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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 […]
Generic wind turbine near farm. Photo: @gonz_ddl
Finally, a study looks at data on nine houses within ten kilometers of an old (probably small) wind turbine. What’s amazing about this research is not the result but that this study is so tiny, yet it’s still a “world first”.
There are already probably around 400,000 wind turbines installed around the world.* So you might think that there would have been scores of studies involving hundreds of people and followed up for a year or two. They would have looked at the effect of wind turbines upwind, downwind, side wind, in low wind, high wind, and at different times of day. They’d check for altered sleep patterns, lack of deep sleep, REM sleep, cognitive performance, blood pressure, cortisol levels, and school marks. Dream on. It’s like everything with climate change — who needs data?
Renewables are a $300 billion annual global industry. This work was done with a $1.4 million National Health and Medical Research Council grant. Where is the precautionary principle when we need it?
Can wind turbines disturb sleep? Research finds pulsing audible in homes up to 3.5km away
Nicole Hasham, Sydney Morning Herald
[…]
Wind turbines either kill or scare away three quarters of buzzards, hawks and kites at three sites in India. That makes them the new “top predator” in the ecosystem according to new research. Perhaps not the niche that Greens were expecting wind farms to occupy.
It’s not all bad news though, fan-throated lizards are pretty happy about not being dinner.
h/t GWPF
Lizards vote for wind.
Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows
Harry Pettit for Daily Mail Online
Predatory bird numbers are four times higher in areas away from wind turbines This is having a devastating ‘ripple effect’ across the food chain It means numbers of certain small animals are growing unchecked 9.6 out of 10 based on 69 ratings […]
It’s not often we see a report that turns things on their head quite like this.
Wind turbines may cause more local warming than global cooling in the next century.
Photo: Jo Nova
If the US were to install a lot of turbines, Wind power could warm the United States by 0.24 degrees Celsius instead of cooling it, because wind turbines “redistribute heat” in the atmosphere. They mix the surface layers. (0.24C would be equivalent to two decades of recent warming.) The largest effect is at night where wind plants can warm the local area by 1.5C.
At least 10 previous studies have now observed local warming caused by US wind farms. Keith and Miller compared their simulated warming to observations and found rough consistency between the data and model.
Nick Carne — Cosmos magazine
The new studies by Keith and Miller were published in Environmental Research Letters and Joule.
Major downer. The power density of wind energy is up to *100 times* less than predicted.
The new research suggests we can’t put too many turbines to close together or the whole group become far less efficient. That means we need 5 – […]
The ABC reports that finally the people of SA can find out what the emergency Tesla battery cost — $56 per person, or $220 per family, just for the purchase, not for the operation. Hands up South Australians, who would have rushed to sign up to be the Star Renewable State if they had to sign the checks themselves and their electricity bill had a item called: “The price of renewables”.
South Australia didn’t need a battery when it had coal power:
A 505-page report released by Neoen this month ahead of an initial public offering suggested the battery cost around $90 million, at the current exchange rate.
The giant 100-megawatt lithium ion battery near Jamestown in the state’s mid-north commenced operation late last year.
“It actually costs taxpayers’ money. There’s a cost of $4-5 million a year to have the battery in place.
“There are more costs than that involved.
Where does Giles Parkinson think these “revenues” come from?
However, Giles Parkinson said the battery was on track to “make revenues of about $25-26 million in its first year”
The battery makes no electricity. All it does is shift […]
Don’t camp under an old wind turbine
What weighs 100 tons, sits 100 meters above the ground, leaks transmission fluid and may disintegrate into a million sharp fibreglass spikes…
….
NoTricksZone
As much of Germany’s nearly 30,000 strong fleet of wind turbines approach 20 or more years in age, the list of catastrophic collapses is growing more rapidly. The turbines are now being viewed by technical experts as “ticking time bombs”.
According to a commentary by Daniel Wetzel of online German Daily ‘Die Welt’, the aging rickety wind turbines are poorly inspected and maintained and thus are now posing a huge risk.
Over the past months alone there’s been a flurry of reports over wind turbines failing catastrophically and collapsing to the ground, e.g. see here, here and here.
Industrial systems in Germany need to get technical inspections and safety approvals, but wind turbines don’t…
Read the rest at NoTricksZone
Vernunftkraft keeps a list of failures.
The Greens, of course, are apoplectic (not).
_______________________
Photo: this particular turbine crashed in Antarctica. If you own a photo of a failing German one, please let me know.
9.8 out of 10 based on 72 ratings […]
The subsidy that flows whatever the weather | by Josh.
How do you know when an industry is a loser? When even repowering old turbines, which were put in the best spots, is not worth the trouble unless they get a subsidy, I mean, even more subsidies.
Remember the days when subsidies were needed to get a project going?
Maintenance is not an option
Europe is full of old windfarms. The original subsidies have run out and there’s not much appetite for new ones. Without more free money from taxpayers the most economic option for older turbines is to run them into the ground and give up on them. Maintenance costs are the silent plague. But so too is red tape and legal approval. The age of the European turbines is reaching the point where half of the entire fleet is facing do or die decisions.
John Constable of the GWPF wonders if the wind industry in Europe may be on the point of collapse.
And Europe’s fleet is old:
By 2020, 41% of the currently installed capacity in Germany will be over 15 years old, 44% in Spain, and 57% in Denmark.
John Constable is responding […]
Just another hidden cost — intermittent generators are vandals on our baseload suppliers. Wind power needs gas, but gas doesn’t need the wind. When the two are paired together it makes the wind energy “reliable” but adds nearly $30/MWh to the cost of the energy from gas. Right now that cost will be added to the gas plant, but in a free market, it should be paid by the wind farm investors.
Stacy and Taylor compared the cost of running a Closed Cycle Gas plant (CC Gas) on its own or combined with a wind farm. The combination produces reliable electricity “on demand” and uses less gas to do it. The sole benefits to this odd industrial couple are a smaller gas bill and lower emissions of a fertilizing gas (CO2). All the capital and labor costs of running a gas plant are the same, but now it sits idle more often, pointlessly waiting like a spare wheel til the wind slows and gas power is needed again. About the only thing we can predict about the wind farm is that it can be relied on for almost nothing, so the gas plant must be almost as large whether or […]
Last year one of our largest coal power plants suddenly closed, with only five months warning, catching the market by surprise and taking out 5% of our cheapest generation. (This kind of improbable anti-free-market feat shows just how screwed our national market is). The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has looked at the effect the closure of Hazelwood had on electricity prices and concluded that closing cheap brown-coal plants and replacing them with black coal and gas will make electricity prices rise. This will come as no surprise to anyone who can count to 100.
Dan Harrison at the ABC reports:
A year on from the closure of the 1600 megawatt-sized plant in the Latrobe Valley, the report from the Australian Energy Regulator found wholesale prices in Victoria were up 85 per cent on 2016.
Because electricity retailers use hedging for wholesale prices, the rise in retail prices is still feeding through. In the wash, the wholesale increase is expected to add 16% to retail prices this financial year compared to last year. After that, through some miracle, the AEMC expects prices to come back down from Exorbitant to Slightly Lower Than Exorbitant in the next two years thanks […]
Image of offshore wind farms. Baltic Sea Wikimedia | Mariusz Paździora
We are trying to collect dilute erratic energy, spread over hundreds of square kilometers in windy, salty, and wet conditions with machines that spin at 330km/hour. What could possibly go wrong?
From: “Offshore wind fiasco” at GWPF — The original story in Danish.
Ørsted must repair up to 2,000 wind turbine blades because the leading edge of the blades have become worn down after just a few years at sea.
The wind turbine owner will not disclose the bill, but says that the financial significance is “small”.
The cost of repair is so small they need to keep it a secret.
But it can’t be cheap. For the most repairs, the blades need to be brought down, shipped and fixed on land. Repairing them at sea is a rare feat.
This must be the infamous leading edge erosion.
The Offwhore Wind Industry website discussed this type of damage in 2015:
Large rotors lead to large yields, but also to lots of annoyance – at least as far as the coating is concerned. After only a few years, the protective layer that […]
We are trying to collect dilute energy across a million square kilometers with heavy machinery in extreme conditions. What could possibly go wrong?
Last night around 9pm, the top part of the 30-metre turbine fell off in 40 knot winds — which is not unusual in Mawson (in September wind gusts of 185km/hr were recorded). Fortunately no one was killed because people were inside. Though it looks pretty close to that red building (was anyone there?) No one knows why it happened. The other turbine at the station has been turned off as a precaution (though I wouldn’t be walking underneath it). Maybe someone can tie ropes with a helicopter?
ABC News: Mawson Antarctic research station relying solely on diesel after wind turbine crashes to ground
Wind Turbine, Antarctic research station, Mawson, break, collapse.
Right now things have warmed up a lot at Mawson, and temperatures even climb above 0C by 3pm some days. Though on November 1 the maximum temp was -8.8C. Naturally diesel saves the day. Of course Mawson is fully backed with diesel power.
These are 300kW turbines installed in 2003, so only 14 years old. Maybe it was just bad luck.
The maintenance costs […]
Welcome to the world of baby-economics where people think a “negative” price is a sign of success. In Simpletown people are cheering. But in the real world a price signal that’s negative tells us that someone is selling something so awful they have to pay someone to take it away. It’s a burden that must be got rid of, like trash.
Germany set to pay customers for electricity usage as renewable energy generation creates huge power surplus — The Independent
Electrons cannot be created nor destroyed. If you make them, you have to deal with them. Negative pricing is a bad thing, a sign of “junk electricity” — a burden. It’s utter nonsense in a free market.
From the outset, I’m skeptical that anyone is actually paying someone to take electricity. If wind farms were coughing up dollars (euro) to “customers” surely they would just disconnect their spinning thingo from the grid? Who wants to be a shareholder in a company that forgets to lock the turbine, or press the “off” switch, and has to pay customers to take its electronic trash? The truth (whatever it is) will turn out to be some variation of an unfree market. Probably […]
Who wants to wait for charging? Instead, just dump the flat batteries, pick up a new set. (See the youtube below).
Having a nation full of electric cars is fine as long as you don’t want to drive them.
Wind Farms would need to “cover whole of Scotland” to power Britain’s electric vehicles
By Paula Murray
Jack Ponton, emeritus professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, said another 16,000 turbines would be required in order to replace petrol and diesel cars with electric vehicles.
“If you want to do this with wind turbines, you are talking about 16,000 more wind turbines, four times as many as we have at the moment, and I’ve estimated that would occupy some 90,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Scotland.”
The academic – a member of Scientific Alliance Scotland, a group which promotes open-minded debate on issues such as climate change – believes the plan is “unworkable”…
The UK plans to phase out combustion engines by 2032. What happens when surges of holiday tourists arrive in a town without enough charging points? “Charge-rage” and long queues. Lets spend our holidays waiting for […]
In Germany as 20 years of wind subsidies comes to an end in 2020, half to three quarters of the industry may disappear.
So many parallels with Australia. The Germans have had wind subsidies for 20 years, but even after two decades of support, the industry is still not profitable on a stand-alone basis. In 2016, some 4600MW of new wind plants were installed, but that may drop to one quarter as much by 2019 as subsidies shrink. According to Pierre Gosselin (August 31st, 2017) there are more wind protests, electricity prices are “skyrocketing” and “the grid has become riddled with inefficiencies and has become increasingly prone to grid collapses from unstable power feed in.”
Pierre Gosslin writes that “Germany is more in the green energy retreat mode”.
German flagship business daily “Handelsblatt” reported … how Germany’s wind energy market is now “threatening to implode” and as a result “thousands of jobs are at risk“. José Luis Blanco, CEO of German wind energy giant Nordex, blames the market chaos on “policymakers changing the rules“. Subsidies have been getting cut back substantially. The problem, Blanco says, is that worldwide green energy subsidies are being capped and wind parks […]
…
OK, a wind farm isn’t making sausages, but it’s also not a farm.
Nothing about this makes sense, unless you follow-the-money.
John Constable and Matt Ridley outline the absolute rort that Scottish wind generators are screwing out of British electricity customers. Scotland already has 750 industrial wind plants (the scammers) in their best moments making a total of 5,700 MW which is more than the peak demand of the whole Scottish grid. This is, at times, not just more than Scotland can use, but even more than it can safely absorb, so UK slaves were forced to spend £1.8 billion on giant interconnectors partly to send the excess down to England and whatnot, otherwise the profits of the unprofitable might suffer, and the weather might not be as nice in 2100 (or not).
If that’s not bad enough, these protected industrial plants sometimes produce a product when nobody wants it, and they still get paid. When it would be unsafe to dump it on the market. The geniuses who set this up promised the wind-generators that they would still be paid. And not only are they paid, but as Ridley and Constable document, before 2011 they were […]
The wind fizzled out over the South East slab of Australia during June. Predictably, that meant the wind industry lost millions, and wholesale electricity prices went up. When the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was asked where the wind had gone, Darren Ray, expert climatologist, said it was due to a high pressure system over the bight, which, he explained, was linked to “climate change”. Thus, as the world warms, wind farms will be progressively more useless in South Australia. Perhaps the BOM should have mentioned that before SA became dependent on wind farms? I don’t think he had thought this one through.
Perhaps the BOM is hoping that the masochistic sacrifice of South Australia will stop global warming before global warming stops the wind farms?
You might think that if the global climate models could see this coming they would have suggested that wind farms weren’t a good idea. Or maybe, since climate models predict every equal and opposite outcome in unison, the models are always right post hoc, but not so useful in projections?
Climate models predict climate change causes faster and slower winds over Australia
In 2017, Darren Ray, BOM expert, said the decrease in winds was due […]
Looks like the halo is fading. Today-Tonight is a current affairs show in Australia. Today a few more Australians discovered that free energy is not just expensive but creates its own kind of pollution.
This hardly a surprise for anyone who can spell cost-benefit, but it’s healthy to see the prime-time media in Australia doing something other than singing the Clean-Green advertising jingle.
h/t Scott of the Pacific
8.8 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
Wind farm in Xinjiang viewed from the Lanxin railway. | Image by “Train to Xinjiang Provnice” (sic)
The command economy strikes again. China is touted as the renewables leader, installing a gobsmacking one third of all the worlds wind towers. But with a recent economic slowdown, when push comes to shove, coal power is used and wind farms are not.
It Can Power a Small Nation. But This Wind Farm in China Is Mostly Idle.
[NY Times] — More than 92,000 wind turbines have been built across the country, capable of generating 145 gigawatts of electricity, nearly double the capacity of wind farms in the United States. One out of every three turbines in the world is now in China, and the government is adding them at a rate of more than one per hour.
But some of its most ambitious wind projects are underused. Many are grappling with a nationwide economic slowdown that has dampened demand for electricity. Others are stymied by persistent favoritism toward the coal industry by local officials and a dearth of transmission lines to carry electricity from rural areas in the north and west to China’s fastest-growing cities.
[…]
These are Enercon wind turbines in Germany, Lower Saxony. Image: Philip May
This could be a watershed — if word gets out that turbine manufacturers will not even contest claims of noise damage, there could be many more claims around the world. There are rumors these cases are often settled out of court with confidentiality agreements, but who would know?
In an update to the Irish court case we discussed last month, the latest news confirms that the wind turbine manufacturer has admitted liability without contesting it. The court will be deciding damages in April. As I deduced at the time, the wind industry was using desperate wordsmithing to minimize attention on the story. The news item related to it even disappeared from the Irish Examiner. The turbine industry must be hoping no one notices this story.
Stop These Things has an update:
Wind company admits nuisance damage to neighbours Irish Farmers Journal Paul Mooney 5 January 2017
High Court to determine compensation for seven families in April hearing.
9.2 out of 10 based on 91 ratings […]
Victoria is driving down Blackout Drive. They have reports from South Australia up ahead, they know where the road goes, but the state is paying for the first class ticket on a trip to RiskyGrid.
Victoria has 5.7 million people, over three times bigger than South Australia. Right now SA relies on the Victorian grid stability to keep running, and gets up to 800MW of reliable electrons from the state-next-door. But Victoria wants to add more wind power — theoretically the equivalent of a big coal fired plant (like Hazelwood).
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly looked closely at the numbers and patterns and see the writing on the wall. To help expensive, unreliable, intermittent green energy survive the government subsidizes it by around 9c per KWhr (bear in mind the wholesale rate for coal fired power is 3 – 4c per kWhr.) The government also demands retailers have a 12.5% mix of renewables, and that they accept most electrons from wind power whenever and wherever it is available. This strange anti-free market rule is called “nondispatchable” power, meaning the system can’t just throw it away if there is any demand at all. Whereas coal […]
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