Faux-Green Renewable Energy…..It doesn’t work!

March 9, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Marita on renewable nonsense

Posted on March 9, 2015

Can you imagine that people are still straining to make renewables work–when they are such colossal failures.

Solar and the renewable idiocy are the focus of this essay by Marita

Link to: Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world

Greetings!

You know I have written on extensively on what I call Obama’s green-energycrony-corruption. I’ve addressed news stories such as the near-certain death of Cape Wind and exposed the criminal activity of the solar panel Abengoa. In December, based on a thorough report someone else produced, I wrote a column about the German renewable energy experiment. It got me thinking, what if I pulled all of my research, and others, together and produced a report like the German one on which I’d based my Germany’s “energy transformation” — unsustainable subsidies and an unstable system column?

For the past couple of months, I have been quietly working behind the scenes to put together my first “white paper:” Solar Power in the U.S.—intended to provide a comprehensive look at the impacts of solar power on the nation’s consumers. It has been planned to be released today! I know when we released it, a review of the content would be the topic of this week’s column. I just didn’t know how it was going to take shape. But then, someone on my newsletter distribution list sent me a link to a U.S. News and World Report blog. As I read it, I kept finding discrepancies, omissions and flat-out untruths. While the Blog posttitle is: Keystone isn’t about jobs, the author was really writing about solar. He has obviously bought into the talking points; the propaganda—but didn’t know (or chose to ignore) the real world implementation of solar power in the U.S. As I read it, I knew I had the structure for this week’s column: Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world.

I had fun writing Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world—especially since I’d just completed the report and had the content top-of-mind. I hope you enjoy reading it and will post it and/or pass it on. It introduces the new report.

Thanks to Solar Power in the U.S., there is now a handy (15 page) guide that offers the real view, rather than the fantasy version, of what solar power can and cannot do, how effective it is, and the impact its rapid implementation is having on consumers. It is my hope that both consumers and policymakers will read Solar Power in the U.S. before making decisions with long-term implications.

Because I already have the 900-word version ready, I am offer you both the full-length and the shorter version. Please use whichever is better for your readers. The full-length version is pasted-in-below.

Marita Noon

Executive Director, Energy Makes America Great, inc.

PO Box 52103, Albuquerque, NM 87181

505.239.8998

For immediate release: March 9, 2015.

Commentary by Marita Noon

Executive Director, Energy Makes America Great Inc.

Contact: 505.239.8998, marita@responsiblenergy.org

Words: 1277

Solar Power propaganda vs. the real world

When a former “senior communications official at the White House” writes a blog post for U.S. News and World Report, you should be able to trust it. But when the author states that the Keystone pipeline (should it be approved) would create only 19 weeks of temporary jobs, everything else he says must be suspect—including the claim that our “energy infrastructure will be 100 percent solar by 2030.”

I contacted both a union representative and one from TransCanada—the company behind the Keystone pipeline. Each affirmed that the 19-week timeframe was total fantasy. The portion of the Keystone pipeline that remains to be built is 1179 miles long—the vast majority of that within the U.S.—with construction expected to take two years.

TransCanada’s spokesperson Mark Cooper responded to my query: “While some people belittle these jobs as temporary, we know that without temporaryconstruction jobs—and the hard work of the men and women who do them—we wouldn’t have roads, highways, schools or hospitals. We wouldn’t have the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Hoover Dam. So, I would say to these detractors: ‘It is OK if you don’t like or support Keystone XL. But let’s stop putting down the very people who have helped build America.’”

The premise of the On the Edge blog post is that we shouldn’t look at Keystone as a jobs creator. Instead, the author claims, the jobs are in “solar energy disruption.” He is frustrated that “GOP leaders almost universally ignore or disdain this emerging energy economy.”

He states: “A third of all new electric generation in 2014 came from solar. A new solar installation or project now occurs somewhere in the U.S.—built by a team of American workers employed in the fastest growing energy sector in the world—every three minutes.”

This may be true but, as you’ll see, it belies several important details. Plenty of cause exists for Republican lawmakers to “disdain” the growth in renewable energy.

If “a third of all new electric generation in 2014 came from solar,” there is reason for it—and it does not include sound economics.

First, efficient and effective base-load, coal-fueled electricity that has provided the bulk of America’s power is being prematurely shut down by regulations prompted by environmental lobbyists and promulgated by the Obama administration. It is virtually impossible to get a new coal-fueled power plant permitted in the U.S. Even natural gas-powered plants, such as the one planned to replace the Salem Harbor coal-fueled plant, meet with resistance from groups such as Grassroots Against Another Salem Plant, which “has pledged to use peaceful civil disobedience to block construction of the gas plant.” And, of course, just try to build a nuclear power plant and all the fear-mongers come out.

What’s left? Renewables, such as wind and solar, receive favorable treatment through a combination of mandates and subsidies. Even industrial wind and solar have their own opposition within the environmental lobby groups because they chop up and fry birds and bats— including protected bald and golden eagles.

The brand new report, Solar Power in the U.S. (SPUS), presents a comprehensive look at the impacts of solar power on the nation’s consumers.

Clearly, without the mandates and subsidies, this “solar energy disruption” would go dark.

We’ve seen companies, such as Solyndra, Abound Solar, and Evergreen Solar, gobankrupt even with millions of dollars in state and federal (taxpayer) assistance. I’ve written extensively on these stories and that of Abengoa—which received the largest federal loan guarantee ($2.8 billion) and has resorted to questionable business practices to keep the doors open (Abengoa is currently under investigation from several federal agencies).

SPUS shows that without the subsidies and mandates these renewable projects can’t survive. For example, in Australia, sales of solar systems “fell as soon as the incentives were cut back.” Since the Australian government announced that it was reconsidering its Renewable Energy Targets, “investments have started to dry up.”

Knowing the importance of the “incentives,” the solar industry has now become a major campaign donor, providing political pressure and money to candidates, who will bring on more mandates, subsidies, and tax credits. Those candidates are generally Democrats, as one of the key differences between the two parties is that Democrats tend to support government involvement. By contrast, Republicans lean toward limited government and the free market. The GOP doesn’t “disdain” solar, but they know it only survives because of government mandates that require a certain percentage of renewables, and specifically solar, in the energy mix, plus the subsidies and tax credits that make it attractive. Therefore, they can’t get excited about the jobs being created as a result of taxpayers’ involuntary investment, nor higher energy costs. There is a big difference between disdaining solar power and disdaining the government involvement that gives it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

The blog post compares the “solar energy disruption” to what “occurred when direcTV and Dish started to compete with cable television. More choices emerged and a whole lot of new jobs were created.” However, those jobs were created through private investment and the free market—a fact that, along with solar’s dependence on incentives, he never mentions. Likewise, the jobs supported by building the Keystone pipeline would be through private funding.

The blog’s author touts this claim, from the book Clean Disruption: “Should solar continue on its exponential trajectory, the energy infrastructure will be 100 percent solar by 2030”—15 years from now. Even if state and federal governments were to continue to pour money into solar energy—which, as is pointed out in SPUS, subsidies are already being dialed back on a variety of fronts, there is no currently available solution to solar’s intermittency.

SPUS draws upon the example of Germany, which has led the way globally in solar and other renewables. Over time the high renewable penetration has contributed to residential electricity prices more than doubling. Renewables received favored status, called “priority dispatch,” which means that, when renewable electricity becomes available, the utilities must dispatch it first, thereby changing the merit order for thermal plants. Now many modern natural gas-fueled plants, as well as coal, couldn’t operate profitably. As a result, many were shut down, while several plants were provided “capacity payments” by the government (a double subsidy) in order to stay online as back-up—which maintains system stability. In Germany’s push for 80 percent renewable energy by 2050, it has found that despite the high penetration of renewables, given their inherent intermittency, a large amount of redundancy of coal- and natural-gas-fueled electricity (nuclear being decommissioned) is necessary to maintain the reliability of the grid.

As the German experience makes clear, without a major technological breakthrough to store electricity generated through solar systems, “100 percent solar by 2030” is just one more fantasy.

The blog post ends with this: “the GOP congressional leadership ignores these new jobs inside an innovative, disruptive energy sector that is about to sweep across the country it leads—in favor of a vanishingly small number of mythical Keystone ‘jobs’ that may never materialize. It makes you wonder. Why?”

The answers can be found in SPUS, which addresses the policy, regulatory, and consumer protection issues that have manifested themselves through the rapid rise of solar power and deals with many more elements than covered here. It concludes: “Solar is an important part of our energy future, but there must be forethought, taking into account future costs, jobs, energy reliability and the overall energy infrastructure already in place. This technology must come online with the needs of the taxpayer, consumer and ratepayer in mind instead of giving the solar industry priority.”

The author of Energy Freedom, Marita Noon serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE). She hosts a weekly radio program: America’s Voice for Energy—which expands on the content of her weekly column.

Nuclear Proponents Look Foolish, When They Support Useless Wind Turbines!

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

Renewable Energy Appeasement

I was mildly shocked yesterday because one of my nuclear friends started “supporting” renewables.*

His intention was to “appease” renewable backers so they may eventually agree not to oppose nuclear.

Well, in my opinion that is the wrong approach. Scientists pinpoint the problems but it is us engineers that need to solve those problems.

Renewables, in general, make no sense.

Why?

Because they are intermittent, unreliable, diffuse (in other words, they require loads of material and area to produce significant amounts of power), expensive (particularly when the “system” is considered), short lived (compared to other options) and do not particularly reduce carbon emissions (again, once the system is considered).

Yes, they have and will continue to have a niche in the global energy market, but it makes no sense to subsidize them to push them above and beyond their “natural” market penetration.

Solar, for example, makes a lot of sense in off-grid remote localities but eventually inhabitants in those locations will demand “real” electricity.**

Governments are creating a monster that will damage the economy (see what has happened in Germany with the Energiewende) if they don’t curtail, and fast, all overt / covert subsidies for renewables.

Yes, if somebody wants to spend money from their own pocket in renewables, that is OK. What is not OK is for society to pay for their hobby.

Yes, yes, yes, fossil fuels also have subsidies, but when you measure them per unit of energy actually produced they are lower than the renewable ones. Sure, we have nobusiness subsidizing fossil fuels either, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

Renewables, for the most part, are already mature technologies. That is one of the reasons why China is the #1 producer of solar panels and wind turbines.

As mentioned, renewables (since they capture diffuse power) require loads of “material” to produce meaningful amounts of energy. Some of the elements being consumed in the renewable trade are quite scarce and are badly needed in other sectors. Should we even be sinking them into renewables? This is a question we should definitely ask. ***

Finally, we have to understand that our financial / material resources are not infinite and thus we must use them wisely. Are we going to waste them in renewables, or invest them in better options such as nuclear, natural gas (replacing coal with it), and efficiency?

Appeasement won’t work. We have to stand firm and defend our convictions on what works better for a) reducing our carbon emissions and b) begin to gradually reduce the market share of fossil fuels in the global energy diet.

Thank you.

Feel free to add to the conversation on Twitter.

* By renewables I mean mainly solar PV and wind turbines. There is nothing wrong with supporting hydro which is, was, and will continue to be the premier renewable source.

**http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/bihar-village-dharnai-nitish-kumar-clamours-for-real-electricity/1/375733.html

*** http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2011/January/CriticalThinking.asp

Much Like WindPushers, Climate Alarmists Will Personally Slander Anyone Who Dissents!

February 23, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Greenpeace enlists Justin Gillis &John Schwartz of the NY Times in Journalistic Terrorist Attack on Willie Soon – Miss Target, Hit Smithsonian Instead

February 23, 2015

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen

I cannot bring myself to quote from this unconscionable piece of journalistic malfeasance:

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher

By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ FEB. 21, 2015

Instead, I simply let my title and the following excerpts from the so-called “supporting” documents offered by Greenpeace speak for themselves. Their [non-]journalist lackeys: Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of the NY Times, apparently didn’t actually read them – or they might have noticed that the contracts are between the Smithsonian (not Soon) and Southern and if they had stretched themselves, might have uncovered the definition of “deliverables”….I can’t believe Gillis and Schwartz allowed themselves to be duped again.

*****

Wind Power will NOT Keep the Lights, or the Heat, ON!

February 4, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Power Goes AWOL Right When Freezing Brits Need It Most

February 4, 2015 by stopthesethings 7 Comments

The hackneyed myth that wind power “powers” millions of homes with wonderful “free” wind energy is taking a beating around the globe (seeour post here).

The idea that a wholly weather dependent power generation source can ever be – as is touted endlessly by the wind industry and it parasites – an “alternative” to conventional generation is, of course, patent nonsense.

If there wasn’t already a complete power generation system built around on-demand sources, such as gas, coal, nuclear or hydro – then a country trying to run on wind power would – unless it was keen to revisit (or remain in) the stone age – would inevitably need to build one (see our post here). So far, so insanely costly, and utterly pointless.

Now, just when winter starts to bite, and the Brits are looking for some extra sparks to toast their crumpets, brew their tea, to warm their homes and keep the icicles from their noses and toes, their massive fleet ofblade-chucking, pyrotechnic, sonic-torture devices has completely downed tools – proving once and for all that wind power is the greatest fraud of all time.

Here’s The Telegraph with, yet another tale of just why it is so.

Electricity demand hits highest this winter – as wind power slumps to its lowest
The Telegraph
Emily Gosden
20 January 2015

UK electricity demand hit its highest level this winter on Monday – while wind turbines generated their lowest output, official figures show.

Cold weather saw UK demand hit 52.54 gigawatts (GW) between 5pm and 5.30pm, according to National Grid.

At the same time, low wind speeds meant the UK’s wind turbines were producing just 573 megawatts of power, enough to meet only one per cent of demand – the lowest of any peak period this winter, Telegraph analysis of official data shows.

Earlier on Monday wind output had dropped even lower, generating just 354 megawatts at 2pm, or 0.75 per cent of Britain’s needs – the lowest seen during any period this winter.

The analysis will fuel concerns that despite receiving billions of pounds in subsidies, Britain’s wind farms cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on when they are needed the most.

Britain now has about 12 GW of wind capacity installed on and offshore – meaning during Monday’s peak demand period, wind farms were generating less than five per cent of their theoretical maximum output.

Gas, coal and nuclear power plants instead provided the vast majority of the UK’s electricity needs.

A spokesman for National Grid said that Britain’s spare margins – the safety buffer between supply and demand – had remained “adequate”.

On average, UK wind farms produce about 28 per cent of their theoretical maximum power output.

But critics warn that cold snaps when demand soars can often coincide with periods when the wind doesn’t blow.

They argue that Britain’s energy security will become ever moreprecarious as old coal and gas power plants are closed and the country becomes more reliant on intermittent wind farms.

Dr Lee Moroney of the Renewable Energy Foundation, a think tank critical of wind farms, said: “Low wind speeds frequently accompany low temperatures as happened yesterday.

“The proliferation of wind farms encouraged by Government policy is misguided because a reliance on wind energy in these conditions leads to inevitable extra costs for consumers.

“Either reliable backup electricity supply from conventional sources must be provided when the wind does not blow, or extra costs in the form of constraint payments are incurred when there is too much wind on the system. It is a lose-lose situation for consumers.”

National Grid’s data, which covers the period since December 1, shows that the second highest peak demand – 50.9GW on December 4 – also coincided with the second lowest peak wind contribution, at just 1.5 per cent.

However other periods of particularly high peak demand, such as the evenings of December 9 and 10, coincided with much higher wind power output, with turbines meeting 18 per cent of demand.

The data also shows that Christmas Day was the only day when solar panels contributed anything at all to peak demand – because it was the only day when peak demand fell in daylight hours.

Demand on December 25 peaked after 12.30pm as families cooked their Christmas dinners.

On all other days demand peaked after it got dark – the vast majority between 5pm and 5.30pm.

Ministers were last year forced to approve a series of emergency powers to help prevent blackouts this winter, by firing up old power plants or paying factories to switch off.

National Grid said it had not yet needed to use any of the emergency powers.

Jennifer Webber, director of external affairs for wind industry body RenewableUK, said: “It’s wrong to cherry-pick statistics for short periods when the wind didn’t blow, as they’re unrepresentative of the full picture of the benefits wind provides for the UK.

“To get a proper idea of how well wind is performing as a vital part of our energy mix, you have to look at National Grid’s official figures over a meaningful period. In December, wind energy provided a record monthly high of 14 per cent of all the UK’s electricity needs.

“As a whole, 2014 was wind energy’s most productive year so far in this country, generating nearly 10 per cent of Britain’s electricity – equivalent to the annual demands of a quarter of all British homes.”

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We need a diverse energy mix to reduce our reliance on imported fossil fuels and renewables, including wind, are helping us to achieve this.

“Over £10bn was invested in clean energy in 2014 and the sector could also support up to 200,000 jobs by 2020.”
The Telegraph

Another fine piece of “doublethink” and “doublespeak” from wind industry spin-kings, Renewable UK and DECCs – in the other-worldly, Orwellian tradition under which they operate; and which they deploy in their efforts to control the energy ‘game’ (see our post here).

When the hard numbers see it pressed on its central claim about “powering” millions of homes, the wind industry and its parasites start back-pedalling at a full pelt, whine about “cherry-picking data” and resort to waffle about ‘averages’, ‘overall benefits’ etc, etc (that’s if they haven’t already run off and hidden from their interlocutors – see our post here).

And, in this case – resorting to their classic “hey, quick look over there” tactic – the spinners pitch up the well-worn lie about wind power ‘investment’ creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs (see our post here); as if that will be some kind of consolation when Brits are all left freezing in the dark.

STT just loves their exhortation about the need to measure wind power output “over a meaningful period”, which, apparently, means “averaging” wind power output over a month or more.

Funny, you know, that power punters – selfish lot that they are – tend to consider having power available when they need it, as a “here and now” kind of thing. So let’s see how things are “averaging” out over at the ICU:

DECCs and Renewable UK are obsessed with the ultimate (nonsense) goal of Britain running exclusively on wind power – and every malicious move they make is aimed at seeing wind power totally ‘displace’ fossil fuel generation sources.

If their (impossible) ‘dreams’ were ever realised, it would be interesting to see how the (few) remaining businesses would manage to operate without power for hours on end, every other day; and how householders might toast their crumpets, and keep warm and well-lit homes whenever the wind does what it’s done since the dawn of time.

STT buffed up the crystal ball and conjured up this forlorn image, that might be somewhere near the mark:

POINTMAN – Always Gives Us Something to Ponder….

January 29, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Pop, pop, and poppety pop.

by Pointman

A friend once turned to me on a day that had no mercy in it and said, “you’re right, there is no God.” We were both watching something slowly unfolding, something cold and just petrifying cruel which couldn’t be stopped by either of us. We couldn’t exert any control over it, we could only watch; emasculated observers at the final end of world extinction event of any residual hope about how low us human beings could really get. Pop, there they go, pop, pop, another couple of the buggers. Pop, pop, and poppety pop and yet a few more of them.

At the time and in a vague distracted sort of way, it broke my heart to see him lose his faith, because I loved him as only one man can love another and I’d always somehow relied on him to be the last unwavering believer in some sort of floor of decency that none of us could ever drop through, though I’d never quite realised that until that moment. It was a sort of good-natured buddy buddy routine we did. I’d always dissed his notions of a big G, he’d always thought I was joking as he worked on me but I wasn’t. Not really.

He did have a certain something about him and whatever that was, it became an unexamined backstop of our friendship. He was my touchstone, a glimmer of hope and my ace in the hole, someone who’d pushed through all my tough-guy BS front and taken a deep look down into me and found the little me who still wanted to be a believer. He was always confident he’d get me back into the fold and I had a sneaking hope he just might pull it off, but I should have known I couldn’t protect him from the fire, because he’d never really seen the fire. That day, he saw it and it burnt that something out of him.

It roasted the poor bastard alive.

As bad days go, the complete destruction of the steady and sure religious underpinning of his life was the cherry on top of it all. Lord help an unbeliever out here, at least spare him because I knew he’d be no bloody good wrestling with all the godless doubts that have always nagged away at a low creature like me. It was a slow, untreatable and seventy per cent, first class, New York primo steak, first degree burns injury that no amount of skin grafts could make better. In the end he became someone looking for nothing more than a meaningful way of checking out, but the reality was that he was just another casualty of that day.

It was a kind of delayed reaction thing which took a few more years of his life to play itself out. Corny but true, life has a habit of taking out the decent ones early, and again I watched and couldn’t do anything more than help see him out of the chaos his life eventually became. Hush up now, it’ll all be okay, I swear to Christ. You take your rest, I’ve got you. You just pop along now.

You stagger out of a few discos like that and it becomes clear that the common denominator, that promised basis of all religions simply doesn’t stack up with the reality – behave yourself, follow whatever scriptures you’re supposed to do and you’ll end up in Heaven, Nirvana or wherever deist carrot is being dangled. The innocents never even had the time to be bad boys or girls, so the whole idea of a life as some sort of test you run in order to earn entrance into some higher plain of existence is quite frankly open to question. The wake up message is as old as Agamemnon’s soldiers throwing Troy’s babies from the battlements of a city being sacked.

This is supposed to be a climate skeptic blog and we’re straying into areas theological, which I’m pretty sure most skeptics are uncomfortable with, but I’m afraid that atrophied appendix of a religious upbringing is the mainspring of why I blog. Relax, I’m not some born again Christian after you on the sly. Rather, anything I do here is out of a sense of fairness, which as a reason can be tinselled and tarted up to something as grand as ethics or dare I say it, morality.

Of late, notables like Andrew Montford, Peter lee and somewhat indirectly Richard Tol, have dipped their toe into those murky waters to a slightly puzzled silence from the skeptic blogosphere. Where are you Matt? Even allowing for the stiffness of the articles, it’s about time they moved out of their comfort zones and made the human case for opposition to an agenda that’s supposed to save the Earth at our expense, and I mean that not only in terms of dollars and cents but lives lost.

Lives. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about us being proved right, about egos, about proving them wrong, but about fishing a few people out of a raging sea. We have to be focused, direct and a lot better than the stereotype we’ve always portrayed us as, so we can pull as many out as we can. The fundamental indecency of the whole thing is the widespread and unquestioned belief on both sides that it’s somehow a quasi-scientific argument, a fencing bout with supporters on sides cheering on their champions. It’s all too easy to see why the developing world see us, all of us, as totally irrelevant, if only because we behave like pampered children who’re puzzled that they don’t have any cake to eat.

I can point this very day at the harm being done to human beings by policies which are supposed to save people a century or so in the future. We don’t allow them GM crops, so they die. We don’t allow them to do coal-powered generation, so they die. We don’t allow them to DDT the arse off mosquitos that kill them with Malaria, so they die. We just don’t allow anything we think wouldn’t be good for them and they just obligingly die. It’s not a problem. Nobody sort of notices and anyway, mostly their arses aren’t white so they don’t actually count as real people.

We’ve already done the whole trip and totally ruined our own environment so there’s definitely no way we’d allow them to make the same mistakes. We’ll guide them forwards towards some medieval rustic, but yet beautiful and untainted existence skipping around the savannahs like seventeenth century French peasants and they’ll love us for doing it.

All I see are dire scientific predictions of an approaching Armageddon, which can only be prevented by throwing buckets full of money vampired out of the poor and passed on to the already rich. With a certain boring regularity, the predictions just fail to materialise and are therefore just ratcheted on a decade or two into the future. Nobody cares because it’s a feeding frenzy. Trough it baby, go for it. Get your piece of the pie while it’s still there.

I see people lining their pockets. I see greed, I see lies, mendacity, deceit and raw naked academic thuggery being used to advance a discredited theory that’s been crumbling like a sandcastle before an incoming tide for the last decade. It’s being crushed under the Everest weight of real world data that simply refuses to conform to its projections. What the hell, nobody cares anyway.

You have enough bruising encounters with ethics in the real world and I’m afraid your wonderful standards slip because you end up with the choice of being a righteous prick who’s paralysed within a dilemma of your own artificial ethical framework or someone who’s decided to do something expedient right now because you yielded to your own humanity.

If you’ve ventured to knock around the edges of our comfortable existence in the rich world, that bad day will eventually pay you a visit and it’ll be make your mind up time – and there’ll always be an urgent window on it too. Do something now, right now, because if you keep chewing it over for the next few minutes, circumstances will effectively make your decision for you.

If policies are killing people for no better reason than an unproven theory, then those policies are simply misguided, and if those policies are pursued while turning a blind eye to their impact on the most helpless ones amongst us, then anyone knowingly supporting such policies are not simply bad or ignorant people, they are immoral, if not simply evil. Their finger might not actually be on the trigger, but to my mind they’re still doing the popping.

Perhaps we’ve finally reached the stage where it’s now been recognised that it’s not about whether there actually is a legitimate moral argument which can be made by climate skeptics, but that it’s actually the argument to be made.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Tell me why.

Is there a moral dimension to being anti-environmental?

Wind Weasels Go Out of Their Way, to Dodge Responsibility!

January 12, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

“Unscheduled” Wind Farm Shut-Down Shows Low-Frequency Noise Impact at Waterloo, SA

January 12, 2015 by stopthesethings

One of the major obstacles faced by acoustic experts when trying to do meaningful wind turbine ‘noise’ testing is the dogged refusal of wind farm operators to provide wind speed and operational data.

Moreover, wind power outfits have resisted, with granite-like tenacity, quite reasonable calls by noise experts to shut down their turbines (ie “on-off testing”) during the process; a step that would show – unequivocally – what noise is attributable to the turbines’ operation (as complained of by victims) and what might be put down to “wind in the trees”, the source wind industry spin-masters routinely scape-goat as the reason for the neighbours’ complaints.

STT champion, Mary Morris changed all that when she provoked the South Australian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to conduct on-off testing at the Waterloo wind farm in SA’s mid-north.

Mary hit them with an absolute cracker of a letter (see our post here) and went on to badger SA’s rotten little EPA into reluctant action (see our post here).

Mary’s efforts set up a unique opportunity, which attracted several of Australia’s top research acousticians to the neighbouring farm houses – in the hope of finally getting a meaningful data set, with the turbines shut-off for periods long enough to separate out turbine noise from the rest. Those that lined up at Waterloo included top-flight noise and vibration experts, like Professor Colin Hansen (see our posts here andhere).

However, the operator – Energy Australia – fighting all the way – ‘offered’ to do no more than shut down its turbines for trifling intervals of 40-50 minutes – and to do so at times when complaints don’t normally occur (ie during the day-time). Hmmm…

But – to the noise experts’ delight – where decent and reasonable corporate conduct failed them – mechanical serendipity intervened: acable fault in the line that feeds power from the wind farm to the substation nearby saw the whole operation shut down for 54 hours straight. The ‘lucky’ break occurred at a time when the independent noise experts had the surrounding homes bristling with state-of-the-art kit.

The results gathered, didn’t disappoint: a top-team from Adelaide University, headed up by Professor Hansen, were able to separate out the ‘environmental’ noise (wind in the trees, etc) from the low-frequency noise generated by turbines at distances out to 8.7km.

The length of the unscheduled shut down allowed the team (Kristy Hansen, Branko Zajamšek, and Professor Hansen) to identify the turbine noise ‘signature’ within and external to three neighbouring homes.

Their results were presented at the Internoise Conference (43rd International Congress on Noise Control Engineering November 16-19, 2014 in Melbourne, Australia) in a paper titled “Comparison of the noise levels measured in the vicinity of a wind farm for shutdown and operational conditions” – which can be accessed here as a PDF.

The team – using narrow band spectra analysis – were easily able to contrast ‘environmental’ noise from the turbine ‘signature’ – as depicted in the graphs below: the blue lines showing noise levels with the turbines off; and the red lines showing noise levels with the turbines on (to enlarge it, click on the graph, it will pop up in a new window and you can use your magnifier from there).

So far, so obvious.

When even Blind Freddy can spot the difference, it’s little wonder that wind power outfits have fought tooth-and-nail to avoid meaningful on-off noise testing.

Thanks to their ‘lucky’ break, the researchers conclusions in their paper were:

There is a significant difference in the unweighted third-octave spectra when the Waterloo wind farm is shut down compared to when it is operational for each of the three residences investigated in this study.

The most prominent difference occurs in the 50 Hz third-octave band and it has been shown that operational levels can be as much as 30 dB higher than shutdown levels.

The peak in this third-octave band is also higher than the audibility threshold defined in ISO 389-7 (12) by as much as 10 dB for the outdoor measurements.

This peak was also measured indoors when the wind farm was operational but the magnitude is slightly lower and the rms level averaged over 10 minutes is at the same level as the audibility threshold defined in ISO 389-7 (12), although the variability in the noise results in the peak levels being much higher than the rms audibility threshold.

Outdoor infrasonic noise levels associated with wind farm operation vary depending on the local wind speed at the microphone. During periods of negligible wind at the microphone, distinct peaks corresponding to blade-pass harmonic frequencies are clearly distinguishable.

The outdoor results presented for House 3, where the wind speed at the microphone was zero, showed the most distinct peaks in the infrasonic frequency range out of the three residences investigated. For Houses 1 and 2, these peaks in the outdoor spectra were evidently masked by wind-induced noise and this is further confirmed by their presence in the indoor spectra for measurements at these locations, as shown in Section 3.1.1 and 3.1.2.

The wind-induced noise is caused by pressure fluctuations and vortex shedding, which are sensed by the microphone but bear no relation to acoustic disturbances. Therefore, to adequately portray the levels of infrasound outdoors, it is imperative that there is negligible wind in the vicinity of the microphone.

The shutdown times selected by the wind farm operator gave few opportunities to record such conditions. Hence, it is suggested that in future studies, times between 12 am and 5 am with negligible wind at the measurement locations are selected for shutdown/operational comparisons.

The narrow-band spectra associated with wind farm operation show a consistent occurrence of peaks at specific frequencies in the infrasonic and low frequency ranges.

The frequencies of these peaks are the same at each residence and they are not present when the wind farm is shut down, which indicates that they are the result of wind farm noise.

The low frequency peaks at 23.3 Hz, 28 Hz, 46.6 Hz and 56 Hz are surrounded by side-bands spaced at the blade-pass frequency of 0.8 Hz. Results obtained by increasing the frequency resolution indicate that it is quite feasible that the low frequency peaks are harmonics of the blade-pass frequency.

Thus their presence can either be attributed to selected amplification of blade-pass frequency harmonics or amplitude modulation of a turbine associated noise source at the blade-pass frequency. Further investigation into the source of the noise is currently being undertaken.

Kristy Hansen, Branko Zajamšek, and Professor Hansen (2014)

Nice work team!

But results like that shouldn’t require ‘lucky’ breaks and serendipitous shut-downs. Meaningful, independent wind turbine noise testing should be available to neighbouring victims, as a matter of course.

The terms and times at which turbines should be shut down for that purpose should be a matter for the experts engaged – not the wind industry, its parasites or the pet acoustic consultants that it employs tofluff and obfuscate on its behalf (the ones that wrote the noise standards for the wind industry on a ‘made-to-not-measure’ and ‘avoid-scrutiny-at-all-costs’ basis and – who, for no other reason than benefiting their wind industry paymasters, upped the noise limits from 35dB(A) to 40dB(A) – as Mary Morris points out in her brilliant letter to the EPA).

No, ‘luck’ should only be a matter of concern to horse punters and cardsharks, not independent acoustic experts trying to help wind farm victims get control of a noise source that destroys their ability to sleep, and otherwise drives them mad in their homes; if it hasn’t already driven their owners out of them.

Fortunately, it’s wind industry shenanigans – like that outlined above (that requires good fortune – rather than common sense and science to get to the proper result) that is squarely in the sights of the Senate Select Committee, it’s terms of reference including the following:

(1) That a select committee, to be known as the Select Committee on Wind Turbines be established to inquire into and report on the application of regulatory governance and economic impact of wind turbines by 24 June 2015, with particular reference to:

…

(d) the implementation of planning processes in relation to wind farms, including the level of information available to prospective wind farm hosts;

(e) the adequacy of monitoring and compliance governance of wind farms;

For those suffering from or threatened by turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound, now is you chance to hammer the so-called ‘standards’ and planning ‘controls’ that mean proper noise testing is a matter of ‘luck’ and not good measure.

Why not drop a submission to the Senate Inquiry along those lines? Note that the opportunity to make submissions to the Committee ends on 27 February 2015. See the link here.

More Evidence of the Futility of the Wind Scam!

January 2, 2015 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

AS BRITAIN FREEZES, WIND FARMS TAKE POWER FROM GRID TO PREVENT ICING
AFP
by DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDS 2 Jan 2015
As Britain shivers under a blanket of snow and ice, it has emerged that offshore windfarms have been idling to prevent icing up – and drawing electricity off the national grid to do so. Critics have pointed out the “folly” of having windfarms idle in a cold snap, but industry experts insist that all forms of power generation involve some electrical input.

The issue has been raised by Brian Christley, a resident of Abergele, Wales, who wrote to the Daily Telegraph to say: “Over the weekend just gone, the coldest of the year so far, all 100-plus off-shore wind turbines along the North Wales coast were idling very slowly, all using grid power for de-icing and to power their hydraulic systems that keep the blades facing in the same direction.

“Thanks to Ed Davey, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, we will be subsidising these follies for the next 30 years. And then, if we continue to vote for technically naive green politicians, for further periods after that.”

The energy firm which owns the 30 turbines off the North Wales coastline has countered that, on the days in question, the turbines were actually a net contributor to the grid. A spokesman said: “Our turbines were not idling but generating electricity during each of the days in question, contributing a positive balance of energy into the grid. All energy generators use a small amount of electricity to keep their systems running smoothly, in the case of wind farms drawing power from either an adjacent operating turbine or the grid.”

John Constable, of the Renewable Energy Foundation, a charity which promotes sustainable development through the use of renewable energies, said: “We know that in Denmark there are days when their wind farms are net consumers of electricity, so in some ways this is not surprising. It’s another example of how wind power is difficult and expensive to manage.”

Theoretically, Britain’s wind farms, both onshore and off, have a combined capacity of 12.1GW, enough to power 8.8 million homes. However, a report published last October by the Scientific Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute found that the chance of all Britain’s windfarms running at full capacity together was “vanishingly small”, meaning that actual output is often far lower. Rather, they found that the average output was just eight percent of the headline figure.

Moreover, they can only produce energy if the wind is blowing at between 10 and 50 mph, above which they automatically shut down to prevent damage. And in freezing conditions they must draw on the energy grid to rotate their blades slowly to prevent them icing, and to power the system which turns the blades into the wind. It also costs about twice as much to produce offshore wind energy as it does to produce traditional coal fired energy.

Roger Helmer, energy spokesman for the UK Independence Party, who want to see wind farm subsidies scrapped, told Breitbart London: “We’re familiar with the layers of subsidy necessary to make wind farms viable. We’re familiar with the inefficiency of the necessary back-up fossil fuel generation, for when the wind doesn’t blow. Now we learn that on windless days these wind turbines are cannibalising power from the grid merely to help maintain them. Will the folly never stop?”

News That is So Wonderful, I must Share It Again! Windweasel Goes Down in Flames!

December 14, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Bye-Bye Barnyard: Mike Barnard’s Boss – IBM – Shuts Down the Wind Industry’s Most Rabid & Nasty Propaganda Parrot

December 14, 2014 by stopthesethings

Mike Barnard – “Barnyard”, as he’s affectionately known – is easily the most vicious, vile and virulent of the wind industry’s beleaguered band of propagandists, spruikers, parasites and media manipulators.

Along with other members of his dwindling pack of marauding-media-manipulators, Barnyard stalks internet sites and Twitter like a starving hyena – venting spleen; denigrating and ridiculing those unfortunates suffering from sleep deprivation caused by incessant low-frequency noise and infrasound – he sneeringly calls them “liars”, without a shred of first-hand evidence to support him, let alone relevant qualifications or experience relating to health or acoustics; slamming highly qualified health and acoustics professionals who’ve been working on the topic of noise and health their whole lives, while simultaneously trying to elevate his best mate – a former tobacco advertising guru – to the status of an acoustics/neuroscience “Einstein” on the health impacts of turbine noise; and otherwise doing his bit to perpetuate every lie, half-truth and myth about the “wonders” of wind.

For a taste of the delusion that grips the man, contrast this complete pile of piffle that Barnyard must have beamed in from the outer reaches of the Cosmos – with the detailed, factually based analysis produced by the Institute for Energy Research that came from good old Mother-ship, Earth (covered in our post here).

Barnyard, runs very close with the other “gold-pass” members of the hyena parasite-pack: “Enemies of the Earth’s”, eco-fascist-in-chief, Leigh Ewbank (aka FOE – a fully paid-up front for Danish fan maker, Vestas); Infigen’s in-house spin-master Ketan Joshi; and “Wind-Lord” Ken McAlpine, the struggling Danish fan maker’s front man in Oz.

But his days of pious pontification, rabid-hate-filled-rants, virulent attacks on highly respected academics, acoustics and health professionals and pedaling myths on the “wonders” of wind power are over.

Barnyard’s self-appointed “expert” status, nastiness and internet ubiquity was speared in a cracking open letter by none-other than STT Champion, Jackie Rovensky who, quite rightly, ripped into his reprehensible ranting with this fine piece of work, that hit pro-community websites back in September.

Mike Barnard’s disreputable wind industry propagandist role revealed
JA Rovensky

Vicious, grossly inaccurate and sometimes defamatory attacks on professionals and researchers are relentless from the wind industry and its vocal cheer squad. Their targets include individuals such as Dr Nina Pierpont, Professor Bob McMurtry, Dr Michael Nissenbaum, Dr Sarah Laurie, Mr Steven Cooper, Professor Colin Hansen, Mr Les Huson, Mr Rick James and numerous others, who work to uncover the truth of reported acoustic emission related adverse health impacts linked to Industrial Wind Turbines.

One of the most prolific and virulent is someone called Mike Barnard, an IBM employee. It seems he began his attacks when living in Canada, and is now physically located in Singapore. Whilst Barnard claims to be operating independently of his employer, IBM, the amount of time he spends blogging on wind power and smart grid related issues, and the business connections IBM have with the renewables industry with respect to smart grid technology and renewable energy, make his assertion that IBM are not involved and supporting his activities questionable.

When one of Barnard’s cyber bullying victims informed him what he’d written was libellous, Barnard’s comment in response was to the effect that he was laughing at them because he was untouchable by living in Singapore and utilising free blogging software in a “Cloud”? IBM has a strict policy on cyberbullying, and has been specifically made aware of Barnard’s activities. What action has IBM taken to discipline their vocal employee, who is bringing their organisation into considerable international disrepute with his behaviour?

So who is Mike Barnard, and what are his professional qualifications? On Barnard’s personal blog site he states he became interested in blogging on energy concerns several years ago, and this led:

to significant contacts, research and writing related to wind energy and its myriad societal and commercial interconnections, including the electrical grid, wind energy innovations, social license, health, noise and legal aspects. [1]

In a response to comment on one of his blogs he responded with:

For a little context on my background, I was the Business Architect responsible for delivery of the world’s first full public health surveillance system for communicable diseases, … funded by the Canadian government …

On his blog site introduction he states:

IBM was engaged to build the major technical solution which automated management of communicable disease and public health surveillance.

This related to Canada. He goes on to state he:

joined the program in the late 2000’s as the business architect, responsible for understanding policy, epidemiology and other business drivers and balancing them with what was pragmatically possible …

IBM was contracted in 2006 to design a system to be completed in 2007. They completed the design of the program in 2008, but in June 2013 the Canadian Medical Association Journal : Journal de l’Association medicale canadienne (CMAJ:JAMC) published an article which reported since then progress had been delayed because of numerous technical problems and confusion among provinces and little had been heard of the program since, “The concept has gone almost nowhere” [2].

Barnard continues to inform us how he has read through health studies and reviews related to wind power from around the world and claims:

constant and deep access and conversations related to public health management, epidemiology and the nature of medical evidence … That experience and on-the-job education has been invaluable as I’ve read through health studies and reviews related to wind power from around the world …

This has apparently also led to:

recognition of my expertise … I’m pleased to say that my material is helping to shape legal defences of wind energy, advocacy programs and investments in several countries.

In addition in 2013 he was assigning a blog “debate” relating to bird flight paths through a proposed Wind Turbine site, as being his impetus to start collecting material, and creating his own personal blog saying:

A few years ago I started down a road that has led to an unexpected place.

However, blogs can be found from him on energy from around 2010 [3], his voyage into health issues seems to have begun around 2012 when he attacked Dr Nina Pierpont and Dr Nissenbaum. Barnard has been involved in blogging on wind energy issues for some time, and he considers himself to be an integral part of the wind industry’s product defence strategy, which is certainly consistent with his behaviour. This is also consistent with how he is perceived by others who are also actively engaged in the same dishonest activities of denying the known adverse health impacts of wind turbine acoustic emissions; known to the wind industry and acousticians to cause damage to health via “annoyance” symptoms including sleep disturbance and body vibrations for nearly thirty years, since the work undertaken by Dr Neil Kelley et al in collaboration with NASA and a number of research organisations and wind turbine manufacturers.

The list of “publications” following these claims relate to blog sites and/or websites which are sites supporting Renewable Energy production and blogs which repeat the misinformation. They are not peer reviewed journal articles, nor has Mr Barnard been qualified to give expert evidence in any jurisdiction on wind turbine health and noise issues.

Barnard proudly displays a list of his 50 “Skills and Expertise” which includes “Wind Energy and Health”. None of the others cover any medical or health skill or expertise, and it hasn’t been possible to locate any medical or health related training or degree, or indeed any other relevant technical, professional or academic qualifications he has achieved with direct relevance to wind turbine noise or health, as he does not provide details of them. This suggests that Mr Barnard does not have that relevant professional background, academic training or expertise.

Just what is Mr Barnard’s specific expertise in this area?

Throughout Barnard’s blogging career he has concentrated on castigating, defaming and ridiculing those who do have qualifications, research and/or authorships, and who are demonstrably independent of the wind industry and from those who benefit financially from its operations.

One person in particular he’s taken aim at is Dr Sarah Laurie from South Australia, who is the CEO of the Waubra Foundation. The Waubra Foundation was established to facilitate independent multidisciplinary research into the impacts of infrasound and low frequency noise and vibration on human health. Wind turbine noise is just one source of noise the Foundation is concerned with.

Dr Sarah Laurie is a fully trained and qualified doctor, with clinical experience as a highly regarded rural General Practitioner, but she is not currently registered to practice medicine because of personal and family health issues and caring responsibilities. In Australia, it is a requirement that to practice medicine, you must be currently registered with the Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Agency (AHPRA). Dr Laurie is not currently practising medicine with her current work as CEO of the Waubra Foundation. She is not seeing patients, she is not diagnosing conditions, and she is not prescribing medicine. She is listening carefully to what people adversely impacted by environmental noise tell her about their health problems, and the diagnoses their treating health practitioners have given them, if they choose to share that information with her.

Claims made by Mr Barnard (and others working with the wind industry such as Infigen Employee Laura Dunphy, and VESTAS employee Ken McAlpine) that she is deregistered are deliberately false. Implying that she has been “struck off” for professional misconduct is just one example of Barnard’s regular defamatory utterances, which are then repeated by others. Further his claims that she was “forced” to stop using the title of Doctor are also false. Mr Barnard continually deliberately misleads his readers with such comments and is clearly disinterested in the truth.

Because of a spurious complaint to the regulatory authority that she was “practising medicine whilst being unregistered” Dr Laurie voluntarily offered to AHPRA not to use the title “Dr” which retired or non-practising doctors are legally entitled to do in Australia, because she did not wish to mislead anyone about her current non registered status in her work with the Waubra Foundation. There had been no complaints to AHPRA from anyone who Sarah had interacted with that she had misled them as she had always been careful to ensure that anyone contacting her directly for information about their own circumstances was well aware of her current unregistered status. Indeed anyone with any awareness of this issue would be well aware of her current unregistered status because of the wide and frequent publicity this issue was given by the wind industry and its vocal supporters, particularly Professor Simon Chapman, the ABC and Fairfax media.

There is no restriction on anyone else referring to her as “Dr”, nor is there a restriction on her using the title if she was not performing her role as the Waubra Foundation CEO. AHPRA staff expressed their gratitude to her for this offer not to use the title “Dr”, which they accepted, with the proviso that when she reregistered to practice she would resume using the title “Dr”.

This issue was specifically clarified in the Environmental Review Tribunal Decision: Bovaird v. Director, Ministry of the Environment where the judgment stated the following:

The Tribunal finds that this evidence supports Ms. Laurie’s assertion that the AHPRA did not make any finding in respect of the complaint made against her.

Why did Mike Barnard ignore this finding of the Tribunal?

It is clear that he did not mention it because his intent was to deliberately smear Dr Laurie’s professional and personal reputation. It is also clear that the original widely publicised complaint to the NHMRC and AHPRA alleging professional and research misconduct, was done for precisely the same reasons by those within public health and wind industry circles in Australia who were unhappy with the attention the issue of health damage from wind turbine noise was attracting.

Those involved in this sordid episode include senior people in the ranks of public health bodies in Australia, including the Public Health Association of Australia, whose CEO, Michael Moore made the complaint, and whose computer created the defamatory “anonymous” allegation document. Mr Moore has since apologised to Dr Laurie, and the NHMRC CEO Professor Warwick Anderson has also apologised for the NHMRC’s behaviour towards Dr Laurie in a letter to the Chair of the Waubra Foundation, Peter Mitchell. The NHMRC unnamed “spokesperson” had leaked information about the allegations to crikey journalist Amber Jamieson, specifically naming Dr Laurie. Others such as Professor Simon Chapman have admitted they “saw a draft” of the defamatory allegations document, and Infigen Energy’s propagandist Ketan Joshi is uncharacteristically silent when challenged by others on various blog sites about his knowledge and involvement in the production and distribution of this defamatory document. The format of the document was remarkably similar to the way Infigen energy prepares their responses to issues raised by objectors to their environmental assessments.

Among Dr Laurie’s credentials are her positions as a former Examiner for the Australian College of General Practitioners, a former Mid-North Division of General Practice representative and former member of the regional Mental Health Advisory Committee. She was a provider of pro bono services to the local Aboriginal community and a cofounder of the regional Rape and Sexual Assault service. She also undertook emergency care work at the local rural hospital as a visiting medical officer, in addition to her role as an employee, associate and then partner in a local medical practice.

These credentials are not confidential, and are available to Mr Barnard and anyone else who wishes to ascertain her qualifications, just by looking at the Waubra Foundation website [4], and reading the speech given in the Australian Federal Parliament about this matter, by the former Member for Hume, Alby Schultz [5].

Dr Laurie states clearly she has no expertise in acoustics, but does consult regularly and collaborates closely with those who are acousticians, to help ensure she understands what she needs to in relation to exposure levels of infrasound, audible noise and vibration and correlations with reported health symptoms. She also repeats constantly she does not undertake and is not trained to do research in an academic manner, but is actively facilitating the research being conducted by others. What she goes to great pains to explain is that she listens very carefully to the symptoms people living near environmental noise experience themselves and then try and describe. This is a core skill required by rural general practitioners, something she was specifically trained to do and was particularly skilled at. Rural doctors need excellent diagnostic skills, most of which is dependent on taking a very careful clinical history, as they do not have the luxury of specialists “next door” and easy and rapid access to a range of diagnostic facilities which city counterparts take for granted.

Dr Laurie then collects and collates pieces of information given to her by people reporting changes to their health after wind turbines and other industrial noise sources begin operating in their vicinity, looking for similarities and patterns which give important clues as to direct causation. Occasionally people provide her with some of their medical records and other health data, which is kept confidential unless the person concerned gives their permission for the information to be out in the public domain, or the information has already been reported publicly in the media or in oral or written testimony to courts, tribunals, and parliamentary inquiries.

Dr Laurie always maintains confidentiality, even when under significant and very public pressure from others demanding she release information to them for their research. One example is the repeated private and public harassment from Professor Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health at Sydney University, and Expert Adviser to the Climate and Health Alliance, to release the names of residents forced to leave their homes and other details such as locations of their abandoned homes [6]. Much of that information had been provided to her in confidence, and some of the information could have caused significant harm to the people concerned – for example because of non-disclosure clauses in legal documents signed by people providing the information, or by their close relations. Others requested privacy because of concerns about property damage, burglary or arson to unoccupied homes. It has subsequently emerged from inquiries made by Senator Madigan’s staff, that at the time Professor Chapman conducted his inquiries, he did not have in place prior ethics committee approvals from the Sydney University Ethics Committee. Requests for information were made directly to wind turbine noise affected residents, causing them considerable distress. [update:The Sydney University Ethics Committee has clarified that no approval was required, as the ‘research’ entailed only asking people to corroborate already public statements.]

Whatever the Bovaird ERT Tribunal said in Ontario, Dr Laurie cannot be objectively considered as having been “diagnosing” patients since she ceased practicing.

Examination of information consisting of health issues diagnosed by treating physicians and discussing this information with the informants does not constitute “making a diagnosis”, which is a process requiring a thorough clinical evaluation by a treating health practitioner. What Dr Laurie did in the Boviard case is no different to what she has done elsewhere, and can only be considered as evaluating the combination of specific individual clinical circumstances with respect to the available research evidence and clinical knowledge. That was precisely what Dr Laurie had been asked to do. She was not asked to diagnose patients, nor would she have done so, as she is well aware of the appropriate constraints on such activities for those who are not currently registered to practice medicine.

Irrespective of the Environment Review Tribunal’s questionable determination in the Boviard case, which is consistent with other questionable decisions made by the same Tribunal resulting in many rural Ontarians being harmed by wind turbine noise because of unsafe and continuing wind turbine development approvals, it is logically impossible for anyone to diagnose someone “before” they have symptoms.

Identifying that some people who have one or more acknowledged risk factors prior to Industrial Wind Turbines beginning to operate provides information about predictable health problems which may ensue with exposure to infrasound and low frequency noise. You don’t have to be a trained doctor or research academic to come to that conclusion, but clearly the knowledge attained from years of study and subsequent clinical practice does put a formerly registered practising medical practitioner in a position where her expertise can be utilised, as an expert witness in this field, without her currently “practising” medicine.

The complete lack of critical thinking used by members of the Ontario Environment Review Tribunal who used such irrational logic to determine whether someone has the ability to offer a hypothesis, is mind boggling at best and disturbingly suggestive of bias at worst.

There are constant references to Dr Laurie not being able to stipulate what distance she determines is a safe distance these turbines should be from people. Dr Laurie consistently states she cannot provide a fixed distance, as there are many variables to be considered and the multi-disciplinary research needs to be undertaken first. After all, not only are turbines becoming larger, and installed in greater numbers in individual projects or through extending existing project many other variables have to be taken into account, such as the geology, wind directions and speed, seasonal changes, temperatures to name some.

Professor Colin Hansen’s research group’s latest acoustic survey at Waterloo Wind Development in South Australia [7] is a good example of the sort of research Dr Laurie has been stating is required for the last four years. That acoustic survey demonstrated that there is indeed a low frequency noise problem for neighbours to Waterloo wind development, and that it can extend out even beyond 8km under certain circumstances.

This is precisely what Dr Laurie stated three years ago; when the Waubra Foundation’s explicit Cautionary Notice was issued on 29th June, 2011. The information which led to the distance of 10km being specified in that document came from adversely impacted residents at Waterloo. Professor Hansen’s team’s research findings have now supported Dr Laurie’s statement in 2011 about the distance of impact and are consistent with the residents’ consistent reports for nearly four years of a low frequency noise problem from the wind turbines at Waterloo, which severely disrupts their sleep.

Much is made by Mr Barnard and others of the “nocebo” effect, whilst they dismiss the existence of “wind turbine syndrome”. However Mr Barnard fails to disclose that British Acoustician Dr Geoff Leventhall specifically acknowledges the existence of the symptoms of wind turbine syndrome, indeed Leventhall stated in June 2011 in a presentation to the National Health and Medical Research Council [8] that he had been familiar with the identical symptoms to WTS which he calls “noise annoyance” for “years”. Leventhall further noted that Dr Nina Pierpont’s contribution to the field of environmental noise was to identify certain risk factors for developing “noise annoyance” symptoms.

For those interested, the presentation and the slide show are available on the NHMRC website, and also on www.wind-watch.org. The relevant slides are slides 42–44, and the footage is between 49 and 52 minutes of the video.

Mr Barnard has also failed to disclose that leading otologist, and Harvard Professor Steven Rauch has recently confirmed that he is seeing patients with the characteristic symptoms of “wind turbine syndrome”. Journalist Alex Halperin had this to say in a recent article [9]:

Dr Steven Rauch, an otologist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and a professor at Harvard Medical School, believes WTS is real. Patients who have come to him to discuss WTS suffer from a “very consistent” collection of symptoms, he says. Rauch compares WTS to migraines, adding that people who suffer from migraines are among the most susceptible to turbines. There’s no existing test for either condition but “Nobody questions whether or not migraine is real.”

“The patients deserve the benefit of the doubt,” Rauch says. “It’s clear from the documents that come out of the industry that they’re trying very hard to suppress the notion of WTS and they’ve done it in a way that [involves] a lot of blaming the victim.”

Mr Barnard also fails to mention the opinions of rural family physicians such as Dr Sandy Reider, from Vermont, who is at the front line of clinical care for those affected by wind turbine noise, that “wind turbine syndrome” is a euphemistic description which does not sufficiently depict the clinical severity of the clinical cases he is seeing [10].

Mr Barnard fails to mention the opinion of Irish Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Colette Bonner, who has also publicly acknowledged the existence of “wind turbine syndrome” and said that those affected need to be treated with understanding. A recent media report from Ireland stated the following [11]:

“The Department of Health’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Colette Bonner, has said that older people, people who suffer from migraine, and others with a sensitivity to low-frequency vibration, are some of those who can be at risk of “wind turbine syndrome”.

“These people must be treated appropriately and sensitively as these symptoms can be very debilitating,” she commented in a report to the Department of the Environment last year.”

Mr Barnard, and those whose commercial interests he is working so hard to protect, is involved in a grubby, dishonest, misinformation and vilification campaign, as part of a global defence strategy for the global wind industry. This industry has been well aware of the problems directly caused by wind turbine noise since 1987, when Dr Neil Kelley’s research [12] establishing direct causation of annoyance symptoms from infrasound and low frequency noise was presented at the American Wind Energy Association conference.

Mr Barnard and his associates’ behaviour is further eroding the personal and professional reputations of all those involved, and eroding the reputations of the companies and organisations they work for, including in this instance IBM.

However, perhaps more importantly Mr Barnard’s behaviour is further eroding the public’s confidence in the global wind industry and its social licence to operate. Such tactics in Australia will only result in the lessening of political and public support for the large subsidies from electrical consumers which are required to keep the wind industry operating.

As Professor Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recently pointed out, the wind industry runs on subsidies [13]. Without the support of the public who are funding the wind industry via their mounting electricity bills, and the politicians responsible for the legislation which forces the subsidies to be collected directly from the public, the wind industry in Australia and elsewhere around the world is doomed – a fitting consequence for such a dishonest and health damaging industry which has shattered the lives of too many rural residents and their families for too long.

It’s time, as a growing number of professionals and researchers are openly saying, for the wind industry to accept the problem, and work to eliminate it. “Shooting the professional messengers” as the Energy and Policy Institute publication by Barnard [14] has tried to do, will not stop the litigation for noise nuisance, negligence against complicit acousticians, or applications for injunctions to cease the operation of turbines, and will only further reduce the diminishing social licence for the wind industry to operate.

JA Rovensky

Nice work, Jackie!

To see the original, along with Jackie’s numerous footnotes and references – click here.

That link also contains a detailed comment from the documentary film maker, Andrew Greg – who put together the brilliant wind power fraud expose, Wind Rush for CBC.

For his fine, well-researched and documented efforts, Andrew was rewarded with one of wind-lunatic, Barnyard’s typically vehement, unhinged tirades: demanding that CBC never employ him ever again; personally attacking Andrew and his family; and anyone else that Barnyard could think of, that poses a threat to his maniacal world-view.

Barnyard’s “motive” for all that untamed malice?

Why, the mighty dollar, of course.

Barnyard works for American IT giant, IBM, developing the computer software that’s used in “smart” grid management systems and “smart” power meters – that are part and parcel of the chaos associated with Barnyard’s pet power generation “system”: a “system” centred on a wholly weather dependent power source, that will only ever deliver power at crazy, random intervals (if at all).

It’s that inherent chaos which provides the “market” for Barnyard’s “smart” grid software, among wind power outfits and grid managers.

And it’s the chaos inherent in the wind power “system” that sets up an increase in the opportunities for rampant gaming and rorting of the market for sparks – which is where Barnyard’s “smart” meter software comes into its own.

“Smart” meters are perfectly designed to allow power companies to make out like Mexican bandits on the hundreds of occasions each year when wind power collapses for hours each day, and for days on end. These inevitable and unpredictable wind power output collapses see the usual dispatch price for power, of around $40 per MWh, quickly rocket towards the regulated cap of $12,500 per MWh and, on plenty of occasions, hit it (see our posts here and here and here and here).

The only trouble for power companies is, that – in the absence of “smart” meters – they can’t hit power punters directly for the full costs of these wind power “outage” driven price spikes. With Barnyard’s smart meter systems in place, they can.

Clever stuff!

The inevitable result will be that – when demand for power to run fans and air-conditioners spikes on a hot, still summer’s day (or for heating during still, frosty weather) – coinciding with a (natural) total wind power output collapse – power punters will face being walloped with the full cost of the rort – being charged at the price prevailing at that very moment by peaking-power piranhas – ie not based on the average cost of power to the grid, but on the actual dispatch price, as it rockets its way from around $40 to $12,500 per MWh.

But – with 10s of thousands of Australians already struggling to afford power and 10s of thousands more being disconnected at unprecedented rates for failure to pay their bills now – adding “smart” meters simply means that more power-starved grannies will end up perishing in hot weather (or shivering to death in winter).

Now, that explains Barnyard’s mercenary motives, but trying to find some kind of explanation for his inherent nastiness requires an investigation to find out whether it’s because mummy didn’t love him, or if he was the fat kid that his schoolmates habitually and gleefully rolled down the hill just for fun?

And – returning to Jackie’s letter – don’t you just love it when self-appointed “experts”, like Barnyard – without a shred of qualification or experience relevant to the task at hand – launch vitriolic attacks on those who do? Barnyard’s style is an insidious phenomenon that’s pervasive among the wind industry’s parasites and spruikers: the less qualified they are, the nastier they are, the louder they shout, and the more lies they tell.

Jackie’s open letter was greeted with cheers among communities battling the great wind power fraud around the Globe; and the thrust of it was drawn to the attention of his boss, IBM, by the North American Platform Against Wind Power (NA-PAW) in a delightful and insightful letter (for a copy of NA-PAW’s thumping letter to IBM – click here).

Now IBM have responded in the only way a major corporation trying to protect an International reputation for ethical and socially responsible dealing could: it’s pulled Barnyard into gear – forcing him to: shut down his wind industry backed propaganda website, Barnardonwind; drop his self-appointed “role” as “Senior Fellow” for wind industry propaganda front, the Energy and Policy Institute; and to “no longer publish on wind energy”.

OUCH!

Here’s a rundown on IBM’s embarrassed response to Barnyard’s unauthorized, vitriolic and deranged extracurricular activities from NA-PAW.

Mike Barnard’s wind wings clipped by employer IBM
NA-PAW (North American Platform Against Wind Power)
12 December 2014

Barnard told to stop writing on wind power, resign fellowship from Energy and Policy Institute, and delete his blog: Barnard on Wind

Mike Barnard last month was taken to task by researcher Jackie Rovensky of AU and NA-PAW (North American Platform Against Wind Power) for a long-standing series of malicious attacks on trusted and respected professionals worldwide, who have variously documented and researched the now widely recognized devastating effects of industrial wind on human health.

This action by IBM is easily understood.

Barnard is best known for his self-proclaimed stance as a pro wind “expert”, who critiques others for their “lack of expertise.” He has zero qualifications for his writings on wind, yet “calls himself the lead researcher” in a study that calls wind victims “liars.”

Barnard has also falsely asserted that his “power reading” and “constant and deep access and conversations related to public health management, epidemiology and the nature of medical evidence … That experience and on-the-job education has been invaluable as I’ve read through health studies and reviews related to wind power from around the world” … which led to “recognition of my expertise … I’m pleased to say that my material is helping to shape legal defences of wind energy, advocacy programs and investments in several countries.”

This bravado has found its “religious” base with wind power developers and promoters, but Barnard now can only boast of a protracted vacation from writing on wind.

Others use his cyber bullying and “manufactured facts” to recreate their own smears.

IBM Corporate Officer (Brand Manager, Communications) Carrie Bendzsa, after numerous discussions with Lange of NA-PAW, wrote to NA-PAW, thanking the organization for bringing this matter to their attention, asserting that none of “these postings or comments (libel by Barnard) were IBM endorsed actions.”

The communique continues:

“We don’t have an advocacy position on energy and we have a number of social computing guidelines and policies in place that our employees are instructed and expected to follow. Furthermore, the individuals who are upset by the postings should be assured that IBM does not have any negative views about them personally or professionally.

“IBM has spent considerable time reviewing this matter internally and has taken several actions that our employee has agreed to comply with to resolve this matter. These include having the employee delete the Barnardonwind blog, terminate the Energy and Policy Institute Senior Fellow role and agree to no longer publish on wind energy.”

“We truly appreciate you stepping forward to bring this matter to our attention.”

Lange notes that the kind of serial cyber bullying that has occurred with Barnard on Wind, some of which has been subsumed into other pro wind sites, is of a serious nature: “It is regarded as irrational, unprovoked criticism,” based on the apparent, some would say obvious, intent to harm careers and cast doubt on the professional integrity of individuals. It has no basis in fact, and can be compared in a way to “hate” speech.

Notes Lange: “Cyber Bullying and defamation falls under the Criminal Code, and is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in Canada.” “Defamatory libel is likewise a crime under the Criminal Code, if the libelous statement is directed against a person in authority and could seriously harm his or her reputation.” (The persons affected by the Barnard libel are indeed persons in authority.) “This is punishable by up to five years in prison.” (While the US defamation laws are less plaintiff friendly, there are legal markers since 1964 for those knowingly harming by the power of innuendo and falsehoods.)

NA-PAW expresses thanks to IBM for its ethical leadership, and reserves the right to observe and facilitate the removal of all related and corollary defamation from satellite websites, if need be with the assistance of web expert libel/defamation lawyers.

One of several bullying notes to Dr. Sarah Laurie of the Waubra Foundation:

Ms. Laurie: You have not responded as of yet to my letter below. I await your confirmation that you will stop actively promoting health fears which cause illness near wind farms in light of the recent and historical research showing this to be the case.

Yours,
Mike Barnard
Singapore

CONTACT:
Sherri Lange
CEO NA-PAW (North American Platform Against Wind Power)
www.na-paw.org
kodaisl@rogers.com
416 567 5115

For the original with references – click here.

From NA-PAW’s piece above, it seems that those Barnyard’s attacked in Canada are keen to see him spend a little time in a Canadian “cooler”; although we’re not sure what the extradition rules are between Canada and Singapore?

In any event, Barnyard – who taunts his growing band of detractors from his bunker in Singapore – might like to hole up for a while with boys like Julian Assange, in the Ecuadorian Consulate in London; or Edward Snowden in Russia? That way he would get to compare notes with some other computer programmers, who turned opportunistic, self-righteous, narcissistic, media manipulators. We’re sure that he’d be amongst friends.

But, Barnyard’s clear and present danger isn’t a Canadian Clink, it’s his future tenure with IBM.

IBM’s edict that: Barnyard “no longer publish on wind energy” is going to have an utterly crippling effect on the rogue blogger and website-stalker.

What will he do with the thousands of hours that he would have otherwise spent vilifying and attacking those who don’t share his infantile love of giant fans? Take up golf? More time at Pilates?

Following his bosses’ orders will, no doubt, be a big challenge.

But STT’s sure that our followers will be only too glad to help him stay on the “straight-and-narrow” with his employer. Think of it in the same vein as steering that struggling AA member away from the pub and otherwise keeping them off the booze.

To that end, we suggest that from here on in, wherever and whenever you see Mike Barnard (or Mike using any known or suspected nom de plume) “publish on wind energy” – whether posting or commenting on a blog or website, writing papers, journals, etc; or otherwise spreading his version of the “wonders” of wind energy – let Sherri Lange of NA-PAW know with an email to: kodaisl@rogers.com – so she can pass on the links to Barnard’s posts, comments, etc to IBM.

STT’s has no doubt that Sherri will be delighted to help Barnyard keep his future employment with IBM safe and secure.

Or, if you catch Barnyard breaching IBM’s edict about not publishing on wind energy, why not send his posts, comments and rants DIRECT to IBM?

Here’s the link to send an email to IBM:http://www.ibm.com/scripts/contact/contact/us/en

And here’s the postal addresses, if you think snail-mail would work better:

Chairman, President and CEO, Ginni Rometty
IBM Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, New York 10504
C.c. Board of Directors

And

IBM Non-Management Directors
c/o Chair, IBM Directors and Corporate Governance Committee
International Business Machines Corporation
Mail Drop 390
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504

Think of it as noble work – you’ll be helping some-one who can’t help himself keep his well-paid job with IBM, while ridding the internet of one of its most rabid pests.

Oh, and if you see Barnyard commenting and/or blogging in relation to this post, be sure to let Sherri Lang and IBM know.

Ohio Citizens Band Together to Fight The Industrial Wind Scourge!

December 13, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Ohio Joins Global Effort to Slam the Door on Big Wind

December 13, 2014 by stopthesethings

Around the world, rural communities are fighting back hard against the great wind power fraud.

Wherever wind farms have appeared – or have been threatened – big numbers of locals take a set against the monsters being speared into their previously peaceful – and often idyllic – rural communities. Their anger extends to the goons that lied their way to development approval – and the bent officials that rubber-stamped their applications and who, thereafter, help the operators ride roughshod over locals’ rights to live in and enjoy the peace and comfort of their own homes and properties.

Australians are in there fighting hard – with the numbers solidly against wind power outfits that cause nothing more than community division and open hostility where ever they go (see our posts here and here and here)

The Irish have already hit the streets to bring an end to the fraud: some 10,000 stormed Dublin back in April. The sense of anger in Ireland – as elsewhere – is palpable (see our post here).

Rural Ontario is seething, with locals taking the law into their own hands – sabotaging turbines and construction equipment in order to defend their (once) peaceful and prosperous communities (see our post here).

And the Scots have joined in – tearing down MET masts in order to prevent wind power outfits from gaining a foothold and, thereafter, violating their right to live free from turbine terror (see our post here).

The back-lash against wind power outfits has been mirrored in the US – with communities rallying to shut down projects before they begin; and a raft of litigation launched by neighbours (see our post here).

In the US, even turbine hosts – who we’re repeatedly told by the wind industry’s pseudo-scientist advocates NEVER complain about turbine noise impacts on their homes and health – have issued civil actions against the companies that pay them handsomely to let them plant their giant fans in the top paddock. In Texas, 23 of them are suing 2 wind power outfits for damages caused by excessive noise – which has led to health problems and homes being abandoned – true to form, the companies involved had lied to the farmers concerned about the noise their turbines would generate from the very beginning (see our post here).

Now, farmers in Ohio have taken up the battle to defend their homes, properties and families from turbine tyranny.

Fighting Big Wind
Telegraph-Forum
Todd Hill
7 November 2014

“Stop the wind turbines!” “Say no to wind turbines!” “Wind turbines, go away!”

Drive around rural Ohio long enough, particularly the parts of the state that are flat and dominated by large, agricultural fields, and you’re bound to see signs voicing these sentiments in the front yards of property owners.

Fifteen miles north of Mansfield, just north of the Richland County line near the Huron County village of Greenwich, red and white anti-wind farm signs have sprouted like weeds. A subsidiary of Windlab Developments USA Ltd. wants to build a 25-turbine wind farm on 4,600 acres of leased land just south and east of the village.

The Greenwich Wind Park was approved by the Ohio Power Siting Board in late August.

“We first identified the site and approached landowners to discuss the project concept in 2010. Since that time, the project has benefited from significant community support throughout an extensive development and OPSB process,” Monica Jensen, vice president of Windlab Developments USA, said.

“Now that the project has been approved, Windlab looks forward to completing this project for the benefit of both involved landowners and the neighboring community.”

Well, not so fast.

Kevin and Marcia Ledet live on Omega Road, square in the middle of where the Greenwich Wind Park is supposed to go. They, along with about 27 other local residents, have formed Greenwich Neighbors United, and they’re not taking this wind park lying down. They have their reasons.

“My parents aren’t in their home anymore and we were going to sell their home,” Marcia Ledet said. “The guy called up and said, ‘Well, what about the wind situation?’ He’s backed out, he doesn’t want to buy it now because he doesn’t think it will be a good selling thing to have turbines in the neighborhood.”

The Ledets’ home sits less than a mile north of a busy CSX railroad track, with two even busier CSX tracks a couple miles south of that, typical for northern Ohio. And a variety of pungent smells waft on the breeze.

“They’ll say the railroads make noise and you have all these chicken and hog farms. Hey, this is agriculture,” Kevin Ledet said.

Dennis Alvert and Marcia and Kevin Ledet of Greenwich, Ohio, are unhappy with the environmental effects of a wind turbine farm proposed for their area.

“I love that they call this a wind farm, because what are you farming here? You’re making an industrial power-generating facility superimposed on a community, and it will alter it forever. Our property rights are being infringed upon.”

Ledet said he’s not against wind turbines, although like most opposed to these projects, he certainly sounds as if he is. He complains about federal subsidies “throwing a lot of good tax money” at wind farms, although a federal tax credit for turbines expired last year, with no signs that Congress intends to rejuvenate it any time soon.

Still, the Ledets probably wouldn’t be opposed to wind energy if it were coming from Texas or Oklahoma, where the wind power industry has really taken off. Here in Ohio, only two wind farms are in operation, in Van Wert and Paulding counties. Several more have been either approved by the OPSB or are in pre-application status with the state agency, including two in Richland and Crawford counties, the much larger Black Fork Wind Farm west of the city of Shelby and near the village of Tiro, and the Honey Creek Wind Farm in Crawford and Seneca counties.

Within just the past year, the legislative environment for wind energy in Ohio has grown progressively more unfavorable.

Gov. John Kasich has frozen the state’s renewable portfolio standard, which had stipulated that 25 percent of the electricity sold in Ohio must be generated from alternative energy sources, such as wind, located here by 2025. That mandate is now stuck at a much lower 2014 level, although the freeze is temporary.

Dennis Alvert discusses the environmental effects of a wind turbine farm that is proposed for the Greenwich, Ohio, community.

“It’s not a freeze at all, because if they don’t give us something that works we go back to the old rules, the old standards, which I don’t think fit the state,” Kasich said.

“The numbers that got set were pulled out of thin air. You don’t want to put burdens on companies in this state where they can’t possibly meet the rules, and we don’t want to burden the consumers where we’re costing them a fortune, so we’re going to do a reset.”

In addition, the governor signed over the summer legislation, which never received any public testimony, revising the setback provisions for wind farms from the outer wall of the nearest habitable structure to the edge of a property line, essentially rendering these projects impossible in a heavily populated state like Ohio.

“Look, here’s the issue. Private property rights are important. People choose to live somewhere, and you don’t just go in there and disrupt their life. The idea that you have a setback from your property line rather than your personal home I think makes a lot of sense,” Kasich said.

Will the new setbacks be the death knell for wind projects like Greenwich and Black Fork?

“That question is up in the air,” Dayna Baird Payne, a Columbus-based lobbyist for the American Wind Energy Association, said.

“There is language in the statute, House Bill 483, that projects certified as of early September (again, Greenwich Wind Park was approved in late August) will be grandfathered in. But some of the language in the statute suggests that if a project files an amendment, that kicks it out of grandfathering. There may be a rule coming soon from the OPSB explaining a little about the process.”

“There are not any immediate plans to do that,” Matt Butler, public outreach manager for the OPSB, said.

“The setback change has a number of legal issues that are subject to further interpretation before we can issue any additional clarification on that in a case that comes before the board.”

Kevin and Marcia Ledet of Greenwich, Ohio, discuss the negative effects not often addressed by the wind turbine farm advocates.

The energy marketplace also is challenging for the wind industry right now, given the abundance of natural gas being extracted from the Marcellus and Utica shale plays, along with a general decline in energy demand that’s persisted since the 2007-09 recession.

Still, the members of Greenwich Neighbors United aren’t taking any chances. They’re hoping to litigate the wind park to death before it gets off the ground, a strategy that’s so far been working for the opponents of the Black Fork Wind Farm.

“Windlab had an informational meeting, and just prior to that they took out a big, color advertisement in the newspapers that says how marvelous this is. It shows a little girl with these pinwheels on a prairie with some turbines,” Kevin Ledet said.

“It was an amicable meeting, but I told them we would fight them tooth and nail, take them all the way to the Supreme Court, whatever we have to do.”

Dennis Alvert, another opponent, questioned why Windlab has chosen Huron County, where the wind can be calm for days on end during the summer. There are, however, several power transmission lines stretched across the Buckeye State.

“The alarm for us is the way they have done business so covertly. They spend three to four years in an area getting their ducks in a row before they make an announcement,” he said.

Indeed, a flow chart showing the approval process for a wind project, provided by Windlab, has the first public mention (a legal notice in a local newspaper) more than halfway down the page.

“These people, they know the game we’re playing, and we don’t. By the time we got on board with this, the bus was already over the hill, we never even saw the taillights,” Ledet said.

“Everyone we talked to, they thought it was a done deal, there’s no sense in fighting, forget about it. And half didn’t even know what was going on,” Marcia Ledet said, adding Greenwich Neighbors United is $30,000 in debt.

The group is having its first fundraiser, a community chili rally, Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. at the South Central K-8 School, 3305 Greenwich Angling Road.

“And we’re selling hats,” she said. “Five dollars if you wear them, $10 if you don’t. If you think they’re ugly, you should see the wind turbines.”
Telegraph-Forum

Wind Turbines, and The Problems Caused by Their Nasty Habit of Burning Up!

December 11, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

BUSHFIRE RED ALERT: Wind Power Really Is Setting the World on FIRE

December 11, 2014 by stopthesethings

As the Australian countryside turns to the golden hues of summer, the attentions of its farming and rural communities also turn: hundreds of eager eyes become fixed on the horizon for tell-tale signs of the smoke that heralds the bushfires that cast fear amongst those that live and work in the bush.

Rules are set to avoid bushfires on high fire danger days – when a Total Fire Ban is called:

You cannot light, maintain or use a fire in the open, or to carry out any activity in the open that causes, or is likely to cause, a fire. No general purpose hot works such as using tractors, slashers and/or welding, grinding or gas cutting can be done in the open either, and this includes incinerators and barbecues which burn solid fuel, eg. wood or charcoal.

Farmers engaged in crop harvesting operations think twice about operating harvesters when the northerly winds pick up and send temperatures into the 40s – the safety conscious leave their headers parked in the shed or the corner of the paddock and spend the day in front of the A/C enjoying the cricket on TV – ready to respond in a heartbeat to the call if a fire does break out. Better to miss a day’s reaping than set the country ablaze.

All sensible stuff.

But such is the seriousness with which country people take the ever-present threat of a bushfire, that can turn a swathe of country black; destroy homes, sheds, equipment, livestock, fences, generations of hard work; and, most savage of all – lives.

The approach taken to the threat of the savagery of an Australian bushfire is about the common sense management of RISK – and, wherever possible, taking steps to minimise or prevent that risk altogether.

But one massive – and utterly unjustified – RISK is the one created by the roll-out of hundreds of giant fans across WA, SA, NSW, Tasmania and Victoria – all in areas highly prone to bushfires.

Turbines represent the perfect bushfire incendiary: around the world, hundreds have blown up in balls of flame – in the process – each one raining molten metal and hundreds of litres of flaming hydraulic oil and burning plastic earthwards. Here’s a few pics showing these plucky ‘green’ fire-starters in action:

Wind turbine fires are ten times more common than the wind industry and its parasites claim (see our post here and check out this website:http://turbinesonfire.org).

Here’s a report on, yet more, turbines bursting into fireballs.

One Suzlon turbine destroyed and two badly damaged
Wind Power Monthly
Mike McGovern
8 December 2014

NICARAGUA: A Suzlon 2.1MW turbine nacelle caught fire and later crashed to the ground on Sunday in an incident involving three damaged turbines at the 63MW Amayo complex in Nicaragua, the country’s first wind project.

“There were no injuries and the site has been secured,” Suzlon told Windpower Monthly in a written statement, confirming the affected turbines to be S88-2.1MW machines.

Suzlon declined to comment on the possible cause, pending further investigation. Nobody at the US-based owner company, AEI Energy, was available for comment.

Local press reports, citing ground staff and fire fighters, said all three machines at the 23MW Amayo II plant — in service since 2010 — suffered failure in their emergency braking systems, leaving them helpless against high gusts of wind. No other turbines were affected, claimed Suzlon.

The turbines caught ablaze at 5.15am, just under an hour after a blackout hit the Rivas municipality, where the wind farm is located.

All three machines reportedly spun uncontrollably. Turbine 28 finally fell and all three blades of turbine 25 were flung off. A blade on turbine 29 was left broken.
Wind Power Monthly

If the story has an upside, it’s the successful bid for “freedom” made by the blades during yet another “component liberation” event (see our posts here and here and here and here and here).

And glad to see our favourite Indian fan maker, Suzlon making the news! But they weren’t overly keen to let much slip – its spin-masters quickly switching to “radio silence” when quizzed about the cause. And – in typical wind weasel fashion – the wind power outfit concerned went into complete media lock-down. No surprises there.

Suzlon – aka Suzlon REPower, aka Senvion – have planted hundreds of its S88s all over the Australian countryside: near-bankrupt wind power outfit, Infigen operate a stack of them in NSW; Trustpower planted 47 at Snowtown, in South Australia’s Mid-North; and AGL speared a hundred or so into SA’s Mid-North, around Jamestown and Hallett.

Senvion are the crowd behind the ridiculous CERES project – which aims to spear 197 of its whirling, pryro-technic devices into SA’s agricultural Heartland, the Yorke Peninsula. Thankfully for farmers and fire-fighters, the chances of that debacle eventuating are slimmer than a German supermodel.

There have been at least 4 bushfires started by wind turbines in Australia, so far:

Ten Mile Lagoon in Western Australia in the mid-1990s;
Lake Bonney, Millicent (SA) in January 2006 (see the photo below);
Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm, Port Lincoln (SA) in February 2009 (see The Advertiser article below); and
Starfish Hill (SA) in November 2010 (see this link for more detail).

When it comes to talking about the exceedingly “hot” topic of bushfires started by turbines, Australian wind power outfits exhibit the same well-drilled, reticence shown by American outfit, AEI Energy in the article above, about its flaming little Suzlon beauties.

As a result, the media rarely report on the bushfires that are started by turbines. On the rare occasions that the media do – as in this Advertiser article – wind power outfits never comment, keep their heads well below the PR parapet and hope that the flames die down quickly.

Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm turbine fire
The Advertiser
2 February 2009

A $6 MILLION wind turbine has caught fire near Port Lincoln, starting blazes on the ground as embers fall.

The fire, at the Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm about 30km southwest of the town, was first noticed by a boat about 1am.

The turbine is alight halfway up its 60m structure, making it difficult for the 14 Country Fire Service firefighters trying to deal with it to extinguish the blaze.

They are also busy controlling the spotfires, but consider the situation to be safe.

The cause of the blaze is as yet unknown.
The Advertiser

Not only do wind turbines act as the perfect bushfire-starters, their presence precludes the best and safest method of fire-fighting from controlling them: aerial water bombers won’t fly within cooee of these things – experienced pilots have declared that they won’t fly within 3km of a wind turbine, even without the country around them on fire. For a rundown on pilots’ attitudes to flying anywhere near wind farms – see our posts here and here and here.

Aircraft and wind turbines – standing 160m tall, with a whirling wing-span of over 100m – don’t mix at the best of times (see our post here). Add billowing smoke, 50m flames and scorching heat and no-one could blame fire-fighting pilots for giving wind farms a very wide berth when the country around them is ablaze.

Fitting it is then, that the Senate Select Committee has the clearly obvious fire risk created by giant fans, and the ability to fight those fires, squarely in its sights – its terms of reference include scrutiny of: “the effect that wind towers have on fauna and aerial operations around turbines, including firefighting and crop management” (see our post here).

For those in the country keen to avoid the very real threat of incineration that comes hand-in-glove with having wind turbines speared all over it – note that the opportunity to make submissions to the Committee ends on 27 February 2015. See the link here.

It’s high time our political betters brought this insanity under control.

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Ohio Joins Global Effort to Slam the Door on Big Wind

BUSHFIRE RED ALERT: Wind Power Really Is Setting the World on FIRE