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In the Victorian Supreme Court a judge has just ordered that the Bald Hills Wind farm must turn off at night time. After seven years of pain and suffering, two households living nearby will finally get night time relief and some payments of $92,000 and $168,000.
“The wind farm noise has been a common law nuisance at both properties.”
Bald hills, Wind Farm, Victoria, Australia. Image: John Englart Flikr CC BY-SA 2.0
This could change everything. These industrial plants close to homes just became even less profitable because they can’t operate at night. They also need to pay damages to people affected by the noise, and do more maintenance to reduce noise — like repairing gear boxes more often, and they may have to pay to make changes at homes nearby to ameliorate the nuisance, or pay compensation. Many properties near the towers have abandoned plans to build new houses there.
What stands out in this ruling is how entirely inadequate were any of the attempts by the government that approved the wind plants, or the companies that profited from them, to measure and assess the noise, and to respond to complaints. Despite tens of thousands […]
It’s almost like some at the ABC are sympathetic to the anti-wind-farm movement?
The awakening begins. There is an opening here for the two opposite ends of the political debate to come together, and to figure out who the real enemy is — something that would transform the political landscape. Before anyone gets the urge to rub their noses in it (no matter how deserved it is) ponder how useful this is as a way to open a conversation. There are still good green tinted people out there who have no idea they are being used, or that there is a cheaper energy source that feeds plants, doesn’t chop up birds and bats, and doesn’t consume 13,000 hectares of wilderness either.
The wind farms angering renewable energy fans
Steve Nowakowski was a fan of green energy, and hired as a photographer:
Now, as he looked down, he was shocked at what he saw.
Mt Emerald Wind Farm, Queensland, ABC
“I thought, ‘Geez, there’s a lot of destruction here. They’ve transformed what was a really great, pristine area … into a really industrial area’.”
Biologists don’t like it either:
According to James Cook […]
The great offshore revolution that never happened
Dogger Bank Wind Farm
Dogger Bank will become the World’s Largest Wind Farm and maybe the World’s largest white elephant too.
Despite years of research and hyperbole we can conclusively say that offshore wind is still a charity project, losing money from start to end. The GWPF highlights a new Norwegian report that shows that the Net Present Value of Dogger Bank is “minus £970 million.”
Britain’s biggest, newest offshore wind farm still isn’t profitable. It may be killing eagles and hypnotising crabs, but it isn’t cost effective at making energy, and it isn’t cost effective at changing the global weather either.
NetZeroWatch saw it all coming:
The report confirms as series of findings published by the GWPF and others [1–5], which show that offshore wind costs are very high, at best are only falling slowly, and are far above the auction strike prices being agreed.
Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch said:
“We have been warning since 2017 that there has been no revolution in offshore wind costs. Every time we get new financial data from offshore wind farms, the cost estimates […]
Welcome to your prison comrade
A new Taiwanese study investigated wind farm noise on people in homes made of sandstone, concrete, iron or bricks. And they measured the low frequency noise inside and out, and with windows open and closed. Given the health risks involved, they advised that governments ought to set limits on how close towers can be, and recommend airtight windows that nobody opens much.
pixelrockerz
Perhaps someone should have done more studies like this before the world installed 750GW of wind power?
The same people that panic about the effect of a hot weekend on your grandchildren a hundred years from now, don’t seem so worried about whether the wind towers destroy your sleep or put you at risk of heart attacks today.
Thanks to MasterResource.
From the introduction of a new paper in Taiwan on the effects of wind turbine noise on people:
LFN [Low Frequency Noise] exposure has been found to cause a variety of health conditions. Exposure to LFN from wind turbines results in headaches, difficulty concentrating, irritability, fatigue, dizziness, tinnitus, aural pain sleep disturbances, and annoyance. Clinically, exposure to LFN from wind turbines may cause increased risk of epilepsy, […]
Edible crab like the one used in the study. Jean-Pol Grandmont Wiki
It’s a Nightmare on Crab Street
Crabs are being drawn to high electromagnetic (EMF) fields around undersea cables and getting trapped there for hours, “mesmerized”.
They are not just immobilized, in lab tests it screws up their blood chemistry and circadian rhythm too.
Nature-lovers might wonder what other marine life is also being impacted? What if the magnetic fields are playing havoc with migrating fish and turtles too? It might be handy to find that out before we build bigger taller towers offshore with bigger stronger cables.
Where is the Green outcry, or the Save-the-crabs campaign? Perhaps some kinds of pollution are OK “for the greater good”?
These are not some esoteric rare crustaceans, by the way, but common dinner crabs — the ones food chains and fisheries depend on.
If these crabs were victims of coal plants the headlines would be a catastrophe.
Underwater power cables are ‘mesmerizing’ crabs around Scotland
In a new study, researchers found brown crabs ‘freeze’ when they come too close to the electromagnetic fields generated by these cables. This disturbing behavior may negatively affect the marine creature’s […]
It’s not even winter yet but suddenly all eyes are on the gas prices
Gas through the roof…
Thanks to fear of climate change voodoo many nations in the EU have effectively stopped exploring for gas and decided not to frack their shale deposits to get cheap gas too. (In Australia too). Vainglorious governments aimed to change the weather instead of having cheap electricity and lo, wind-towers were built everywhere.
What could possibly go wrong? Nearly everything.
Even the massive size of the European market hasn’t saved them from price rises so large that retail suppliers are collapsing, and fertilizer factories are closing.
Its a great way to give your enemies the upper hand
The wind drought in spring and summer meant that wind farms failed. Then the Russians squeezed gas supply in to the EU looking suspiciously like they were hoping to push up prices and pressure Germany into approving the controversial Nordstream 2 pipeline. Now the Kremlin is suggesting a quick approval will alleviate the gas shortage (they’re just trying to help). In the latest news one large interconnector between the UK and France has suffered a fire and broken down and won’t be restored til […]
The Humelink transmission line does not connect a single large city.
Just another hidden renewable subsidy.
Boy O boy, that bill blew out fast:
Households could be up for $2b electricity transmission cost blowout
Peter Hannan, Sydney Morning Herald
Transgrid now expects its proposed HumeLink – a 500-kilovolt line connecting Wagga Wagga, Bannaby and Maragle – to cost $3.317 billion, up from $1.35 billion estimated in January 2020. That would make it “by far the most expensive transmission project” in Australia, said Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre…
NSW Households will be forced to pay $60 per year above their already-inflated-costs whether they want renewable energy or think windmills are a bird-killing, shamanistic health-hazard that won’t stop storms, floods or droughts any better than crystal shields do.
We can see why the government won’t let people choose to buy green power voluntarily.
Transgrid said the steel and materials costs more, but wow, golly, there was also a bill for “environmental offsets” through the Kosciuszko national park of an eye-watering, wait for it, $935 million. Perhaps they are transplanting the trees they cut […]
Is this the future of wind all over the world? The salad days of wind power in Germany are over. Bad news is rolling in from several directions. Twenty years of hope-n-subsidies has run aground. Profits are grinding down, and hardly any new towers are being erected. People are fighting back against the noise, the views, and the bird chopping. Conservationists might like the idea of wind, as long as it’s in someone else’s forest. Suddenly groups that oppose wind towers are gaining traction, and the red tape and legal battles have grown wings and settled on new developments like a bat plague.
New turbines are now supposed to be two kilometers from any home, and there just isn’t enough spare land to build them on. German wind farms are running out of Germany.
If only they were profitable and provided an essential service, they might still have friends.
Wind energy in crisis as expansion stalls in Germany
Alex Reichmuth; Nebelspalter, via GWPF
Lengthy planning and approval procedures stand in the way of the expansion of wind energy. There is too little designated space for possible locations and too many lawsuits against projects. The resistance to […]
It’s almost like China’s climate action was just window dressing. It seems to be unraveling…
China’s National Carbon Trading Scheme was supposed to go into full operation later this month, but now it’s been cut back by two-thirds. Instead of burdening 6,000 companies it will only afflict 2,000. And only a week ago, the Chinese government suddenly axed solar and wind subsidies, with the cuts starting just six weeks from now. Oilprice calls it “a crushing blow for wind and solar”. In a devastating move, there are even demands that solar plants have to sell electricity at the same price as coal power. The cruelty!
China produces three quarters of all the world’s solar panels, having subsidized-the-heck out of the global industry, exploited slave labor and driven the US leaders out of production.
Judging by the Wall St Journal story — in the last two months the paradigm has shifted from Environmental control to Economic priority. Perhaps solar power wasn’t much use for building ballistic missile submarines?
How different things would be if solar was actually cheaper than coal…
No new solar power plant subsidies. Just like that? China to stop subsidies for new solar power stations, onshore wind projects […]
What grows on a wind “farm” ? Debt-cows
On Wednesday nearly all the wind generators in the country failed. About 4,000 turbines across five states of Australia were hit by some kind of simultaneous fuel crisis. At one point all the wind power in our national grid was only making 3% of Australia’s electricity, and that was the best part of the day. At its worst, all those turbines produced about 1.2% of the power we needed. It was that bad.
Across the nation, something like $15 to $20 billion dollars of infrastructure ground to a halt.
Welcome to the clean green energy future:
The black line in this image is the total power generation across the day, and that equates equally to power consumption across the day. The green colour rolling along the bottom is wind generation, all of it, across the day. Who pays for the battery back up for these dysfunctional non-farms?
As Rafe Champion would say — it was a “choke point” all day.
It would be nice to believe this incident was due to all the old failing wind towers that used to be reliable workhorses. If only. Then there would be hope […]
Yesterdays free advertisement for the Renewables Industry comes from Peter Martin, ANU, and was swallowed whole by The Conversation, and then repeated by The ABC. (If only the ABC had three million dollars a day to spend on checking things before it published them, they might have warned the economist that he doesn’t understand much about the grid or even the energy market.) This kind of anti-coal PsyOps might work on teenagers: Electricity has become a jigsaw. Coal is unable to provide the missing pieces
March 16, 2021 1.46pm AEDT
Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, provides up to 20 per cent of Victoria’s power. It has been operating for 47 years. Since late 2017 at least one of its four units has broken down 50 times. Its workforce doubles for three to four months most years to deal with the breakdowns. It pumps out 3 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions.
And here’s Macarthur Wind Power plant, Victoria’s largest at 420-never-attained-MW. It breaks down nearly every single day:
Fig 1: Anero.id Macarthur Wind output
Martin goes on in a non-stop infomercial for wind and solar He must be aiming for 12 year old voters, or perhaps […]
Surprising no one: lumpy expensive electricity does not make for a High Tech Paradise
It’s another example of how more green jobs means less real ones. A German High Tech Chip maker driven to Singapore by renewable energy prices
Emden, Germany by Gritte
To understand the scale of just how green Germany is, ponder that it has the third largest wind power fleet in the world, with around 30,000 turbines. In 2020, wind power generated more than a quarter of German electricity and solar power another 10%. Despite all that *free* energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Germans are famous for their high tech engineering, but now they can’t afford to manufacture it at home. Siltronic is moving, and along with that presumably goes some of the intellectual property, brains, and security that comes with having that production locally.
h/t GWPF Chipmakers lament high taxes and levies on electricity in Germany 9.5 out of 10 based on 62 ratings […]
Welcome to Woke World where states pretend to control the weather while the weather controls the state
An Arctic blast; an ice storm called Uri, has frozen up half the wind turbines in the hot southerly Big State of Texas.
Supplier Oncor is warning it may be hours before power is restored. People are livid, their pipes are freezing, some have had no electricity for 12 hours. Their website is down, their phone lines are out. People can’t even report outages.
UPDATE: NY Times is already blaming Climate Change for the frigid weather.
While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.
Anchorage, Alaska is warmer than parts of Texas.
At least five dead and 5 MILLION without power as winter storm Uri sweeps the nation, freezes wind turbines, plunges wind chills to -20 in Texas and causes tornadoes in the south west
Records will be broken in Texas
Daily Mail
Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without […]
All good environmentalists detest renewables and are appalled at the money wasted on the industrial renewables corporations.
All the rest are unwitting marketing agents who provide free advertising for banks and multinational conglomerate profits. In the process they hurt the poor and scorch the Earth.
In short: The world spent $3.6 trillion dollars over eight years, mostly trying to change the weather. Only a pitiful 5% of this was spent trying to adapt to the inevitable bad weather which is coming one way or another. Both solar and wind power are perversely useless at reducing CO2, which is their only reason for existing in large otherwise efficient grids. Wind farms raise the temperature of the local area around them which causes more CO2 to be released from the soil. Solar and wind farms waste 100 times the wilderness land area compared to fossil fuels, and need ten times as many minerals mined from the earth. Biomass razes forests, but protects underground coal deposits.
The role of large wind and solar power in national grids is to produce redundant surges of electricity at random or low-need times. They are surplus infrastructure designed in a religious quest to generate nicer weather. […]
Another cost of wind towers
Laura David and Jack Kelleher had to leave their family farm at Gowlane North, Donoughmore, Cork, four years ago after a shuddering, flickery 10-turbine wind farm began operating a bit more than 700 metres from their home.
They suffered from “nosebleeds, ear aches, skin rashes, swollen and painful hands, loss of power in their limbs, sleep disturbance, and headaches.” Naturally, they moved into a hotel, and then found a new home eight miles away, and took it to the High Court.
Family in Cork win a €225k payout:
by Ann O’Loughlin, IrishTimes
Two brothers and a sister from the same family who claimed they suffered illness as a result of noise, vibrations and shadow flicker from a Cork windfarm have settled their High Court actions for a total of €225,000.
The settlements which were without an admission of liability were approved by Ms Justice Leonie Reynolds and occurred after mediation.
The defendants had denied all the claims they had been allegedly negligent resulting in the siblings becoming ill. They also denied that noise, shadow flicker and vibration from the windfarm had intruded onto the […]
On average, every 3 days, wind farms generating as much as one coal fired unit, fail on the Australian grid
TonyfromOz exposes a failure rate so common it’s hidden in plain view. Wind “Farm” intermittency is even worse than we thought.
On average, every three days within a one hour period there’s a sudden failure of 500 MW of wind generation — equal to one industrial coal turbine. That’s four full wind farms or about 250 spinning turbines that stopped spinning.
Every time a coal plant trips out, it’s reported as a problem of relying on our “old coal fleet”. But when the same power output fails from wind, it’s the new clean green future at work (!) , and a sign we need to spend another $20 billion to “upgrade the grid” with interconnectors we don’t need, and Hydro schemes we don’t want.
A few wind farms are bad for the grid. More windfarms are worse.
100 times a year we get a 500MW outage
TonyfromOz (Anton Lang) laboriously finds and documents two different kinds of failure. The largest and longest outages are when wind farms are becalmed. But there are many more short sharp and very sudden failures […]
More ironies. One fifth of all soil carbon is stored in peat bogs. Unfortunately when industrial wind turbines are built on them, the damage turns them from carbon sinks to carbon sources thus neutralizing the point of building the wind farm.
The headline evokes some supernatural power:
Wind farms built on carbon-rich peat bogs lose their ability to fight climate change
As if the magical whirly totem stick loses the gift of weather control when placed on a peat bog?
But the real damage is not just to wallets for another pointless windfarm. Peat bogs are so much more than carbon sinks — they are also an archive of paleohistory and the ancient climate. Indeed, even though cattle, wind and rain can damage the bogs, the researchers now say the wind farms now pose the “most serious risk” of all. Apparently the vehicle access tracks create artificial streams that drain the peat. The drainage changes are pervasive and “affect the whole peatland” not just the part near the track.
The “blanket bogs” are rare, but occur from Spain to Norway in Europe as well as in Canada, New Zealand and Korea.
The paper is a thinly disguised plea from bog […]
In 2017 in its last month of operation, the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant was still operating reliably 24 hours a day at around $30/MWhr and producing 1360MW of electricity. Despite its age, it could peak at 86% of its original rated output.
After Hazelwood closed, wholesale prices jumped 85% in Victoria. And the annual average spot wholesale price in Victoria in the last year was $100/MWH.
So naturally Victoria wants to build more wind power, and blow up old reliable coal. Every single week in January, when electricity demand peaks in Australia, there were days when one old coal plant could have provided more electricity than all 57 new wind farms on the National Electricity Market could.
How much did it cost to build 57 not-there-when-you-need-it wind farms?
The output of all the wind farms in Australia still isn’t enough to reliably produce more than one 50 year old coal plant.
In its lifetime Hazelwood made $15 billion dollars worth of electricity (or 520TWH). It paid for itself many times over.
Source: Anero.id
h/t David B, Serp
..
9.8 out of 10 based on 75 ratings […]
Wind turbines pose a threat not just to bats, birds and bedtime, but also Buicks, buildings and babies.
By some miracle luck, no one was killed. This wind turbine was installed two weeks ago…
Coming soon: insurance premiums to rise in car parks under turbines, and real estate values to fall. Children’s car seats to be reinforced with 6ft thick titanium shells.
Presumably Al Gore and the member for Warringah will dismiss the risk and plan to build one in their own backyards.
Repeat after me: Wind energy is free and there are no hidden costs from installing gigatons of infrastructure across the country to catch low-density random unreliable energy.
9.4 out of 10 based on 54 ratings
Fragile grids
Over a million people customers lost power in the UK yesterday thanks to the sudden outage of a gas and a wind plant. Some of the country’s biggest railway stations were inoperable. Passengers were stuck on trains for up to seven hours. Others stayed in hotels, walked miles or paid “hundreds” for taxis. The outpatient sections of Ipswich Hospital were blacked out for 15 minutes when backup generators failed. “At the height of the Friday rush hour, all trains out of King’s Cross were suspended and remained so for most of the evening.” — BBC. Commuters resorted to using their phones as torches to get out of tunnels in the dark.
Urgent Investigation called for into “fiasco”
According to headlines, at this early stage before the investigation all we know for sure is that wind power is definitely not to blame, but Boris might be. (Seriously, it’s the no-deal Brexit that hasn’t happened).
Officially, people are saying in solemn knowing tones that it is “extremely rare” for two generators to go out at once. But the odd thing about this is how small the loss was. Barfield Gas power is only a 730 MW generator, and Hornsea Wind […]
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