Wednesday
Apr062011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Windy flops
The John Muir Trust is that rare beast, an environmental organisation that is more sane than bonkers. One of their big bugbears is their fellow greens' enthusiasm for windfarms, a position they seem to take a certain amount of relish in tearing to pieces in their recent report on the subject.
Delingpole's take on the story is here. Apparently BBC Scotland covered it too.
Reader Comments (17)
There was a fairly sceptical piece on Newsnight Scotland too this evening (Wed 6th April).
The industry defence looked and sounded even more threadbare and desperate than usual.
The UK winter of 2009/10 clearly demonstrated the unsuitability and uselessness of this form of energy generation. During that winter, I regularly reviewed wind energy production. For a sustained period of about 3 weeks, wind energy production was no more than 8% of designed capacity and frequently less than 3%. Given that these machines require the consumption of energy in extreme cold conditions to krrp them warm and/or the consumption of energy to keep the rotors turning slowly (so as to avoid mechanical damage such as flattening of bearings) when there is no wind for sustained periods, it would not surprise me if the total net output from wind during this 3 week period was effectively nil. Just imagine if the UK was reliant upon this form of energy for say 30% of the UK's energy needs.
The winter of 2009/10 was said to be a 1 in 30 year event. Following that winter, I observed that no sane government could sign up to an energy programme where one in 30 yeears there would have to be significant power cuts (perhaps up to 12 to 20 hours a day) for the best part of a month in the depths of winter since this would lead to a substantial increase in cold weather deaths (the UK already has the worst record in Europe of premature deaths in old people during winter months). One would have thought that after the experience of that winter, any sane politician would have put an end to the folly of the wind programme. But oh no. The 1 in 30 year winter of 2009/10 was followed by a 1 in 100 year winter of 2010/11 and yet the politicians are seeking to increase not cut back on the windfarm project. This is sheer madness and will lead to many deaths due to increasing fuel poverty and unreliability of supply.
This is one more straw which ought to break the AGW's back. But it is taking such a long time - the scaremongers are certainly entrenched.
It was a year ago that this report appeared at the BBC about the cracks in the dam,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2010/01/the_dam_is_cracking.html
and the dam will still not crumble.
The BBC Scotland story is here.
Note that Jenny Hogan (policy director, Scottish Renewables) said:
What curious comment: "as you don't have a viable way to lower emissions, you mustn't point out that ours is non-viable." (And I liked her "It could be argued".) Desperate stuff.
Nuclear power is clearly the answer to Jenny Hogan, but I doubt the Muir Trust would back nuclear..
"It concludes that the average power output of wind turbines across Scotland is well below the rates often claimed by industry and government."
A resigning matter surely: or is a severely flawed energy policy with enormous repercussions for the whole electorate a price worth paying to appear green? If so, where is the demand for this greenness and what moral authority does it draw from to allow deceit to be one of its cornerstones?
Analysis of hard data from National Grid shows that wind behaves in a quite different manner from ... wind speed records which in themselves are averaged.
I don't suppose that if we actually measured heating and cooling costs, rather than averaged instantaneous temperature records, that we would find precisely the same effect with heat?
Well, the report on the BBC website that Robin links to was itself a scandalous piece of reporting.
Every time there's a study which establishes *facts* that weaken the case for wind energy, the BBC are very careful to give the last, and extended, word to Scottish Renewables, a lobby organisation for the wind industry.
Compare that to the pieces on Fukushima. Do they EVER give the last word to spokespersons from the nuclear industry? Or reports on the harm from smoking closing with three paragraphs from the tobacco industry? Aye, right.
Note also the unchallenged stupidity and irrelevance of the first comment by Scottish Renewables in that report: no form of energy generation is 100% efficient. That was given without quotation marks (the BBC are always very careful to put quotation marks around things they don't agree with). But the whole point of the JMT study was that while no form of energy generation is 100%, no form of energy generation is as inefficient and wasteful of resources as wind. What the study shows is that wind will never have the slightest impact on C02 emissions savings. And that the loss of amenity to our lives will never be compensated by 'safe and secure' energy provision.
Finally, it was inexplicable why the BBC report should be confined to the 'South of Scotland' section of their website. This was a report of national importance.
Nothing the BBC does surprises me any more but this really takes the biscuit.
It will be really interesting to see the political repercussions of this report within Scotland. Salmond and the SNP have been totally duped by the renewable sector's spin - so much so that he didn't stay to listen to Rupert Soames excellent speech to the parliament. Salmond went on record later to dismiss Soames by stating that Scotland already generates 25% of its electricity from renewables, which is patently not true, except on the intermittent days when the wind is neither too weak nor too strong.
I am not totally against renewables, I grew up in the Highlands and am very much in favour of large scale storage based hydro, which is largely controllable, cheap and safe. I could even cope with a few wind farms if they were in the right place. But the politicians have lost the plot if they think that 30GW of renewables is possible by 2025, as they seem to do. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/28/salmond-green-electricity-scotland Madness we cannot afford.
Reported in the Daily Mail today:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1374251/Wind-farms-working-just-21-capacity.html
The Eastern Daily Press (Norwich & Norfolk) also had a brief mention, however they were more concerned with the UEA's announcement of a postgraduate course in energy engineering and environmental management.
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/education/university_of_east_anglia_sets_up_course_to_put_east_anglia_at_forefront_of_green_energy_industry_1_856689
No one should be surprised that the last word is given to organisations like Scottish Renewables. In effect this is Government policy as set out in Carbon Plan - it talks about "enthusing our whole society" re cutting greehhouse gas emissions.
The Carbon Plan itself is worth a posting here in its own right. I would have thought. There is enough in that document to cause multiple heart attacks. Ceretainly, it deserves billing as a national suicide note.
richard verney - I too took a great interest in the NETA tables during last winter. On several (prolonged)occasions wind output was 0.1% of demand (actually probably less, but the tables only report to one decimal place).
When ARE the politicians going to wake up..??
Slightly OT, but an extraordinary comment by Spartacusisfree to Dellers’s piece. Piers Corbyn has turned his attention to earthquakes, apparently, and has suggested that the US might be at some risk soon.
“government funded researchers may be intentionally censoring inconvenient seismic activity that would lend credence to Corbyn’s claims that lunar gravitational forces are instrumental not only on Earth’s climate but also on earthquake activity”
A few weeks ago, I made the effort to switch on the TV. I heard, with considerable incredulity, Simon Hughes say that we could set up a solar array in Morocco and transport the output back to the UK. With people like that in Government, what hope do we have?
Also, can anyone explain this new obsession with energy security? Again, Simon Hughes said it and I couldn't help wondering whether oil from Saudi or solar from Morocoo was the more secure supply.
@ diogenes
It sounds like he's been reading Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, by David J C Watkins, who is now the Government's pet science advisor and a paid-up warmist.
He advocates exactly that.
He is at pains to stress that he's only talking about what appears to be technically feasible, not what it is actually economic to do. That is how ideas like that got into the book. It can be done - at huge cost and at the cost of being dependent on Middle Eastern respect for property rights and contract law rather than on Middle Eastern oil.
How this is an improvement I can't really see. Sunshine won't run out, but we'll be Ukraine, Morocco will be Russia and the sunshine will like Russian gas that gets cut off whenever the Ukraine pisses off Putin.
J4R
David JC MacKay?
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Don't be too harsh on MacKay. He has gone to the trouble of writing a good, if slightly optimistic analysis of the potential of renewables to displace fossil fuels.
A critical reading tends to support the case that renewables are unlikely to do this. His work is a valuable resource.
Can I humbly draw readers' attention to my letter published in 'The Sunday Times' Business section on 3rd April, commenting on an article the previous week about the huge new turbines proposed for the London Array.
The thrust of my argument..? Wind is erratic; unreliable; and unpredictable - always was, and always will be. Making bigger and bigger turbines changes nothing.
Oh - and an industry built on subsidies and tax breaks is never, ever going to be viable long-term.