The ‘arguments’ pitched up by the greentard about these things ‘saving the planet’; and being the ‘answer’ to ‘cataclysmic’ global warming (or ‘climate change’, whichever is your poison) require the suspension of our good friends – ‘logic’ and ‘reason’.
To make it plain – wind power generation has NOTHING to do with the CLIMATE – one way or the other.
STT seeks to completely disconnect claims for and against man-made ‘global warming’, and wind power generation (see our post here).
As laid out in the posts linked above the simple FACT is that wind power can only ever be delivered (if at all) at crazy, random intervals.
It doesn’t matter how many turbines are planted – or how far apart they’re spread – wind power will NEVER amount to a meaningful power source.
It will always require 100% of its capacity to be backed up 100% of the time with fossil fuel generation sources; in Australia, principally coal-fired plant. As a result, wind power generation will never “displace”, let alone “replace” fossil fuel generation sources.
Contrary to the anti-fossil fuel squad’s ranting, there isn’t a ‘choice’ between wind power and fossil fuel power generation: there’s a ‘choice’ between wind power (with fossil fuel powered back-up equal to 100% of its capacity) and relying on wind power alone. If you’re ready to ‘pick’ the latter, expect to be sitting freezing (or boiling) in the dark more than 60% of the time.
Wind power isn’t a ‘system’, it’s ‘chaos’ – the pictures we’ve thrown up time and time again, tell the story.
When Labor came out to announce its ludicrous 50% renewable energy target (even more ludicrous than the current $45 billion monster) a week or so back (see our post here) – we predicted that the attentions of journos and politicians would be drawn to the great wind power fraud, in much the same way multiple car pile ups draw a crowd.
Much to STT’s delight, what’s occurred is a flurry of mainstream-press-pieces, that are starting to sound a whole lot like the authors have been perusing these very pages: articles that start with facts, instead of fantasy – and which end with the obvious conclusion – that these things will NEVER WORK.
And so it is with the claims being run by the intellectually compromised, who steadfastly “believe” that wind power will ‘kill coal’ and ‘gas’; and everything else their puny little minds have taken a set against.
As we’ve pointed out, diggers and drillers simply love these things, as they provide no threat to their opportunity to sell their wares – on the contrary – coal miners and oil and gas producers would profit very handsomely if the wind power fraud was taken to its illogical ‘conclusion’:
Here’s former Labor man, Gary Johns picking precisely the same theme.
Wind farms use fossil fuels, too … lots
The Australian
Gary Johns
28 July 2015
Bill Shorten should have asked a couple of questions before committing Australia to a 50 per cent renewable target. Can you build a wind turbine, or start a wind turbine, without fossil fuels?
The answer is no and no, you cannot. So what is the point of saddling Australia with an increasing load of wind turbines? (Much is also true for solar.)
Whatever one’s beliefs on the veracity and level of threat from climate change, what is the point in spending hard-earned dollars on expensive and inadequate-for-purpose technology?
The energy density of wind power is a little over one watt a square metre. As Smaller, Faster, Lighter, Denser, Cheaper author Robert Bryce tells, if all the coal-fired generation capacity in the US were to be replaced by wind, it would need to set aside land the size of Italy. Hydrocarbons are denser energy sources than wind. There is nothing that can overcome that fact.
James Hansen, the former NASA climate scientist, wrote in 2011: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase out rapidly fossil fuels is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter bunny.”
The other thing about renewables is that they cannot produce the intensity of heat required to not only build turbines but just about anything else that makes the modern world modern.
The material requirements of a modern wind turbine have been reviewed by the US Geological Survey (Wind Energy in the United States and Materials Required for the Land-Based Turbine Industry From 2010 Through 2030). On average, 1 megawatt of wind capacity requires 103 tonnes of stainless steel, 402 tonnes of concrete, 6.8 tonnes of fibreglass, three tonnes of copper and 20 tonnes of cast iron. The blades are made of fibreglass, the tower of steel and the base of concrete.
Robert Wilson at Carbon Counter takes us through the science. Fibreglass is produced from petrochemicals, which means that a wind turbine cannot be made without the extraction of oil and natural gas. Steel is made from iron ore. To mine ore requires high energy density fuels, such as diesel. Transporting ore to steel mills requires diesel.
Converting iron ore into steel requires a blast furnace, which requires large amounts of coal or natural gas. The blast furnace is used for most steel production.
Coal is essential, not simply a result of the energy requirements of steel production but of the chemical requirements of iron ore smelting.
Cement is made in a kiln, using kiln fuel such as coal, natural gas or used tyres. About 50 per cent of emissions from cement production comes from chemical reactions in its production.
Then there is the problem of priming windmills. Large wind turbines require a large amount of energy to operate. Wind plants must use electricity from the grid, which is powered by coal, gas or nuclear power.
A host of the wind turbine functions use electricity that the turbine cannot be relied on to generate — functions such as blade-pitch control, lights, controllers, communication, sensors, metering, data collection, oil heater, pump, cooler, filtering system in gearboxes, and much more.
Wind turbines cannot be built and cannot operate on a large scale without fossil fuels.
As important, wind and solar do not have the energy densities to create an economy. Forget trains, planes and automobiles; your humble iPhones, laptops and other digital devices consume huge amounts of electricity and cannot be made with renewables. That most modern of new economy inventions, the computing cloud, requires massive amounts of electricity.
As Mark Mills wrote: ‘‘The cloud begins with coal.’’ The greenies who got into the ears of Labor leaders to convince them that the era of fossil fuels is over should think again.
Reservoirs of methane hydrates — icy deposits in which methane molecules are trapped in a lattice of water — are thought to hold more energy than all other fossil fuels combined.
The Japanese, among others, hope that the reservoirs will become a crucial part of the country’s energy profile, as Nature reported in April 2013. A pilot project 80km off the country’s shores has produced tens of thousands of cubic metres of gas.
As with any new resources there are risks and much work is to be done for safe extraction, but the UN Environmental Program report in March, Frozen Heat: A Global Outlook on Methane Gas Hydrates, was very keen to ‘‘explore the potential impact of this untapped natural gas source on the future global energy mix’’.
Bill, you are suffering from Big Wind. You have let down the party and the nation. The Australian
In Australia, the wind industry exists – and ONLY exists – to wallow in a subsidy stream which will hit $3 billion annually in 2019; and continue at that colossal rate until 2031. The cost of the greatest subsidy rort in the history of the Commonwealth will exceed $45 billion – every last cent of which will be recovered from Australian power consumers through retail power bills:
True it is, that the PM is keen to R.E.D.U.C.E the LRET subsidy for these things, but plenty of other Coalition lightweights and wind industry shills – like Dan Tehan, Sarah Henderson and young Gregory Hunt (and two wind industry plants that work in his office) believe (or publicly claim) that the cost of the massive subsidies directed to wind power outfits under the LRET is magically picked up by fairies and pixies; and that the policy is a no-cost, family and business friendly vote winner.
However, the Senators on the Inquiry into the great wind power fraud – including Coalition Members, Chris Back and Matt Canavan – have worked out that the truth is all the other way – which has led to the recommendation of a 5 year limit to the rort:
The response from the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers – like the Clean Energy Council – is as galling as it is pathetic; predictably pathetic.
You see, we’re consistently told how wind power is getting cheaper all the time – so cheap, in fact, that it’s cheaper than the cheapest of them all: coal-fired power (for a trip to a parallel universe see this piece of twaddle from ruin-economy).
The Clean Energy Council would have us believe that its clients – although now that it’s headed up by Miles George from near-bankrupt wind power outfit, Infigen (aka Babcock and Brown), it’s hard to tell who’s servant and who’s master – are blessed with a kind of ‘divine altruism’, under which their only objective is to power the world for free, while saving the planet from the ‘dreaded’ CO2 gas; and otherwise spreading health, wealth and happiness all over the planet.
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But all of that benevolent bonhomie seems to melt away, like snow in summer, with the merest hint that the massive stream of power consumer and/or taxpayer subsidies are under threat.
Here’s STT Champion, Graham Lloyd with the parasites’ response to the Senate recommendations.
Subsidy limits ‘a wind farm body blow’
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
1 August 2015
Limiting subsidy payments for new wind farms to five years would destroy the future of renewable energy, says the industry’s peak lobby group, the Clean Energy Council.
A Senate committee will next week recommend the winding back of billions of dollars in subsidy support for wind farms. It will also recommend renewable energy certificates not be issued to projects in states which do not comply with federal guidelines on low frequency noise.
The final Senate report is due to be tabled in federal parliament on Monday.
Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the government presently had no plans to amend the Clean Energy Act but would consider the Senate inquiry recommendations after the report had been tabled.
The government accepted interim recommendations from the Senate committee to establish an independent scientific panel to oversee research into the impact of infrasound and low frequency noise.
It agreed to appoint a wind farm commissioner to receive complaints. And the government also instructed the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation to concentrate future funding on large-scale solar projects and emerging technologies rather than wind.
The final report of the Senate committee will call for new wind farm projects to be given renewable energy certificates for a maximum of five years, rather than 20. Clean Energy Council chief executive Kane Thornton said this would damage Australia’s international investment reputation.
“Business needs stability and confidence to invest, and this has only recently been restored to the renewable energy sector after 18 months of uncertainty,” he said. “Adopting the headline recommendation of this report would be economically reckless, and shows some of the senators are out of touch with the business community and the Australian people.”
Mr Thornton said the wind industry remained open to scrutiny, provided that the scrutiny was objective and based on evidence. “The wind industry remains committed to constant improvement in the way it interacts with the local communities surrounding wind farms, and to treating all community members with respect,” he said.
Mr Hunt said he would consider the Senate report. “We’ve recently passed Renewable Energy Target legislation that gives certainty to the industry and will see 23.5 per cent of Australia’s energy come from renewable sources by 2020,” he said. “We are not proposing and have no plans to make any changes to RET legislation.” The Australian
Kane Thornton’s whining is not just pathetic; it’s embarrassing.
Running counter to the CEC’s repeated claims about wind power being competitive and becoming cheaper all the time, Kane tells us that limiting the flow of renewable energy certificates (RECs) to a period of five years, spells the end of the wind industry.
What Kane won’t tell you, is that the amount of subsidy available for a single 3 MW turbine operating 35% of the time (with RECs trading at their expected value of $93) will top $855,000 annually. That single turbine – if planted in 2015 will keep raking in that same amount of subsidy until 2031; allowing its owner to pocket a total in the order of $13,686,624 over the remaining life of the LRET: all at power consumers’ expense.
So, Kane’s complaint breaks down to this: if the subsidy scam is limited to 5 years, his client’s turbines will only get to rack up RECs worth a mere $4,275,000.
And that’s just the federal government’s mandated subsidy: wind power outfits receive guaranteed rates of around $120 per MWh under power purchase agreements, which run for 10-15 years – a price which takes account of the assumed value of the REC received for the MWh dispatched. That figure compares, somewhat unfavourably, with the average wholesale price of around $35 per MWh.
Bear in mind, that a 3MW machine and its installation costs less than $3 million; and that being able to spear it into some dimwit’s back paddock under a landholder agreement costs a piddling $10-15,000 per year. Oh, and as the CEC and its clients keep telling us, the “wind is free”; and that these things run on the smell of an oily rag for over 25 years:
Under the Senate’s recommendation, your clients would get to pocket RECs worth over $4 million per turbine, at power consumers’ expense – more than the price of the turbine – where, on your case, the “fuel” is “free”; and the power produced is so cheap, retailers are just chafing at the bit to take it (although the fact that commercial retailers haven’t signed a PPA with a wind power outfit since November 2012, suggests otherwise). So, 5 years of RECs should be seen as money for jam, Kane?
The CEC, and the wind power outfits that it’s paid handsomely to represent, are starting to sound like a bunch of spoiled brats being disciplined for the very first time.
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The other Kane ‘cracker’ – that we just can’t let go – is his throwaway that the “wind industry remains committed to constant improvement in the way it interacts with the local communities surrounding wind farms, and to treating all community members with respect”.
Either Kane has been living under a rock, and remains blissfully unaware of just how his clients “interact” with rural communities and the kind of “respect” that they mete out; or his idea of community “interaction” and “respect” is drawn from the pages of the old GDR’s Stasi Handbook on community relations.
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As noted above, Kane’s boss, Miles George runs Infigen – an outfit that has had many “interactions” with rural communities; and has, apparently, created its own definition of “respect”.
Back in June, three farmers told the Senate Inquiry about how Infigen managed to force them to enter land holder contracts with it, through a combination of threats, bullying and deceit. One of them, Robert Griffin, told the Senate:
It is hard for us to generalise because we have one man, Jonathan Upson, from one company, Infigen. I must say he was really shocking. He was an incredibly arrogant man. He was arrogant about everyone. All the protesters were just idiots. You could never have any discussion. They were just idiots. The department of planning were dopey. When we raised problems, we were the troublemakers.
We never got anywhere with him at all, except to get threats. Even when the department of planning first said that they would have to get our written signature on a document after the date of approval we never got any consultation. We read in the local newspaper that we were going to be made to come into line. For six months we did not get one bit of consultation from them. They could not come around and try and sweet talk us—’What’s your problem?’- none of that. We just got threats straight away, right from the word go. We were told, ‘They will be made to step into line.’ That was the thing in the local newspaper and that was the attitude.
Funnily enough, the farmers in question have resolved to get out of their contracts with Infigen; and wish to have nothing more to do with goons like Jonathan Upson:
Then there’s that paragon of community relations, Pac Hydro. The union super fund backed Pac Hydro has destroyed the ability of the Cape Bridgwater community to sleep, live in and otherwise enjoy their homes for over 7 years:
After receiving hundreds of complaints over that time – largely ignoring and dismissing them – Pac Hydro was eventually forced by residents to engage Steven Cooper to carry out some proper acoustic testing. Cooper’s work – properly described as groundbreaking by qualified acoustic experts, including America’s best – demonstrated that the terrible effects being suffered – including constant sleep deprivation – were clearly related to the operation of Pac Hydro’s turbines:
After Cooper’s smoking gun research was made public, Pac Hydro was faced with a community and media backlash. True to form, Pac Hydro responded with its own brand of community “respect”. During a “community relations” meeting in February its then head-spruiker, Lane Crocket accepted Cooper’s work, and then practically told its numerous and long-suffering victims to “get stuffed”:
After that effort, wind industry corporate relations were never sunnier – well, not since James Hardie spent $millions trying to cover up and avoid its liability for thousands of asbestos-related deaths and illnesses – all with the help of the same class of so-called “academics”, that help run cover for the wind industry today (see our post here).
STT can only endorse the CEC’s brand of “community interaction”; and the type of “respect” dished up by Infigen, Pac Hydro & Co. If there was anything that was guaranteed to result in the demise of the wind industry, it’s treating honest, decent hard-working country people with condescending contempt, of the kind usually reserved for bitter and sworn enemies.
Australians – especially rural Australians – aren’t so gullible and guileless to tolerate the lies, treachery and deceit doled out by the likes of the CEC and its clients. Under the current LRET, the Coalition is expecting rural communities to cosy up alongside another 2,500 of these things; Labor’s 50% renewable energy target lunacy requires more than 10,000.
There is no way that rural Australians will take this rubbish lying down. Not anymore.
STT hears that hundreds of people, in dozens of communities are already organising the mother of all counter-attacks. And it’s the high-handed arrogance of outfits like the CEC, Infigen and Pac Hydro that’s driving them to revolt. Thanks Kane.
“From a legal point of view what is important is that the courts, including the Supreme Court, accepted the expert evidence of the authors of this paper concerning the terrible toll that infrasound and low-frequency noise has on both humans and animals, whilst it rejected the opposing evidence led by the wind industry lawyers.”
By Neil van Dokkum (B. SocSc; LLB; LLM; PGC Con.Lit)
Neil van Dokkum is a law lecturer.
I have just finished reading a fascinating article “Low Frequency Noise-Induced Pathology: Contributions Provided by the Portuguese Wind Turbine Case” written by Nuno A. A. Castelo Branco, MD, Senior Surgical Pathologist; Mariana Alves-Pereira, PhD, Biomedical Engineer; Augusto Martinho Pimenta, MD, Senior Neurologist; and José Reis Ferreira, MD, Senior Pneumologist; all resident and practising in Lisbon, Portugal. The authors were involved in giving evidence to the Portuguese courts culminating in a Supreme Court action.
Their findings were presented and accepted as expert evidence to Portuguese courts which eventually resulted in the wind farm developer being ordered by the Supreme Court of Justice of Portugal to remove the wind turbines from the vicinity of the applicant’s property (Supreme Court of Justice of Portugal. Decision No. 2209/08.oTBTVD.L1.S1, 30 May 2013).
These legal proceedings involved four wind turbines (although more were built subsequent to the commencement of the legal proceedings).
The four wind turbines were located adjacent to the family farm as follows:
No. 1: 321.83m from the house and 182.36m from the stables,
No. 2: 539.92m from the house and 439.64m from the stables,
No. 3: 579.86m from the house and 565.50m from the stables,
No. 4: 642.08m from the house and 503m from the stables.
The distances are important to Irish readers as our current guidelines suggest a clearance of 500m from residential homes (which wind developers routinely ignore in any event). Therefore, three of the listed turbines would be in a permissible position in Ireland.
What are expert witnesses?
As a general rule, witnesses can only testify about facts. It is the task of the jury, or the judge if there is no jury, to draw inferences from the facts presented in court, and witnesses must not be allowed to usurp this central function.
There are two notable exceptions to this general rule. First, expert witnesses may give opinion evidence, which is their primary function. Secondly, non-experts are sometimes allowed to give opinion evidence in defined circumstances, usually where their evidence would not make any sense if it were not accompanied by opinion.
Generally, a witness is considered an expert on the basis of their experience, training and knowledge. An expert witness is there to assist the court in coming to a conclusion in areas where the trial judge or jury might not have considerable expertise.
The expert witness is called for his or her expertise and as such should regard themselves as ‘neutral’ witnesses, there to help the court rather than to help one of the litigating parties. Indeed, the authors point this out very clearly at the end of their paper, saying that they are only interpreting the evidence, and in fact support the push towards renewable energy.
A famous decision setting out what is expected of expert witnesses is National Justice Compania Naviera S.A. v. Prudential Assurance Co. Ltd (“The Ikarian Reefer”) [1993] 2 Lloyd’s Rep. 68 Where the court held:
Expert evidence presented to the Court should be, and should be seen to be, the independent product of the expert, uninfluenced as to form or content by the exigencies of litigation.
An expert witness should provide independent assistance to the Court by way of objective unbiased opinion in relation to matters within his expertise.
An expert witness should state the facts or assumption upon which his opinion is based. He should not omit to consider material facts which could detract from his concluded opinion.
An expert witness should make it clear when a particular question or issue falls outside his expertise.
If an expert’s opinion is not properly researched because he considers that insufficient data is available, then this must be stated with an indication that the opinion is no more than a provisional one.
If, after exchange of reports, an expert witness changes his view on a material matter having read the other side’s report or for any other reason, such change of view should be communicated to the other side.
What is also important to remember is that an expert witness must be recognised as such by the court. The party who wants to lead expert evidence has to prove to the court that their witness is indeed an expert in their field. The opposition (in this case the wind industry) is entitled to attack the qualifications of the expert witness and attempt to convince the court that the witness should not be allowed to give his or her expert evidence. They can also call an opposing expert witness.
In this case the Portuguese Supreme Court not only accepted the expertise of the authors of this article and allowed them to give evidence, but the Court also preferred their evidence to that of the expert witnesses used by the wind industry, whose evidence was rejected.
So what was that evidence?
The family in question consisted of a father, a mother, and two children. Before the wind farm was built, the eldest son was a high achiever and regularly came top of his class at school. The authors take up the story:
“The Industrial Wind Turbines were installed at a distance of 321-642 m from the residential home. Complaints of sleep disturbances were first reported in December 2006. In mid-March, Mr. and Mrs. R received a letter from their 12-year-old son’s schoolteacher, expressing concern for the growing difficulties in an otherwise outstanding student, “particularly in English, Humanities and Physical Education. He progressed in Mathematics, which is a field that naturally attracts his type of intelligence. However, in the above mentioned coursework, it seems that [the child] has lost interest, makes a lesser effort, as if he were permanently tired. In Physical Education, an abnormal amount of tiredness is also observed. Is [the child] leading a healthy life? Does he sleep sufficient hours during the night?”
This immediately prompted the parents to begin legal proceedings and seek medical assistance, and thus, this team’s first contact with Family R.”
The family hired an accredited acoustical firm to conduct continuous acoustical monitoring both inside and outside their home, for a period of 2 weeks, and that included real time wind speed data. Numerical data regarding acoustical and wind speed information, independently collected by the accredited firm, was then provided to these experts (the abovementioned authors) for analysis and these experts deemed the turbine noise to be dangerous to the health of this family.
On that basis the family were sent for medical examination. The authors summarise the findings of the examinations (my emphasis):
“The 12-yearold child received a neurological test assessing cortical nerve conduction times: P300 Event Related Evoked Potentials (ERP). P300 ERP disclosed nerve conduction time to be 352 ms, when expected value should be closer to 300 ms. Brainstem Auditory Evoked Potentials (BAEP) disclosed asymmetries in the right and left nerve conduction times, and the right I-V interval interlatency value was at the threshold of normal (4.44 ms). Mr. and Mrs. R. disclosed slight to moderate pericardial thickening: between 1.7 mm and 2.0 mm (normal for the equipment in use: <1.2mm) [12]. Respiratory drive was below normalized values in both adults (46%-53%, normal: >60%), suggesting the existence ofbrain lesions in the areas responsible for the neurological control of breathing.
Observations made by the family included animal behavioural changes: Horses were seen to lie down and sleep during the day; Dogs were lethargic, and no longer jumped up requesting attention from their owners. Ants simply disappeared.”
Remember that these examinations are carried out in 2007, just a few months after the wind turbines are erected, and already the effects are dramatic.
Alarmed by these symptoms, the mother and children moved into an apartment in the city in 2007. The boy’s health improved immediately and dramatically:
“After the summer vacation in 2007, spent away from the farm, the 12-year-old child had again received the P300 ERP examination that, this time, disclosed nerve conduction times much closer to normal: 302 ms. In 2010, this child was again an outstanding student, top of his class.”
The father, Mr. R, did not have the option of moving into town, as he had to stay with the family business on the farm. In contrast to his son, his health continued to deteriorate rapidly in those three years between 2007 and 2010:
“Over these 3 years, Mr. R’s health and wellbeing had continuously and visibly deteriorated: intolerance to (any) noise had become more severe; situations compatible with an unregulated sympathetic nervous system increased in frequency; and cognitive impairment became more pronounced.”
I would like a medical person to comment on this but to me this sounds like the father became seriously noise-sensitive, nervous and jumpy, and confused in his thinking.
The family’s business was also threatened:
“Between 2000 and 2006, 13 healthy thoroughbred Lusitanian horses were born and raised on Mr. R’s property. All horses born after 2007 (after the wind farm was erected) on his farm developed asymmetric flexural limb deformities. Besides the IWT (Industrial Wind Turbines) installed in November 2006, no other changes (constructions, industries, etc) were introduced into the area during this time.”
This echoes the findings of another study detailing limb deformities in horses caused by industrial wind turbines.
In 2015 the following alarming observations were made on the father’s health:
“Mr. R continues to live away from Mrs. R and the children, and his health has further deteriorated. The respiratory drive value that in 2007 was 46% (normal: >60%) is now at 28%. The development of balance disturbances associated with loss of consciousness has apparently caused several falls, requiring medical treatment for facial and rib fractures. This situation is still under clinical study, as late-onset epilepsy is one of the most severe outcomes of excessive ILFN (Infrasound & Low Frequency Noise) exposure.”
In May 2013 the Supreme Court of Justice of Portugal decided that the remaining 3 turbines had to be removed from the vicinity of Mr. R’s property. The lower court had ordered the removal of the closest turbine but allowed the other three to stay, hence the appeal to the Supreme Court. The developer is apparently appealing the decision to the European Court.
In addition to ordering the removal of the wind turbines, the court also granted damages to the family. The wind farm developer was ordered to pay damages as follows:
For personal injury, the sums of € 250,000.00 to Mr. R, and the sum of € 150,000.00 each to Mrs. R and the two children.
To Mr. and Mrs. R, as co-owners of the land, the difference in value of the land before and after the wind turbines were erected.
The payment of € 200,000.00 to Mr. R, for his business losses.
The payment of all legal fees and costs, whether judicial or extrajudicial, that the family have incurred in order to bring the legal action and the cost of relocation of people and goods during the period of operation of the wind turbines.
A bittersweet victory given that Mr R’s health is ruined and the family’s way of life destroyed. Money cannot fix that sort of damage. Further turbines have also been built in the area as these legal proceedings concerned only the first four that were built (adjoining the family farm) and therefore the battle is not over yet.
From a legal point of view what is important is that the courts, including the Supreme Court, accepted the expert evidence of the authors of this paper concerning the terrible toll that infrasound and low-frequency noise has on both humans and animals, whilst it rejected the opposing evidence led by the wind industry lawyers.
A court is clearly neutral in this matter and has no hidden interests in a decision going one way or the other. A civil court must decide the evidence on a balance of probabilities. This means that before it accepts evidence, the court must be satisfied that the evidence is probable (capable of belief) and that it is more probable than the evidence given by the other side. In this case the Supreme Court accepted the evidence of the independent and neutral expert witnesses concerning the destructive effect of infrasound and low-frequency sound on the health of this family, whilst rejecting the evidence of the wind farm developer’s expert witnesses who claimed that the noise was within acceptable limits.
As the authors conclude:
“An effort toward developing and implementing appropriate construction techniques that would minimize the deleterious effects of in-home ILFN could be, perhaps, an excellent beginning. The hindrance to this apparently viable beginning is the sine qua non prior recognition that ILFN is, de facto, a physical agent of disease.”
Again, I am not a medical person but I take that to mean: Wind farms are a danger to our health. Period.
Wind turbine syndrome is not confined to English-speaking countries!
Lilli-Ann Green gives evidence that wind turbines cause adverse health impacts for some people who live nearby in France, Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden.
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON WIND TURBINES
Monday, 29 June 2015
Extract from Official Committee Hansard (page 1 to 6):
Lilli-Ann Green
(Cape Cod Times/Ron Schloerb)
Ms Green: I am CEO of a healthcare consulting firm with a national reach in the United States. My company works in all sectors of the healthcare industry. One of the core competencies of the firm is to develop educational programs to help doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers better communicate with their patients around various disease states. Currently, as a volunteer in my town, I am secretary of our energy committee and a delegate to the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission as an alternate. Cape Cod National Seashore is part of the United States National Park Service. In the late 1970s, I built a passive solar superinsulated home. I directed an environmental education school for several years. I work seasonally as a naturalist interpretive ranger for the National Park Service. I have been interested and active in the environmental movement since the early seventies. Today, I speak as a private citizen.
CHAIR (Senator Madigan): Thank you. Could you please confirm that information on parliamentary privilege and the protection of witnesses and evidence has been provided to you?
Ms Green: It has.
CHAIR: Thank you. The committee has your submission and we now invite you to make a brief opening statement and at the conclusion of your remarks, I will invite members of the committee to put questions to you.
Ms Green: Thank you. Until the beginning of 2010, I believed wind turbines were good and green. My town was interested in constructing wind turbines and a friend visited my office in early March 2010 to provide my husband and business partner and me with new information. Following the visit, I spent the next 10 hours researching wind turbines. That very day, after concluding my research, I was saddened but I became convinced there was credible evidence that wind turbines cause adverse health impacts for some people who live nearby. In the past, over five years, I have learned it is a global phenomenon that wind turbines make some people who live nearby sick and it is a dose response so these people become more ill over time.
My husband, who is now deceased, and I travelled to Australia and New Zealand in 2010-11 and subsequently created a film called Pandora’s Pinwheels: The Reality of Living with Wind Turbines. We then travelled around the world in 2012 and conducted interviews in 15 different countries. Most of the people we interviewed expressed that they were in favour of wind energy prior to wind turbine construction nearby. There are some common symptoms people the world over report who live and work too close to wind turbines. A good summary is found in the book Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment by Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD.
It does not matter whether people live in English-speaking countries or in countries where people do not speak English. People reported to us they are made sick when they live too close to wind turbines, no matter what country they live in. We interviewed people in both English-speaking countries and non-English-speaking countries alike who reported to us they were not ill prior to wind turbine construction nearby and after the wind turbines were operational nearby they were made sick.
We interviewed people in five countries—France, Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden—who either needed an interpreter to speak with us or who spoke broken English. Some locations were quite rural with little or no internet connection. Still, the people we interviewed through interpreters expressed the same symptoms, others the world over described to us. These people with no or limited internet connection even used similar phrases, analogies and gestures, as others did globally to describe their symptoms. What we actually found is most people are reluctant to speak about their health problems.
In the United States, there are privacy laws regarding medical information. Culturally, people do not openly discuss their health problems with strangers. We found this to be the case in the countries we visited around the world. It was a brave person who opened up to us about their health problems. Usually, the people we interviewed expressed they wanted to help others. If anything, people tended to minimise their symptoms or try to attribute the symptoms to other circumstances. Even when they acknowledged a common symptom such as sleep deprivation, many people who experienced additional common symptoms were reluctant to attribute these other symptoms to the wind turbines nearby. Furthermore, people the world over reported that they and their healthcare providers puzzled over health problems that appeared after wind turbines were constructed near their homes.
Many endured a huge battery of medical tests to try to determine what the cause of their health problems were. The medical tests, at a huge cost to the healthcare system, only ruled out various diseases. Typically, the cause of their sickness was not diagnosed by their healthcare professional. Frequently, we heard that the patients would be in a social situation with others in their neighbourhood and eventually people they knew well confided they had similar health problems that recently appeared, or after research online about a different topic these people reported stumbling upon the cause of their health problems, which were the wind turbines constructed nearby.
We even interviewed people who lived for 11 years near wind turbines in a non-English speaking country—and that was in 2012. Several people came to an interview to talk about their property devaluation. It was only during the interviews when they heard others speak about health problems that the people realised they had been suffering because they lived too close to wind turbines. One man in his 80s sobbed during his interview. He had been visiting his doctor for 11 years trying to figure out what was wrong with his health.
The woman who invited us to interview her and her neighbours learned about health problems from wind turbines when she saw the film I produced Pandora’s Pinwheels, with interviews conducted in Australia and New Zealand, that was translated into her language. These people needed an interpreter; they did not speak English. She told me that her husband had passed away in the not too distant past due to heart problems. Before he died, he had complained quite frequently of common health symptoms people living near wind turbines experience. Although they visited their doctor frequently, no-one could figure out why he was so sick. She thanked us because, in seeing our film, it helped her to understand what her husband had been going through and why. It gave her closure that she did not have prior to viewing our film.
Another person at the interview told us she had to hold on to the walls of her house some days in order to walk from room to room and felt nauseous frequently. She knew she was unwell in her home and abandoned it. She did not know why until she saw our film. She came back to the area for the interview because she wanted to tell the world that wind turbines made her so ill that she sold her home at a huge loss.
One of the people I have known for the past five years lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which is very close to where I live—it is an hour and a half away. In 2010, he had recently retired to his dream home of many years. He was in great physical health, very fit and has over a 20-year record of normal to low to blood pressure. Since the wind turbines have been constructed in Falmouth, Massachusetts, he has reported that his blood pressure skyrockets to heart attack and stroke levels when the wind is coming in the wrong direction for him.
In Falmouth there are three wind turbines that are 1.65 megawatts near this person’s home. This person’s doctor, whom he has seen over the past 20 years, is in the Boston area and his doctor has been quite blunt. The doctor has told the patient that his life is in danger and he must move. Unfortunately, the Falmouth resident is crushed and cannot bear to leave his dream home at this point in time. He goes to other locations when the wind is predicted to be coming from the wrong direction. Others we interviewed in many different countries told us similar stories. Many reported they have abandoned their homes, sold their homes at a huge loss, purchased other homes to live in when the wind is coming from the wrong direction or in order to sleep in, and others spend time away from their homes at a huge and unexpected expense. People considered their homes as sanctuaries prior to the construction of wind turbines nearby. Now their opinion is not the same.
We have interviewed people on three continents who live more than five miles from the nearest wind turbine and are sick since wind turbine construction. I contend that we need honest research to determine how far wind turbines need to be sited from people in order to do no harm. People report to us that over time their symptoms become more severe. Many report not experiencing ill effects for some time following wind turbine construction, meanwhile their spouse became ill the day the wind turbines nearby became operational. They speak of thinking they were one of the lucky ones at first, but after a number of months or years they become as ill as their spouse. Not one person who stayed near wind turbines reported to us that they got used to it or got better; they all became more ill over time.
Since we are dealing with a dose response, we do not know over the projected lifetime of a wind turbine—say, 20 to 25 years—how far from people it is necessary to site wind turbines. To me, it is just wrong to knowingly harm the health and safety of people. There are responsible solutions to environmental issues that do not impact the health and safety of people nearby. Our humanity is in question when we continue to knowingly harm others. I thank you for your time today. I sincerely hope that you do take active steps to help the people in your country who are suffering due to living and working too close to wind turbines, and I am glad to answer questions you may have.
CHAIR: Thank you.
Senator LEYONHJELM: Good morning, Ms Green—I suppose it is not morning there. Thank you for your submission—
Ms Green: No, it is Sunday evening here.
Senator LEYONHJELM: Sunday evening? I am sorry to being interrupting your evening.
Ms Green: I am glad to speak with you.
Senator LEYONHJELM: You have interviewed people in 15 countries, I think you said, under all different circumstances and so on. I appreciate we are not pretending this is a gold-plated, statistical survey, but I am interested in your impressions because I think you have more experience of this than any other witness we have heard from. What do you think, based on your experience, are the common factors in the people you have interviewed in different communities living near wind turbines? What are the common factors to all of them?
Ms Green: I think we seriously do not have enough research to understand this problem fully. We saw the same symptoms. Slide 17 that I submitted has a listing of the common symptoms that Dr Pierpont lists in her book. I really believe that we just do not have enough information yet. But throughout the interviews, country by country, people described the same symptoms. Many times they used the same phrases to describe them and the same gestures—even if they were not speaking English. There is a common thread here.
Senator LEYONHJELM: Do you get the impression that not everybody exposed to wind turbines is affected the same? Have you seen evidence of substantial individual variation?
Ms Green: I have, indeed. Just as some people are more prone to asthma and some people are more prone to lung cancer, let’s say, or any disease, we did see a variation. It appeared that if there were people who were, say, prone to migraine headaches, they were severely affected. But, again, there were people who did not seem to have the symptoms who were living either in the same house or nearby. I do not know whether it is a question of time, if over 20 years people become more sensitised and they will become sick. Very frequently we did hear the same theme running through the stories of the people we interviewed, where, say, the husband thought he was one of the lucky ones and six months later he could not sleep, he was experiencing ear pressure, ear pain and severe headaches or other symptoms.
Senator LEYONHJELM: We are aware of community groups in English-speaking countries who have expressed opposition to wind turbines, but we are not aware of that sort of phenomenon in non-English speaking countries. Have you encountered that?
Ms Green: Yes, indeed. We travelled around the world. It was a 10-year goal. We had it very well planned out and we thought it was for pleasure. But people kept emailing us and asking us to come and interview them. So we met people in a lot of non-English speaking countries, and they were such nice people, I have to say. They had just about any profession you would like to mention. They just wanted to tell their story. Many times these people wanted to talk to us for other reasons such as their house had been devalued because the wind turbines were nearby. As they were listening to other people in the room talking about their health problems, these people realised that they had been struggling with the same illness since the wind turbines were constructed nearby. They had never made that correlation before; in fact, they were quite frustrated. They told us that they would go back and back continually to their healthcare provider and talk about these symptoms, and they could not find a resolution or a reason. As I said, there is one man I recall quite vividly just sobbing—and that was in 2012; he was in his 80s. He had realised that since the wind turbines had been constructed nearby he was experiencing these symptoms that were the common symptoms.
Senator LEYONHJELM: Some witnesses have suggested to us that there is a relationship between not only the distance their residence is from the turbine but also the power of the turbine, the size of the turbine. Have you been able to come to any conclusions on that or is that outside your interest area?
Ms Green: No, it is not outside my interest area. In fact, it is quite alarming to me, because I have interviewed people who live near wind turbines that you in Australia would probably consider to be quite small and solitary—wind turbines that are 100 kilowatts, even—and they are experiencing health problems, even people living near a 10-kilowatt wind turbine. Frankly, it is the nearest wind turbine to where I live, and a number of neighbours are having problems, and not just with the audible noise but with the infrasound and low-frequency noise, based upon the symptoms they are reporting to me. It really is quite alarming. In my state, Massachusetts, there is a woman who has told me she lives more than five miles from the nearest wind turbine and she is quite ill. The onset of her symptoms was when the wind turbine was constructed. When she went on trips she was fine; when she came back she was ill, and it has only become worse over time. That wind turbine is not as powerful as wind turbines in Australia, and it is a solitary wind turbine.
Again, we travelled quite a distance in France—mid-south-eastern France—over a number of days at the invitation of the people in the area and visited several different communities where there were wind turbines. One of the situations is that the wind turbine is 10 kilometres from one of the neighbours who is very ill and 12 kilometres from the other neighbour. The person who lives 12 kilometres away reported to us that she had been very supportive of the wind turbines. She is very well known as an environmentalist in the area, has quite a reputation as an environmentalist and is highly regarded. But she is quite ill, and it was very difficult for her to speak with us.
The other person related a story of trying to detect what the problem was because he could not sleep and was becoming so frustrated that he would go in his car to try to find the source of what was keeping him awake. He talked about going night after night until he went into the wilderness. He could not imagine what was there, and then he found the wind turbines. They were creating a humming noise in his head at that point. He could actually hear this frequency. In our discussions with researchers, medical professionals and scientists, one of the scientists told us that what people hear is mostly a bell curve—that is the way it was described to us. Most people hear audible noise within a certain range, but there are people who are more sensitive to noise, and they hear sounds that most people would consider inaudible.
Senator URQUHART: I have a lot of questions. I am not going to get through them all, so I am wondering whether you are able to take some on notice at the end.
Ms Green: I will try. I am very busy, but I will try.
Senator URQUHART: In your submission you say you run a healthcare consultancy. Do you have any qualifications in health care or medicine?
Ms Green: I have a background in education.
Senator URQUHART: What is the name of your company?
Ms Green: I do not want that on the record.
Senator URQUHART: Can I ask why?
Ms Green: I am speaking today as a private citizen. I would be glad to give you that information if it is held as in-confidence.
Senator URQUHART: Okay. How many employees do you have?
Ms Green: My husband has passed away. He was my business partner, and I have scaled back the business. I am the only employee at this point in time. However, I will tell you that I have created in our company, with teams of people, educational programs that have been implemented throughout the United States. One of the oncology programs that was created by my team, which was quite a large team, interviewed over 100 oncology patients throughout the United States and numerous doctors and nurses and was mandatory for all of the oncology nurses in the Kaiser health system in California.
Senator URQUHART: In your submission you say that 300,000 physicians and healthcare professionals have undertaken training through your company.
Ms Green: That is correct.
Senator URQUHART: What are the products or services? Is it communication? What is it that you actually sell?
Ms Green: There is a number of different core competencies in our company. One is developing educational programs around different disease states, such as oncology, diabetes, heart disease and various other disease states. Another path we have taken is to develop a service quality initiative. My husband was an extraordinary speaker and was often the keynote speaker for national conferences in all sectors of the healthcare industry.
Senator URQUHART: In your opening statement you talked about how you had interviewed many people from various countries. I could not find any of the transcripts, either in your submission or online. I am sorry if I have missed them.
Ms Green: You have not missed them. In the company we are still in the process of editing the films. It was a huge undertaking of many months, at huge expense. There is a lot of information that is still being edited.
Senator URQUHART: Are you able to provide copies of the transcripts and the full names of the people you interviewed?
Ms Green: No. It is on film; it is videotaped interviews, and the film is being edited.
Senator URQUHART: You talked about how you undertook the research after you had new information from people within your area who were concerned about wind farms. Was that the purpose of the interviews?
Ms Green: No. In my town, one month after we learned that our energy committee wanted to put one 1.65 wind turbine in our town—and we had conducted the research and people in our town were quite concerned—our board of selectmen, which is like your town councils, decided to not move forward with the project. I am now on my energy committee, as secretary, and we are devising a plan to become 100 per cent electrical energy efficient without wind energy but using other alternative methods. Are you asking me what propels me to do the interviews?
Senator URQUHART: Yes. I guess my real reasoning was whether the purpose of the interviews was to inform the body of research on international attitudes to wind farms. Is that why—
Ms Green: No. It is not an attitude; it is to understand the realities of living near wind turbines—living, working, attending school, being incarcerated near wind turbines.
What happened was that my stepson was living in Australia and we went to Australia at the end of 2010. I knew there was a location called Waubra and I had seen the Dean report that had been recently published. I put out one little email asking ‘We will be in the Melbourne area and is it possible to meet some of the people that are living near the wind turbines at Waubra? Is it possible to see the Waubra area?’
It was amazing that I was connected with the people in that area of Australia. My husband and I drove to the area and we interviewed over 17 people in one day. They welcomed us into their homes. We did not know what to expect. We turned the camera on and we asked them questions, and they told us their story. We had no idea what we were going to find. We went to New Zealand and people emailed us after they had heard we had been to Waubra. They asked us if we would come and visit them and interview them. We did that in two different locations in New Zealand. When we came home we put together this film called Pandora’s Pinwheels—
Senator URQUHART: You interviewed people—
Ms Green: During our 2012 travels we just thought we would go back to Waubra and talk to the people at Waubra because we had been emailing them over the year. But people around the world kept on emailing us and asking us to come and interview them.
Senator URQUHART: So you conducted interviews in 15 countries, as I understand it from your submission. Is that how you got the contact information on the people you interviewed?
Ms Green: I do not understand your question. Everywhere we were travelling people kept on emailing us and contacting us and asking if we would come and interview them and talk with them. They wanted to go on camera and tell their story. We had no agenda; we had no plan. We work in the healthcare industry; we talk about various illnesses and disease states, and we educate doctors and nurses about disease states. I am sorry; I want to retract that: we find a cross-section where patients are having issues with the communication around their disease state, and the doctors and nurses are having issues around communicating with their patients. We find those intersections and help doctors and nurses better communicate with the patients. So we are trying to improve patient care. That is what we do as one of the core competencies of our business.
When we found the health problems with the wind turbines and when we saw in every country we visited that people were saying the same thing, we wanted to get that word out to people like you who are hearing from your constituents that they are having health problems. That is all I want to do—to provide you with the truth.
Senator DAY: Ms Green, as you might imagine, we have received submissions from hundreds of people who have reported adverse health impacts and yet we are being accused of trying to destroy the wind industry. We are being accused of rigging this inquiry and of being engaged in a political stitch up. What has been your experience with such hostility towards genuine inquiry?
Ms Green: I really do not have a response for you, Senator. I have heard a lot of stories from people and I have experiences myself, but I really do not have a response on that topic.
Senator DAY: Okay. I will follow up then: you say that a number of governments around the world are realising there is a need for more or better regulation surrounding the wind energy industry. Which governments are doing better in this area, in your opinion?
Ms Green: I know that in my state, I have a new governor and my governor has a background in health care, and I am expecting that my governor understands that people do have health problems when they live and work too close to wind turbines in my state.
Senator BACK: Ms Green, I have just one quick question; I know that we are over time. In Australia, we are proceeding to have independent medical research undertaken for the first time. One of the proposals put to us is that they try and simulate this effect of either noise or infrasound, and do so in a one-off exposure in a clinically sterile circumstance for exposure times of somewhere between 10 to 30 minutes and an hour. From what you have learned and heard—and from interviewing people—do you think there would be anything to be learned in exposing somebody for a very limited period of time, and once only, in a sort of laboratory-type circumstance? Do you believe that is likely to lead to any reasonable outcome or result that we might be able to use?
Ms Green: Senator, I am not a researcher or a doctor. But given what I have heard from people and what people have reported to me, I find it highly unlikely that that would have any results that would have any validity.
Senator BACK: Thank you.
CHAIR: Thank you for evidence today to the committee, Ms Green. You will receive questions on notice and if you are able to come back to us with answers to those, that would be appreciated.
Ms Green: Absolutely. I would like to thank the committee; the chair, Senator Madigan, and the members of the committee, and also to thank you, Graham.
The Germans are rueing the day the bought into the great wind power fraud.
The Germans went into wind power harder and faster than anyone else – and the cost of doing so is catching up with a vengeance. The subsidies have been colossal, the impacts on the electricity market chaotic and – contrary to the environmental purpose of the policy – CO2 emissions are rising fast: if “saving” the planet is – as we are repeatedly told – all about reducing man-made emissions of an odourless, colourless, naturally occurring trace gas, essential for all life on earth – then German energy/environmental policy has manifestly failed (see our post here).
Some 800,000 German homes have been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. In response, Germans have picked up their axes and have headed to their forests in order to improve their sense of energy security – although foresters apparently take the view that this self-help measure is nothing more than blatant timber theft (see our post here).
German manufacturers – and other energy intensive industries – faced with escalating power bills are packing up and heading to the USA – where power prices are 1/3 of Germany’s (see our posts here and hereand here). And the “green” dream of creating thousands of jobs in the wind industry has turned out to be just that: a dream (see our post here).
The ‘gloss’ has well and truly worn off Germany’s wind power ‘Supermodel’ status – as communities fight back against having thousands of these things speared into their backyards – and for all the same reasons communities are fighting back all over the world; those with a head for numbers have called the fraud for what it is; and medicos have called for a complete moratorium on the construction of new wind farms in an effort to protect their patients and quarantine their professional liability:
And, on a practical level, those in charge of Germany’s power grid have stepped up calls for an end to the lunacy of trying to absorb a wholly weather dependent generation source into what was never designed to deal with the chaos presented on a daily basis:
Electricity grids were designed as – funnily enough – ‘SYSTEMS’ – that can only operate around tolerances of a few volts and hertz, either way. Their designers never had the chaos of wind power generation in mind – with 60% of its installed capacity being thrown at the grid for a few hours when the wind blows and – without meaningful warning – having the whole lot disappear in a heartbeat.
[Now, that’s what STT means by ‘disappearing in a heartbeat’. Entire South Australian Grid – 13 June 2015 – from 9am to 3pm – a collapse of 750MW – 800MW to 50MW – or an output drop of 94% – at a rate of 125MW/hour]
That kind of chaos is set to have calamitous consequences for the entire grid – and every living thing connected to it. Here’s NoTricksZone with a no-punches-pulled take on Germany’s unscheduled return to the very Dark Ages.
“Alarming Results” From Fraunhofer Institute Study On Grid Overloading From Wind, Solar Power … Crippled Cities Pierre Gosselin
NoTricksZone
15 July 2015
As Germany piles on more sporadic energy from wind and solar into its power grid, stability concerns are growing.
Increasingly volatile energies like wind and sun are turning out to be more of an expensive nuisance rather than a benefit.
Researchers at the Germany-based Fraunhofer-Instituts für Optronik, Systemtechnik und Bildauswertung, Institutsteil Angewandte Systemtechnik (IOSB-AST) have studied the risk of grid overloads caused by renewable energies at the community level, the online Ostthüringer Zeitung (OTZ) writes here.
Already in just a few years power will have to be stored locally as well. […] And the answers in their study are, depending on the perspective, thoroughly alarming or spurring for policymaking and the economy.
According to the OTZ, a team of researchers led by Peter Bretschneider at the Fraunhofer’s IOSB-AST conducted a 3-year study, where they literally built a statistical mock-up city of 30,000 that included a downtown, residential areas, commercial district, solar installations and wind parks. “A total of 1847 residential and business buildings that included everything from grandma’s little house to office complex for public officials.”
And so that the mock-up city simulates what is typical today in Germany, it also had everything a town would expect to have with the current German feed-in act:
4456 ‘grid elements’, i.e. power lines, transformers, large points of consumption and feed-in systems, foremost photovoltaics on the roofs.”
Even the homes were provided with the thermal insulation that they are expected to have later on.
Next the Fraunhofer scientists electrified their simulated city. Then using meteorological data they allowed the sun to rise and set, the wind to blow, the temperatures to change – just like in real life.”
Next they extrapolated outwards to the expected conditions of the year 2018 and 2023, leaving the local power grid unchanged and allowing more wind and solar energy to come online as expected from the provisions of the feed-in act. How did the city’s power grid fare? The OTZ tells us the shocking results, and they aren’t pretty:
Already today in the simulated city one of the 14 network nodes gets sporadically overloaded. In 2018 the impacted transformer comes under serious stress 22 days a year, and so does another transformer. Five years later three nodes are impacted by long-term frequent back-feeding of surplus solar energy in the medium-voltage grid. At least one cable in the area exceeds ‘the limits of thermal loading’. […] ‘Yes, a transformer would be glowing – and the cable would go up in smoke,’ system engineer Sebastian Flemming explains the results in layman’s terms.
The OTZ asks what this all means for the citizens? Flemming responds: “Blackout, for the entire city.”
In the wintertime this would be most inconvenient, and for some possibly even fatal.
Flemming adds that even if a blackout were averted, the wild frequency fluctuations in the grid would have “grave consequences” for many electrical appliances and systems. The OTZ writes:
None of today’s productions systems in the economy could function under such fluctuations, especially everything that is computer-controlled.
In other words, it would not even take a blackout to cripple a city.
The OTZ then asks what can be done with the surplus electrical energy that will surely result from the wind and sun. Here once again the financially and technically unfeasible storage systems get brought up. Another solution mentioned is the conversion of the electricity into heat for supplying warmth to homes.
But the online OTZ daily writes that solutions appear to be a ways off, and so it warns:
Time is running out: According to the study, beginning in 2018, the first transformers are threatened with prolonged overloading.”
Do these findings of the Fraunhofer Institute surprise us? Not at all. It’s been known for a long time that the feed-in of solar and wind power leads to crazy, uncontrolled power surges in the grid. Supply stability remains the glaring problem that too many among us continue to deny.
The wind industry is the perpetual infant of power generation: always looking for the subsidies to last that little bit longer; always promising to improve its performance; always claiming it will outdo hydro, coal and gas – provided, of course, that the subsidies keep flowing. STT for one thinks the wind industry has had ample time to grow up and stand on its own two feet.
Like the brat that it is, the wind industry can’t be told what to do and, especially, won’t ever respond to demands from power users about when its product should be delivered.
It’s quite happy to produce plenty of power when it’s not needed at night time; and much less during the day, when it is (as seen in the graph above); and often, none at all during periods of peak demand: as seen in our posts from earlier this week:
When challenged about its consistent failures to match output with demand, the wind industry and its parasites respond by mumbling about “battery technology improving”.
The pitch is that – one day “soon” – there will batteries big enough and cheap enough to allow huge volumes of wind power produced when it’s not needed, to be stored for the occasions when it is. That way, the “variable” output from wind farms could be delivered when there might just be a market for it.
Of course, the pitch is made so the subsidies keep flowing to allow an endless sea of giant fans to be erected now – in order to take advantage of the (so far, elusive) storage technology that’s just over the “horizon”. Except that the “soon” is more like light-years and the “horizon” is a mirage.
Even if a technology was invented (STT likens it to the chances of finding a perpetual motion machine or alchemy turning lead into gold) to store large volumes of the electricity output (in bulk) from all of the wind farms connected to the Eastern Grid, say (which now have a notional capacity of 3,669 MW) – the economic cost would be astronomical – and readily eclipse the value of the power produced. Not that the wind industry has ever made any economic sense. We visited the topic a while ago:
And, with the wind industry’s PR spinners becoming more desperate and silly by the day – in a ‘we love kicking a mangy dog when it’s down’ kind of way, we thought it high time to revisit – and launch a final assault on – the greentards’ last redoubt.
Their pitch is that cost effective, ‘grid scale’ electricity storage will overcome the chaotic and occasional delivery of wind power, to have it stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘big boys’ – coal, gas, hydro and nuclear.
The following article details the INSANE cost of attempting to store electricity in bulk quantities. In just one example, the paper explains how with the “simple” addition of a US$14.4 million, 16.8 MWh Lithium-Ion battery, the crazy, intermittent output of a 30% capacity factor, US$3.5 million, 2MW wind turbine can be turned into a constant 0.6MW output (2MW x 30%) combination – for trifling US$18 million. That works out to a staggering US$30 million per MW of wanna-be “base load” power – with its major component (the battery) having a useful life of around 10 years.
As it will never amount to a meaningful power source, wind power is simply an energy and economic nonsense. The fact that the electricity it produces (usually, when no-one needs it) can’t be stored, dooms wind power to the Dark Ages – from whence it came.
Intermittent grid storage Climate Etc
Rud Istvan 1 July 2015
From the utility grid perspective, a fundamental problem with wind and solar is intermittency.
In the US, wind has a median capacity factor of 31%. In California’s Mohave Desert, solar PV has a capacity factor of 23%. To make up the electricity supply difference during the rest of the time, grids must either add otherwise unnecessary backup generation, or flex base load generation (dropping below optimum output so the grid can accept the intermittent renewable input). At a minimum, flexing results in costly capital inefficiency. Otherwise unnecessary backup generation is even more costly.
The higher the renewable penetration, the greater this intermittency burden becomes. For Texas’ ERCOT grid with 10.6% wind, the additionalcosts are ~$19/MWh for generation plus ~$6.50/MWh for transmission. It is now so expensive in Germany (26% renewable generation) that its largest utility, RWE, took a €3.3 billion impairment charge 1Q2014. The second largest, E.ON, took a €4.5 billion impairment charge 4Q2014, and announced it was spinning its conventional generating assets off into anunprofitable separate company. E.ON will also be shutting Irsching 4 and 5, large efficient CCGT units completed in 2010 and 2011! Irsching simply is not viable without being compensated for the forced Energiewende flexing it endures, while selling its electricity against the subsidized renewables with which it is also forced to compete.
So renewables advocates hope for major advances in grid storage to offset wind and solar intermittency. This guest post surveys what might be possible in the future given what is presently known. The focus is on utility scale, but takes an irresistible detour through TESLA’s newly hyped residential Powerwall. Sandia has a more detailed (albeit somewhat dated and hopefully slanted) utility storage analysis than this post, for CE denizens interested in digging deeper.
There are in principle only five ways that generated electricity can be subsequently ‘stored’: potential energy (e.g. pumped hydro), kinetic energy (e.g. flywheels), electrostatic energy (capacitors), electrochemical energy (batteries), and chemical energy (e.g. water hydrolysis). Anyone inventing another is in line for an automatic Nobel Prize (probably two, physics or chemistry plus peace).
Pumped hydro storage (PHS)
Potential energy in the form of pumped hydro storage (PHS, essentially reversible hydroelectricity) is >99% of existing grid storage worldwide.The figure is from EPRI 2011. EPRI has not updated their overall grid storage analysis, but did estimate that ~140,000MW of PHS was installed by YE2014.
All that a grid needs are upper and lower water ‘reservoirs’ in ‘hilly’ terrain, and reversible hydroturbogenerators. It is possible to excavate a lower reservoir deep underground, but at much higher cost. One such facility is proposed for Holland. O-PEC would be 1400MW x 6 hours for €1.8 billion, using a 1400m (!) hydrostatic head to minimize water and underground chamber volume.
Round trip efficiency is high at over 80%, and facility life is long at much over 40 years. The LCOE depends on facility size, cost, and hydrostatic head, ranging from as low as ~$85/MWh (EIA) to as high as ~$150 to $200/MWh (Sandia). PHS has so far been used mainly for peak load shifting. Off peak base load is used to pump water into the upper reservoir, which then generates back into the lower during peak load. This allows a larger grid proportion of low cost base load generating at optimal output 24/7 than would otherwise be possible. Where grid/terrain possible, PHS can also support renewable intermittency as already done somewhat in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland (the Alps).
PHS always pays on a grid system basis if suitable affordable terrain is available. Many places favorable for wind (low relief Iowa, Denmark, northern Germany) or solar (low relief Mohave Desert) are distinctly NOT favorable—even though PHS does not have to be co-located, just very strongly grid intertied.
Developed world grids have already taken most of the advantage they can of PHS. California is an odd exception.
Kinetic Energy Storage
Kinetic energy storage is also extensively used on the grid, in the form of synchronous condensers for reactive power compensation (aka volt ampreactive, VAR). These are essentially unpowered generators spinning on grid. Some old decommissioned coal generating plants repurpose the old generators as ‘new’ synchronous condensers. Rotors may weigh hundreds of tons and spin at up to 3600 rpm, but still only store enough kinetic energy to provide transient voltage/frequency regulation (VAR). Downtown Tokyo alone uses six Toshiba purpose built 200MVARs. The human figure illustrates the enormous size/mass of grid scale kinetic storage machines. They are still grossly insufficient for bulk intermittent renewable storage.
Beacon Power enhanced kinetic energy density by using grid-coupled carbon fiber flywheels spinning at 16000 rpm (reaching Mach 2, requiring they spin in a vacuum). Beacon’s first (subsidized) 20MW x 0.25hour facility comprised 200 flywheels and cost $4800/MWh. Its purpose was frequency regulation (VAR), not bulk energy storage. This facility is the flywheel capacity in this post’s initial EPRI energy storage figure.
That is far too little energy for bulk utility wind or solar intermittency. To back up a single 2MW wind turbine at 30% capacity factor would require ([1-0.3]*24 hours / 20MW/ 2MW * 0.25hour) 6.7 of the pictured facilities.
Electrostatic storage
Electrostatic storage in capacitors is ubiquitous. There are large capacitor banks for reactive power compensation (VAR) on all utility grids.
Super capacitors have the highest energy density of any capacitor type, an order of magnitude more than the next best kind. Supercaps plus power electronics have created a rapidly growing new utility device class in the past decade, static compensators (statcoms). These substitute for smaller synchronous condensers; ABB’s statcoms come in sizes up to 30MVAR. Their advantage is no moving parts/maintenance. Like synchronous condensors and capacitors, statcoms store far too little energy for bulk wind and solar needs.
Electrochemical batteries
Electrochemical batteries presently have limited use on the grid. Rechargeable battery electricity is stored in some reversible electrochemical reaction. Familiar lead acid (PbA) electrochemistry is sponge lead/lead dioxide electrodes creating/removing lead sulfate, with sulfuric acid electrolyte conducting the needed sulfate ions. Which is also why deeply cycled PbA batteries have inherently short cycle life unsuited to utility storage. Cycling grows ever-larger and increasingly insoluble lead sulphate grains (sulfation), while the growing/shrinking lead sulfate in the electrodes eventually causes them to disintegrate from mechanical stress. Xtreme Power designed an industrial/utility PbA capable of 650 cycles to 80% discharge, which would last less than two years supporting solar. Xtreme delivered (to utilities) about 35MW at about $1000/MWh before going bankrupt. Xtreme is the PbA in the initial figure.
There are many reversible electrochemistries. Commercial ones include PbA, Nickel Metal Hydride (NMH, in most hybrid autos), lithium ion (LiIon, ubiquitous in portable electronics and electric vehicles), and sodium sulfur (NaS). There are several ‘experimental’ chemistries with one or more as yet unresolved issues. These include lower cost lead carbon (PbC, cycle life), lower cost and higher energy zinc air (cycle life, safety), lower cost and higher energy sodium ion (cycle life), higher energy lithium air (cycle life, safety), higher energy solid state LiIon (SSLiIon, cost, cycle life), and higher energy lithium sulfur (LiS, cycle life). Furthest along seem to be PbC, SSLiIon, and LiS (the links are illustrative, not exhaustive of all the entities working on these electrochemistries).
There is a lot of uninformed MSM reporting on battery progress, often based on hyped lab PR (most recently Harvard’s rhubarb battery, below). Electrochemistry has been known since Alessandro Volta’s 1799 stack of zinc, brine soaked paper separator, and copper twitched a frog’s leg. Sticking zinc and copper into a lemon still works—but not for any practical application. Many, many $billions have been spent on battery R&D over the past century. Progress remains a very slow slog. It is beyond unlikely that any fundamental electrochemical miracles remain unrevealed.
There are two basic battery design concepts. The familiar one (like PbA, NMH, and LiIon) stores electricity in the electrodes. This is not a problem for portable electronic tiny energy storage needs. It is a big problem for utility bulk storage requiring a lot of expensive electrode. A123 Systems delivered one 20MWh LiIon system (10 of the imaged containers) that cost (based on its federal loan guarantee) $17.1 million. This facility is the LiIon capacity in the initial figure.
Backing up a single ~$3.5 million 2MW wind turbine at 30% capacity factor would require 8.4 of these containers at a cost of ~$14.4 million. They would be purchased from NEC Energy Solutions; A123 went bankrupt. Its assets were sold to the Chinese at a $119 million loss to US taxpayers who gave A123 grants and loan guarantees. The Chinese sold the utility portion to NEC. NEC has a new order for 3 20MW installations for the PJM grid. Like Beacon’s flywheels, these are for frequency regulation, not bulk renewable energy storage. In that application (which does not deeply discharge the batteries), NEC says they last 20 years—still insufficient for wind or solar without replacement.
If energy density can be increased, then the amount of electrode per unit electricity can be decreased proportionately. LiIon’s theoretical limit is 1015 Wh/liter. The Panasonic cells Tesla uses (below) are about 620 Wh/L (cells, not the Powerwall battery at ~350 Wh/L with liquid cooling). Panasonic produces more advanced (andmore expensive, shorter lived) smartphone cells that approach 800 Wh/L. There will undoubtedly be some further improvement in LiIon energy density, but nothing like what has already been achieved.
The main ‘electrode concept’ utility battery is NaS. Several hundred MW are already on grid, as the first figure shows. These operate at 350C (and must be kept at that temperature continuously), have a 15-year life (significantly longer than deeply discharged LiIon at ~10 years per Tesla), and have a round trip efficiency of 75%. They are used in special grid distribution situations, for example to support remote peak loads where a small peaker or a beefed up transmission line would be even more expensive than NaS. California’s PGE just installed a 4MW x 6hour NaS facility from Japan’s NGK. It cost $18 million.
At 30% capacity factor, about (16.8 hr *2MW/[4Mw x 6hr = 24MWh NaS] /0.75 efficiency) 1.9 of these facilities would be needed to back up a single2MW wind turbine. NaS would cost $34 million to back up one $3.5 million turbine. And it would have to be replaced after 15 years to support the turbine’s ~25 year life. NaS is not commercially feasible for renewable bulk electricity storage.
The other class of battery design stores electricity in the electrolyte, and only uses smallish expensive electrodes to put it in and take it out as electrolyte is pumped through the electrodes. In such ‘redox flow’ batteries, the electrolyte can be stored in arbitrarily large tanks. This theoretically solves the grid scale electrode cost problem. And also part of the battery cycle life problem, since the electrolyte and/or electrodes can be separately replaced.
There are several redox flow chemistries in development. Some are expensive and corrosive, like the vanadium redox battery (VRB). The most recently hyped experimental system uses inexpensive organic quinones similar to those found in rhubarb. No word yet from Harvard on round trip efficiency, or how long their ‘breakthrough’ rhubarb flow battery might last.
One seemingly promising type (since a commercial unit exists) uses relatively (compared to vanadium) inexpensive iron/chromium, championed by 2008 California startup EnerVault. Their first ‘commercial’ flow battery (250kw x 4hour = 1MWh) was installed in 2014 to support a solar powered 250kw irrigation pump in Turlock, California. It has a round trip efficiency of 60%. To back up a single 2MW wind turbine at 30% capacity factor would require (16.8 hours *2MW/ 1MWh/0.6 efficiency) 56of the pictured EnerVault facilities. Or requires tanks, electrodes, and pumps that are 56x bigger than pictured.
The facility cost $9.5 million, $4.7 million from a US grant. EnerVault told EPRI and DoE (as part of the grant process) that it expected to be ~$350/kWh in volume production. Backing up a single $3.5million 2MW turbine might cost ‘only’ $12 million in the future. The useful lifetime is TBD; EnerVault says >20 years. But EnerVault also says the pumps last “thousands of hours” before needing replacement. That could mean yearly—and probably does. On April 14, 2015 EnerVault announced it was ‘restructuring’ (laying off most employees) and ‘seeking new owners’. Existing investors including Japan’s Mitsui, French oil company TOTAL, and 3M declined to put in more money. EnerVault has failed.
The foregoing examples illustrate the immensity of the utility bulk storage challenge. No foreseeable battery solution overcomes this enormous challenge.
Distributed grid storage
There has been much renewables discussion of ‘distributed’ grid storage. Put many smaller batteries at residential or commercial locations, in the hope that manufacturing volumes would provide cost economies of scale. Thus the MSM excitement Elon Musk created with his Tesla Gigafactoryand the Powerwall. The 7kWh daily cycle unit (complementing rooftop PV) has a guaranteed 10 year life at 92% round trip efficiency for $3000, excluding installation and inverter.
Whether Powerwall makes any sense is a less exciting question, which Musk’s fawning MSM did not ask. Palo Alto’s approximate LCOE for rooftop PV is ~$0.155/kWh for a 5kWDC system before subsidies, according to Palo Alto itself. To charge a single Powerwall while still using the original PV as before, about (7kWh/5.4 ‘sun hours’ per NREL /0.92 efficiency) 1.4 kW of additional PV would have to be installed. Using Palo Alto’s ‘official’ estimate, that is an additional PV cost of about $8400 (including the inverter Tesla does not supply). Total cost $11,400 for one Powerwall is no problem—if you can afford to live in Palo Alto and install PV there in the first place. The city says its average home consumes about 1000 kWh/month or (1000/~30.5) 32.8kWh/day. A 6.4kW PV plus one Powerwall will not take an average Palo Alto home off grid—it is (32.8-12) 20.8kWh short. It would take 4 Powerwalls (plus their additional PV) to go off grid. Not enough dollars or roof to make that work.
Being a little bit Palo Alto/Tesla green comes at a large cost. The 10-year, 0.065 discount rate LCOE of single Powerwall is $0.118/kWh. To that must be added the LCOE of the extra charging PV, adjusted for Powerwall efficiency. According to Palo Alto, that is (~0.155/0.92) $0.168/kWh, for total Powerwall LCOE of $0.286/kWh. The residential cost of electricity in California (March 2015) averaged ~$0.17/kWh. Powerwall is a bad deal, costing almost twice what California’s residential grid electricity does. (Tesla cars are a similarly bad deal.)
Chemical storage
Chemical energy storage involves electricity reversibly converted into simple chemical energy (some fuel). Two chemistries have been seriously proposed: hydrogen and methane.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen can certainly be hydrolyzed from water. And the necessary electricity can certainly come from intermittent renewables. The most efficient way to convert hydrogen back to electricity at grid scale would be a PEM fuel cell or an SOFC. The math can be done using Ballard’s 1MW PEM, since a few have actually been sold as demos. Ignore the technical difficulties of bulk hydrogen storage, which the following methane alternative ‘solves’.
The theoretical efficiency of hydrolysis is ~88%. About 4% of commercial hydrogen is made this way today, with real efficiencies of ~75%. EERE says PEM fuel cells can be 60% efficient. But that is also theoretical. Ballard’sreal 1 MW ClearGen® is 40±2% efficient, with a lifetime of ~15 years (similar to NaS). The round trip efficiency of a hydrogen electricity storage system would be about (0.75 * 0.4) 30%. For a utility, that is awful.
The electricity to be stored comes mainly from otherwise flexed base load generation, with chemical storage buffering renewable intermittency no different than PHS buffers peaks. The energy cost alone would be about ($57/MWh baseload / 0.3 efficiency) $190/MWh. Ballard’s ClearGen® costs about $10 million/MW (including inverter, transformer, and installation).That calculates a capital LCOE of about $114/MWh. Adding hydrolysis and H2 storage, the system LCOE is >>$304/MWh. It is simply not commercially viable–by nearly an order of magnitude. Before solving the hydrogen storage problem.
Methane
Or, hydrogen from electrolysis could be reacted with CO2 over nickel catalysts to produce methane. Methanation is significantly exothermic, although up to half of the resulting ~20% ‘waste’ heat could be reused (e.g. heating input feedstock, since the catalysis works between 200C and 550C). A number of lab scale reactors plus at least one pilot facility have been built, with methane yields from ~70% for one pass to ~95% for three. Solves the hydrogen storage problem. The resulting synthetic methane can be stored and used like natural gas from any other source (e.g. in flexible CCGT with 58-61% efficiency). Input CO2 could theoretically be obtained from fossil fuel carbon capture (without sequestration), a process with 20-30% parasitic energy loads.
Methane round trip energy efficiency would be about 0.75 (hydrolysis) * 0.95 (catalysis yield) * 0.9 (net [half] methanation exothermic loss) * 0.8 (minimum CC parasitic load) * 0.6 (flexed CCGT) or ~31%— no better than hydrogen alone, after all the chemical complications. Methane storage avoids the technical hydrogen storage challenge, but at the expense of much additional chemical plant capital, operations, and maintenance cost. It worsens the chemical storage economics.
Conclusions
Most renewables advocates don’t appreciate the scope and scale of electricity grids, the difficulties intermittency creates, and the technical/ commercial inadequacies of electricity storage technologies other than PHS.
Utilities already utilize four out of five forms of energy storage wherever they make sense. Potential energy is ubiquitous pumped storage. Kinetic energy is ubiquitous synchronous condensers. Electrostatic energy is ubiquitous capacitors and statcoms. Conventional electrochemical batteries are not practical except in special situations, and probably never will be. Flow batteries may improve on conventional batteries somewhat, but are still far from feasible for large-scale bulk wind and solar storage needs. Chemical storage is even worse than batteries because of its inherently greater thermodynamic inefficiency.
It is very unlikely that any grid storage solution (other than PHS where feasible) could ever practically cover the intermittency of high penetration utility scale wind and solar. Utility voices (like RWE and E.ON) charged with making electricity grids work seamlessly and reliably despite ever increasing renewable intermittency burdens are only starting to be heard. Those voices are very negative. It may not be until some grid goes dark because of intermittency (as increasingly uneconomic flexed conventional generation is shut in Germany and UK) that the general public will understand. Germany, UK, and California seem determined to run this unfortunate experiment for the rest of us. One or more appear likely to succeed soon in experimentally proving the grid instability ‘blackout’ hypothesis. The question is mainly when, not if. Climate Etc.
Despite rising public complaints about adverse health effects from industrial wind turbines, thousands continue to be erected across the province.
Environmentalists often talk about people whose lives are ruined by man-made global warming.
But they never mention the lives that are devastated by misguided climate change policy.
There is no better example than the debilitating human health impacts of the hundreds of thousands of industrial wind turbines (IWTs) that are being erected around the world to supposedly mitigate climate change.
In “Adverse health effects of industrial wind turbines,” a 2013 paper in the magazine of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, Dr. Roy D. Jeffery, Carmen Krogh, and Brett Horner explained, “People who live or work in close proximity to IWTs have experienced symptoms that include decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression, and cognitive dysfunction.”
“The problem is not just cyclical audible noise keeping people awake but also low frequency infrasound which can travel many kilometres,” notes Dufferin County-based Barb Ashbee, who says she was forced out of her Amaranth, Ontario home by the siting of IWTs too close to it.
“Infrasound goes right through walls,” said Ashbee, operator of the Wind Victims Ontario website. “It pummels your body.”
Tens of thousands of complaints have been received by governments around the world.
Sherri Lange, CEO of North American Platform Against Wind, said, “I have personally received hundreds of phone calls from distressed people who need to vacate their homes [because of IWTs].”
Lange contended governments try to not address the issue.
“It is my experience from talking to doctors, researchers and other high-level professionals, that governments seem to be (under the influenced of) the industry.”
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne promised her government would not force any of the 6,736 IWTs being erected by the province into “unwilling communities”.
To date, 90 communities have declared themselves as “Unwilling Hosts”, yet construction is underway, or planned, in many of these areas.
For example, in West Lincoln and surrounding regions, wind developers have received approval to install at least 77 three-Megawatt IWTs, each as tall as a 61-storey building, despite strong public objections.
Local resident Shellie Correia is particularly concerned.
Her 12-year-old son, Joey, has been diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder and it is crucial that he live in a quiet environment.
But now, as part of the Ontario government’s climate change plans, an IWT will be sited only 550 metres from his home, the closest “setback” allowed in Ontario for residents who do not sign lease agreements with wind companies.
The province, which cites a 2010 report from its Chief Medical Officer of Health that found no direct causal links between IWTs and adverse health effects, has claimed the province’s setbacks are “the most stringent in North America”.
In reality, most jurisdictions in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Europe require greater setbacks. Two kilometres is commonplace.
As Correia explained in her January, 2015 presentation before the government’s Environmental Review Tribunal, “On top of the incessant, cyclical noise, there is light flicker, and infrasound. This is not something that my son will be able to tolerate.”
Correia is supported by her son’s pediatrician, Dr. Chrystella Calvert, a specialist in the care of children with developmental and mental health problems.
Calvert says, “I, as a ‘normal brain’ individual would not want this risk [of an IWT] to my mental health (or my children’s) in my neighbourhood.”
Like most governments, Ontario officials insist the adverse health effects of IWTs are minimal, citing various studies.
But there is much scientific evidence to the contrary and studies are lacking with regards to children.
Krogh, one of the authors of the report on health problems linked to IWTs that appeared in the magazine of The College of Family Physicians of Canada, wrote in a May 13, 2013 open communication to Canada’s health minister, “Vigilance and long-term surveillance systems regarding risks and adverse effects related to children are lacking. … This evaluation should take place before proceeding with additional approvals.”
But the approvals go ahead regardless.
As Correia notes, “Wynne speaks about ‘protecting’ her granddaughter’s future (in defending her government’s plan to introduce carbon pricing through cap-and-trade.) Why then, is it not important for her to protect my son, now?”
— Tom Harris
Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition and a policy advisor for environment policy at The Heartland Institute. He has 30 years’ experience working as a mechanical engineer and project manager, science and technology communications professional and media and science and technology advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic. For the past 10 years, Harris has been working intensively with a growing team of independent scientists and engineers to promote a sensible approach to a range of energy and environmental topics, climate change in particular. His main focus has been the highly controversial science underlying these issues. Along with Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia, Harris coordinated the open letter from 100 top climate experts to the Secretary General of United Nations during the Bali Climate Change Conference in December 2007.
A little while back, that great philosopher, Kenny Rogers spelt out the rules for Gamblers in clear and simple terms:
You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.
That sound and sage advice is ignored in the breach by the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers.
Every time there’s a ‘little blow’ – and wind power output registers more than the usual piddling fraction of its ‘installed capacity’, there’s a flurry of Tweets and blog posts about the ‘monumental’ (but always ‘momentary’) energy effort. All laced with the kind of tear-filled joy that accompanies cheers for a disabled athlete, who’s just won Olympic Gold.
But, when it comes to cheering on the ‘disabled’ energy runner, wind power fans are always in breach of the Gambler’s 3rd rule, about counting their money while sittin’ at the table – they always count too loud and too soon.
And, just like the Gambler, the greentard is always quick and ready to tell you about their “wins”, but never about their “losses”. When he’s down on his luck, the Gambler will happily lie to himself, friends and family about his failing fortunes – the greentard Gambler is no different.
In the last two posts (here and here) we popped up the some of the “track results” for wind power and, as laid out in dozens of pictures, its shameful ‘form’ would have had it “scratched” from the book, long ago – but for the gullible and naive (not to mention corrupt) among our political betters that control the field.
We’ll start with another example of how the “Gambling Bug” has displaced common sense, with greentards cock-a-hoop about “a single windy NIGHT in Denmark” – said to herald a ‘new dawn’ in our wind powered ‘future’.
GetUp! striving for an Australia where wind power meets 3am demand Freedom Watch
Brett Hogan
14 July 2015
The hearts of climate change lobbyists were aflutter recently with news that wind farms had generated 140 per cent of Denmark’s electricity demand, and local advocates contrasting this with the Abbott Government’s supposed ‘war on wind’.
What this story is really saying is that in a country with a population the size of Victoria (around 5.6 million) and less than half the geographical area of Tasmania (at 43,000 square kilometres), wind power is able at 3am in the morning, when very few people are using electricity, to generate electricity in excess of demand.
Great work!
To get a sense of what 3am demand for electricity looks like, here it is this morning in Victoria:
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Denmark is of course famous for having the most expensive electricity prices in the world and enjoys the luxury of being close enough to Germany, Sweden and Norway to buy their excess electricity (in part supplied by significant nuclear and hydroelectric facilities) when the wind isn’t blowing.
Wind farms turn the economics of energy markets upside down. Traditional power plants, like any other commodity, generate a product (power) that is sold in a market competing with other providers, and charging a price that is set balancing demand and supply.
However, wind farms, which are typically only economical in the first place due to significant government subsidies, which often include fixed tariffs (so much for the free market) actually rob the market of price signals when the wind blows. It can destroy the economics of electricity providers that need to stay in the market as backup for the 70 per cent of the time that the wind doesn’t blow.
Every country needs cheap and affordable electricity to build and sustain a modern economy and for its people to enjoy quality of life.
Australia has a population of almost 24 million people spread over 7 million square kilometres with an electricity demand more than 6 times that of Denmark, and no neighbouring country’s electricity to fall back on. Denmark offers no lessons for Australia other than “Don’t do this.”
Chris Berg in The Drum today wrote about the history of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and its political genesis. The Abbott government was right to follow the lead of the United Kingdom and instruction to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to no longer invest in wind or small-scale solar facilities. Freedom Watch
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Now, while the wind industry and its greentard-gamblers are ready to keep rolling the dice with our energy future, thankfully, the PM, Tony Abbott and his Vice-Squad, Treasurer “Smokin’” Joe Hockey and Mathias “The Terminator” Cormann have tipped the gaming tables and prevented the Clean Energy Finance Corporation from laying anymore high-risk bets, with taxpayers’ money. Here’s a little piece on the Vice-Squad’s raid.
There’s no ‘war on wind’, just MPs doing their job
Chris Berg
14 July 2015
The Drum
There are a lot of objectionable things in Australian politics, but Government ministers directing the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to stop funding new wind farm projects doesn’t rate, writes Chris Berg.
There was a lot of heat in the debate about the Clean Energy Finance Corporation over the weekend, but not much light.
Social media was livid. Tony Abbott was waging a “war on wind power”. How dare the Abbott Government presume to interfere with such a virtuous independent market program to tackle climate change?
That reaction was, to put it mildly, a load of nonsense. The Government’s direction to the CEFC is not unprecedented interference in an independent body. Nor is the CEFC a “market” mechanism. The CEFC is a government program whose funding policies are set by the executive.
Yes, the Coalition wants to abolish the CEFC outright. But it can’t. So the Government says it would rather the CEFC focus on funding innovation rather than established technology. There are a lot of objectionable things in Australian politics. This doesn’t rate.
The CEFC’s enabling legislation – which was written and introduced by the Gillard government and passed without Coalition support – allows the sitting government to do exactly what the Coalition is doing now. Asnoted in an explanatory memorandum authored by the Gillard government:
It is appropriate that the Government, as manager of the economy and owner of the Corporation, have a mechanism for articulating its broad expectations for how the Corporation’s funds will be invested and managed by the Board.
The memorandum specifically nominated “allocation of investments between different types of clean energy technologies” as one of the areas in which ministers might issue a direction.
What independence is provided by the CEFC Act is a requirement that ministerial directions not be contrary to the CEFC’s statutory obligations, and that ministers must not direct or prevent CEFC investments in specific companies. All fair enough.
With these provisions, the Gillard government gave itself the statutory leeway to direct the CEFC’s investment direction. If it didn’t want an Abbott Government to have the same leeway, it should have written the legislation differently. It knew the Coalition was opposed to the CEFC.
Anyway, that discretion is entirely proper. The CEFC is not an ethereal, non-political part of the Australian social fabric. It is the result of a four-year-old political compromise, designed to funnel money into one particular sector of the economy as part of the quid pro quo for theGreens’ carbon tax support.
So it’s a little bit silly to hear (as we did over the weekend) that by changing the CEFC’s mandate the Abbott Government is “picking winners”. That’s exactly what the CEFC was designed to do. The CEFC was designed to pick winners. It was designed to choose investments that it felt were not being adequately funded by open capital markets.
Because it is not driven by the profit motive in a competitive market, the CEFC has to rely on non-market criteria on which to evaluate alternative investments. Right now that is done by these folk – the board of the CEFC. All the Abbott Government’s no-wind mandate does is constrain their criteria some more.
The idea that the CEFC is a “commercial” operation is nonsense. If it makes a profit consistently then it is a good candidate for privatisation. Why should the government own a profit-making financier? Why would it need to?
Australia has a long history of government-owned banks like the CEFC – banks designed to push money into politically favoured sectors.
Who now remembers the Commonwealth Development Bank or the Australian Industry Development Corporation? Or the Commonwealth Bank’s Mortgage Bank Department and Industrial Finance Department? Or the joint public-private ventures of the Australian Resources Development Bank, the Primary Industry Bank of Australia, or the Australian Banks’ Export Refinance Corporation?
These banks were abolished or privatised because Australia came to recognise that markets allocate capital better than bureaucrats.
In today’s post we lay out the wind power fraud in pictures, as it’s perpetrated in, what’s referred to as, ‘Australia’s wind power capital’, South Australia (tomorrow we expand the net to capture the debacle on the entire Eastern Grid).
To call the ‘performance’ of SA’s 17 wind farms (spread over a vast area of the State – with an installed capacity of 1,477MW) over the last few months “diabolical” is to flatter them.
SA’s Labor government has been talking up a wind powered future for months now – it’s presiding over the worst unemployment in the Nation, at 8.2% and rising fast – and seems to thinks the answer is out there somewhere – ‘blowin’ in the wind’. The fact that its wind power debacle has led to South Australians paying the highest power costs in the Nation – if not (on a purchasing power parity basis) the highest in the world – and, yet, the dimwits that run it wonder why it’s an economic train wreck (see our posts here and here).
Well, today, STT – always ready to rain on the wind industry’s parade – as well as the gullible and corrupt that cheer it on – spells it out in pictures – that even the most intellectually interrupted should be able to grasp.
The derisory data that follows comes courtesy of Aneroid Energy. We’ll start with a quick look at SA’s monthly performance (oh, and if the graphs appear fuzzy, click on them and they’ll pop up crystal clear in a new window).
Looking a bit like the meanderings of a drunken spider that had dipped one leg in the ink-well and staggered over the page, that’s the nonsense that wind farms can deliver power as an “alternative” to on-demand power generation sources such as hydro, gas and coal belted, yet again.
With 31 ‘chances’ to make a meaningful contribution to lighting up the230,000 homes said by wind power outfits to be ‘powered’ by their wind farms in SA – output collapses 13 times to less than 100MW – or less than 6.8% of the total installed capacity of 1,477MW.
Here’s the total output from all wind farms in SA for June 2015.
Having hardly lit up the screen for much of May, you’d think that June would see a better effort – but, oh no. Total output spends more time below 200MW (or 13% of installed capacity) than above. And hits the bottom of the pool more than 7 times – with ‘output’ failing to power a single kettle – let alone the hundreds of thousands of SA homes we’re constantly told are ‘powered’ by the wind.
Here’s the total output from all wind farms in SA for the start of July 2015.
Looking more like the fat bloke bouncing around in the deep-end of the local pool, after a long lunch, July’s effort (so far) isn’t much better than the months before.
A couple of short-lived ‘spurts aside, and the rest is largely a ‘joke’: crashing by around 1,000 MW over 24 hours; and almost repeating the ‘performance’ a few days later with a precipitous plummet of over 500 MW in a couple of hours – makes it pretty clear that the words ‘reliable’ and ‘wind power’ don’t belong on the same page, let alone in a sensible sentence.
Spending days struggling to produce 200MW; hours and hours producing less than half that (or less than 6.7% of capacity); and 50MW (3.38%) or less for hours at a stretch, tends to take the gloss off the glory heaped on SA’s wind power dream; and suggests its future will be more of an energy nightmare.
Having taken a ‘helicopter view’, we’ll zoom in now – for a closer look at some of the more outlandish results on: May 3, 16, 25 and 26; June 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 29 and 30; July 2, 3 and 7.
Entire SA Grid – 3 May 2015 – from midnight to 9pm (21hrs):
Total wind farm output: midnight to 9pm – never more than 100MW; from 3am to 8pm (17hrs) – never much more than 50MW; and during the same period collapsing to ZERO around 6am, and 5pm to 6pm.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: midnight to 2 am – 3.4%; 7am to 2pm – 1.7%; 2am to 9pm – 3.38%; 6am and 5pm to 6pm – ZERO%.
Entire SA Grid – 16 May 2015 – from 1am to 12.30pm – a total collapse of 720MW to ZERO:
Total wind farm output: 11.30am to 5pm (5.5hrs) – never more than 100MW; collapsing to ZERO from 12.30pm to 2pm (1.5hrs).
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: 11.30am to 5pm (5.5hrs) – never more than 6.8%; collapsing to ZERO% – from 12.30pm to 2pm (1.5hrs).
Entire SA Grid – 25 May 2015 – from 8am to noon – a collapse of 325MW to ZERO – a 100% drop in output, in around 4hrs.
Total output: from 11am to 9pm (10hrs) – never more than 50MW; from noon to 4pm (4hrs) – ZERO.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: 11am to 9pm – less than 3.85%; from noon to 4pm – ZERO%.
Entire SA Grid – 26 May 2015 – from midnight to 6pm (18hrs):
Total wind farm output: from midnight to 6pm – never much more than 350MW; from midnight to 2am 150MW; from 8am to 4pm – never more than 200MW; and falling to 90MW at 11am.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: from midnight to 2am – 10%; 8am to 4pm – never more than 13.5%; and dropping to 6.1% – at 11am.
Now for a closer look at June 2015.
Entire SA Grid – 12 June 2015 – from midnight to 4pm a collapse of over 600MW:
Total wind farm output: 10am to 6pm – less than 150MW; 3pm to 5pm – dropping to 50MW.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: 10am to 6pm – 10%; and 3pm to 5pm – dropping to 3.85%.
Entire SA Grid – 13 June 2015 – from 9am to 3pm – a collapse of 750MW – 800MW to 50MW – or an output drop of 94% – at a rate of 125MW/hour:
Total wind farm output: from 2pm to 8pm – never much more than 100 MW; from 3pm to 5pm – around 50MW.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: 2pm to 8pm – between 6.8% and 10%; 3pm to 5pm – around 3.85%.
Entire SA Grid – 14 June 2015 – from 8am to 3pm – a collapse of over 650MW – from 700MW to 30MW – or a 96% drop in output:
Total wind farm output: from 1pm to 4pm (3hrs) – less than 100MW – dropping to 30MW.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: 1pm to 4pm – less than 6.8% – dropping to 2.03%.
Entire SA Grid – 16 June 2015 – 24 hours – never more than 140MW:
Total wind farm output: from midnight to 5pm (17hrs) – less than 30 MW; from 3am to 7am (4hrs) – ZERO; falling to ZERO between 9am and 11am.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: never more than 10% for the entire 24 hour period; midnight to 5pm – less than 2%; with ZERO% produced for around 5hrs.
Entire SA Grid – 17 June 2015 – 24 hours – never more than 260MW – or 17.6% of capacity:
Total wind farm output: from 5am to 8am – less than 140MW; dropping to 100MW at 8.30am.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: never more than 17.6%; 5am to 8am less than 9.4%; falling to 6.8%.
Entire SA Grid – 20 June 2015 – from midnight to 6pm (18hrs) – never more than 70MW:
Total wind farm output: from midnight to 6pm – less than 70MW; 3am to 6am (3hrs) – around 25MW; from 1pm to 6pm (5hrs) – 25MW; falling to 10MW – around 4pm.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: midnight to 5pm – less than 4.7%; 3am to 6am – 1.7%; 1pm – 6pm – 1.7%, falling to 0.7% – at 4pm.
Entire SA Grid – 29 June 2015 – from 3am to 1pm – an almost total collapse of 550MW to 10MW – or a 98% drop in output:
Total wind farm output: from 1pm to 5pm (4hrs) – never more than 10MW; from 6pm to midnight (6hrs) – 50MW – briefly rising to 170MW and dropping to 90MW.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: from 1pm to 5pm – 0.7%; 6pm to midnight – 3.3% – briefly rising to 11% – dropping back 6.1%.
Entire SA Grid – 30 June 2015 – for the 24 hour period – never more than 200MW:
Total wind farm output: from 1am to 7pm (18hrs) – never more than 80MW; from around 3am to around noon – less than than 40MW and closer to 20MW for that period; falling to less than 20MW around 4pm.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: 1am to 7pm (6hrs) – never more than 5.4%; from around 3am to around noon (9hrs) – less than than 2.7% and closer to 1.3% for that period; falling to less than 1.3% around 4pm.
Now a look at the scoreboard for July, so far.
Entire SA Grid – 2 July 2015 – a total collapse of output over the period – 700MW to around 10MW:
Total wind farm output: from noon to midnight (12hrs) – never more than 150MW; generally around 100MW – falling to 10MW around 10pm to midnight.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: from noon to midnight (12hrs) – never more than 10%MW; generally around 6.8% – falling to 0.7% around 10pm to midnight.
Entire SA Grid – 3 July 2015 – for the 24 hour period – never more than 150MW:
Total wind farm output: from midnight to 3am (3hrs) – never more than 20MW; twice falling to around 10MW; short burst to reach 80MW by 6am; dropping back to 40MW by 8am; with peaks and troughs later in the day – before dropping back to less than 100MW – 7pm to midnight.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: never more than 11% for the 24 hour period; much of it producing less than 6% – and often less than 2%.
Entire SA Grid – 7 July 2015 – from 2am to 1pm – a collapse (almost total) of 450MW – from 470MW to 20MW – or a 97% drop in output:
Total wind farm output: from 10am to midnight (14hrs) – never more than 60MW; twice falling to less than 20MW; and to ZERO around 10pm to midnight.
Output as a percentage of total installed wind farm capacity: from 10am to midnight (14hrs) – never more than 4.1%; twice falling to less than 1.3%; and to ZERO% – around 10pm to midnight.
We’re bored now – we’ve made our point: the idea that SA (or anywhere else for that matter) can ditch fossil fuel power generation sources and – by relying on wind power – go ‘100% renewable’ is pure fantasy.
Anyone who – after perusing the pitiful pictorial above – tries to tell you otherwise is probably not playing with the full deck. Either that, or they’ve got their trotters firmly planted in the wind power fraud trough.
At STT we love scorching wind power myths – and all the more so when it can be done with pictures.
In the last few months the lunatics from the fringes of the Labor party – and other hard-green-left nutjobs – have ramped up their rhetoric – pressing all and sundry join in their ultimate mission to go “fossil free” – they mean abstaining from the use of “fossil fuel”, rather than ceasing to rely on T-Rex and his – now stony/boney – kin. Although they have no apparent hesitation when it comes to burning up millions of litres of kerosene, flying to groovy backpacker must-sees, and “climate change” jamborees, all over the globe (see our post here).
Contrary to the anti-fossil fuel squad’s ranting, there isn’t a ‘choice’ between wind power and fossil fuel power generation: there’s a ‘choice’ between wind power (with fossil fuel powered back-up equal to 100% of its capacity) and relying on wind power alone. If you’re ready to ‘pick’ the latter, expect to be sitting freezing (or boiling) in the dark more than 60% of the time.
Wind power isn’t a ‘system’, it’s ‘chaos’ – the pictures tell the story.
One thing that amuses the STT gang, is seeing links to our posts appearing on the comments pages of online news sites, blog forums and the like: often they’re dropped into a ‘debate’ about the ‘wonders of wind’, with an apparently gleeful ‘splat’ – in a ‘get around that, and play fair’ kind of moment – that usually pulls the ‘debate’ to a shuddering halt.
STT predicts that this is going to be one such post.
So, next time you find yourself dealing with the intellectual pygmies, that are still clinging to their wind power myths and fantasies, why not flick them a link to this post – or have a little fun with an STT ‘splat moment’, on their favourite blogs and news sites?
Why not pitch a few sitters along with it, such as: on 3 May; after lunch on 25 May; after lunch on 13 June; on 16 June; on 20 June; and after lunch on 7 July:
How many South Australian homes (not kettles) were actually being powered by ‘wonderful wind’?
Where did all the power come from that kept the lights on and got the kettles boiling?
Was it coal? Was it gas? Or a bit of both?
In the light of your last answer, how much ‘dreaded’ CO2 gas was saved by SA’s 17 wind farms?
And what effect did wind power have on power prices in SA’s wholesale market for electricity?
We don’t expect them to enjoy it; but wind power worshippers have never been that keen on the facts.
Despite rising public complaints about adverse health effects from industrial wind turbines, thousands continue to be erected across the province
FIRST POSTED: SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2015 07:00 PM EDT
But they never mention the lives that are devastated by misguided climate change policy.
There is no better example than the debilitating human health impacts of the hundreds of thousands of industrial wind turbines (IWTs) that are being erected around the world to supposedly mitigate climate change.
In “Adverse health effects of industrial wind turbines,” a 2013 paper in the magazine of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, Dr. Roy D. Jeffery, Carmen Krogh, and Brett Horner explained, “People who live or work in close proximity to IWTs have experienced symptoms that include decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression, and cognitive dysfunction.”
“The problem is not just cyclical audible noise keeping people awake but also low frequency infrasound which can travel many kilometres,” notes Dufferin County-based Barb Ashbee, who says she was forced out of her Amaranth, Ontario home by the siting of IWTs too close to it.
“Infrasound goes right through walls,” said Ashbee, operator of the Wind Victims Ontario website. “It pummels your body.”
Tens of thousands of complaints have been received by governments around the world.
Sherri Lange, CEO of North American Platform Against Wind, said, “I have personally received hundreds of phone calls from distressed people who need to vacate their homes [because of IWTs].”
Lange contended governments try to not address the issue.
“It is my experience from talking to doctors, researchers and other high-level professionals, that governments seem to be (under the influenced of) the industry.”
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne promised her government would not force any of the 6,736 IWTs being erected by the province into “unwilling communities”.
To date, 90 communities have declared themselves as “Unwilling Hosts”, yet construction is underway, or planned, in many of these areas.
For example, in West Lincoln and surrounding regions, wind developers have received approval to install at least 77 three-Megawatt IWTs, each as tall as a 61-storey building, despite strong public objections.
Local resident Shellie Correia is particularly concerned.
Her 12-year-old son, Joey, has been diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder and it is crucial that he live in a quiet environment.
But now, as part of the Ontario government’s climate change plans, an IWT will be sited only 550 metres from his home, the closest “setback” allowed in Ontario for residents who do not sign lease agreements with wind companies.
The province, which cites a 2010 report from its Chief Medical Officer of Health that found no direct causal links between IWTs and adverse health effects, has claimed the province’s setbacks are “the most stringent in North America”.
In reality, most jurisdictions in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Europe require greater setbacks. Two kilometres is commonplace.
As Correia explained in her January, 2015 presentation before the government’s Environmental Review Tribunal, “On top of the incessant, cyclical noise, there is light flicker, and infrasound. This is not something that my son will be able to tolerate.”
Correia is supported by her son’s pediatrician, Dr. Chrystella Calvert, a specialist in the care of children with developmental and mental health problems.
Calvert says, “I, as a ‘normal brain’ individual would not want this risk [of an IWT] to my mental health (or my children’s) in my neighbourhood.”
Like most governments, Ontario officials insist the adverse health effects of IWTs are minimal, citing various studies.
But there is much scientific evidence to the contrary and studies are lacking with regards to children.
Krogh, one of the authors of the report on health problems linked to IWTs that appeared in the magazine of The College of Family Physicians of Canada, wrote in a May 13, 2013 open communication to Canada’s health minister, “Vigilance and long-term surveillance systems regarding risks and adverse effects related to children are lacking. … This evaluation should take place before proceeding with additional approvals.”
But the approvals go ahead regardless.
As Correia notes, “Wynne speaks about ‘protecting’ her granddaughter’s future (in defending her government’s plan to introduce carbon pricing through cap-and-trade.) Why then, is it not important for her to protect my son, now?”
— Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition, which opposes the hypothesis carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are known to cause climate problems
"Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" Phoenix Rising... 
