Carmen Krogh’s upcoming event. Please plan to be there, if at all possible!
environmental
More Deaths Due to a Plane hitting a Wind Turbine!
4 dead as plane crashes at South Dakota wind farm
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press
Updated 3:15 pm, Monday, April 28, 2014
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A small airplane heading back to South Dakota after a Texas cattle sale crashed into a wind farm in foggy weather, killing the pilot and three passengers.
Elizabeth Cory, a spokeswoman for theFederal Aviation Administration, said the Piper 32 was traveling from Hereford, Texas, to Gettysburg, South Dakota. The single-engine plane was registered to Donald J. “D.J.” Fischer of Gettysburg, according to the FAA.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating, but authorities have not released any details on the crash.
Authorities have not released the names of the victims, but Luce Funeral Home confirmed that Fischer, the 30-year-old pilot, died. Lien Funeral Home confirmed the deaths of cattlemen Brent Beitelspacher, of Bowdle, and Logan Rau, of Java.
The funeral home handling arrangements for the fourth victim said it could not release any information.
The three passengers were in Hereford to attend a sale of live cattle and embryos, primarily for the production of show steers, said Mike Mimms, a veterinarian who runs the annual event.
Mimms, who performs cattle embryo transfers, said he has probably bought 3,000 cows from Beitelspacher through telephone calls but hadn’t had the opportunity to meet him until this past weekend.
“I got a Christmas card from him this Christmas,” Mimms said. “It was the first time I even knew what he looked like, and he’s standing there with his family with young kids. And I can’t get that image out of my mind.”
Fischer, a crop sprayer for Air Kraft Spraying Inc., followed in his father’s footsteps into the aerial business and was extremely involved in his community, said state Rep. Corey Brown, R- Gettysburg.
Brown, a longtime family friend, said Fischer had just gotten married in March and was a volunteer emergency medical technician who was often out on calls.
“This is one of those things that’s going to hit the community pretty hard, because I would venture to say there are probably are not many people here who D.J. didn’t touch their life in some way,” Brown said.
Fischer attended South Dakota State University and played defensive tackle for the school’s football team from 2002-2005.
John Stiegelmeier, SDSU’s head football coach, described Fischer as a gifted athlete who was a great friend to his teammates.
“I’m a small school guy and he was the same — phenomenal work ethic, phenomenal loyalty to the coaching staff and his teammates,” Stiegelmeier said. “Whatever you asked D.J. to do, he did it, with a smile on his face, too. He didn’t hesitate.”
Mimms said the three cattlemen noted that they had a rough flight down to Texas due to high winds, and conditions were similar in Hereford when they left Sunday morning.
“They made it through the windy weather, and the fog was the problem when they got there,” he said.
The wreckage was found Monday at the South Dakota Wind Energy Center, a site south of Highmore with 27 turbines that are about 213 feet tall, plus the length of the blade.
Steve Stengel, a spokesman with Florida-based NextEra Energy Inc., said there was damage to a turbine but he couldn’t say what part of the tower was hit.
“It’s been so foggy up there and we haven’t had a chance to investigate,” Stengel said Monday.
Fog and low clouds combined for reduced visibility in the Highmore area on Sunday night, and winds were out of the east at about 15 to 25 mph, said Renee Wise, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Aberdeen. There were also scattered showers across region Sunday night, and some might have been heavy at times, she said.
Mimms, said the news has sent shock and sadness through the close-knit ranching community.
“There are a lot of people out there who feel like they lost one of their best friends,” Mimms said.
Similar conditions contributed to a 2008 crash in southeast Minnesota. Federal investigators concluded the pilot of a 1948 Cessna 140 lacked proper instrument training for the day’s foul weather. The National Transportation Safety Board’s probable cause report also noted the pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane while maneuvering around a wind farm.
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Wind Power is a SCAM….Onshore, or Offshore!
Dave Cameron sends wind power offshore and consigns Brits to economic dustbin
April 28, 2014 by
Even more expensive than they look.
David Cameron’s so-called “Conservatives” have seemingly ditched plans to roll out thousands of giant fans across the hills and dales of Old Blighty.
Faced with a brewing voter backlash from their own rural constituents about the negative impacts Britain’s great wind rush has had upon the landscape, property values and the ability of neighbours to enjoy a peaceful night’s sleep, Cameron’s crew has, apparently, retreated.
Instead of lobbing fans far and wide across its bucolic landscape, the Conservatives have decided to plant them out to sea, instead.
The cost of delivering offshore wind power is INSANE – with generators guaranteed obscene returns – being able to charge “three times the current wholesale price of electricity and about 60% more than is promised to onshore turbines.”
In January the Economist reported that “offshore wind power is staggeringly expensive” and “among the most expensive ways of marginally reducing carbon emissions known to man”. But that is merely to compare the insane costs of onshore wind power in the completely insane costs of offshore wind power (see our post here).
While backing away from his planned onshore onslaught might save Cameron a few rural seats at the next election, it will not immunise his party from the consequences of forcing power punters to pay for a policy which is already sending power prices spiralling through the roof – punishing families and crippling business. By backing offshore wind power, Cameron will only accelerate that process.
Britain has struggled to regain any serious economic traction after it was forced to bail out its bankers in 2008; and the European banking crisis struck it and its European trading partners in 2009: GDP growth has been anaemic; and, away from London, unemployment rates remain stubbornly high.
By plumping for the most expensive form of intermittent and unreliable electricity generation known to man, Cameron has consigned Britain to a very dark and very grim future, indeed. Here’s The Telegraph’s Chris Booker on just how dark things are about to get in Britain.
Why does Ed Davey want to keep us in the dark?
The Telegraph
Christopher Booker
26 April 2014
The Energy and Climate Change Secretary is trying to hoodwink us over the value of wind farms
We may think we are so used to politicians trying to pull the wool over our eyes that we accept that this is just what politicians do. But we are still right to think that deliberately trying to deceive people is wrong – on some occasions more than others.
Two examples of this last week again brought home just what a dishonest and disastrous mess Britain’s leaders are making of our national energy policy. The first was the announcement by Ed Davey, who runs the Department of Energy and Climate Change, of eight flagship projects he has chosen to play a leading role in helping to meet the European Union’s requirement that, within six years, we produce 32 per cent of our electricity from “renewables”.
Five of these are giant offshore wind farms. Three more are power stations burning what is known as “biomass”. And most commentators seemed happy to take at face value Davey’s claims that these will bring in £12 billion of private investment, to generate “4.5 gigawatts” of electricity, create “8,500 green jobs”, help give us “energy security”, and enable us to lead the world in the heroic fight against climate change.
Let us look, however, at what Mr Davey carefully didn’t say. For a start, of course, because the wind only blows intermittently, his five wind farms – covering, incidentally, 200 square miles of sea – will not provide anything like the 3GW of power he mentions. He is playing the old trick of confusing “capacity” with actual output. Even using implausibly generous figures from another part of his department’s own website, we can see that the average output of all Mr Davey’s £12 billion worth of projects would only be around 2.2GW: much the same as that of the single gas-fired power station recently built by RWE at Pembroke for a capital cost of just £1 billion.
Because the wind is so unreliable, we would still need 3GW of power from the fossil-fuelled power stations the Energy Secretary so hates, just to provide back-up for when it isn’t blowing at the right speed (on Thursday, for instance, all our 4,500 existing turbines combined were only giving us 215 megawatts, less than 0.6 per cent of what we were using). Mr Davey may pretend that all his projects will help meet our 32 per cent EU target. But those 2.2GW would only raise our output from renewables from 11 per cent to 15 per cent of the total, so we will still have to spend a further £40 billion before 2020.
Mr Davey is similarly not keen to explain why these wind farm companies, all foreign-owned, are so eager to join the bonanza that has made Britain such a magnet to the world. This is because we pay the world’s highest subsidies for electricity, which therefore costs us, through our bills, more than three times that from conventional power stations (and six times more than that from coal).
Even more absurd are Mr Davey’s “biomass” plants, easily the largest being Drax in Yorkshire. This is being driven by subsidies and George Osborne’s “carbon tax” to switch from coal to burning millions of tons of wood. This is specially grown across the Atlantic, then shipped 3,000 miles, and carried by train to the middle of the now-closed Selby coalfield: a process so energy-intensive that even green lobby groups protest that it ends up saving no CO₂ emissions at all.
So Mr Davey’s projects will do little or nothing to achieve any of their declared aims – instead producing, at colossal expense, a comparatively derisory amount of electricity, and adding a further £1.5 billion a year to our bills, equivalent to £60 for every household, which is even more than what we are already paying for Osborne’s “carbon tax”.
But we can get little comfort from the week’s other announcement – the Tories’ pledge that, if re-elected and no longer hamstrung by Mr Davey’s Lib Dems, they will halt the building of onshore wind farms. This is just a cynical bid to allay the ever-growing unpopularity of windmills among the Conservatives’ rural supporters, overlooking the fact that the party’s leaders still favour the offshore wind farms, which get subsidies that are more than twice as high as those onshore.
So yet again we must conclude that only when the lights go out and our computer-dependent economy seizes up – despite all those diesel generators being secretively hooked up in a bid to keep the National Grid “balanced” – will our politicians finally be forced out of their crazy bubble of groupthink, to confront a very dark, cold and hostile real world.
The Telegraph
For the dark days ahead, Dave Cameron is unlikely to be treated well by either British voters or by the pages of history.
Intent on leaving a lamentable legacy.
Useless, Destructive, Wind and Solar!!
Microwaves of the Desert; Cuisinarts of the Sky
Los Angeles PBS station KCET reports:
A report just made public by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documents a disturbing amount of bird injuries at three large California desert solar power plants, and says that there are no easy fixes to the issue.
The report, compiled by the USFWS’s National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, describes the results of examinations of 233 carcasses of birds found at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) south of Las Vegas, the Desert Sunlight facility near Joshua Tree National Park, and the Genesis Solar project west of Blythe in Riverside County.
The occasionally gruesome report indicates that injuries from concentrated solar flux and from impact with mirrors or photovoltaic panels constitute the two largest solar facility threats to wild birds, and suggests that the limited scope of carcass surveys at solar projects may be obscuring the true magnitude of bird mortalities they cause.
Here’s just a couple of illuminating (so to speak) excerpts of the actual report:
OLE [USFWS Office of Law Enforcement staff] observed large numbers of insect carcasses throughout the Ivanpah site during their visit. In some places there were hundreds upon hundreds of butterflies (including monarchs, Danaus plexippus) and dragonfly carcasses. Some showed singeing, and many appeared to have just fallen from the sky. Careful observation with binoculars showed the insects were active in the bright area around the boiler at the top of the tower. It was deduced that the solar flux creates such a bright light that it is brighter than the surrounding daylight. Insects were attracted to the light and could be seen actively flying the height of the tower. Birds were also observed feeding on the insects. At times birds flew into the solar flux and ignited. . .
Ivanpah employees and OLE staff noticed that close to the periphery of the tower and within the reflected solar field area, streams of smoke rise when an object crosses the solar flux fields aimed at the tower. Ivanpah employees used the term “streamers” to characterize this occurrence.
When OLE staff visited the Ivanpah Solar plant, we observed many streamer events. It is claimed that these events represent the combustion of loose debris, or insects. Although some of the events are likely that, there were instances in which the amount of smoke produced by the ignition could only be explained by a larger flammable biomass such as a bird. Indeed OLE staff observed birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently becoming a streamer.
OLE staff observed an average of one streamer event every two minutes.
Somehow this all escaped the Environmental Impact Review of the project before it was built?
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reports on the latest victim of wind power in the UK: a rare bird last sighted on the Isle 22 years ago:
There had been only eight recorded sightings of the white-throated needletail in the UK since 1846. So when one popped up again on British shores this week, twitchers were understandably excited.
A group of 40 enthusiasts dashed to the Hebrides to catch a glimpse of the brown, black and blue bird, which breeds in Asia and winters in Australasia.
But instead of being treated to a wildlife spectacle they were left with a horror show when it flew into a wind turbine and was killed.
Wind Power does NOT do what it was Promised to do!
Nuclear power replaces fossil fuels, while wind has the effect of locking them in
JENNY Hogan (“Time truth was told about the vital role of renewables in our wellbeing”, Agenda, The Herald, April 22) makes the case that the continued growth of renewables in Scotland is an essential response to climate change.
However, Scotland has been delivering copious low-carbon electrical energy through nuclear since well before climate change became a political issue. Indeed, nuclear is our single largest generator of electrical energy, with the output from only two compact plants at Hunterston and Torness far exceeding the combined output of every wind, wave and solar generator in Scotland.
The sole result of the future growth of renewables in Scotland, mostly through onshore wind, will be the replacement of long-lived, compact baseload nuclear capacity with short-lived, diffuse and intermittent wind capacity once Hunterston and Torness close in 2023.
But worse, due to its intermittent nature, wind requires significant fossilfuel capacity to ensure that demand is met. Wind is in fact enabled by fossil fuels, and locks in their use, while nuclear replaces fossil fuels, in particular the most polluting baseload coal plants.
Colin R McInnes,
23 Williamwood Park West,
Netherlee,
Glasgow.
I NOTE with interest Jenny Hogan’s article and Jack Ponton’s response (Letters, April 24). There are, however, two further claims made by Scottish Renewables that I believe are misleading.
Large-scale energy storage is the elephant in the renewables room.
Utilising pumped storage when generating one-third of our energy from wind, we would require a further 97 Cruachans to withstand a three-day lull across the UK. Such lulls are not infrequent. This is a topographic,geological and geographic impossibility. We simply cannot do it.
The recently-mooted cost for doubling the size of Cruachan is £1bn, with much infrastructure already in place, giving an approximate related total cost, were it feasible, of around £175bn.
It is also the case that pumped storage uses energy; it takes up to 25% more energy to pump the water to the upper reservoirs than is generated on release, so at best it is partial storage.
Whilst researching the performance of the Pelamis wave energy devices from last year’s results (following nine years of sea testing) when preparing a major review (since published), I established that with the then-current model it would take Pelamis, operating continuously, at least 16 years to go “green” – that is, generate the energy it took to build it. It was no surprise, therefore, that Eon withdrew its support. Subsequently, the Energy and Climate Change Directorate wrote to me confirming: “Clearly the technology needed to utilise and harness Scotland’s wave and tidal power is in its infancy…”
As a chartered electrical engineer I support the research, but the general public who provide the subsidies should be appraised of the energy facts.
DB Watson,
Saviskaill,
Langdales Avenue,
Cumbernauld.
Sad Goodbye to Esther. We will miss her….
“Leave”: A poet forced from her home by wind turbines (Ontario)
Apr 27, 2014
Editor’s note: Esther Wrightman. The young mother who became the face and voice of massive, organized resistance to wind energy companies in western Ontario. Who became famous for satirizing NextEra as “NextTerror,” so triggering a lawsuit from the offended corporation. Esther and her family are leaving Ontario, “shaking the dust off their feet” as they depart.
Esther and her father, Harvey Wrightman, endured the charade of an “appeal” before the Ministry of the Environment’s so-called Environmental Review Tribunal, which, it turns out, is basically a front for the wind energy companies and the Green Energy Act. (This is the hearing where Dr. Pierpont was deemed unqualified to testify regarding Wind Turbine Syndrome. In fact, virtually all the Wrightmans’ expert witnesses, including their WTS victims, were shit-canned — denied a hearing.)
The Wrightmans have concluded that Ontario has become a chapter in Lewis Carroll’s surreal, “Alice in Wonderland.” They are leaving “Ontario in Wonderland” for New Brunswick, Canada — a province that takes a dim view of bullshit wind energy.
Esther is a poet. I predict she will be hailed someday as one of Canada’s premier poets. Visit her website. Esther wrote the following lament as she has watched wind energy employees bulldoze and torch the landscape — trees, pond, fields, wildlife habitat — surrounding her home.
A new “Silent Spring” is underway outside her window. One that will turn into an “ILFN-Rich Spring” once those turbines begin operating — and the wildlife altogether vanish, along with the Wrightman family.
..
“Leave”
I should have known
..that night watching
…our gracious hollow tree in the field
….burst into flames.
And firemen running about —
..frenzied ants — revealing
her charred remains.
Something should have clicked
..when the pine,
…(patiently leaning,
….a hundred years)
twisted to the ground.
And even last week,
..in case I didn’t get the message,
that Manitoba maple
..with all the keys to the world,
…where the early days hammock .. hung
…forever,
snapped in half.
Leave,
as the yellow house
dismantles — brick by
brick,
fence lines rip up
as an old roll of fabric,
ponds, bursting with every frog we know
become backfilled graves,
and cabooses and box cars
morph into black tankers and
white towers — eagles to
vultures and
wild grass to
tiled Land
Now, put out the flames
with waves of tears, and
leave.
— Esther Wrightman (April 2014)
Agenda 21 is NOT Sustainable!!!
The Sustainability Hoax
All over the country, city and regional governments are writing “sustainability plans,” which are supposedly aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While the goal may be laudable, for the most part these plans won’t significantly reduce emissions. However, they will certainly impose huge costs on urban residents and taxpayers.
From Lafayette, La., to the Twin Cities, to the San Francisco Bay area, the heart of the plans consists of a one-size-fits-all prescription: make costly transit improvements in major corridors and then subsidize the construction of high-density housing in those corridors so lots of people will have access to transit. This prescription not only demands a huge change in American lifestyles, but also offers no reason to think it will help save the planet.
“The transit-plus-density prescription imposes major costs on cities without significantly saving energy or reducing emissions.”
The Department of Energy, for example, has found that multifamily housing actually uses more energy (and therefore emits more greenhouse gases) per square foot than single-family homes. The only way multifamily housing would save energy would be if people accept smaller homes. A better solution is making single-family homes more energy efficient, which costs less and does not require the loss of privacy in multifamily housing.
Meanwhile, data from the Department of Transportation show that transit uses, on average, about the same amount of energy — and emits about the same amount of greenhouse gases — per passenger mile as the average car. Getting people out of their cars and onto transit won’t reduce emissions, but it will inconvenience a lot of people because transit is slow, expensive and inflexible.
Even if transit were truly greener than driving, the transit-plus-density solution doesn’t even reduce driving. Between 1980 and 2010, San Francisco Bay area population densities grew by more than 55 percent, and the region built more than 200 miles of rail transit lines and scores of high-density developments along those lines. Yet per capita transit ridership fell by a third while per capita driving increased by at least 5 percent.
Moreover, cars are rapidly becoming more energy efficient. It takes around 10 years (and huge amounts of energy) to plan and build a rail transit line, but 10 years from today the average car on the road will be at least 25 percent more fuel-efficient than cars today.
We can do a lot of things to emissions, but we have to ask whether they are cost-effective. It won’t do much good to reduce emissions if we bankrupt ourselves in the process, as our descendants will be too busy trying to survive to worry about the planet as a whole.
A 2007 report from McKinsey & Company suggests anything that costs more than about $50 per ton of abated emissions is a waste of money. Even using the optimistic assumptions built into sustainability plans, the transit-and-density strategy will cost thousands of dollars per ton — and it is more likely that it won’t reduce emissions at all.
While transit and density won’t significantly reduce emissions, it will have huge effects on cities. It will make traffic more congested and roadways less safe. It will make housing less affordable and increase other consumer costs. Besides, the increased tax burden will drive away jobs.
Population data clearly show that the fastest-growing urban areas are ones that have kept housing affordable by not using land-use regulation to impose lifestyle changes on their residents. For example, urban areas in Texas, which has some of the least restrictive land-use laws, are growing far faster than in California, which has some of the most restrictive laws.
Data also show that urban areas that spend more on transit grow more slowly. Of the nation’s 65 largest urban areas, the ones that spent the most on transit in the 1990s tended to grow slower in the 2000s than the ones that spent less. This doesn’t mean regions have to settle for poor-quality transit: in most places outside of New York City, buses can move as many people as fast and as comfortably as trains at a far lower cost.
In short, the transit-plus-density prescription imposes major costs on cities without significantly saving energy or reducing emissions. Nor does it cure obesity, end poverty, or bring about world peace, as some of its advocates seem to believe. Urban leaders need to be wary of people who propose policies that are anything but sustainable.
Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.
Everybody….fight hard, like the Aussies Do!!! We don’t need Wynne Power or Wind Power!!!
Australia’s Wind Industry Finally Faces its “Waterloo”
April 27, 2014 by
He always seemed a little taller in the saddle.
During the latter part of the French Revolution a diminutive Corsican took charge of French affairs, installing himself as First Consul in 1799; and, in 1804, anointing himself French Emperor – adopting the tag Napoleon I.
The little Emperor bestrode Europe and – with his Grande Armée – from 1803 to 1815 generally gave his neighbours hell. His trip to Moscow in 1812 languished in the Russian winter snows – it wasn’t anywhere near the roaring success he’d planned for (although it did result in one or twothumping orchestra tunes – and a few very long and somewhat grimpieces of literature).
After his trip to Russia, his Grande Armée was defeated at Leipzig, Germany and in the Peninsular War at Vitoria, Spain – but still, the little Emperor fought on.
Napoleon’s self-confidence and belief in his own brilliance bordered on the maniacal – he lived and breathed hubris and hyperbole – and if he was worried that he had made an enemy of every European state, including the Super Power of the day, Great Britain, he didn’t show it.
But, eventually, the little Corsican’s luck ran out in June 1815 – near a little Belgian town called Waterloo. Napoleon ran smack bang into a grand coalition of forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington – backed up by a host of other Countries, including the massive Prussian army, commanded Gebhard von Blücher.
At Waterloo, Napoleon’s defeat was final and definitive – with the Corsican banished thereafter to rot on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then to meet one’s “Waterloo” – in common parlance – is to meet one’s final, insurmountable challenge and be defeated by it.
Well, the Australian wind industry has just got a glimpse of its Waterloo.
Last Wednesday, the Coalition’s Expert Panel – charged with the task of reviewing the Renewable Energy Target – held a meeting in Sydney, attended by representatives from peak business bodies, such as the Business Council of Australia; miners, like Rio Tinto; and serious (ie conventional) power generators. Along for the ride too were a bunch of rent-seekers from the wind and solar industries – including, of course, the Clean Energy Council – all desperate to keep the RET gravy train rolling.
The wind industry and its parasites reacted in fits of horror when the make up of the panel was announced back in February. The panel is headed up by Dick Warburton – former Reserve Bank board member and all-round friend of (real) business and industry – with Matt Zema, the chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator; Brian Fisher, the former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics; and Shirley In’t Veld, the former chief executive of Verve Energy in Western Australia making up the rest of a hard-hitting team (see our post here).
Dick “RET Slayer” Warburton spells it out.
At the time the make-up of the panel was announced, the wind industry had no real insight into just how bad things were about to get. All of that changed at last Wednesday’s meeting.
During the meeting, Dick Warburton – and other members of the panel – laid out precisely what the panel’s task is all about (and what it isn’t about) and gave some pretty strong hints about what its recommendations will ultimately be: none of it favourable to the wind industry.
The wind and solar industry representatives present descended into a state of panic stricken shock – one of STT’s operatives noted that Infigen’s boys left the meeting looking like “zombies”.
The eco-fascist bloggers that spin propaganda on behalf of the wind industry are crying foul – calling the review a “farce”; “rigged”; “biased”; with a “pre-determined outcome”.
STT puts their hysterical language down to the fact that they’re just working their way through the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
What really got their goat was the announcement that top-flight energy market consultants, ACIL Allen has been appointed by the panel to carry out the modelling for the review.
No fools, ACIL Allen – these boys are well and truly alive to the insane costs of the RET.
Back in 2012, they produced a report for Energy Australia which pointed out that the mandatory RET – with its current fixed target of 41,000 GW/h – would involve a subsidy of $53 billion, transferred from power consumers to wind power generators via Renewable Energy Certificates – a Federal Tax on all Australian power consumers. On the modelling done by Liberal MP, Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor – and privately confirmed by Origin Energy – ACIL Allen’s figure for the REC Tax is pretty close to the mark.
The wind industry’s cries of “farce”, “rigged” and “biased” fall just a little hollow, however, against the fact that Infigen & Co had pushed very, very hard for wind industry “friendly”, SKM to do the modelling for the review.
SKM has already performed $millions worth of engineering consultancy work for the wind industry and hopes to do tens of $millions more. It’s already tossed up a few pieces of wind industry backed drivel – pitched as hard-hitting “research” – but which are no more than the kind of fluff and guff you get from the Clean Energy Council. No surprises there. What’s that you say about “bias” and “pre-determined outcomes”? Apparently, it’s only an issue when the bias and outcome isn’t set to run in your favour.
During the meeting, the expert panel made it very clear what their mission is NOT about: the review has nothing to do with “climate change” (formerly known as “global warming” – until it stopped getting warmer 17 years ago); it has nothing to do with the spurious claims made by the wind industry about the creation of tens of thousands of “green” jobs; and it has nothing to do with modelling or measuring CO2 abatement.
On that last point, the panel flagged its position by implicitly rejecting the wind industry’s unsubstantiated claims about CO2 abatement. At one point, Dick Warburton made it plain that the review had nothing to do with CO2 emissions – and that the review was only concerned with the cost impacts of renewable energy in the electricity sector.
The panel told the meeting that its modelling will assume that there will be no carbon price between now and 2030 and no CO2 abatement target during that time – and that the modelling will assume that meeting the current 41,000 GW/h by 2020 is a physical impossibility – which it is.
Head spruiker for the Clean Energy Council, Russell “Rusty” Marsh addressed the meeting from the podium – while Infigen’s boys carped and whinged from the back of the room – banging on about “dangerous climate change” – mumbling about saving Polar Bears and Penguins – and bleating about the “wonders of wind” – much to the panel’s amusement.
Dick Warburton grinned through most of Rusty’s plea for RET mercy. It seems Rusty was squarely engaged in venting the first and third stages of his and his clients’ grief: “denial” and “bargaining”.
In a moment of pure desperation, the clowns from Infigen resorted to an effort to link the La Nina and El Nino weather patterns to giant fans – apparently the latter are the perfect solution to the former.
Although, we think it a little bit of a stretch to suggest that the continued maintenance of a massive stream of taxpayer/power consumer subsidies to an intermittent and unreliable power generation source – which cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions – might have a bearing on the movement of ocean currents in the Pacific – a phenomenon which predates human history.
Rusty – and the boys from Infigen – made a raft of other wild claims about the “benefits” of wind power – all of which were soundly dismissed by the panel as “too hard to model” (polite code for “patent nonsense”) – and that any such “benefits” amounted to nothing more than a “wealth transfer” from power consumers to wind farm operators. Ouch! No wonder Infigen’s boys shuffled out of the meeting looking like extras from the Night of the Living Dead.
Having woken up to the RET review panel’s true mission, the wind industry and its parasites have now been reduced to name-calling – tagging Dick Warburton “a climate change denier and pro-nuclear advocate”; former ABARE chief, Brian Fisher a “fossil fuel lobbyist”; and Shirley In’t Veld, a “front for big coal”.
Hardly the kind of approach that might help their “cause” you’d think, but hysterical responses are to be expected, as they work through the second stage of their grief: “anger”.
The noises made by the panel at the meeting last Wednesday clearly don’t bode well for the RET. Scrap the RET and the wind industry – on life support now – will, of course, die a quick and natural death.
The panel’s likely recommendations will find a Federal Parliament raring to lay waste to the most ludicrous energy policy ever devised. The great majority within the Coalition are keen to bring the rort to an end, seeing the RET for what it is: nothing more than “corporate welfare” on a massive scale.
Come July, the new Senate takes its place and the balance of power will be held by a bunch of arch-conservative newcomers – along with STT Champions, John Madigan and Nick Xenophon.
The newcomers include 3 Senators from the Jolly “Un-Green” Giant, Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party (PUP) – plus 1 – Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts’ Party, who has already done a deal to side with the PUP; Bob Day (Family First) from South Australia; and David Leyonhjelm (Liberal Democratic Party) from NSW. All of them have signalled that they are itching to help the Coalition ditch Labor’s Carbon Tax – and all of them have made noises that they’re just as keen to scrap the Renewable Energy Target, too.
From July, to get its legislation through the Senate, the Coalition will have to do business with the help of these 6 newcomers – and John Madigan and Nick Xenophon. With that line up, getting legislation scrapping the RET through the Senate will be a doddle.
With the RET review panel sharpening its axe – and the Parliamentary Planets about to align – things couldn’t look much worse for the wind industry. This, of course, couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of lads.
Expect to hear a whole lot more hysterical language from that quarter as the industry, its parasites and the Clean Energy Council work their way through the 5 stages of grief; the first of which is “denial”.
At Waterloo, even with his artillery captured, his troops in disarray and Wellington’s superior forces holding all the points of strategic importance, Napoleon tried to rally the last rump of his forces, flattering himself with the hope of the victory he knew was his.
It wasn’t, of course, to be – Napoleon had, finally, met his Waterloo.
From the noises made by the RET review panel last Wednesday, it appears the Australian wind industry is about to meet its very own Waterloo.
Even Emperors run out of luck, eventually.
I’m Sure the Alarmists will Blame “too much ice”, on Global Warming….
Alaskan Polar Bears Threatened…By Too Much Spring Ice
April 25, 2014 – 4:09 PM
Female polar bear with cubs. (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service/AP)
(CNSNews.com) – Five meters of ice– about 16 feet thick – is threatening the survival of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea region along Alaska’s Arctic coast, according to Dr. Susan J. Crockford, an evolutionary biologist in British Columbia who has studied polar bears for most of her 35-year career.
That’s because the thick ice ridges could prevent ringed seals, the bears’ major prey, from creating breathing holes they need to survive in the frigid waters, Crockford told CNSNews.com.
“Prompted by reports of the heaviest sea ice conditions on the East Coast ‘in decades’ and news that ice on the Great Lakes is, for mid-April, the worst it’s been since records began, I took a close look at the ice thickness charts for the Arctic,” Crockford noted in her Polar Bear Science blog on April 18th.
“Sea ice charts aren’t a guarantee that this heavy spring ice phenomenon is developing in the Beaufort, but they could be a warning,” she wrote, noting that they “don’t bode well” for the Beaufort bears.
“What happens is that really thick ice moves in because currents and winds from Greenland and the Canadian islands push it against the shore,” Crockford told CNSNews.com.
“The male seals arrive in the area in early spring to set up breeding territories. They drill a hole through the ice to maintain breathing holes close to the shore. But there’s a limit. They can drill through two meters (about seven feet) of ice. But too much beyond that and they’re in trouble.”
Ringed seal (NOAA)
“The reason that’s important is that seals mate right after the pups, who are born in April, are weaned. So the male seal wants to be there, but he has to have breathing holes. If the ice is too thick, he has to move off someplace else,” she explained.
But this is the same time that female polar bears are just emerging with their newborn cubs from maternity dens either on or near the shore.
“When those bears come out of their dens in the spring, they need to find seals right away because they will have gone six months without eating,” Crockford said. “If there are no seals, they have to go further out, where there’s thinner ice.”
“Spring and early summer are really a critical time for polar bears. That’s when they need to eat as many seals as they can because that’s when they put on fat for the rest of the year. If they have trouble doing that in the spring, they’re in big trouble.”
There were comparably high levels of spring ice in the Beaufort Sea in 2004 and 2006, when bear counts were “one of the pieces of evidence used to have the bears listed as ‘threatened’ in the U.S.,” Crockford pointed out.
“Polar bear biologists were finding some bears quite thin and found a population decline,” she said, which they attributed to melting summer ice caused by global warming.
“But the biologists were not there to see the thick [spring] ice. All they saw was thin bears,” she pointed out. “They blamed the poor condition of the bears on summer ice, instead of acknowledging that it was likely the condition of the ice in the spring that was the cause of the problem.”
“Female [polar bears] with cubs having trouble feeding are one aspect of the repercussions of thick ice,” Crockford added. “The other repercussion is that other bears, instead of hanging around and starving, probably left the area. They could have gone to the Chukchi Sea, which is located between the U.S. and Russia near the Bering Strait.”
The international IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) conducted a polar bear population survey for the area in 2006. It reported a decline in the adult polar bear population and reduced cub survival rates, which was used to list the bears as a “threatened species” in the U.S. in 2008.
But the PBSG did not take into account the fact that polar bears “can just move” to other areas if their food supply is limited, Crockford told CNSNews.com. “If some of those bears were part of that count, it would look like they died,” she pointed out.
In its 2013 status update, released on February 14th, the PBSG repeated its 2006 “reduced” population estimate, putting the Southern Beaufort Sea at 1,526 bears and “declining due to a negative trend in sea ice conditions, particularly over the continental shelf, resulting from the continuing effects of climate warming.”
However, in what Crockford characterizes as an “astonishing admission,” the update also stated that “it is important to note that there is the potential for un-modeled spatial heterogeneity in mark-recapture sampling that could bias survival and abundance estimates. A thorough re-assessment of survival and abundance is underway and a final result is anticipated in 2014.”
“What’s shocking is that the PBSG have now admitted that the ‘movement of bears’ issue essentially invalidates the 2006 population estimate and the much-touted ‘reduced survival of cubs’,” Crockford said in a March 24th blog post.
“This is a cyclical pattern that is quite specific to that part of Alaska, which has been known about since the 1970s,” when wildlife biologists noticed “ten times as many seals as usual in the Chukchi Sea. There were more bears, too,” Crockford told CNSNews.com.
“It seems to happen every 10 years, so it should be expected by people who work in the area. And not just by people who study polar bears, but also people who study seals.”
“It looks like similar conditions are setting up now, and we know the timing is right,” she added. “We’re keeping an eye on it.”
Wind Pushers Have No Respect for the Communities they are Harming!
Wind turbine fallout: roads take a pounding
Simcoe Reformer, By Monte Sonnenberg
JARVIS – Wind power companies have done a lot of damage to roads in Haldimand County. Each of the 168 wind turbines put up by NextEra, Capital Power and Samsung requires 40 truckloads of cement to anchor the base. Then there are the dump trucks filled with soil and gravel and the cranes and heavy equipment required to move parts of the giant structures around.
Most of this is happening on concession roads, culverts and bridges designed to carry the occasional heavy truck and tractor.
Fortunately for Haldimand taxpayers, the county thought about this before the wind companies went to work. Agreements require the companies to restore Haldimand’s roads to the condition they were in before construction began. Work in this direction has begun in west Haldimand now that the NextEra and Capital Power projects are in place. Read article
"Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" Phoenix Rising... 