After nearly two weeks the ABC carrier pigeons finally brought the news that Bob Brown, former Greens leader, is campaigning against this gigantic wind farm — the $1.6b one in NW Tasmania that wants to be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Could it be the ABC doesn’t want to admit they were wrong too, pushing wind power non stop for years?
Look how erratic that wind is — 90% one day, zero the next
Tom Quirk looked at the nearest wind farm to Robbins Island, and it’s a fitful machine (see that graph below). Worse, it fails in synchrony with most wind farms in Australia. Thus exacerbating the unstable, fickle supply of wind energy.
Tom Quirk predicts the demise of another coal plant
Quirk was Deputy Chairman of VENCorp, which managed the transmission and wholesale natural gas market and system planning for the electricity market in Victoria, Australia.
A wind farm on Robbins Island will simply extend the variations in power supplied to the mainland while making no difference to the correlations of wind through the states in the wholesale market. Thus more backup would be required from gas and hydro sources. Loy Yang B with 1,000 MW would clearly become uneconomic to operate since more wind farms are also planned for Victoria…
Woolworth Wind Farm, Tasmania, Output, June 2019, Data source anero.id/energy
The proposed 400 to 1,000 MW Robbins Island wind farm is at the North West of Tasmania close to the 140 MW Woolnorth wind farm. The capacity factor for Woolnorth is shown below. The behaviour of the Robbins Island wind farm should be the same with a capacity factor varying from 0 to 90%.
If it’s built, it will make good money for the American owners on the days it works, but make electricity more expensive for Australians. The awkward truth is that, barring freak accidents, its power arrives exactly when Australians don’t need it — when they have an excess from every other wind farm and a steady reliable baseload supply working just fine that must sit around, waiting for the wind to ebb, while it has bills to pay.
Like other windfarms it will help drive the cheap baseload off the grid, and leave Australians footing the bill for high cost peaking replacements.
With turbines moving at 300 km an hour it’ll be the apex predator — death to avians too.
Whats the difference between and ABC reporter and a PR writer? PR writers are more honest.
They don’t pretend to be journalists.
The ABC headlines Bob Browns opposition as “the height of hypocrisy” — which it is, but hey, at least there’s a point where he admits the truth. Shame he didn’t speak up sooner.
Carrington Clarke of the ABC gives free advertising to an industry, interviews no critics and does no research. Watch the pea, the word “average” is used to bury the bad-news variability. This sounds like it could be from a prospectus for UPC:
“We have an absolutely stellar, solid, low turbulence, high average wind speed around the 36 kilometres an hour average, which in my experience is some of the best in the world,” UPC chief operating officer David Pollington said.
“Best” in this case being “best for the owners”, bad for Australians. For about a quarter of the entire month of June the output was between ten percent of capacity and “zero”.
The average buries the bad news on prices too:
Mr Pollington argues projects like Robbins Island are good news for consumers in Tasmania and on the mainland. “We’re confident that we can produce energy at a lower rate than is currently the average price in the market,” Mr Pollington said. “So we should be helping depress the price of electricity for consumers.”
It’s hardly an achievement if wind turbines can make electricity cheaper than the “average” record high prices we pay now. In any case, it’s the effect on the whole system that matters, not the cherry-picked five-minute bids for wholesalers on windy days. The average retail price paid by consumers is what matters and the more wind we get, the higher it is. If wind farms “depressed” the price (rather than the consumer) there might be a country on Earth which has cheaper electricity since it built wind farms. There isn’t.
Tom Quirk looks at the erratic synchronicity of wind power of the national grid:
Wind power supplied is an example of state by state wind correlations that reflect the reach of the weather systems in the Australian eastern region.
Total wind power contribution to the wholesale electricity market
Total wind farm output Australia, June 2019 | Data source anero.id/energy
The capacity factor is the energy produced as a percentage of the maximum output of a wind farm. The total capacity factor is the weighted average of all wind farms. The capacity factor is a useful way of showing the correlations in wind energy supply from the state regions.
The figures below show strong correlations for Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia with lesser correlation for New South Wales and Queensland.
Wind farms, Australia, combined output, June 2019. Data source anero.id/energy
.
There are 55 wind farms on the National Electricity Market in the Eastern States: 2 wind farms in Tasmania and Queensland, 22 in South Australia, 17 in Victoria, and 12 in NSW. Those graphs for June 2019 for each state up close:
NSW Wind power | VIC Wind power | QLD Wind power | Tas Wind power | SA Wind power |
Sometimes all 55 wind farms are useless.
What about the birds?
Here’s one of the great whitewash lines of PR by the ABC:
UPC’s Mr Pollington says the company has been working with experts to ensure the wind farm is designed to minimise the impact on birds.
What does minimize even mean? They’ll make choices that kill less birds as long as it doesn’t cost much. The way to minimize the impact is to not build it in the first place.
Graham Lloyd, The Australian, reports on the terrible toll, and reveals useless forward estimates, Bob Brown, and minimization are:
…AGL’s Macarthur wind farm in Victoria is a good example of how expert reports can be wrong and conditions difficult to enforce.
Local farmer and bird lover Hamish Cumming has been raising the alarm for almost a decade. In September 2014, he wrote to all federal MPs: “The AGL Macarthur wind farm is slaughtering raptors at an alarming rate and no one seems to care, especially the Greens.” He asked Brown for help: “Dear Bob, I think the Greens in Victoria (and nationally) have forgotten what they are supposed to be protecting,” he wrote. “They refuse to help me make AGL adhere to their permit conditions just because they are a wind farm.” Cumming says he got no reply.
When the Macarthur wind farm was approved, AGL estimated it would kill two birds per turbine a year. However, post construction monitoring showed the project was killing 13.4 birds per turbine a year, more than six times the pre-construction estimate. The AGL permit application claimed a raptor kill of three a year across the wind farm, yet a post-construction report estimates a kill of 430 raptors a year, 30 per cent of bird deaths at the wind farm.
The experience in northern California is an 80 per cent decline in golden eagles numbers with none nesting near the Altamont facility, although it is a prime habitat.
In comments on the last Robbins Island thread one Prof Mike Tarburton suggested smaller wind turbines could save the vulnerable birds:
The best solution to this conflict is to use different types of Wind Turbines that would not kill birds. There are at least 4 types of smaller wind turbines on the internet that will not kill any birds. That they are smaller would mean that they would be easier to transport to Robbins island. One of the birds I research, the White-throated Needletail is the main species being killed at a wind farm near Robbins island, in spite of it being one of the fastest birds in the world. Because it flies all day it is going to pass many wind farms and risk being killed. Two weeks ago the Australian Government accepted my application and declared this species as Vulnerable.
Also near Robbins island, Short-tailed Shearwaters or Muttonbirds are also being killed by wind farms of the same type that are used across Australia. Which politician has shares in this company. Lets solve the problem by using the types that will generate cheap electricity and do not kill birds.
Prof Mike Tarburton.
Likely this is Prof. Mike Tarburton, “retired” from Dean of School of Science & Technology, Pacific Adventist University, Papua New Guinea. His website is Swifts of the World.
Turbines are going to get bigger, so Prof Tarburton, bird specialist, is effectively telling us that things for birds are going to get much worse. Sadly, the awful bird toll will get more awful.
Smaller turbines might save the birds, which is a good thing, but they still make grid-wrecking, job-destroying electricity that makes the entire network more inefficient and more expensive. And presumably small turbines must be more expensive per Watt than large turbines or the profit making corporations wouldn’t be building the biggest ones they can get approval for.
Lets save birds and jobs and keep the heating and lights on.
— Jo
h/t David B, Pat, George.
Data source anero.id/energy from Andrew Miskelly
The whole wind energy production problem is easily solved
by using nuclear powered fans to blow air at the windmills
when Mother Nature is not doing her job.
Nuclear power is clean.
Wind power is clean.
Combine the two.
And perhaps the bird carcasses
can be burned in some kind
of bird carcass oven electricity
generator device, for extra energy?
Every problem has a solution
if you just think hard enough,
or hardly think.
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DEAR GOD RICHARD!!! DON`T, I MEAN DON`T give them any ideas.
180
Another is to combine 2 ‘green’ technologies, LEDs and solar cells, so they can produce electricity at night or when clouds are overhead.
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That has already been tried in Spain a few years ago.
130
Yes, when the Spanish solar farm was receiving so much subsidies that it could afford to install and operate lamps, run off a diesel generator, to produce “solar” energy at night.
50
Alternatively, one could consider an army of trained chimpanzees on bicycles next to a banana plantation………
110
Your average chimp has only the attention span of a 4 year old. So I don’t see how you could keep them going to produce reliable power.
40
Happened in Germany – some geniuses realised that they could make money by using highpowered lamps to generate solar power as it they made more money selling the electricity than it cost them to buy it. I believe the scam fell apart because they kept doing it into the night.
40
Obviously, its not the problem of our wind farm providers to make sure there is an “average” wind. This is the fault of the government.
Governments need to alter the environment to enable renewable energy.
As this cannot be physically achieved using any known technology, its up to government to set the corrrect policies to enable the creation of a sustainable “virtual” wind, otherwise known as the V-Wind.
V-Wind now drives a virtual return on investments, or V-Profit$. V-Profit$ will eventually drive our GDP which will become a virtual economy versus a real economy. We will be able to report on this veconomy daily as no data is needed to calculate it.
Such success would normally be associated with a socialist group like the ABC, the Greens or the ALP
In our case, this pinnacle of achievement is now accepted as a religion based on Gaia worship, (ly face down on Gaia and pray for forgiveness daily, no mat please).
Praying to Gaia will change your lot in a virtual life. Not praying makes you a denier. Clearly, by not praying you do not like Gaia and must be dealt with by denying any access to the veconomy. You will be sentence to live only in the real economy. A horrible fate in a virtual world as the belivers in Gaia will simply legally take any real profits made by you. Your real success will only create more “Believers”.
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Why won’t that work. After all the wind energy is free.
The thing that is wrong with it, is the energy from coal, gas, and nuclear is also free. The cost is in building and maintaining the facilities to capture the energy, transform it to electricity, and then distribute it to the users.
The fact that wind is so intermittent adds cost on top of those costs. Then with government meddling into what they have no competency only multiplies the cost beyond all reason. It is madness without limit.
If your goal is to destroy technological civilization and to reduce the population to a few struggling hunting and gathering tribes, the madness makes sense. For most of us, that is not our goal.
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Wind is free – sunshine’s free! Argument by way of the matador’s red cape. All that ENERGY required fer building the energy-capturing technology, not 24/7 available and not 100% output producing, not even 50%. And fossil-fuel back-up required, landscape use 🙁 … its HUGE, jest to boil the kettle in a few homes.
Windmill technology never was much good, design failure, lumbering giant, too top heavy, arms too long fer when the wind blows strong, it’s a bestiary beast…https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/645165900/medieval-bestiary-art-print-aberdeen
… Whereas ol’ king coal rescued serfs from slavery, rescued western civilisation from famine. Cits ‘n serfs, lets hear it fer ol’ king Coal!
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No, no no. You don’t understand. If you want reliable wind just send us your wind turbines and I’ll arrange to have them set up in House of Representatives hearing rooms. Then stand back and watch those turbines go into overdrive. There is no better source of hot air than Democrats bent on impeachment of a president whose only crime is that Hillary should have won. Honestly, nothing will do the job better.
You would need to provide the connecting cables but I’m sure that with all the engineering talent that hangs out on Jo Nova there would be a solution for that in short order.
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You would have to wait for them to finish their summer vacation home where they will waste more hot air on their constituents. But that’s only a small problem compared with guaranteed wind forever.
50
50
Another well put together commentary on the absolute evil of renewables.
Science has been excluded, ethics have been ignored, electrical engineering principles hidden out of sight and the whole mess wrapped up in deliberately confused economics.
What more could a politician wish for.
We have lost control of our government.
KK
310
Have we ever had control of our government? Our form of democracy is a deception. We only ever have a reasonably good government, such as Howard’s by pure luck. We the people have our say only on one day at election time. The rest of the time the government can and does whatever it likes. Actually for much of the time it doesn’t do whatever it should do for the good of the nation. Still waiting for PM Morrison to announce that nuclear energy is permitted and that cutting our emissions has already gone too far and needs to stop immediately. Either he is too stupid to know cutting our emissions is a waste of time or he does know and too afraid to say so. Either way we’ve not only lost control of our government the government has lost all credibility wrt the climate change crap.
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A government has nothing to lose or fear from an unarmed population, to quote the Howard as reasonably good while it had the greatest success on disarming the people is bitter irony.
90
I was speaking in relative terms. All politicians have their bad points, just that some have many good points too while others have very little if any.
40
The real purpose of electing representatives to enact our will is to hold those elected to account for any digressions from their promises and our self interests.
Placing political figureheads on an untouchable pedestal is the behaviour of the left, no matter how popular or successful a leader is just a few fateful decisions can become a catalyst for the erosion of rights and society as we know it.
90
All I can say is I don’t trust any politician no matter what political persuasion unless I see good results. Howard produced lots of good results but he failed in certain areas too. PMs ever since up until and not including the current one have been woeful to the extreme, and in so many ways have set back this once great nation a lot – so much so I suspect it’s now too hard to recover. As for the current one it’s too early to tell but he’s starting to become a disappointment.
40
Sorry, I don’t understand the claim about disarming the people.
All law abiding Australians can apply for a licence to own a wide range of weapons, under certain circumstances even a Vietnam War SLR semi-automatic rifle can be licensed. But not for most Australians.
We can obtain a licence and purchase shotguns and rifles, it is not difficult, join a gun club, obtain the necessary weapons handling basic training and apply for a licence.
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The one act that outed Howard as a socialist was disarming Australians.
Many people think Im wrong, but as Howard once said “The times will suit me”.
yep.
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“Little Johnny Howard”(Australias then prime minister)conned us into giving up our fire-arms(for our own safety),should be a lesson to everyone here.It turns out our so called”Conservative”was in fact a”Globalist”following his orders from the UN(as per agenda 21,now agenda 2030)There is between 500,000 and 1,000,000 or more guns that they don’t have records of.So no,it didn’t work like they thought it would.
A couple of instances to help you make up your own minds…
The gun buy back that was a con….https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=285&v=FUNNmfOtmv8
The truth about Port Arthur(Tasmania Australia) https://gumshoenews.com/201…
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” the entire output of the civilised world would simply exist to produce electricity to keep society civilised. Forget leisure and all forms of exploration.”
Precisely the plan that the perpetrators of Agenda 21 and Agenda 30 have in mind.
60
Incidentally, John Howard turned 80 years young the other day. Happy Birthday Mr. Howard!
50
Renewables by themselves are not evil. Using fear mongering supported by corrupt science to support renewables to the exclusion of fossil fuels is the real evil.
160
Evilness is an attribute of an intelligent entity so yes renewables of themselves can’t evil. In the same way a gun is not evil but someone can use it for good to kill for food or evil to murder.
60
When there’s deliberate intent to push renewables onto trusting voters, that’s the big E.
80
‘What does minimize even mean?’.. well probably by instructing the birds to be more careful when flaying around these things……..
The mind boggles.
60
ABC Radio in Qld also went a bit heretical earlier this week when they interviewed George Christensen who had called for the arrested French
Adani protestersjournalists to be deported. During the interview he called for the government to fund Peter Ridd’s legal fees if James Cook Uni appeals Judge Vasta’s ruling. Several minutes air time with George calling for better quality science from JCU. Nothing since.180
Im not sure whether the French journos were supporting them or trying to show them up as the bozos they are.
40
Think the French journos worked for an activist newspaper.
30
Maybe edged in today’d “peak stupid”
“CNN: “One of America’s oldest power companies is going carbon free” apart from coal and natural gas.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/26/cnn-one-of-americas-oldest-power-companies-is-going-carbon-free-apart-from-coal-and-natural-gas/
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LOL … the finest educations money can buy.
50
The day we become carbon free is the day life ceases to exist. Anyone with even a small amount of scientific knowledge understands what I am talking about. So anyone proclaiming we should be carbon free is proposing we extinguish all life here on earth.
80
Typo in above – “today’s”
And also running in the “P.S. Stakes”
“CNN: Rich People Can Save “the Planet From Climate Change” Aeuhhh???”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/26/cnn-rich-people-can-save-the-planet-from-climate-change-aeuhhh/
Read it and marvel
50
And
“Revision to: Wind Farm Back-of-the-Envelope Economic Analysis”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/25/revision-to-wind-farm-back-of-the-envelope-economic-analysis/
Conclusion – “I think we should stop building these wind farms — yesterday. “
120
That’s a pretty good conclusion.
If you look at the weather map for today (http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/synoptic_col.shtml)
the isobars show there won’t be much wind over northern Tasmania at the moment. It may speed up a bit
in a day’s time as the front to the left gets there and maybe a bit the day after. The anticyclone coming
in though is going to keep wind pretty patchy for a while.
With a bit of practice, you should be able to predict what wind farms are likely to produce at any time.
From what little I’ve seen of Australia’s daily dose of natural weather, why are you lot building wind farms
at all?
110
They are subsidy farms, not wind farms, and they are being built to “farm” the subsidies – LRE Certificates in particular. Also our federal government, without notice or cost/benefit analysis, forced our electricity supply authorities to accept this rubbish power whenever it turns up, so they have a captive market, and electricity consumers held to ransom. Why wouldn’t a foreign bank get involved in such a rigged operation, robbing the Australian nation of dollars and a future?
20
The uncertainty surrounding current energy policy is crippling many aspects of economic development in Oz and elsewhere. Climate change causation aside the crunch question for energy production is the role of CO2. If CO2 is not the culprit then energy production methods can embrace the cost-effective coal-fired power stations developed 50 years ago.
A recent post to this blog suggested the complexity of the behaviour of atmospheric CO2 is way beyond anything incorporated in IPCC’s models and in any case exonerated CO2 as a cause of harmful impacts on climate.(Looks like what John Nicol has been saying since 2008 or so.)
Conclusion: Let the superannuated “scientists/modellers” go chase the causes of climate change. In another 50 years they might get a result. In the meantime focus on removing the stigma attached to CO2 and get the economy back on its feet.
130
“Let the superannuated “scientists/modellers” go chase the causes of climate change.,” it is already known on large scale..The solar variation, the earths orbit and lunar modulation..just some details to work on. BUT the elephant in the room is the AGENDA,’removing the stigma attached to CO2′ so it will never happen.
10
A couple of examples of the economic distortions caused by windmills, that as well as receiving wholesale prices averaging $100/MWhr in SA over the last 12 months have also received an extra $80/MWhr through the sale of RET certificates, although as the RET target is nearly achieved, recent certificate sales have dropped to $40/Mwhr.
On July 24 in SA, to meet the evening peak demand, wind delivered just 150 MW from a nameplate capacity of 2142 MW. Gas supplied 1576 MW with 200 MW imported from Vic.
On July 20, wind delivered over 1200 MW throughout the day, with gas constrained to just 250 MW to maintain system stability, peaking at 500 MW in the evening.
So to meet SA peak demand of about 2100 MW, SA needs to maintain 3,000 MW of gas and diesel generators. And prices must be high enough to support 2,142 MW of wind capacity, and cope with 500 MW of solar that peaks at midday.
Now consider the impact of 1000 MW nameplate capacity Robbins windmills. On average that is likely to deliver about 300 MW, but supply will vary from zero to 900 MW at 90% capacity factor peak. Transmission lines must be able to cope with 900 MW.
Tas demand peaks at about 2,200 MW, with minimum around 1100 MW. What happens to the 2,270 MW of hydro capacity, 370 MW gas, and 308 MW of wind capacity in Tas? The assumption has to be that the extra will be shipped to Vic, with talk of a possible new interconnector. That’s the only way more income can be generated from Tas generators. So who is the loser in Vic?
100
The Robbins Island and Jim’s Plain wind farms are planned to mainly supply power to the mainland via a new interconnector, which of course has to be paid for by the Tasmanian Government, who no doubt would seek federal financial assistance.
30
“… there might be a country on Earth which has cheaper electricity since it built wind farms. There isn’t.”. Is there a study that formally shows this? It would be very useful. Especially if there is any country that has reduced power prices over the same period.
70
Mike,
I don’t know of any study that actually shows cheaper electricity since wind farms were introduced. The cases of Denmark, Germany and South Australia show that it raises costs. The chart here
http://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-and-the-high-price-of-european-electricity/
shows that the more renewables the higher the electricity cost in Europe.
50
If there weres tudies indicating that wind had reduced prices they would be ramming it down our throats by now . . . It just plain isn’t the case !!
GeoffW
60
It cannot reduce prices in Australia while the RET is in operation paying the generator a second time for its output.
So far as I’ve been able to ascertain the wind bandits only operate in countries where a RET type disincentive operates against coal.
60
TdeF has all the detail further on at http://joannenova.com.au/2019/07/robbins-island-mega-wind-farm-killing-birds-and-baseload-power-at-300-kilometers-per-hour/#comment-2167312
30
But Graeme No.3, you have to look at the big picture.
Just ignore those transitory little things like the wind mills being made from steel, aluminum, grass and carbon fiber reinforced plastics, whilst mounted on huge concrete and steel foundations. Foundation that were dug and filled using large trucks and earth moving machinery. Or that lots of these processed materials were imported.
Ignore that they are connected to the grid by lossy converters and aluminum or copper power lines strung throughout the countryside on steel pylons on more reinforced concrete foundations. Or that lots of these materials are imported.
Also ignore the vast amounts of money needed for new technology to continually monitoring, protect, and switch sources to and fro on grid to accommodate these intermittent sources of electricity on the grid. Or that most of this technology has been imported.
Ignore too the requirement for lots of maintenance by humans and machines during a wind mill’s relatively short lives (~20-27years). Or that most of the spare parts and specialize machinery was imported.
And ignore the degradation and industrialization of the countryside that their installation necessarily brings. After all the countryside has no value has it? Besides you can always travel to some foreign country to see proper natural countryside, not that low grade local Australian countryside, should you wish.
No, if you look at the really big picture with its persuasive vista of the taxpayer subsidizing and consumers paying more for a grid supply that includes the better inefficiency, more intermittency, and degraded reliability gained from this form of electricity generation, then it all makes sense. Perfect sense for the profiteers and governments’ control freak bureaucrat that allow this great revolution to march-in to destroy power generation efficiency, and so industries, jobs, and trade that relies on it.
Profiteering companies that are mostly are foreign owned and managed. Government bureaucrats have good pension provisions.
90
Hahahah!
not —
“… grass and carbon fiber reinforced plastics,”
should be —
“… glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastics, ” …
60
tomOmason:
Don’t laugh, sisal plant has been used as a reinforcement in polyesters. Not as strong but adequate.
Favourite story; during the craze for ‘advanced’ americans going off to India to bring technology to the natives, a rocket scientist found himself in a village dependent on fishing but short of boats. He arranged a supply of polyester resin but couldn’t get any glass fibre. There was lots of sisal growing locally so he decided to use that. The next problem was the method of manufacture, and as a scientist involved in the rocket trade the only method he knew was filament winding (usually even in those days computer controlled). Nothing daunted he set up a rotating horizontal shape and the sisal fibre was drawn through the resin trough and wrapped around the ‘mould’ (in the shape of the boat’s interior). Motive power was provided by a water buffalo walking slowly around a capstan which drove the contraption via belts and pulleys.
The cured shape was then cut horizontally and turned out to be 2 crude but usable boats. By the time he left the village had plenty of boats and he was trying to adapt the system to making huts.
31
Graeme No.3,
Wow nice information. Also it’s interesting to know my misspelling jogged you memory of real grass (well sisal) and resin products, of course recent fashion seems to be for Bamboo/resin products. e.g. https://www.dezeen.com/2015/11/04/bamboo-fibre-stronger-than-steel-dirk-hebel-world-architecture-festival-2015/
20
The proposed Robbins Island turbine height in comparison to …
. Eiffel Tower: 324m
. Eureka Tower: 297m
. Robbins Island turbine: 270m
. Statue of Liberty: 93m
. Wrest Point Casino: 73m
https://theconversation.com/taller-faster-better-stronger-wind-towers-are-only-getting-bigger-120492
70
Smaller wind turbines have been discussed here before, I gave a link to Austeng who built the Ecowhisper Turbine with mixed success with footage of it going here.
50
Here’s an update two years later from AgInnovators https://www.aginnovators.org.au/news/whisper-wind-eco-whisper-turbine
From Link: This novel Australian wind turbine design employs an outer cowling to reduce noise and increase efficiency. Its design is suitable for smaller farm-scale applications.
20
Fist time I’ve seen these . . have to say they I am very impressed.
Smaller blade structure & less space required, high range 5 to 20kw claimed, and less noise.
What’s the catch?
GeoffW
30
Sorry Geoffrey I can’t find any actual capacity factor results online, maybe contact the manufacturer but it makes me wonder also.
10
With Bob Brown’s support we can stop this slaughter.
https://stopthesethings.com/2019/07/26/licenced-to-kill-government-endorses-wind-industrys-rampant-eagle-slaughter/
70
At the current state of technology, the only truly renewable energy is managed forests. They can produce around 10kWh/sq.m of dispatchable power. A managed forest is lower cost than wind or solar for dispatchable electricity unless the existing network has a high percentage of hydroelectric generation and is perched water storage constrained.
I expect managed forests would actually increase bird habitat than destroy it. The environmental impact of managed forests is generally positive and visually appealing compared with wind and solar generators.
It may surprise many that the specific energy density of wind subsidy farms, that are unconstrained, is a meagre 9kWh/Sq.m so is less than a managed forest. And that figure excludes any provision for dispatchable power, which becomes very significant when storage is considered. The lowest cost dispatchable wind generator using current storage technology would have a specific energy density of between 3 to 5kWh/sq.m.
Managed forests ARE renewable. Wind and solar generators at their present level of development are UNRENEWABLE.
80
The respective energy recovery values in above post are on a per annum basis.
20
Managed forests such as described here https://www.sustainablelumberco.com/2017/06/wood-renewable-resource/ I take you to mean.
20
Seeing as Hamish Cumming mentioned the Golden Eagle in California I’ll post the link to SAVE THE EAGLES who have tried to get the story of Raptor deaths via turbines reported in the MSM for years.
Oh and while I’d usually offer viewer discretion of seeing Birds torn apart from wind turbines I now encourage anyone who believes in the use of wind power or anyone that knows someone that does to look at the intermittent useless slaughter of beautiful Avian’s by using the intermittent useless wind turbines that DO NOTHING TO SAVE ANYTHING ON THIS PLANET.
110
Yonnie, I worked with Hamish a couple of decades ago now, and without doubt he has a passion for things native. Back in the day it was the few nesting bolga pairs left in Victoria. Hamish had a couple of nests on his property, and had, at great personal expense, built fox excluding fencing around the nest sights. I don’t know of brolgas still exist / visit Victoria these days but it certainly wasn’t through a lack of this chap trying. Wind turbines would make life very difficult for these birds, large wing spans and relatively slow flight style and I guess they would be sitting ducks. I hope he has some success with his latest genuine cause.
80
Fine, let them do it, let them learn the hard way, it will be a global example of what not to do and the wake-up call the rest of Australia. The nagging question though is will they understand the results and resulting economic shambles? Almost certainly not, they elected the turnip Daniel Andrews as premier after all, so obviously they’d need the ‘world’s biggest’ Li battery installation.
Hey, maybe the federal taxpayers should pay for half of it?
60
I agree let them do it but currently they can get away with it by relying on power from other states using the interconnects. A fairer system would be some form of record kept of the net transfer over a year with a quota based system in place. When a state reaches their quota they are on their own for the rest of the year.
40
On the other hand Australia federated to overcome the sort of sectionalism you suggest.
30
We just need the interconnectors cut..
30
Morning Jo,
This is a bit off topic, but I think sufficiently significant to seek your forgiveness.
The ABC has just posted this attack on a number of our arguments against the climate scare campaign.
…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-27/climate-change-denial-zombies-killed/11291724
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I’ve only partially read it, but it is frighteningly plausible for uninformed readers.
I guess I should be grateful that the ABC has acknowledged that some people disagree with them, and also acknowledge, with fear on their side, some of the real science aligned against them.
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That some of the arguments used by the ABC Science team appear to be straw man arguments will be lost to many readers.
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Cheers
Dave B
120
ABC have a science team?
80
No It’s dedicated propaganda team !
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As a non-qualified scientist I can debunk every false argument they produce with basic scientific proven facts that are available to every person on this planet, these basic proven facts have not only been around for ~200 years but have been the backbone of industry and innovation that everyone can experience on a daily basis.
In fact I retract ‘false argument’ and use politicised lie in its place, their ABC have no right to be funded by the people it pretends to serve.
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This is a serious attack which should be addressed urgently.
GeoffW
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i was reading this nonsense and marvelling at the nonsense…minimum 30 year periods…huh? So the daily temperature record doesnt matter. Excellent…shut down the BOM….
“But climate is measured at a minimum of 30-year periods, according to Will Steffen and Annika Dean of the Australian National University and the Climate Council.
As time went on, 2005 was hotter than 1998, 2010 hotter than 2005, and 2014, 15, 16, 17 and 18, hotter than all of them.
1998 now clings on to 10th place in the global temperature books, with the hottest nine all since 2005.
30
“It will make good money for the American owners on the days it works”
That is because they get $80 a Megawatt hour for GENERATING power, regardless of whether it is sold. Plus if it is SOLD at the world’s highest prices, they get another $90 a Megawatt hour.
That’s $170 a metawatt hour with $80 guaranteed. Who needs to worry about fluctuations?
As for the Carbon generators, anyone who needs to buy their product must buy these $80 carbon indulgences to cover the purchase.
It is a system designed for one purpose, to shut down our power generation system. Just read the Renewable Energy(Electricty) Act 2000. This is an illegal system which was banned in Magna Carta, the government enforced payment to third parties for nothing at all.
Consider socially caring private collective owned Hepburn Wind has no debts now with their two windmills bought with our money. On top of payments for all electricty sold, they get $840,000 a year from RET certificates for nothing at all. Plus they do not pay tax on that money because they get to depreciate the $10Million windmills bought with our money.
What small business owner would not love $16,000 a week tax free as a gift. Plus another $16,000 a week from free wind and windmills given to them with public money.
Of course AGL wants to shut down coal. So does everyone else. And the Americans and the French and everyone else wants to build giant windfarms.
Who pays for them? You do. What do you get? Who cares?
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For those who can read
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C00624
Look for
1. Any mention of Carbon
2. Any mention of tax
and ask where the money goes.
As for how much is paid for these RET and LGC certificates, you have to look more widely. For example here.
LGCs have reached $90 a Megawatthour. I seem to remember STCs are limited to $40 a Megawatt hour.
It is all fake. An act created in the swamp of Canberra and introduced by the Howard government. All the misery has been created by this.
Repeal this act and the whole stack of cards would collapse. No more windfarms would be built. And those that exist could not compete with coal. No one would buy their random rubbish.
This Act is a disgrace, a breaking of the trust the people have in Canberra to not rob them. Then there is Turnbull’s Snowy II. The $444 million given to friends of Lucy to “Save” the Great Barrier Reef without even an application. The NBN where Korea and Shanghai now have 5G and can download a movie in seconds.
We are being robbed by our own government. How else does anyone explain an electricity price increase since this Act of 900%? Is free coal suddenly beyond price?
How does anyone explain blowing up working power stations, like Port Adelaide, Whyalla and the shutting down of LIddell and now Loy Yang B?
And why is anyone building a $1.6Billion windfarm overseas in Tasmania and even offering to pay for the link?
Free money. Protected by law. Or else. The standard fine for not buying these Carbon Indulgences is $65 a megawatt hour. That also is hidden.
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Great that you invoke Magna Carta, if that term could be widely publicised and the concepts involved we might just stir voters and taxpayers into working out what’s happening.
Magna Carta: to be synonymous with “look out you’re being ripped off”.
KK
20
This statement is wrong on one aspect and outdated on another:
The generator has to sell the energy to earn the LGC. No energy sold means no LGC created. That is why intermittent generators resent having their output curtailed.
LGC prices have dropped precipitously and will continue that trend unless the RET is increased:
http://www.demandmanager.com.au/certificate-prices/
The ScoMo government is unlikely to increase the RET. Victoria is already struggling to meet demand for the State subsidy on rooftop solar so is unlikely to add any financial incentive to grid scale intermittents to back the State RET. The State RETs are toothless without federal unifying them.
The real cost of intermittent energy is that its priority market access squeezes out base load generators and replace it with faster response, high cost dispatchable generators. Think of the recent actions in both SA and Vic to recommission dated gas plants and buy/hire diesel generators. There has to be enough dispatchable power to meet the maximum demand and the dispatchable generators need to at least recover costs or they go broke. Each time a base load generator goes out the back door the remaining base load generators and replacement high cost dispatchable generators have increased opportunity to recover their costs meaning their unit price goes up when wind and solar output is scarce.
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Good outline, sounds like positive news.
Maybe Scomo is active after all.
00
Yes, what you write makes logical sense. You should have to sell the power. That is perfectly sensible. However the act does not say so.
Certificates do not require you to sell the power. The advisory note at the time makes that extremely clear. It is a carrot and stick affair where ‘
liable entities’ have to pay fines if they cannot present certificates. Certificates are created by the generation of power, not the sale of power.
It is devious in the extreme and as you imply, almost unbelievable.
—
“Part 2 –Renewable energy certificates
Division 1 –Preliminary
8 Overview of part
The certificates are used to avoid or reduce the amount of renewable energy shortfall charge that liable entities who acquire electricity have to pay. The liable entities will generally acquire the certificates by purchasing them.
The certificates are created by people who generate power from accredited power stations using eligible energy sources.”
—
It’s very clever.
You have to buy certificates because you will be fined if you do not. The eligble sources of power are listed. Anyone not listed is ‘ineligible’, which avoids saying it is a carbon certificates. Then it never goes into general revenue. So it is not a tax.
This is supervised by the Clean Energy Authority who never touch the money. So the government has nothing to do with the ripoff. Very clever. Not in the budget and the government can direct the theft of $6Bn a year direct to the windmill and solar suppiers and owners and not be accountable. Brilliant.
Fraud and theft. Brought to you by lawyers who write and read documents very carefully.
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And the people administering this ripoff
Australian Energy Market Commission https://www.aemc.gov.au/
Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) https://www.aemo.com.au/
Australian Energy Regulator https://www.aer.gov.au/
Clean Energy Finance corporation https://www.cefc.com.au/
Australian Renewable Energy Agency https://arena.gov.au/funding/programs/
Clean Energy Regulator http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/
They know all about it. The regulator reports on how their ‘renewable’ targets are being met. The targets themselves are only aspirational. They are shutting down coal by making it commercially unviable to produce coal or gas electricity. This is enforced by massive fines for not presenting certificates. The fine is $60 a MWhr.
Consider, in what other market is the biggest, established and by far the cheapest form of product (coal is free too) forced out of the market?
It’s because if you buy coal, you must present wind and solar certificates to the same amount. You need to buy these even if you do NOT buy wind energy or hydro. You also need them if you buy gas energy, which is much more expensive as gas has half the CO2 per MwHr but you pay by the MWhr.
This also makes it clear that certificates are not for the sale of wind power. They are for the generation of it, even if it is not sold.
40
An LGC is ONLY created by the generation and sale of electricity by an intermittent generator or biofuel dispatchable generator and new hydro. Retailers are fined if they are not acquiring and surrendering enough LGCs for the required proportion of their total sales to meet the RET.
If there is no intermittent energy produced there are no LGCs to acquire and surrender so the retailers would be fined.
When LGC prices were rising at least one retailer accepted fines rather than surrendering the LGCs they held because they would make more money by delaying the sale of LGCs. Now with LGC prices falling, the generators are limiting sale of them so the bottom does not fall out of the market. Without an increase in the RET, LGCs will have no value beyond 2030.
10
“Without an increase in the RET”. What does that mean?
“An LGC is ONLY created by the generation and sale of electricity”. Where in the Act does it say a sale is necessary? Please prove it. Otherwise you are a victim of logical thinking, not legal thinking.
In fact the government has been at pains to say these are two different things, if not in the current advisory notes associated with the Act. In the earlier notes is was very clear.
The payment for LGCs for Green electricity is quite independent of the sale of the Green electricity.
It is an additional income and not necessary for the creation of LGCs. Again, if you have information to the contrary it would be very interesting.
If you disagree with this, please give your source.
30
As for accepting the fines, when the fine is legislated at $65 Mwhr, why pay what was $85?
At present there is a 10% leeway so people are waiting for the last minute to buy their LGCs. Vendors are taking a lower price but the electricity companies will have to buy them eventually. The reason the price has fallen below $65 is simple, they want the cash. After all, it is money for nothing. If the govenment did not force electricity retailers to buy LGCs and STCs, no one would buy them. They are worthless.
20
The RET itself is notional, a goal. The only mechanism to force people to buy ‘renewable’ energy is the $65 fine.
If you believe the RET is separately enforceable, how does this work? What does the government do to punish retailers for not buying enough ‘renewable’ energy.
20
It appears you have limited understanding how the RET actually works. That is clear by the statement you made.
The RET is a precise volume of electricity sales. In 2019 each retailer needs to surrender sufficient LGCs to cover 18.6% of the electricity they sell:
http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/RET/Scheme-participants-and-industry/the-renewable-power-percentage
This link provides the calculation:
http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/RET/Scheme-participants-and-industry/the-renewable-power-percentage#a-Renewable-electricity-required-for-the-year
The current RET reaches its maximum of 33,850GWh in 2020 and, without any increase in RET, will be 33,000GWh from 2020 through 2030.
There is certain to be an excess of LGCs produced, which means their price will continue to fall. The forward price for CAL21 is down to $14.75:
https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/banking-on-a-falling-market/
States have notional targets and their own programs but none are as insidious and financially damaging as the federal scheme. The good news is that without an increase in the federal RET, the LRET subsidy effectively disappears as supply for LGCs outpaces demand. The SRET has been reducing since 2015. All subsidies disappear by 2030 unless the RET is increased, which Labor proposed for their 2019 campaign.
00
17 What is an eligible renewable energy source?
(1) The following energy sources are eligible renewable energy sources:
(a) hydro;
(b) wave;
(c) tide;
(d) ocean;
(e) wind;
(f) solar;
(g) geothermal‑aquifer;
(h) hot dry rock;
(i) energy crops;
(j) wood waste;
(k) agricultural waste;
(l) waste from processing of agricultural products;
(m) food waste;
(n) food processing waste;
(o) bagasse;
(p) black liquor;
(q) biomass‑based components of municipal solid waste;
(r) landfill gas;
(s) sewage gas and biomass‑based components of sewage;
(t) any other energy source prescribed by the regulations.
Everything else is ‘inelegiible’. Again notice how the people who drafted this evil legislation worked to do it in a logically inverse way by saying what was eligible. Of course that means every carbon source of power is ‘ineligible’.
So not a tax and not on carbon. So not a Carbon Tax. Extraordinarily devious. Also against every principle of Westminster government, windpower companies are paid directly from your bills when you buy electricity but it is not shown on the bill. This makes energy retailers like AGL accomplices in this criminal business. Except it cannot be criminal if it is an act of parliament, can it?
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My point is that selling electricity is not a necessary condition for generating it if you have a windtower or solar. That does not mean that they are not paid, but under the Act if they dumped it into the ground, they would generate RET certificates.
Also consider that last week for a short period no one was paid. The price for electricity actually hit $0. Too much in the system when no one could use it. Still the valuable LGCs were generated, but was that electricity sold?
20
This statement displays a misunderstanding of how an LGC is created:
To produce an LGC the generator has to supply electricity into the NEM. It is metered as it is sent out. It cannot just disappear into the ground!!
Negative prices reflect that there are costs attached to reducing output from baseload plants and they are prepared to pay to send out for a short period to avoid the high cost of reducing output. Negative prices encourage intermittents to reduce output when the price falls below what they will recover from sale of LGCs. As the price of LGCs fall, they will be incentivised to voluntarily curtail at smaller negative electricity price. When LGCs no longer have value or are no longer required post 2030, then intermittent generators will curtail as soon as prices go negative.
00
Rick, you should be right. It should be for the sale of wind energy. It isn’t. People who do not buy wind energy need to buy these things. The government has made it very clear that generation and sale are quite independent.
20
Although to be fair, the government bodies have hidden that now. The clear advisory has vanished from their web sites. I will see if I can find it.
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Of great interest is the sudden drop in LGCs from $80 to $37 as people delay their obligations to surrender certificates and game the system
https://renewablesnow.com/news/lgc-price-in-australia-drops-as-liable-entities-delay-ret-obligation-645542/
but they have to pay. You might note the penalty of $65 a MWhr if you do not present a certificate.
You might also ask, how is the government going to fund all these windmills and solar panels without huge taxation? How is the government going to drive carbon based energy out of the market.
The answer is the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000. It’s working. That’s why prices have gone up 900%. That’s why coal power is being shut down. It’s uneconomic. And wind power can double or triple again. It’s already 9x the price when the scheme started.
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It’s also why capitalists want to build free wind farms and even a free interconnector across Bass Strait. The fact is you will pay for it and pay and pay and pay. For free power. Thank you Dr Bob Brown. Now it’s in your backyard too.
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I am correct. Go through the posts I have added above. No intermittent generators can produce an LGC unless they have supplied power into the NEM.
There is nothing notional about the federal RET. The LRET has a precise number for each till 2030 and precise calculation to the retail sales volume it applies to each year. All explained in above posts.
30
So an intermittent supply gets you continuous payment?
Wow, how about that. That’s not what you’d ordinarily expect in a free-market competition.
Sounds a lot like State and Federal political corruption actually.
Things that make you go … hmm.
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Very good analysis to the point. Yep we ALL pay for these monstrosities.
10
Have you got climate zombies? We (their abc) debunk the myths that refuse to die …
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-27/climate-change-denial-zombies-killed/11291724
Climate Zombie – It’s Milankovitch cycles
abc zombie killer: While throwing around the term Milankovitch cycles may sound good at parties, it’s a pretty simple and flawed explanation for the [global warming] we’re experiencing right now.
Climate Zombie– It’s a natural cycle, man
abc zombie killer: Earth’s climate is constantly changing. Typically that’s due to things like Milankovitch cycles, variations in solar activity, as well as changes in greenhouse gas quantities in the atmosphere, and it mostly happens on timescales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
Climate Zombie – Plants grow better with more CO2 anyway
abc zombie killer: … on face value there is some truth to this argument.
(pro-tip: We’re gonna need a bigger zombie killer)
Climate Zombie: There’s been a 5? 10? 20? year pause in warming
abc zombie killer – “But climate is measured at a minimum of 30-year periods, according to Will Steffen and Annika Dean of the Australian National University and the Climate Council.”
Whoa. Wait. What?
2013, Professor Steffen:
“The tumbling of records had prompted conversations in the scientific community to turn a corner, he said.
Previously, ”weather is not climate” was the mantra, but now the additional boost from greenhouse gases was influencing every event.
It might even be the case that the mantra chanted after every catastrophic weather event – that it can’t be said to be caused by [global warming], but it shows what [global warming] will do – has become a thing of the past.”
https://www.theage.com.au/national/climate-change-a-key-factor-in-extreme-weather-experts-say-20130303-2fefv.html
Note: No climate zombies were harmed in this debunking.
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“Climate Zombie- It’s a natural cycle, man
abc zombie killer: Earth’s climate is constantly changing. Typically that’s due to things like Milankovitch cycles, variations in solar activity, as well as changes in greenhouse gas quantities in the atmosphere, and it mostly happens on timescales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years.”
Or it could be none of those things; If “The climate system is a coupled nonlinear chaotic system” as the IPCC says, then the chaos alone is enough to cause the Climate System to change on both short and long time scales.
50
It seems that Their ABC and all the other Marxist “news” organisations are ramping up their war against the truth. They are getting more desperate due to the truth as espoused by President Trump and now PM Johnson.
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What I notice is that the Australian Brainwashing Corporation
Never engages in any discussion
Of it’s propaganda.
No email address to contact the authors
No blog where readers can comment
Not even on the ABC’s ‘Science’ Facebook page
Nothing contrary to the propaganda script
Is allowed.
40
yes its called misleading the sheeple….
40
This illegal act has been copied in the UK. A key is to steal the cash at a wholesale level. So it turns the electricity companies into criminals. They double the cost to the public but do not show it on their bills.
The government gets credit for subsidies but it costs them nothing. Free money.
We have a similar theft in Victoria where the Andrews government splits the income from tolls on roads which are now public property.
Who is paying for the windmills? You are
Who gets the government guaranteed income and who owns the windmills? They do.
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It’s as if Enron metastasized and spread its economic cancer globally.
50
Perhaps the most egregious ripoff is when the public servants of the City of Canberra went Green. They have their own windmills. They own them as far as I can tell. Last year it appears the City of Canberra had $38million in cashable RET certificates. This money has come from people across the country and from the people of Canberra. It is free money. I suppose they could put it in general revenue, or they could just pay it to their employees as bonuses, especially upper management. Money blowing in the wind. Manna from heaven. All thanks to the caring Greens and their coconspirators in the Liberal and Labor parties.
All for the common good and no one is exempt. No tax deductions here because it isn’t a tax. It’s legalised mandated theft. And best of all, no one knows it’s happening, except a few might be wondering why we have the world’s most expensive electricity when it is still 90% free coal from old free power stations.
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I posted this in Unthreaded but that thread has gone stale:
Electricity prices across the grid fall to zero as renewables reach 44% share
You don’t get to see this very often – when the spot price of electricity on all the state-based grids in Australia’s main wholesale market hit zero at the very same time.
The incident, captured in this screen shot of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s data page by Macquarie Capital’s Brian Morris and posted on his LinkedIn account, occurred at 1.15pm on Sunday.
This was when cloudless skies and good breezes – combined with low demand – pushed the share of renewables to more than 43 per cent. At the time of the zero pricing, wind was providing 12.3 per cent of supply in the National Electricity Market, while the combination of rooftop solar and utility-scale solar was providing 22.5 per cent. (Graph at top, courtesy of OpenNem.org).
https://reneweconomy.com.au/electricity-prices-across-the-grid-fall-to-zero-as-renewables-reach-44-share-77635/
They seem to think this is a good thing, that consumers are getting “free” electricity. They aren’t of course, the wind/solar generators are still pocketing their subsidies and the coal burners will still need to be paid to keep the grid stable.
Some bright spark in the comments says that all this “excess” renewable power should be put to use running desal plants. Hang on! There is no ‘excess” if they are only generating 44% of load. And I’d imagine that starting and stopping desal plants depending on wind would be even stupider than doing so with coal fired gen sets.
This afternoon when I read this Qld still had a $0 price while southern states were >$100. They were using a few hundred MW pumping water uphill though.
30
Let them ‘crow’ all they like about something like this, as it is utterly inconsequential.
At that time, 1.15PM on the Sunday, it is the time of lowest overall daily power consumption, and on the day of week with the lowest overall power consumption.
Total power demand at that time was 22,700MW.
Rooftop Solar delivered 17.13% of the total demand, used only by residences with the panels, and homes in the local area around those with the panels, as none is fed back to the overall widespread grid, as this is two million itsy bitsy teensy weensy microscopic power generators spread out across the whole vastness of the Continent.
Solar plant power delivered 7.05% of the total demand at that same time.
Wind power delivered 12.78% of the total demand at that same time.
(So, all up, these three renewables of choice totalled out at 36.96% of all the generated power at that time)
Coal fired power delivered 54.18% of the total demand at that same time, 12,300MW of that 22700MW total generation.
Now, roll forwards just five and a half hours to the evening peak on that same day, the Sunday, you know, peak power time, when power is required absolutely to cover the increase at that time, 6.40PM.
Total Demand – 26700MW (4000MW more than at that low time for the day)
Rooftop solar power – ZERO percent of total demand.
Solar Plant power – ZERO percent of total demand.
Wind plant power – 6.02% of total demand.
Coal fired power – 65.74% of total demand, 17,500MW of 26,700MW.
Sometimes, you have just to say ….. Ho Hum!
Tony.
80
Any glider pilot will tell you that 270M is not high for an eagle
70
I can vouch for that after witnessing a Wedge Tailed Eagle attempt to pick up a lamb in a paddock and another swooping low to have a look at our Maltese dogs!
60
Having flown in “lighties” across parts of the outback, it’s amazing how high the wedge tailed eagles climb up to to.
20
These people seem to think, if the average wind speed is 36 kph, that’s a minimum 36 kph. But the funny thing about averages, that doesn’t mean it will always blow at 36 kph. if the average speed is 36 kph and there are times when it blows at 120 kph, then there will also be times when it doesn’t blow.
There was a post a few days ago about a farmer in Queensland, after several years of drought, there was a flood. He was quoted as saying “it doesn’t look like we will be returning to average rainfall any time soon.” But it is average rainfall. If there is a three year drought, then they get 300 mm of rain in a day, the average is 100 mm per year.
70
Plus the average doesn’t take into account the many times the wind is actually blowing but is either too slow to produce electricity or too fast and the windmill has to be shut down to avoid self-destruction.
50
“Plus the average doesn’t take into account the many times the wind is actually blowing but is either too slow to produce electricity or too fast ”
The average also doesn’t take into account whether the wind is blowing fast enough to get the wind turbine up to its rated output. If the wind is blowing at 36 Kilometers per Hour [kph] that would be 10 Meters per Second [mps] (36 kph * 1000 Meters per Kilometer / 60 Minutes per hour / 60 seconds per minute). According to the website Wind-Power-Program, the cut-in speed of a wind turbine is typically reached at 3.5 mps, the rated output for the wind turbine is typically reached at 14 mps and the cut-out speed is typically reached at 25 mps. This means that with a wind of 36 kph (10 mps), the wind turbine is not yet generating its rated output. Winds going faster than the rated output speed will not produce any additional output and if the winds are below the cut-in wind speed or above the cut-out speed, the wind turbine will not produce any output at all.
30
You might have seen this on wattsupwiththat, or the revision that followed.
While this applies to the USA, with their “Production Tax Credit”, I’ll wager that this analysis is pretty close to the mustard here in Australia, when one considers the impact of all the many and varied subsidies that are mulcted from the unsuspecting public.
20
Averages have no place in the hard sciences. No engineer builds a structure to withstand average loads.The average birth rate needed to maintain a stable population is 2.25 children/couple. No one actually does that. 🙂
30
I wish people wouldn’t use the term “wind turbine”. That might be a technically correct definition for the giant subsidy-harvesting windmills but “turbine” has an association with a properly engineered continuous power system such as a jet turbine or a hydro power turbine that does genuinely useful work. Wind turbines are in essence a political construct and don’t deserve to have an engineering term associated with them.
80
We could use the term Generator but I guess that’s another misnomer, I suggest Spasmotic Orbital Boondoggle or “SOB” for short.
100
The designers would rightly argue they are “engineered”. In fact the wide ranging ambient conditions that they must contend with has serious engineering challenges for wind turbines.
The most descriptive collective alternative is intermittent generators. This used to be an acceptable term in AEMO reports but is now replaced with more politically correct terminology like semi-scheduled, non-scheduled or some other term. It is not really inconvenient to term them simply wind and solar generators.
The term “renewable” applied to solar and wind generators, of current technology, is deceitful and misleading.
The only truly renewable current technology for dispatchable power generation is managed forests. Would be about twice the cost of coal generation at current prices but only 25% of the cost of getting intermittents plus storage up to 100% dispatchable. At 100% dispatchable from intermittents, the entire output of the civilised world would simply exist to produce electricity to keep society civilised. Forget leisure and all forms of exploration.
20
Fully agree. They are an engineering nightmare, but a fantastic advertising gimmick.
20
We need to find out the names of the engineers who approved this technology and the names of the people who granted the patents for them.
20
You and I both, Dave
A turbine has a stator for each rotor.
Those ugly contraptions are windMILLS!
50
They are an alternator stuck on a gearbox with a big propeller on it, like a prop job plane in reverse. ho hum. What ever you call them the only real name is USELESS.
30
It’s really nice to see the split in the greens ranks over this issue.
But wait till the time comes when they (the wind turbines) turn to huge, useless, rusting hulks in the ocean and nobody wants to pay to clean up the mess!
GeoffW
80
They’ll be claimed then as bird roosts
30
Especially the 300kg of neodymium in each motor.
20
Sounds like a good business will pop up getting back the rare earths.
10
By far the biggest cause of premature death for birds in Australia are feral cats, next is tall buildings. worldwide these two are reversed, https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
I know, lets get upset about wind turbines instead.
016
Feral cats? prove it and don’t use model projections with selective inputs.
Also if your claims are correct is the further increase in avian death via turbines necessary or justified?
Remember the entire premise of renewables is to reduce CO2 output as it will destroy Earths atmosphere, you can prove that too Peter.
130
https://theconversation.com/for-whom-the-bell-tolls-cats-kill-more-than-a-million-australian-birds-every-day-85084, Also you might want to look at the impact of open pit coal extraction and ground dwelling birds
Also number of human deaths due to coal mining in Australia vs number of human deaths for wind turbines
But no, get upset about wind turbines
016
That is a terrible argument Fitz. Cats kill birds so we shouldn’t worry about those wind farms kill.
Alcohol kills people so let’s subsidise drug pushers and cookers. DOH!
110
How many large raptors, particularly protected species such as the Wedge tailed Eagle in Tasmania or the Golden Eagle in the USA are killed by cats, Fitz? Or how many predators cause bats’ lungs to explode?
120
“cause bats’ lungs to explode?”
Or more to the point: cause human lungs to pulsate.
This pulsing has been hidden by governments but has the undeniable effect of over-riding human neural control systems.
Then it’s labeled as “noise” to hide it.
Ethical?
KK
80
Show us one picture of a coal fired powered station killing birds.
Show us one picture of a raptor, or any other bird for that matter, chopped down in it prime by a coal mine.
As always, you have NO ARGUEMENT, PF, just mindless illogical bluster. !!
80
Oh Peter F! Where are the figures for bird deaths from cats? How were/are they collected and verified? And how many large raptors are killed by cats? I rather think the reverse could be true…how many cats are killed by large raptors? Not to mention livestock losses to crows and hawks…ever seen lambs with their eyes pecked out?
90
I think there is a lot of imaginative extrapolation by cat-haters.
70
The links are in the post(s) but…
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312130141.htm
https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5b13/0450423350472b0a016f944e773515fecfe2.pdf
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567
“wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fuelled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh.” from the last link
http://www.stateofthebirds.org/2014/abundance/anthropogenic
111
Pictures PF, not fabricated anti-statistical BS.
https://www.sibleyguides.com/wp-content/uploads/Bird_mortality_chart.jpg
Not even a column for coal mining or coal fired power stations
Wonder why that is.
YOU ARE LYING !!!
Now, where are those pictures of a cat killing a golden eagle or any other raptor.
60
“The average [bird death] per turbine comes down to 333 to 1,000 deaths annually “
That’s birds: add bats to that, so considerably more.
Now, what is the number of deaths per window (or per building if you like) or per cat each year, little PF ???
Sydney Town Hall, Birth rate of birds is way higher than the death rate. !!
40
Your http://www.stateofthebirds.org/2014/abundance/anthropogenic link also doesn’t have a column for coal mining or coal fired power station.
20
That’s an interesting burst of reality Annie.
40
There was a comment here about how unpopular large raptors were with farmers.
30
Peter the solution to feral cats killing wildlife
Is to get rid of the feral cats.
Now that is a major environmental issue
In Australia
And one that needs a solution.
But building more wind farms will just add to the problem
They are another native wild life killer.
In fact I suggest that it will not take feral cats
long to learn to hang around wind farms
Waiting for injured birds & bats to fall
Into their claws.
60
Bill window strike is the next biggest killer, so lets follow your logic there as well. Note that feral cats are not hanging around windows are they?
18
Efforts are made to stop birds flying into STATIONARY windows, PF
And how many STATIONARY windows are there in the world. They are part of the URBAN landscape. Very different from putting slicing and dicing and lung-exploding murder machines into wild avian habitats.
Birds are killed by flying into rock-faces as well, dumbo !!
Why are you SO DUMB that you can’t see the MASSIVE PERIL to avian wildlife of adding HUGE BLADES with tips travelling at 300kph into wilderness avian habitats.
You seem to have a distinct HATRED for any animal with more brain than a pigeon.
Inferiority complex, I guess.
80
No feral cats don’t hang around windows Peter
Waiting for birds hitting them
To prey on them.
But then where there are windows
There are people
And feral cats, as I’m sure you know
Are very shy of people.
PS : Where is your evidence for birds hitting windows ?
In my experience living on organic farms for 26 years
I had about 3 birds hit windows..Always it was migratory Rosellas
Who do not know the territory.
No hawks, eagles or even honey eaters, owls etc
As they all know their territory intimately..
50
Two ways I can think of to reduce birds hitting windows is to keep curtains drawn and NOT have mirrored sliding cupboard doors facing the windows.
It took me a couple of weeks to move into this house and when we settled there were all these little muddy splotches on the bedroom window. Eventually it twigged: Nesting peewees were hitting the window with mud in their beaks [they build mud nests]. The curtains had been open and mirrored cupboard doors would have been reflecting the blue sky behind the birds.
Dunno about bluddy parrots, they fly at “breakneck” speed. Prolly beyond saving.
20
you never see many feral cats die from running into windows….hmmm…
30
I back onto scrub, the foothills of Mt Stuart and in recent years even roos and wallabies have been noticeable by their absence but if there were feral cats I couldn’t shoot them. Thanks Howard.
Teenagers could once go shoot rabbits. Nope! Banned.
30
So 1 million birds a Year are killed by feral cats in Australia, and window strikes – estimated to kill 97 to 976 million birds/year (world wide). but but but… those turbines, Wind farms are not in the same ball park. Second point, are you against the bird mortality due to coal mining? Or the 6 coal miners killed this year in Queensland.
Seriously, why aren’t you concerned about deaths by feral cat? Why aren’t you concerned about the bird deaths (including raptors) by tall buildings? Why aren’t you concerned about bird mortality due to coal mining, and other forms of human encroachment? Why aren’t you concerned about preventable human deaths, both in coal mining and in the polluted Hunter and Latrobe valleys?
011
Again,
Your argument is specious and irrational.
I know you DON’T CARE about raptors or birds of prey, because they are species far above you.
Of course people are concerned about feral cats, I’ve hunted and baited them when living out near Parkes.
Everything is down to stop bird strike on windows, which are, by the way, not moving at 300kph. They are stationary.
Your argument is EMPTY just like it always is.
“Second point, are you against the bird mortality due to coal mining? “
“Why aren’t you concerned about bird mortality due to coal mining”
Again with the EVIDENCE-FREE yapping !!!. Just make it up, PF, Fabricated your lies.
PRODUCE PICTURES of birds killed by coal mines, you KNOW you can’t.
Mining accidents.. guys drive his car in front of a truck ! DOH !!
Another guys has a heart attack.
“both in coal mining and in the polluted Hunter and Latrobe valleys?”
Hunter medial study got SHOT DOWN by local data and doctors.
Latrobe has background levels of mercury the same as other places.
STOP trying to use debunked propaganda, little trollette.
20
Again,
Your argument is specious and irrational.
I know you DON’T CARE about raptors or birds of prey, because they are species far above you, you only care about Indian Minors and other “avian rats” of the cities.
Of course people are concerned about feral cats, I’ve hunted and baited them when living out near Parkes.
Everything is done to stop bird strike on windows, which are, by the way, not moving at 300kph. They are stationary.
Your argument is EMPTY just like it always is.
80
Ignore the TROLL, he’s just playing interference to cloud-over the picture TdeF just painted of what a scurrilous corrupt rent-seeking politicized industry windmills are.
100
“Second point, are you against the bird mortality due to coal mining? “
“Why aren’t you concerned about bird mortality due to coal mining”
Again with the EVIDENCE-FREE yapping !!!. Just make it up, PF, Fabricated your lies.
PRODUCE PICTURES of birds killed by coal mines, you KNOW you can’t.
Mining accidents.. guys drive his car in front of a truck ! DOH !!
10
“Second point, are you against the bird mortality due to coal mining? “
“Why aren’t you concerned about bird mortality due to coal mining”
Again with the evidence-free nonsense. !!!.
Just make it up, PF, Fabricated your lies.
PRODUCE PICTURES of birds killed by coal mines, you KNOW you can’t.
40
A picture of an absence? you are taking abusrbity to new levels
26
No Patricia, your argument is a “tar baby” one…..as in “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar-Baby
30
Poor sad, pathetic PF.
As always it cannot present ANY EVIDENCE to back up his fantasy claims
Knows that cold mines and coal powered power stations DON’T kill bird, because they have a chance to move away.
Against a wind turbine, a bird has NO CHANCE
But PF DOESN’T CARE.
20
Seems PF wants to thrash about to distract from the above damning picture of political corruption at the state and Federal levels and massive institutionalized taxpayer theft enabled by left and right political parties.
90
PF, would you like to live NEXT to one of these things!
40
It’s a diversionary tactic in argument. Firstly talk about something else like feral cats. Then get the scale wrong. Like heroin is not so bad. Only a drug like tea or coffee.
Also starlings and low flying city birds are not what is being killed. It is the very rare high altitude raptors in the wild, where Bob Brown lives and even he has realised the monster he has created.
The Australian Wedge Tailed Eagle is rare and adored by societies and especially the Greens. Kestrels, falcons, goshawks, osprey,.. The eagle is the core symbol of many countries including the United States, Germany, Russia, Poland, Romania, Mexico and many more. It is protected from hunters, very rare, flies high and is being slaughtered by giant windmills on ridges where they get uplift. To make it much worse the windmills are placed for good reason exactly where the uplifts is good or the cross winds or in the valleys and thus in the migration or hunting routes. So they selectively slaughter eagles. At 50-270 metres above the ground, most raptors are safe from other predators but not from bird chomping windmills.
70
No – I’m saying that although the number of bird strikes in wind farms seems high, it not on the same scale as other factors in bird mortality.
Also I would prefer bird deaths against human deaths, and there are way to many of those in Australia
17
There are around six clear examples of human induced bird deaths.
https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions.php
A lot seem to die from natural causes, like heatwaves and old age.
‘Also I would prefer bird deaths against human deaths …’
Mixing memes is unhelpful, wind farms are useless, expensive, ugly white elephants, which endanger the health and well being of humans and livestock.
The birds are collateral damage in a war with CO2, a failed hypothesis based on an invisible blanket. There has been no due diligence, so we don’t need more wind farms.
50
Again utterly irrelevant, off topic, intentional distraction.
As for dragging human deaths into the argument, what happened to feral cats? Why not the fate of the hippopotamus in Tanzania? And those poor dugongs in the Amazon?
Firstly it is the type of bird being killed, our rarest and most prized raptors. The most deserving of protection by the Greens and ornithologists. Elegance, grace, power and precious. Not starlings by the millions. Nor black throated Finches.
Have you ever seen an Australian Wedge Tailed Eagle? Or an osprey?
90
This reminds me of a discussion about the Nth American salmon. They live their life to have one glorious summer when they swim upstream, jumping obstacles to partake in a spawning frenzy, only to die. Every dam and barrage has ladders to help 90% pass upstream. Likewise they all take measures for 90% of the fingerlings to pass on the passage back to the sea.
Each 10% mortality is cumulative but by your logic they don’t matter. Please never get involved in conservation. I am clearly a more concerned conservationist than thou.
50
“Also I would prefer bird deaths against human deaths”
What a disgusting person you really are, PF.
You actually WANT to kill this top bird species, don’t you. !!
You DON’T CARE if they die, so long as you get your treasured wind turbines.
That’s just SICK and DEPRAVED.
20
“Also I would prefer bird deaths against human deaths”
Windmills have a horrendous effect on the top echelon of avian life
Windmills have ZERO effect at saving human lives
(almost certainly the opposite when infrasound taken properly into account)
Nor do windmills supply regular electricity that is required to keep human environments functional and safe.
So what your idiotic self-centred comment is actually saying,
is that WE SHOULD SCRAP ALL WINDMILLS and go for a RELIABLE electricity supply.
That way we save avian lives as well as human lives.
10
Maybe someone is subsidizing the feral cats?
Well no but bird killing wind mills are the main event when it comes to subsidy farming.
20
YOU DOLT, PF
And the ratio of wind-turbine kills to cat bird kills is magnitudes higher.
You have use that dumb argument more often than enough, and you get shot down every time
Grow up and stop doing it.
60
I had a cat once, never killed a bird in its life.
50
proof, you have none
07
you are so dumb, PF.
Where is YOUR empirical evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.?
Notice that you haven’t produce one single piece of evidence for any of your above rantings.
You are Mr. ZERO-EVIDENCE personified.
60
Let’s defund cancer research
There are more deaths due to motor vehicles
02
I’ve heard that “the science is settled” before, but this is the first time I’m aware of contention that “the game is over for the climate deniers”!
Lively discussion on over at the Hobart Mercury.
30
saved this recently – worth a read:
11 Jul: PetroleumEconomist: Wind farms threaten to speed up North Sea decommissioning
Oil and gas operators planning to prolong fields’ lifespan may find themselves increasingly in conflict with wind farm developers
by Craig Guthrie
The projected timeline for oil and gas decommissioning in the North Sea could be forced forward by spatial constraints created by offshore wind farm construction, according to the developers of a planned wind hub in the region.
A consortium of Dutch, German and Danish companies wrote in a concept paper on 9 July that the North Sea Wind Power Hub (NSWPH) they are developing would have an estimated capacity of 180GW by 2045, providing clean power to “hundreds of millions of Europeans” in those countries and the UK.
“To meet the ambitious targets as set in the Paris Agreement, a large-scale roll-out of offshore wind is required. Increased spatial use by offshore wind energy and transmission infrastructure is then expected accordingly.”
Because the turbine foundations deemed the most cost effective need a water depth of less than 55 metres—and as the targeted area is already used extensively for shipping, military exercises and fisheries—there is not currently enough available space for the required number of offshore wind farms (OWFs)…
The NSWPH’s first phase would be connected to shore as early the 2030s. But the British authorities expect decommissioning work to continue in the area until 2060.
Larsen says the eventual decision on whether projects such as the NSWPH should take precedence over the oil and gas sector in the North Sea is one that must be taken by governments. “Which will be the most cost-effective source of power from a social-economic perspective, as part of the green energy transition?” he asks. It is fair to say that it is a leading question…
Currently only 3pc of the area the NSWPH would need is available, or only 14,000 km2, according to the NSWPH researchers’ February feasibility study…READ ALL
https://www.petroleum-economist.com/articles/politics-economics/europe-eurasia/2019/wind-farms-threaten-to-speed-up-north-sea-decommissioning
10
Meanwhile, please scroll up to TdeFs comments.
30
We are presently in a war, and have no choice but to watch the waste and ruin, even be an unwilling part of it.
But when the war is over and it is finally admitted that mainstream wind/solar, Big Battery, Timmy’s Geothermia, Oceanlinx rustbuckets etc are just old, clunky, minor-use tech, promoted by shameless touts and doomed from the blueprint…
…we dismantle it all and take it all away, no matter what the cost. That’s how wars work. You win, remove the rubble and start over.
But do NOT talk of compromise and of keeping any portion of this mess. The cost now is heartbreaking, the cost of removing it will be crippling…but all of it must go. And we need to let the carpetbaggers and white elephanteers know now that such are our definite intentions. Don’t give them an inch, don’t leave any back doors ajar.
60
I agree with your sentiment 110% !
Degenerative socalist/Marxist/totalitarians destroying once pristine landscape with avian destruction.
Destroying once solid electricity supply systems.
Destroying economies
Stopping third world progress and development
And pocketing the proceeds, only to disappear with the loot come clean up time.
No need to be polite, no need to step back.
Go for the tip of the nose… and go hard !! (figuratively, of course)
40
As has been stated many times the war is against the West from within. It’s subtle yet very real. The goal is simply to replace the current Western system of democracy warts and all with a new form of socialist come fascist totalitarian rule. The unusual aspect about all this is there are many non-Western nations who are building in total hundreds of new coal fired power stations yet they remain silent about the efforts by the West to destroy itself by strangling their economies with an overemphasis on renewables. I suppose they have little sympathy.
40
Climate change believers seem to attempt justify spending $billions and $trillions to stop climate change by saying that Governments spend $billions on repairs after cyclones, floods etc, as if the $billions and $trillions being spent to stop climate change will actually stop the cyclones.
I heard on the ABC news today that the federal opposition has criticised the Government for not spending enough to stop climate change, after the Government has promised $3.2 billion to assist farmers with drought problems. One of the things the Opposition climate spokesperson said was that the Government is spending $billions repairing damage after cyclones (as if the $billions could be spent stopping climate change and the cyclones would be stopped).
30
26 Jul: BBC N. Ireland: NI coast ‘not suitable’ for offshore wind farm
By Conor Macauley
Northern Ireland’s coastline is not suitable for off-shore wind farm development due to likely objections to how they would look.
The findings were included in Department of Economy report (LINK).
It said the “visual impact” to potential sites based within 13km of the shore would be a “significant issue”.
As a result, NI has been excluded from a 2019 leasing round by the Crown Estate which controls the seabed.
However the report says offshore wind may be a possibility in the future if technology changes and things like floating wind platforms come on stream…
The assessment also concluded that disturbance to sensitive protected sites and species along the coast might present difficulties when it came to the cables necessary to get the power ashore…READ ON
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-49127180
10
Windmills are destroyers of Western Civilisation and the environment, but that’s the plan.
40
Quadrant has major article about wind farms,
Their dangers and problems
And yes bird kills are a major issue
: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/07/its-past-time-to-flip-the-bird-at-wind-turbines/
20
“They’ll make choices that kill less birds as long as it doesn’t cost much. ”
No, it means “They’ll make choices that kill fewer birds as long as it doesn’t cost much.”
20
from Horizon – the EU Research & Innovation Magazine:
25 Jul: Horizon Mag: Shoppers ‘can’t afford’ energy efficient cars, homes – researchers
by Alex Whiting
(The research in this article was funded by the EU)
Europeans can slash their fuel bills and have a significant impact on curbing global greenhouse gas emissions by buying more energy efficient cars, homes or even fridges – but many do not because of higher initial cost of green products, mistrust in EU energy ratings, and lack of awareness of long-term savings, researchers say…
Researchers have been trying to find out why people do not opt for the greener products.
‘The main reason is that (consumers) can’t afford them. For the most part the more energy efficient product is more expensive,’ Prof. Denny said.
In a consumer survey carried out by CONSEED across five countries (Greece, Ireland, Norway and Slovenia), up to 74% of the 3,000 respondents said they could not afford more efficient cars or appliances, or the costs of upgrading their homes.
Lack of trust was another major factor, with 60% of people believing that sellers of cars, properties and household appliances are manipulating the energy efficiency information they provide.
The researchers said this may be a legacy of ‘dieselgate’, a 2015 scandal over diesel car makers cheating emission tests…
Dieselgate had a ‘huge impact’, said Ibon Galarraga, research professor at the Basque Center for Climate Change, Spain, who leads part of CONSEED’s field research. ‘Suddenly there is this mistrust on how producers declare their emissions or the environmental impacts of the energy efficiency.’…
To help people make better informed purchasing decisions, the EU is simplifying its energy efficiency labelling scheme by introducing a scale that runs from A to G rather than A+++ to G. The new labels will also include QR codes which people can scan to get more information about the products’ energy use.
‘Hopefully that’ll provide more transparency and let people have more trust in those labels,’ said Prof. Denny…
Nudging
Nudging people with clear labelling and information is important but it does not go far enough, said Massimo Tavoni, professor of climate change economics at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, who leads a project called COBHAM. He has been researching how people’s decisions regarding climate-friendly actions can be influenced by policies and information.
‘Nudges are easy politically … but we should not be under any illusion that they can solve a problem which is as serious as climate change,’ he said…
Incentives
In Norway, the government has introduced financial incentives for electric vehicles and high taxes for polluting ones to increase demand for low-emission vehicles…
The car industry in Britain has blamed a recent drop in sales of low-emission vehicles on ‘confusing’ policies and the UK government’s decision to end or reduce subsidies.
‘If we are to see widespread uptake of these vehicles, which are an essential part of a smooth transition to zero-emission transport, we need world-class, long-term incentives,’ the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said in June…
CONSEED say banks could offer low cost financing for people to make their homes more energy efficient – by installing more efficient boilers, solar panels, insulating homes, or changing windows for example…
Habits
EU countries have committed to rolling out nearly 200 million smart meters for electricity and 45 million for gas by 2020…
Seeing how much each appliance is consuming in real time ‘will make a huge difference in your behaviour’, said Prof. Galarraga.
People can make a big impact on energy use with small changes like putting the lid on a saucepan when heating water, or using the right-sized electric plate, he added.
Prof. Tavoni also stressed that it is up to each individual to reduce their carbon footprint. ‘We typically blame governments for not doing enough, but it’s also up to us to do something.’
https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/shoppers-can-t-afford-energy-efficient-cars-homes-researchers.html
00
Soon like the the fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin (https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bethselamin ) people of Europe may also have their sewage metered.
So you may then find that when you’re out enjoying life in one of the many European hotels, hostelries, bars, or restaurants you may be charged a set levy for using their bathroom facilities. However you may get a refund on production of the bathroom ticket that’s dispensed when you leave the little room. So you’ll soon find that every time you go to the lavatory there, it’s vitally important (financially) to get that receipt.
🙂
10
The questions you have to ask
1. Who has paid for all the windmills and why?
2. Where is their return, especially on a $1.6Billion windfarm in Tasmania and even offering to pay for the undersea cable?
3. Why has electricity gone up 900% since 2000?
4. Why are owners walking away from coal power when it is the cheapest electricity in a demand market? Hazelwood was in perfect working order and the lease had another 20 years to run.
5. Why can’t coal compete with wind?
6. Who is paying half the cost for the solar panels?
7. Is lunch time solar actually of value when everyone is at lunch?
8. Can domestic solar really power factories in another suburb? How does the electricity get there?
9. Who is paying for all the transmission lines for all these windfarms?
10. Why aren’t the Greens screaming about the transmission lines and the windfarms on every ridge and in the ocean in plain sight?
11. Why weren’t the Greens upset about the massive impact on wildlife and the loss of habitat, as they are for coal mines?
12. Why is no one measuring the value of ‘renewable energy’ in saving the planet and lowering CO2?
13. Where is our return on all this, as a country? Cui Bono?
When all the coal power is closed, the gas is gone and the windmills stop turning without a breeze in the right place at the right speed at the right time, what will we do?
And why are the Federal Government and the Victorian government paying $80,000 a worker to pretend Alcoa still makes aluminum profitably? And Port Pirie still smelts led. And Whyalla still makes steel profitably.
Our governments have destroyed smelting and manufacturing in this country. Even the recycling has stopped as they cannot afford the electricity.
Dr. Bob Brown, I can only hope you recognize that you have been the instrument of this devastation, this ecological, social and financial wreck which we call Australia. Still your generous indexed pension should see you through.
40
3. Why has electricity gone up 900% since 2000?
A little hyper bowl there. 🙂
My flat rate general tariff is 25.3c/KwH and the controlled tariff is 21c. There is a Qld Govt Asset Ownership Dividend CREDIT of $50 which nearly negates the service charge of $0.90/day.
I don’t recall ever paying <10c which your claim would indicate.
BTW I think I can thank southern states for buying so much of our cheap coal fired power for that credit. 😀
30
It looks like electricity is much cheaper in Queensland.
10
25 Jul: Reuters: UPDATE 1-EU plans to impose import duties on Indonesia biodiesel
The European Commission has proposed duties ranging from 8% to 18% on imports of biodiesel from Indonesia to counter what it says are unfair subsidies, the latest twist in a case that has lasted seven years.
The subsidies would be a double blow for Indonesian biodiesel after the European Union decided in March that palm oil should no longer be considered as green and so should be phased out of renewable transportation fuel.
The Commission, which coordinates trade policy for the 28-member European Union, launched an anti-subsidy investigation in December following a complaint by the European Biodiesel Board…
European biodiesel producers welcomed the move.
“It is an excellent thing for the biodiesel industry in Europe in order to regain fair and market competition as it had been the case with Argentina,” European Biodiesel Board (EBB)chairwoman Kristell Guizouarn told Reuters.
“It is legitimate to have provisional duties since there is a subsidy for Indonesian biodiesel.”…
https://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFL8N24P5BA
26 Jul: Reuters: Indonesia says EU anti-subsidy duty part of plan to block palm oil
by Bernadette Christina
“This is a structured, systematic and massive grand design,” said Pradnyawati, the director of trade security at Indonesia’s Trade Ministry. “The point is they don’t want vegetable oils produced from European soil rivalled by vegetable oil produced by tropical countries.”…
The EU began looking into biodiesel from Argentina and Indonesia in 2012 and imposed anti-dumping duties on companies from both major producers in 2013.
However, the exporters won challenges at the World Trade Organization and the European Court of Justice. This prompted the EU to remove duties on most biodiesel imports from the two countries, resulting in a surge in imports…
“How can we improve our relationship to closer ties if they keep bothering our exports,” (Pradnyawati) said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-indonesia-biodiesel/indonesia-says-eu-anti-subsidy-duty-part-of-plan-to-block-palm-oil-idUSL4N24R2M9
00
26 Jul: Reuters: EU executive approves support for six offshore wind farms in France
by Daphne Psaledakis
BRUSSELS – The European Commission said on Friday it approved French state aid for six offshore wind farms in France to help the country meet its climate and renewable energy targets.
The farms, which will each have 62 to 83 wind turbines and an expected capacity of 450 to 498 megawatts, should allow to France boost its renewable energy generation capacity by about three gigawatts and curb its carbon dioxide emissions.
“The level of aid granted to the six projects is proportionate and does not entail overcompensation of the beneficiaries,” the Commission said…
The companies involved, selected through two tenders in 2011 and 2012, will receive the support in the form of feed-in tariffs over a period of 20 years, the Commission said.
Under EU law, the bloc’s governments can provide state support for the production of electricity from renewable energy sources under certain conditions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-france-windfarm/eu-executive-approves-support-for-six-offshore-wind-farms-in-france-idUSKCN1UL18K
00
25 Jul: ABC: Police drop trespass charges against French reporter and crew arrested at Adani protest
The Queensland Police Service (QPS) has dropped trespass charges against a prominent French journalist and his film crew who were arrested while filming anti-Adani protesters earlier this week…
In a statement, QPS said it “has reviewed the circumstances surrounding the arrests of five people at a port facility near Bowen on Monday”.
“The decision to withdraw charges follows careful consideration of the circumstances including QPS policies and procedures,” the statement said.
“As a result, the QPS will withdraw all charges against a 28-year-old Victorian man and four male French nationals — aged 29, 30, 32 and 39 — when the matters are brought before Bowen Magistrates Court again on July 30.”…
Charges will still proceed against two Victorian women, aged 20 and 22, who took part in the protest…
Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) CEO Paul Murphy said it was “wonderful news”.
Mr Murphy said the union had written to the Premier, Attorney-General and Police Commissioner asking for the charges to be dropped.
“It was such a bad look for Australia and it is great news that common sense has prevailed,” Mr Murphy said.
“It seems extraordinary they were not given the opportunity to be informed that they were on private land and given the opportunity to move on.”…
(Clement) said he had never been arrested before in a democratic country and thanked the MEAA for their guidance and support.
“They contacted the politicians and I am very glad they did,” he said.
“I was happy to see Australian journalists did not think [our arrest] was normal.
“I think it is very strange that police [are] protecting a private company like that. It is not the role of the police.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-25/police-drop-trespass-charges-against-french-reporter-and-crew/11347524
VIDEO: 34sec: 28 Jun: BBC: French police pepper spray Paris climate protesters
French police have pepper sprayed at close range climate activists blocking roads in the capital Paris, before removing them by force…
The protest happened as France baked in a heatwave, with temperatures in Paris around 33C (91F).
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-48807155/french-police-pepper-spray-paris-climate-protesters
10
FakeNewsMSM & CAGW:
Global Climate Strike: 20-27 Sept 2019
Georgetown University: UPDATE: MSNBC Joins as Media Partner for GU Politics/Our Daily Planet Climate Forum, Now Scheduled for September 19-20
Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, Our Daily Planet, and MSNBC
to Host Climate Forum with 2020 Presidential Candidates
All Declared Candidates from Both Parties to be Invited to Two-Day Forum…
Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” and Ali Velshi, host of “MSNBC Live,” will moderate the forum. The event will be streamed live on NBC News Now and featured over two nights of special coverage on “All In with Chris Hayes,” which airs weeknights at 8pmET…
http://politics.georgetown.edu/press-releases/update-msnbc-joins-as-media-partner-for-gu-politicsour-daily-planet-climate-forum-now-scheduled-for-september-19-20/
UN: Climate Action Summit, 23 September 2019
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is calling on all leaders to come to New York on 23 September…
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/un-climate-summit-2019.shtml
25 Jul: TheHill: CNN announces climate town hall with 2020 Democrats
By Tal Axelrod
The event will take place on Sept. 4 in New York City. The network is inviting all the candidates who meet the threshold for the September primary debates – garnering 2 percent support in at least four different polls…
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/454838-cnn-announces-climate-town-hall-with-2020-democrats
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20 Jul: ForeignPolicy: Democracy Is the Planet’s Biggest Enemy
Young people care a lot about climate change — but most of them can’t vote. Here’s how governments can adapt to accommodate them.
By David Runciman
(David Runciman is a politics professor at Cambridge University and the author of How Democracy Ends)
In today’s Britain, a rare public figure can bring together Brexiteers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour. Yet the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg did just that on a visit to London in April, when she was feted by British politicians from across the political spectrum…
One solution to this generational imbalance might be to simply wait it out, since younger generations will replace older ones before too long…
The problem is that the climate can’t wait that long. Today’s enlightened young will not age quickly enough; decisive action needs to be taken before 2030, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now insists.
One way to make that happen would be to redress the imbalance directly by lowering the voting age…
Maintaining the current voting age but phasing out votes for the very elderly is likely to be just as divisive…
One alternative is more deliberative democracy, which would allow individuals with different points of view to engage with each other directly, free from partisan representation. They might not end up agreeing, but at least they would be speaking for themselves and encountering new opportunities to reach consensus. In citizens’ assemblies, school-age children and their grandparents’ generation could jointly participate in political discussion and decision-making—so long as policymakers agree to bind their own decisions to the outcomes of these deliberations.
Another alternative would be more radical direct democracy. Politicians who are unmoved by electoral threats, and citizens otherwise committed to status quo policy, can sometimes be jolted into action by street protests, especially if they are sustained over long periods of time…
Channeling more energy into these other forms of democracy—into citizens’ assemblies and civil disobedience, rather than elections and party-building—will change our politics drastically. But it may be the only way to ensure our planet does not change beyond recognition.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/democracy-is-the-planets-biggest-enemy-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR3p5dDcwIFPnkzy6mhVEESBuINZA8uuflZvU1VDrm42BOUtQHINlbgpG0w
7 Jul 2017: Guardian: How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous
Doubts about the science are being replaced by doubts about the motives of scientists and their political supporters. Once this kind of cynicism takes hold, is there any hope for the truth?
By David Runciman
Last month Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. For his supporters, it provided evidence, at last, that the president is a man of his word. He may not have kept many campaign promises, but he kept this one. For his numerous critics it is just another sign of how little Trump cares about evidence of any kind. His decision to junk the Paris accord confirms Trump as the poster politician for the “post-truth” age…
Climate science has become a red rag to the political right. The scientific consensus is clear: more than 95% of climate researchers agree that human activity is causing global warming, and that without action to combat it we are on a path to dangerous temperature rises from pre-industrial levels…
Post-truth politics also poses a problem for scepticism. A healthy democracy needs to leave plenty of room for doubt. There are lots of good reasons to be doubtful about what the reality of climate change will entail: though there is scientific agreement about the fact of global warming and its source in human activity, the ultimate risks are very uncertain and so are the long-term consequences. There is plenty of scope for disagreement about the most effective next steps…
But the fact of the scientific consensus has produced an equal and opposite reaction that squeezes the room for reasonable doubt. The certainty among the scientists has engendered the most intolerant kind of scepticism among the doubters…
Not all climate sceptics are part of the “alt-right”. But everyone in the alt-right is now a climate sceptic. That’s what makes the politics so toxic…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/07/climate-change-denial-scepticism-cynicism-politics
26 Jun: Bloomberg: The U.S. Threat to International Democracy
By Leonid Bershidsky
Influential thinkers, such as Johns Hopkins University professor Yascha Mounk and Cambridge University professor David Runciman have been writing about a crisis of representative democracy. In many countries, people are deeply unhappy with the political class. New technology, climate change and inequality are threatening established political systems…
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no need to listen. (paraphrasing) Brexit & Trump – voted for by the old, not the young. non-university-educated voted for Brexit; young concerned about things like climate change, which is a genuine threat to their future. if Trump is around for six years, democracy will be over for America. Geraldine accepts it all without question.
AUDIO: 13min31sec: 25 Aug 2018: ABC Saturday Extra: Geraldine Doogue: How Democracy Ends
Politics professor David Runciman says representative democracy is going through a mid-life crisis and may not survive in its current form…
Guest:
Dr David Runciman, Senior Lecturer, Cambridge University
Visiting Fellow, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/how-democracy-ends/10157796
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Thanks Pat. Hilarious to read that the climate can’t wait. The earth is 4567 million years old and today’s climate needs saving.
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26 Jul: Reuters: Bankrupt wind turbine maker Senvion in talks to buy time for rescue deal: sources
FRANKFURT: Bankrupt German wind turbine manufacturer Senvion is in talks to buy time to strike a rescue deal as negotiations with potential buyers of the company continue, people close to the matter said.
The company is in discussions with creditors to extend a 100 million euro ($111 million) insolvency loan so it can avoid having to agree to sell at any price, they added…READ ON
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-senvion-sale/bankrupt-wind-turbine-maker-senvion-in-talks-to-buy-time-for-rescue-deal-sources-idUSKCN1UL0YB
27 Jul: CBC: Province, wind turbine companies charged under Environmental Protection Act
There are reasonable and probable grounds to believe environmental offences have been committed.
The Ontario Court of Justice has determined there are “reasonable and probable grounds” to believe environmental offences have been committed by Ontario’s Minister of the Environment, ministry staff and three industrial wind companies in Chatham-Kent…
Eric Gillespie, a Toronto-based lawyer, represents complainants who have been experiencing problems with their water wells…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/epa-charges-wind-turbine-1.5226237
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26 Jul: TexasTechUni: Researcher Studying Effects of Wind Turbine Farms on Burrowing Owl Habitat
by George Watson
Clint Boal will lead a team that will track and monitor the bird’s movements in and around area wind farms…
… the owl is considered an endangered species in Canada, a threatened speciesin Mexico and is on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s list of species of conservationnconcern…
The primary threat to the owl’s habitat is development of land for agricultural and urban development. Part of that development in the U.S. is the increase in the number of wind turbine farms. But little is truly known of that impact…
Boal said studies have found burrowing owls in some areas have been killed from collisions with wind turbine blades, but nothing regarding how the introduction of those turbines has affected the habitat. As wind turbine farms continue to expand in the Southern Great Plains, discovering this impact is crucial to the species’ survival…
https://today.ttu.edu/posts/2019/07/Stories/boal-burrowing-owl
26 Jul: PortClintonNewsHerald: Proposed Lake Erie wind turbines spark local debate
by Jon Stinchcomb
A study conducted at North Carolina State University found that more than half of vacationers surveyed would not rent a vacation home if turbines were in view, even if discounts were offered on the rental price…
More important to Lipaj and the Lake Erie Foundation than obstructed views is the real-world impact offshore wind turbines would have on wildlife, the natural ecosystem and environment that is crucial to why Lake Erie is such a popular destination for tourists.
The risk to the lake and the richly diverse wildlife that traverse it is among the reasons the Lake Erie Foundation has come out publicly opposed to a proposed offshore wind turbine development titled “Icebreaker Wind.”…
It would be the first freshwater offshore wind project in North America…
Potentially fatal impact on migrating birds
Birding groups have long opposed a proposed wind turbine like this one that had been proposed for Camp Perry, saying any turbines built along the Lake Erie shore would harm birds migrating through northwest Ohio, also hurting tourism and the local economy…
According to Mark Shieldcastle, research director at the Black Swamp Bird Observatory, millions of birds fly across the lake twice a year.
The Black Swamp Bird Observatory, or BSBO, a nonprofit research organization founded in 1992 to study bird migration throughout the region, has been fighting proposed wind farm developments in the area for years…
The mortality rates for migrating birds that result directly from the wind turbines can be devastating to the populations, according to the BSBO, and have an even broader impact on the ecosystem as a whole…
“The project is simply not environmentally sound,” Lipaj said. “And it’s not just because of the birds that would die during migration.”
Lipaj referenced a study conducted by the Nature Conservancy, which recommended not having wind turbines constructed within five miles of the Great Lakes coastlines as the noise and activity from construction could draw in predator fish to spawning grounds for popular game fish, such as walleye and perch.
Another potential issue that concerns the Lake Erie Foundation is the riling up of sediment at the bottom that sits atop toxic pollutants from generations of pollution in the Cuyahoga River…
“The Lake Erie Foundation has found overwhelming scientific and practical evidence that the environmental and economic costs of Icebreaker far outweighs the benefits that are being sold to use.”
https://www.portclintonnewsherald.com/story/news/2019/07/26/locals-discuss-wind-turbines-proposed-offshore-lake-erie/1835765001/
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behind paywalls:
One in five solar units ‘defective’
The Australian-21 hours ago
More than one in five rooftop solar installations on Australian homes were found to be substandard in 2018 amid a boom in the renewable energy source driven by cheaper costs and government rebates…
Ain’t no sunshine as legal battle launched over Kilcoy solar farm
Courier Mail-26 Jul 2019
THE Hong Kong-based investors in a $3.5 billion solar farm in the picturesque Brisbane Valley are currently belting it out in the Federal Court over an alleged wrongful transfer of shares to the director of the controversial project…Now questions are being asked about the future of the project after Chen Lu, one of the shareholders in a company called Eastern Union that ultimately owns the project, sued Sunshine Energy director Li Chi Man for alleged breach of his duties as a director…
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27 Jul: BallaratCourier: Lal Lal Wind Farm uses radar for aircraft lights
by Alex Ford
In an Australian-first, radar-activated aviation lights have been installed on turbines at the Lal Lal Wind Farm east of Ballarat.
Instead of leaving aviation lights on at all times on the turbines, or removing them altogether, the lights will turn on whenever an aeroplane comes within four to six kilometres.
The aircraft’s distance, speed, and heading are tracked by a central controller once it enters a set warning zone, which then makes the decision on whether or not to activate the lights…
“The incidence of light aircraft operating in the area at night is quite low,” the release notes.
“An exception would be with emergency aircraft that may be required to attend to bushfires.”
Commercial aircraft operate too high to activate the system
CASA will monitor the performance for the equipment – the organisation is not responsible for regulating it, but there are national guidelines which have been met
While common in the United States and Europe for more than 10 years, 29 of the 38 turbines near Yendon will be the first in Australia to use the technology…
The turbines have a maximum height of 161 metres.
https://www.thecourier.com.au/story/6295236/wind-farms-using-radar-tech-for-aircraft-lights/
26 Jul: NewsPress: AP: Ameren scraps planned windfarm in Northwest Missouri
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri’s largest electricity provider is backing away from a plan to develop a wind energy farm in Northwest Missouri.
Ameren Missouri said it has terminated plans for a 157-megawatt wind facility in Atchison County because it was too costly to make the significant improvements that would have been needed to the transmission system.
The St. Louis-based utility said it still plans to go forward with two other wind projects — a 300-megawatt facility in Atchison County and a 400-megawatt facility in Adair and Schuyler counties…
https://www.newspressnow.com/news/four-state_region/ameren-scraps-planned-windfarm-in-northwest-missouri/article_a4166f80-afdd-11e9-86c6-77ddb9c599ab.html
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26 Jul: LA Times: Tesla’s venture into solar panel installation loses its shine
By Brian Eckhouse and Molly Smith, Bloomberg
Elon Musk once called Tesla Inc.’s $2.6 billion acquisition of debt-burdened SolarCity Corp. “blindingly obvious.” Three years later, it’s anything but.
Tesla, which gets most of its revenue from automobiles, installed just 29 megawatts of solar generating capacity in the second quarter — its fewest megawatts yet in a single period. That’s down from its previous low of 47 megawatts in the first quarter. At its height, SolarCity installed more than 200 megawatts over three months.
“They’re just barely in the solar game,” said Joe Osha, an analyst at JMP Securities, said. “This business requires capital and focus, and at this point it’s not even clear who’s running it. They’d just be better off shutting the solar business down. It’s a distraction.”…
Meanwhile, several large construction companies have expanded into solar. California is requiring panels on new homes starting next year. That could boost annual installed capacity in the state to almost 1.6 gigawatts in 2020 from about 950 megawatts last year, according to BloombergNEF…
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-25/assignment-teslas-blindingly-obvious-solar-bet-fades-as-installs-plummet-new-story
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The other important word which is a requirement for electricity is ‘commandable’.
Gas is commandable. Hydro is commandable. Even coal is commandable. Wind and solar are not.
People need their power when they need it, when they want it. They want to go home. They want their car to work. The traffic lights, the trains, the ovens, the elevators, the refrigerators. Renewable energy largely is not commandable. So there is no point giving nameplate figures. If your electric car is flat, you have to wait up to 2 days for it to charge. For this wonderful privilege you not only pay much more, thanks to rocketing electricity prices and the high price of electric cars but you geneate more CO2 than a petrol car.
So what exactly is the point of so called ‘renewables’. Coal is free too.
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The next step TdeF
In this whole greenist saga
will be ‘Commanding ”
The sun & winds !
I wonder which of them
Has pitched for cash to
Researching this sweet
Sounding idiocy ?
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25 Jul: CarbonPulse: EU investigating risk of ETS, registry being used for fra*d, terrorism funding
The European Commission is investigating the risk of the EU ETS and its emissions registry being used for money laundering, terrorist financing, and fra*d…
26 Jul: CarbonPulse: Carbon tax of $200/t would only marginally cut global oil emissions -study
A global CO2 tax of $200 per tonne would only reduce GHGs from oil production by 4% over the next century, as the price would not be high enough to make a large dent in existing and undiscovered reserves, according to new research…
NationalBureauOfEconomicResearch: Coase, Hotelling and Pigou: The Incidence of a Carbon Tax and CO2 Emissions
Geoffrey Heal, Wolfram Schlenker
NBER Working Paper No. 26086
Issued in July 2019
Using data from a large proprietary database of field-level oil data, we show that carbon prices even as high as 200 dollars per ton of CO2 will only reduce cumulative emissions from oil by 4% as the supply curve is very steep for high oil prices and few reserves drop out. The supply curve flattens out for lower price, and the effect of an increased carbon tax becomes larger. For example, a carbon price of 600 dollars would reduce cumulative emissions by 60%…
You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.
You are eligible for a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, an employee of the U.S. federal government with a “.GOV” domain name, or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy…
https://www.nber.org/papers/w26086
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Nameplate power doesn’t matter.
Maximum power achieved at any period doesn’t matter.
Average power doesn’t matter.
Mean power doesn’t matter,
The only thing that matters is the minimum power at any one time.
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both behind paywall:
HSC: Climate change to be included in geography classes
Daily Telegraph – 9h ago
EXCLUSIVE: Climate change will be officially included in HSC geography lessons when the syllabus is overhauled for the first time in 20 years…
27 Jul: TheWest: HSC students to learn about climate change in geography syllabus overhaul
by Jack Morphet, The Sunday Telegraph
https://thewest.com.au/news/nsw/hsc-students-to-learn-about-climate-change-in-geography-syllabus-overhaul-ng-9502990b6e352db1796b8efc9a387560
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Gosh. This is such terrible research if you can even call it that. Wind turbines will still produce on days with virtually no wind and there is not a time when all the wind farms are not producing. People keep quoting capacity factors which are only for full power. That doesn’t mean they are not producing the rest of the time. They are just not at full power. So a 20% capacity factor may seem low but if they are producing at 90%, 80% of the time, it’s actually really good. Averaging them across all wind farms again isn’t the amount of production.
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Justine, thanks for popping in. The graph is the graph. Your numbers don’t add up.
You are new at this aren’t you?
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Gosh. This is such terrible research if you can even call it that. Wind turbines will still produce on days with virtually no wind and there is not a time when all the wind farms are not producing. People keep quoting capacity factors which are only for full power. That doesn’t mean they are not producing the rest of the time. They are just not at full power. So a 20% capacity factor may seem low but if they are producing at 90%, 80% of the time, it’s actually really good. Averaging them across all wind farms again isn’t the amount of production.
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http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity
Check out the link. It’s my favourite way to keep clear the difference between capacity and actual output.
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