, Jr.

Physicist & Environmental Advocate

PS — Although his studies on industrial wind energy only comprise a small amount of his thirty eight years of academic work, they may have resulted in the most notoriety.

Since many of the people on this list are interested in that topic, here are a few other examples of Dr. Møller’s work related to wind energy, in his words:

1) We made an analyses of a wind project in Maastricht, planned to possibly have turbines from a Danish company. The City Council stopped the project after our report — a result that did not make us popular with the Danish wind industry.

2) A reason why we seem to be a nuisance to the wind industry in Denmark is that we keep finding errors in noise calculations and evaluations. As an example, we found serious errors in the environmental impact assessment behind a new law on a wind turbine test center, and the law had to be changed.

3) We also revealed that in a big Vestas promotion, they mixed up two acoustical terms (and Vestas had to change part of their campaign). I’m afraid there are only Danish newspaper articles about that — which is unfortunate, because it was quite funny.

4) We also criticized Danish regulation of wind turbine noise, which resulted in feature articles in Danish newspapers. I am not sure if others have been translated, but here is one example.

5) We also put together some web pages about the Danish wind regulations, which made the wind industry complain about me to the Dean (again).

Unaffordable Renewables. Lefties love them, while we get poorer.

August 5, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

KONRAD YAKABUSKI

A sunny Ontario experiment gone wrong

KONRAD YAKABUSKI

The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Aug. 04 2014,

That glare coming off selected southern Ontario farmlands these days is not the result of some secret state experiment with atomic vegetables. No, it’s the product of another form of state-sanctioned mad science that is costing Ontarians dearly without doing diddly to improve the environment.

After Germany and California, Ontario is “enjoying” its day in the sun as a global hot spot for solar power. Photovoltaic panels are carpeting fertile and fallow farmlands at a furious rate this summer as solar power promoters rush to complete projects before the subsidy gusher slows.

By the end of 2015, more than 2,000 megawatts of solar power will be connected to the Ontario grid as developers take advantage of the province’s feed-in-tariff, guaranteeing them a heady two-decade return on their investment, courtesy of the weary Ontario electricity consumer.

The newly re-elected Liberal government scaled down the FIT program last year, but not before a small group of savvy operators hit the sweet spot by locking into its risk-free cash flow. One 10MW solar farm under construction in eastern Ontario’s cottage country will get 44 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity it produces over 20 years.

Compare that to the average 8.55 cents per kWh that Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator says it cost to produce power in the province in 2013. The price includes a wholesale price of 2.65 cents (what the power was actually worth on the open market) and a so-called “global adjustment” of 5.9 cents to cover the sunk costs in existing nuclear, hydro and wind projects.

No other province has imitated Ontario’s folly. No wonder the solar lobby worked so hard to re-elect Premier Kathleen Wynne in the June election. The opposition Progressive Conservatives vowed to pull the plug on Liberal FIT contracts that will further burden the province’s already uncompetitive manufacturers and saddle consumers with a 50 per cent rate hike within a decade.

Solar power is not the only culprit. Far more FIT-contracted wind power will be added to the grid. Together, these contracts demonstrate the madness of Ontario’s so-called green energy policy. Not only will it cost more, it won’t remove much if any carbon from the atmosphere.

The biggest myth about wind and solar power is that they automatically displace carbon dioxide produced by coal- or gas-fired power plants. Solar power producers consistently make this claim without any proof to back it up. Quite often, the opposite is true.

Take Ontario, which counts on baseload nuclear power for 60 per cent of its installed electricity capacity. Nuclear produces no carbon emissions. Neither does the hydro power that accounts for about one-quarter of Ontario’s capacity. On many days, demand in Ontario isn’t high enough to require power from additional sources. But when it is, wind and solar can’t be counted on.

Quite simply, neither wind nor solar are reliable sources of electricity. In its latest 18-month outlook, the IESO forecasts that 99.5 per cent of Ontario’s 12,947 MW of installed nuclear capacity will be available during summer consumption peaks. But it predicts only 13.7 per cent of the 1,824 MW of installed wind capacity will be available. Solar is even less reliable. So, when wind and solar actually do produce power, it’s usually dumped.

To meet consumption peaks, Ontario’s grid operator needs a dependable supply of complementary power. In the past, that came from coal plants, which could be fired up on an as-needed basis. Thankfully, they’ve all been closed and replaced by natural gas-fired plants.

Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, but its carbon footprint is half or less that of coal. And modern combined-cycle gas plants are so efficient, reliable and cheap to build (relative to other forms of electricity) that Charles Frank of the centrist Brookings Institution calls them, along with nuclear power, “the ‘best bang for our buck’ as we seek to reduce emissions.”

“A nuclear or gas combined-cycle plant avoids far more emissions per MW of capacity than wind or solar because it can operate at 90 per cent of full capacity,” Mr. Frank notes in a new study. “Limited benefits and higher costs make wind and solar less socially valuable than nuclear, hydro and combined-cycle gas.”

Add in the alarmingly high failure rate of solar panels, the absence of a long-term track record, and the quashing of local content rules and the outcome of Ontario’s sunny experiment could be even darker than it looks.

People All Over the World, Fed Up With the Wind Scam!

August 5, 2014 / 1957chev / 2 Comments

Angus Taylor: Community Backlash Brewing Over ACT Wind Farm Plan

August 5, 2014 by stopthesethings

Canberra’s costly carbon follies outdo even the Danes
The Australian
Angus Taylor
1 August 2014

AUSTRALIANS are learning the hard way that moral vanity comes at a high price. After many years of climate policy chaos, we know that most people want some action on climate change but they don’t want to waste money on expensive, inefficient schemes.

Yet politicians spruik and implement them, we all wake up to the cost and the policy has to change. It’s bad for households, consumers and investment. And the merry-go-round achieves little or nothing for the planet.

Bjorn Lomborg recently exposed on these pages the folly of Copenhagen’s plans to be the world’s first CO2-neutral city.

Hot on Copenhagen’s heels, Canberra has announced a plan to mandate that a dizzying 90 per cent of the ACT’s electricity supply will come from large-scale renewables by 2020, with a 50 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.

Canberra’s blueprint suffers from the same overreach as Copenhagen’s. As old-style industry protection has fallen out of favour, rent-seekers are hungrily eyeing green industry subsidies.

The ACT government is hopping on the merry-go-round with a blueprint focused on building masses of wind turbines, and the odd solar farm.

Not content to focus on efficient means to reduce carbon emissions, the proposal props up the troubled wind industry. Yet as the Productivity Commission, last week’s Deloitte report and mainstream economists tell us, wind energy — viable only on the back of vast subsidies — is an expensive way to reduce carbon emissions.

The ACT has ignored sensible alternatives. For instance, decentralised solar is economic without, repeat, without subsidies in many rural and remote areas. Farmers know this — many have been using solar for years for a range of purposes.

But the present NSW regulatory regime hurts the economics of solar: electricity distributors increase profits and returns through massive network investments where rooftop solar is a better option. Nor is increasing soil carbon part of the ACT plan, despite the obvious opportunity in the surrounding agricultural regions.

On the ACT government’s own numbers (which are questionable), the 90 per cent renewables plan will cost an additional $370 million between now and 2020. These costs will be passed on to ACT households in their electricity bills, hurting the poor, and the government tries to downplay the impact by assuming offsetting efficiencies.

In many countries, renewable energy targets are growing rapidly because today’s huge investment costs are hidden in tomorrow’s electricity bills.

The ACT plan expects wind power to cost about $100 per megawatt hour, roughly three times the market price. This is consistent with Deloitte’s recent finding that the federal large-scale renewable energy target is costing $103 per tonne of carbon abated — four times the cost of our inflated carbon tax.

Ironically, in a recent effort to reduce costs, the ACT government itself has pulled back on the use of green power — renewable energy use in the government’s nine directorates plunged by 83 per cent in 2012-13.

It is unclear how the ACT plan may fit with a revised federal RET. The present federal target is intended to include all renewable generation, and ACT efforts should ordinarily be taken into account. This will be a decision for the federal government following the RET review, but there is a real prospect that the ACT’s expensive efforts will have no impact at all on Australia’s emissions.

The ACT blueprint also does not include the extra costs of full-scale back-up from another electricity source. Wind blows only some of the time, so Canberra will need to call on coal-fired electricity. In practice, this means that when the wind blows, ACT-sponsored wind farms will send their electricity into the NSW grid, yet the ACT will demand a reliable and constant supply in return. The NSW grid also will need to address large fluctuations in supply, causing unprecedented operational pressures and additional costs.

The most extraordinary part of the blueprint is the assertion that communities outside the ACT, where the turbines will be built, actually want them. This wind-industry-inspired propaganda is simply untrue.

I represent a large swath of NSW where there are turbines and where many, many more are planned. I know that a growing majority of people in these quiet, beautiful, unique, windswept communities do not want them.

Wind farms nearly always cause deep community fractures and risk serious downward pressure on the value of adjacent land. Typical wind-farm victims are tree-changers from Canberra who have put their life savings into their dream block, only to find it virtually unsaleable. Wind developers have been known to tell these people they should simply “take one for the planet”.

Middle Australia is willing to support sensible carbon emission-reduction efforts, but it will not tolerate big economic hits to achieve it, which is why Australia rejected the world’s biggest carbon tax.

Experience abroad (witness the 2009 Copenhagen Summit) and here tells us that overreach will thwart well-intended initiatives. We need efficient, careful and well-timed emission-reduction policies. The ACT renewables blueprint fails on every front.

Angus Taylor is the federal member for Hume. He was a partner at McKinsey & Co and director of Port Jackson partners, where his work included carbon and energy strategy and policy development.
The Australian

STT agrees with Angus Taylor’s observation that decentralised (“stand-alone”) solar makes good economic sense: providing grid access to handfuls of remote rural properties (at huge ongoing expense) makes little sense where a stand alone solar system (panels, batteries and back-up generator) can be set up for around $35,000 (see our post here).

The other point raised by Angus’ article is that the ACT’s plan is dependent on turbines being slung up in NSW – not in the ACT. The ACT has banned wind farms through planning controls that are aimed at protecting the visual amenity enjoyed by Canberra residents. So, to add hypocrisy to insult, it’s their neighbours in NSW who are being told to “take one for the planet”.

But don’t expect them to take it lying down.

Communities across the Southern Tablelands faced with the threat of a turbine invasion are up in arms at the ACT’s plans to destroy their lives and properties.

Anger has erupted at Lake George near Tarago, NSW over the Jupiter wind farm proposed by Spanish-Australian company EPYC. Locals are furious at the developer’s lies, treachery and deceit – the level of community outrage is clearly palpable (see our post here).

And – just up the road at Rye Park (near Goulburn) in NSW – locals have united in their opposition to plans to spear 100 or more giant fans into their peaceful community. A little while back, in covering what “community division” caused by wind farms really means, we touched on the developer’s “community consultation” that took place there (see our post here).

The “community consultation” in question was held by Epuron – an outfit hoping to develop what it calls the “Rye Park” wind farm (north of Yass and east of Boorowa, NSW).

On a show of hands, the 32 present “divided” as follows: 23 locals, firmly against; and 9 in favour – 4 of whom were employed by Epuron, 2 were contracted as turbine hosts and 3 were “unknowns” (check out this video of the count).

A few weeks after the “community consultation”, the community of Rye Park held its own meeting, where – joined by others from the neighbouring communities of Boorowa, Yass and Rugby – 104 turned up to hear – among others – Angus Taylor (their local Federal Coalition MP) talk about the greatest state sponsored fraud of all time. Angus is clearly on a mission to bring it to a screaming halt – as the cracking speech covered in this post makes clear.

A survey of those at the meeting was taken by organisers to determine the level of support for wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park. After the speakers finished the crowd delivered their responses to the survey to organisers: of the 104 in attendance, 88 people participated. The results were:

“I do not support wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park”: 80 votes (91%)
“I do support wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park”: 6 votes (7%)
“I am undecided about wind power development in Boorowa, Yass, Rugby and Rye Park”: 2 votes (2%).

No surprises there.

One thing’s for certain: the ACT government’s plan to invade NSW is going to be met with an eruption of hostility and anger from people who aren’t willing to “take one for the planet” – especially given the fact that wind power cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector. People will generally suck up a little pain; but not without a purpose.

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