Matt Ridley on the inability of wind power advocates to distort reality:
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.
If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.
It’s a lesson we still need the Ontario government to learn: our electricity prices are scheduled to go up substantially to finance the massive wind farm investment the McGuinty government has signed up for. Much more of our landscape will look like this in future:
Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?
One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.
I might be the only person in the world who thinks windmills are not such an ugly thing to look at. Kinda pretty just lazily turning in the wind.
Be better if they were actually _good_ for something but we can’t have everything.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — March 5, 2012 @ 11:15
I didn’t mind the look of individual units — the first one I noticed was a single unit on the grounds of the Pickering nuclear power plant. I did find it interesting how rarely it seemed to be rotating. The photo was taken last year from the Wolfe Island ferry near Kingston. That, to me, is visual pollution. (And that’s ignoring the potentially huge number of birds that get minced among those whirling blades.)
Comment by Nicholas — March 5, 2012 @ 11:29
Here is a good link to some info on the noise these things generate:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/09/windfarm-noise-renowned-acoustician-denounces-double-standards-in-noise-regulations/
and a link to a video about a guy who lives near some of these things:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jrNYwpIqDsU
Worth the watch and read.
Comment by Dwayne — March 5, 2012 @ 19:46