The eagle has crash landed

I few days back I was pressing Harry Huyton, the RSPB's climate change bod, about the society's weak opposition to wind farms. His position is that the RSPB opposes windfarms when inappropriately sited. I pointed out that windfarms tend to be in upland areas, where raptors - particularly prone to wind turbine collisions - tend to be found in large numbers.

It also occurred to me that the society has been trying to reintroduce sea eagles in the east of Scotland, an area in which windfarm development is frantic and so I thought I would try to work out just how much overlap there is between the two. The RSPB's sea eagle newsletter has a useful map of sightings and maps of windfarm developments are also easy to get one's hands on.

Here are the results. I've fairly crudely superimposed the two maps and shaded out the east-coast wind farms in black, leaving the large coloured dots that represent the sea eagle sightings (ignore the small dots - that's just more windfarms).

The size of the dots for the eagles represents the number sighted rather than a range, but given that sea eagles have a range of up to 70 km, it's clear that the RSPB is going to have to oppose all east-coast windfarm developments north of the Firth of Forth and South of Aberdeen.

I'll ask Harry if he'd like to comment.

More windmill deterioration

David Mackay has left a comment on the earlier thread, saying that in fact he maintains that Gordon Hughes' estimates of windfarm deterioration are incorrect.

Christopher Booker did not check his facts: Booker asserts that "David MacKay ... could not dispute [Hughes's] findings", but this is poppycock. You can find a technical report I wrote, pointing out a significant flaw in Hughes's analysis here or here. Another paper is about to come out in a peer-reviewed journal, by Iain Staffell and Richard Green, which does the analysis properly, combining wind data with weather data. There is a decline in wind farm output, but it is much smaller than Hughes asserted.

As Guido would say: "Developing".

Chinese renewables

An article in the Financial Post in Canada looks at China's much-vaunted renewables industry and shows that it is nearing collapse:

Sinovel – one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers – went from earning hundreds of millions of dollars in profits in 2010 when the renewable energy industry was booming to millions in losses that grow by the day. Revenues are now just a fifth of what they were in 2010. The company has closed its overseas offices and recently laid off thousands of employees.

And it seems that the solar industry is doing just as badly. In China, just as in Europe, renewable energy was only able to survive if it was regularly hosed down with public funds. As soon as the taps were switched off, the industry was in trouble.

MacKay's dilemma

Christopher Booker's piece on windfarm policy this morning visits old ground for BH readers, namely Gordon Hughes' report on the deterioration of wind turbine performance over time. There is, however, an important bit of information towards the end of the article:

I gather that Prof Hughes showed his research to David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, who could not dispute his findings. So DECC is fully aware of this devastating flaw in its projections, but presses on with its insane policy regardless.

Click to read more ...

Ecocide echo - Josh 251

On the noisiness of wind turbines...

Click to read more ...

Windfarm noise: state of play

Via Angela Kelly comes this message from acoustician Mike Stigwood, who sets out the state of play on excess AM noise from windfarms. It looks like surrender from the developers.

Recent research presented at three planning inquiries that were conducted in September, October and November (Starbold, Bryn Lleweln and Shipdham - decisions awaited)  have hopefully exposed the misconceived arguments made by the industry's acousticians, which have successfully avoided controls over wind farm noise impact for many years.

After more than 4 years of smoke screens, obfuscation and erroneous objections raising unrealistic concerns and placing barriers in the way of necessary controls over the wind farm noise called "Excess Amplitude Modulation", industry acousticians have finally admitted a planning condition is "necessary" and "reasonable".  Excess AM is now shown to be neither rare nor only causing minor effects as claimed over the last few years, arguments that have successfully blocked planning controls leaving many communities exposed to serious noise impact.  Research by ourselves and the Japanese have exposed this as a common and serious problem.

Click to read more ...

The unfeeling in pursuit of the unthinking

Simon Jenkins has written an admirable blast at windfarms in the pages - believe it or not - of the Guardian.

I have spent two years traipsing Britain in search of the finest views. It is hard to convey the devastating impact of the turbines to those who have not seen them, especially a political elite that never leaves the south-east except for abroad. Fields of these structures are now rising almost everywhere. They are sited irrespective of the wind, since subsidy is paid irrespective of supply, even if there is none. It makes EU agricultural policy a paragon of sanity.

I don't think Jenkins is right when he says that politicians have been driven mad by the myth of free wind power. That's lazy thinking. Politicians are making logical decisions to get themselves reelected. It was the rational pursuit of the green vote that was behind the appearance of sanity. We have to ask ourselves why so many people were persuaded that wind power was a sensible way to go.

Shuffling the deckchairs

The government looks set to change the levels at which they fix prices for electricity. It seems that hard pressed consumers are going to hand over less cash to onshore wind and solar operators but more to offshore ones.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander described the shift in subsidy as "a rebalancing" and said overall spending would not change.

But Labour said "chopping and changing" pricing was bad for business.

As you can see it is fairly clear that all the big three political parties remain committed to ever-rising energy prices.

Sounds a bit off

Last week I discussed the work of Mike Stigwood on windfarm noise and the fact that the windfarm lobby had managed to nobble the Institute of Acoustics inquiry into the issue.

Today, a report in the Telegraph not only provides some confirmation of Stigwood's story, but also reveals that the green lobby's attempts to corrupt the policy process went even further than that. It seems that they also gained access to DECC officials and, a cynic might think, managed to get them to alter the official guidance on windfarm noise.

Internal energy department emails released following a freedom of information request show the lobby group met ministry officials, after which it was assured that “the majority of R-UK’s input” was “reflected in the guidance”.

Both the Government and the report’s author said last night that RenewableUK had not influenced the advice, but the emails raise new questions about the Coalition’s openness over its wind farm policy.

 The FOI request on which this story was based is here. 

[Update:the FOI reveals that DECC were using a wind-industry acoustician, from RES].

Array awry

The splendid news this morning is that the Atlantic Array, the monster wind farm planned for the Bristol Channel is to be cancelled "because the economics do not stack up".

Much the same could be said of most green initiatives.

Behind the windfarm scenes

Readers may remember Gordon Hughes' report about the lifetimes of real-world industrial wind turbines and the finding that this is much shorter than assumed in government cost projections. The reasons for the short lifetimes centre on wear and tear on the turbine blades and on the gearboxes.

In that vein, you may be interested in this recording from a forum for windfarm operators in which some of these problems are discussed in fairly plain terms. Having listened, you realise that the factors affecting performance are legion, including not only wear and tear, but dirt build-up on the blades, icing. These factors can severely impact upon performance, and because they tend to unbalance the blades they then increase wear and tear on the mechanical parts of the turbine. But icing is even more serious, as the last speaker on the recording notes:

Click to read more ...

Pat's progress

Pat Swords writes with news of his attempt to have the Irish government's renewables plans deemed illegal under the terms of the Aarhus Convention.

Readers will probably remember that the Compliance Committee overseeing the convention has ruled that Irish government is out of line. This decision will now go to a Meeting of the Parties to the convention:

Click to read more ...

The sound of the wind

Woodcut by Paul Bloomer (click for link)Yesterday was spent at the first annual conference of Scotland Against Spin, the umbrella group for Scottish anti-windfarm groups. This was top quality stuff, with an excellent array of speakers with some amazing stories to tell. I'm going to pass some of these on over the next few days.

The theme of the conference was the cost of wind power, so much of the focus was on economics, but the final speaker focused on noise, and had presumably been added to give a bit of relief from the numbers.

Click to read more ...

Greenery still killing the environment

It's behind a paywall, but we gather from the Herald that the Beauly-Denny power line, designed to bring all that wind power from the highlands down to the central belt of Scotland where it is needed, is scarring the landscape to an extent not envisaged and on a permanent basis.

Conservationists have raised concerns that tracks cut into hills to build a controversial power line, which were supposed to be temporary, are becoming permanent scars on the landscape. They say that, although the Scottish Government's planning permission for the 137-mile Beauly/Denny line was on the basis these "temporary tracks be removed", all landowners need to do to make them permanent is to apply to the local council.

Yet again, we see that environmentalism ends up damaging the environment. I hope Friends of the Earth are very proud of themselves.

Thought for the Day starts thinking

Thought for the Day, the BBC Today Programme's faith spot is usually characterised by a lot of faith and not a lot of thought, particularly where matters of global warming are concerned. It was therefore particularly interesting this morning to hear someone put forward the radical idea that when projects turn out to be foolish or misguided it mightn't be a bad idea to put a stop to them. Indeed there was praise for the Japanese retreat from renewables.

Environmentalists will not be amused.

The audio file is below.

(H/T Roddy Campbell)

Thought for the Day