Monument to green stupidity
Once again, the futility of wind energy has been brought into sharp focus in an article by Christopher Booker in the UK Telegraph. The lights will be going out in Britain if the present government, and in particular Chris Huhne, continues with its suicidal plan to wreck the country’s energy generation capacity:
Centrica and other energy companies last week told [the Department of Energy and Climate Change] that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.
We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on “spinning reserve”, 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. This is that their power continually fluctuates anywhere between full capacity to zero (where it often stood last winter, when national electricity demand was at a peak). So unless back-up power is instantly available to match any shortfall, the lights will go out.
Two things make this even more absurd. One, as the energy companies pointed out to DECC, is that it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose. The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency – thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.
How supposedly intelligent people can be taken in by this nonsense is beyond belief, unless of course, rational thinking has flown out of the window, and all that remains is devotion to a green religion.
Read it here.
Australian Climate Madness 
Even greenies could be “Browned” off by that information
It doesn’t matter that they won’t even reduce emissions and will cost a heap. It feels good. It appeases guilt and that is all that matters to greenies.
It seems, for some of us at least, the human race hasn’t advance very much in the past one thousands years:
The Persians thought that human tears could cure a variety of ailments. So they used to bottle them for future use.
Elizabethan women used to think that drinking a puppy’s urine would do wonders for their complexion.
The ancient Greek believed that the womb had two compartments – one for girls, the other for boys.
The number 4 is reckoned to be unlucky in Japan because it’s pronounced the same as “death”.
The Greens thought they could control the Earth’s climate by limiting mans’ output of carbon dioxide through taxes.
Hi Baldrick, the Greem People don’t come from any of those two compartmentss. The midwifes will confirs / werify that the Green People are born on the wrong hole = everythyng they say or do, is offensive to the nose.
It’s one thing to believe this highly suspect (at best) stuff about anthropomorphic global warming … sorry, climate change. It’s a whole leap further into stupidity to then carry out policies which are irrational even by the standards of that dodgy logic in order to “solve” the problem you think you have.
Please tell me someone in our (UK) government will wake up soon and call time on all this nonsense because quite frankly, I’m being charged quite enough thank you for gas, electricity and diesel for my car without further hikes casued by bad energy policy. That’s before we consider what it’s doing to the wider national and global economies
Wind power doesn’t even make me feel good.
CB said, “gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency.”
I assume he does not mean full power.
I did some control panel work at a coal back up plant (got a 290 volt DC jolt in the arm, so I remember it well, AC would have killed me). The engineers said that switching power sources was the hardest test for the system. It is not something you want to do often, if at all.
Switching AC high power from one source to another is hard on the grid, and if it isn’t done right, lights go out or transformers go Kaboom. Although wind powered bird mills don’t produce much power, daily switching destroys the grids ability to supply reliable power.
Talk to power engineers, if you can. Here in Canada, they have been gagged by the provincial governments that employ them.
Good luck!
Wind Powered Employees!
A comment to the Thanet article makes a telling condemnation of the whole business (from the same UK Telegraph article). Very funny…
You are running a business called UK plc. You have to, by law, employ an individual (wind energy) who may or may not turn up for work and you are contracted to pay him 3–5 times the amount you pay your other more reliable, full-time employees on the occasions when he does breeze into the office.
Not only that, but you have to provide the latest and most costly office furniture and technology (grid infrastructure) to realize whatever output he may or may not produce. You also have to pay other employees (back-up generation) who are compatible with his erratic work patterns. They spend a lot of their time at their desks, ready to take on the work-load every time he takes a break or doesn’t show at all, but naturally, are bored doing nothing productive and are not quite as efficient as they would be if they had a proper structured workload.
After a few years of this (your company now consists of approx. 30% of these ‘renewable’ employees), your customers are impoverished and enraged by their ever escalating bills which you’ve passed on to them, so that eventually, your company folds and the lights go out for the last time.
OhSmeg is not totally with it.
Uk nuclear has already passed their stuff-ups of the last two decades to the taxpayer.
Uk wind are the same owners and players–so you have been double-dipped.
I notice that confucious and athena want to claim ‘the climate’
[and communists] must be to blame–rather than the decades of individuals who ‘swore blind’ that ‘privatisations’ benefit all.
As for the first world war crap–any nation that is stupid enough to allow one monarchs relative to spill your blood probably needs a very long wake up to even see ‘the light’–let alone suggest they actually represent it.
Even einstein understood where that pretense led–more war mongering and apologies for the bills.
moronic…
They have Huhne and we have Brow(h)n. Same type of marxists lenists economic saboteurs scum vielding power illegitimately gained.
All the power they will get from solar panels and windmills; allready installed and will be installed, will not produce half of electricity that would have being produced on Franckilng river in Tasy. Prevented to be built by Bob Brown. ABC keep repeating that: because the dam wasn’t built, lots of tourist get there. If the dam was built, even more tourist would have being going there. Dams improve the climate. Tasmania is on simillar latitude as Japan. Japan has more than double the polution than Tasy, but never bushfires. We need climate change! When do we need it ?! NOW!!!
There are some recent threads on Climate Audit regarding renewable power — worth a look.
We have the same problems in Ontario:
Good Luck!
The Lights are going out all over the world (except China and India)…
= a paraphrase of the declaration attributed to Sir Edward Grey on the outbreak of World War 1.
“Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon KG, PC, FZL, DL (25 April 1862 – 7 September 1933), better known as Sir Edward Grey, Bt, was a British Liberal statesman. He served as Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, the longest continuous tenure of any person in that office. He is probably best remembered for his remark at the outbreak of the First World War: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Grey,_1st_Viscount_Grey_of_Fallodon
Make no mistake we are already at war with the “climate” confidence trick being perpetrated by the totalitarian enemies of humankind.
A return to the darkness of the middle ages feudalism is the Agenda!
Not just the Lords’ country estates this time, but whole countries in feudal and debt bondage to the banksters!
“Greek fire sale as country faces reality…
“Greece vows to sell many state-owned assets and catch up to what European countries started doing back in the 1980s. So, better late than never. But can Greece really sell £50bn worth of assets as promised? ”
The vultures are poised to swoop.
http://billionaires.forbes.com/article/05kw2M5eBKbF6?q=billionaire+OR+billionaires+OR+billionaire%27s