Episode 27 – Fake and Vulgar – The Truth Paid Bare – Unintended Consequences – Chapter 9 Part 4

Number 3 – Misrepresentation and Inefficiency

When wind advocates promote the glories of wind power, they use numbers based on the windmill’s nameplate rating, its maximum capacity – as in a February 20, 2015 Earth Watch article, which said, “…the total amount of wind power available… has grown to 318,137 megawatts in 2013.”

They Don't Last Long — They Don’t Last Long

But because wind power is intermittent, windfarms usually generate an average output of about 33% of their capacity, which is why 318,137 megawatts is very misleading, and 95,000 would be more accurate, perhaps even generous. Thus, when they say that windmills can supply xxxxxxx homes, they are usually talking about the cumulative plate ratings on the generators – the output under ideal conditions, not the average amount of electricity they really produce.

US EIA Table 6.07.B. Capacity Factors for Utility Scale Generators Primarily Using Non-Fossil Fuels

US EIA monthly capacity factors 2011-2013

Neither solar nor wind can deliver the 24/7 “baseload” power that is provided by nuclear plants plus hydropower, natural gas, oil and coal. Of those five, only nuclear power plants (despite Chernobyl, a plant deemed to be “illegal” everywhere else in the world), have been safely delivering carbon dioxide-free power for more than fifty years. (Wind also can’t handle cold weather.)

Chicago Loses Wind Power During a Polar Vortex, by Chris Martin, Bloomberg, 31 January 2019

A strong tropospheric polar vortex configuration in November 2013

Great Britain, faced with building 12 nuclear plants or the 30,000 1-MW windmills needed to provide an equal amount of power, chose nuclear. And Japan, which closed its nuclear plants due to post-Fukushima panic, has begun to reactivate them, which will reduce the thousands of tons of CO₂ they’ve been dumping into our atmosphere by burning methane [‘Natural’ Gas].

Nuclear Plants and Facilities in East Asia and Japan (Maps current as at January 2015) -Nuke Info Tokyo No. 165

Germany, which over-reacted by closing nuclear plants in favour of wind and solar, is paying almost four times more for electricity than nuclear France. And with its industries hurting, the Merkel government has begun to rethink nuclear power. While they debate, they are creating more CO₂ by burning lignite, the dirtiest member of the coal family.

“Fake and Vulgar”, climate news from Germany
“…Germany’s wind turbines as a whole ran at between 0 to 10% of their rated capacity 45.5% of the time…! The turbines, which the German government says will become The “workhorse” of the German power industry, ran at over 50% of their rated capacity only… 5.2% of the time.”
Pierre L. Gosselin, 2014

Germany 2014 Report Card Is In! Its 25,000 Wind Turbines Get An “F-“…Averaged Only 14.8% Of Rated Capacity! by Pierre L. Gosselin, 7 February 2015

Adjusted “Unadjusted” Data: NASA Uses The “Magic Wand Of Fudging”, Produces Warming Where There Never Was, by Pierre L. Gosselin, 25 June 2019

Weather Adjustments? Fear Driving the Wrong Solutions for our Energy Needs

Merkel: Nuclear phase-out is wrong 10 June 2008

Angela Merkel, Scientist and Chancellor of Germany 2005-2021

German onshore wind power – output, business and perspectives, by Benjamin Wehrmann 12 Apr 2022

Germany “paid” for the top line of the following graph, but only got the dark blue spikes. The light blue area is primarily supplied by burning carbon, which worsens Climate Change. (Every megawatt of wind generation capacity requires at least another MW of natural gas or coal generation for backup.)

German Installed Wind Power and Generation

German Wind and Solar Installed and Generation 2017

***Size Comparison of Wind Turbines – Huge does not equal massive increases in output***

Germany Faces Huge Cost of Wind Farm Decommissioning by Franz Hubik, 15 September 2017, Handelsblatt

In Germany, more and more wind turbines are being dismantled. The reason: subsidies are running out, the material is worn out… dismantling is extremely complex and expensive.

How much is wind power really costing Ontario? 31 cents per kWh, by Parker Gallant, 6 December 2016

Parker Gallant Uncovers the Hidden Costs of Ontario’s Insane Wind Power Policy

Wind Projects Across Canada, 23 February 2022

Germany’s Wind & Solar Power FAIL: Top Economist Declares Energiewende “Delusional”, 27 January 2018, StopTheseThings

Coming up next week, Episode 28 – Cow Farts

Links and References

#UnintendedConsequences #GeorgeErickson #FissionEnergy #NuclearEnergy #TheThoriumNetwork #Fission4All #RadiationIsGood4U #GetYourRadiation2Day #NuclearEconomics #CostofElectricity #Utilisation #EnergyProduction #Germany #Japan #UnitedKingdom #Canada

2nd Jul 20229th Jul 2022

Episode 25 – Hazards to Humans – The Blades of Death – Unintended Consequences – Chapter 9 Part 2

Burning Dutch Windturbine - Large Format

It’s not just birds and bats that suffer. According to the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, “Just in England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011, which translates to about 1000 deaths per billion kilowatt-hours.

Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data
to 31 March 2022

“Solar and Wind emit more radiation (from mining the rare earth metals), than the nuclear fuel cycle does.”
UNSCEAR 2016 REPORT SOURCES, EFFECTS AND RISKS OF IONIZING RADIATION

“In contrast, during 2011 nuclear energy produced 90 billion kWhrs in England with NO deaths and America produced 800 billion kWhrs via nuclear with NO deaths.”

Why is it almost sacrilegious for the Sierra Club and its clones to rethink windmills, and why do they refuse to watch presentations that compare the records of their “green” alternative energy sources to the record of CO₂-free nuclear power? Could $$$ be involved? (In 2012, TIME magazine reported that the Sierra Club secretly accepted USD 26 million from Chesapeake Energy – an oil company.)

Answering for Taking a Driller’s Cash, New York Times, 14 February 2012

Exclusive: How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Gas Industry—By Bryan Walsh 2 February 2012

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh report that 117 of world’s 200,000 windmills burn every year – far more than the 12 reported by wind farm companies. Even more throw their blades or have them torn off by climate change storms.

Fires are major cause of wind farm failure, according to new research by Colin Smith 17 July 2014

Why hasn’t our media featured this image of two Dutch engineers waiting to die? (It’s been available for years.) One jumped to his death. The other burned to death.

“The accident with Daan and Arjan was already five years ago. It is sad that still no or insufficient measures have been taken to guarantee safety.”
Mother of Arjan, 2018

Wind turbine fire risk: Number that catch alight each year is ten times higher than the industry admits

Why hasn’t our media published easily available images of burning windmills, windmills that have toppled over and windmills that have thrown their blades more than a third of a mile?

Dual deaths in wind turbine fire highlight hazards East County Magazine|Miriam Raftery|October 31, 2013

5 Wind Turbines Which Failed (Environmentally Friendly?)

Bats and Turbines

Bats and Turbines Download

TOO MUCH WIND! 10 Wind Turbine Fails

U. S. Insurance claims for 2018 reveal that blade damage and gearbox failures cost the industry USD 340,000 and USD 480,000 respectively. Claims associated with windmill foundations have averaged USD 1,800,000 per year, reaching USD 3,200,000 in 2018 due to extreme circumstances.

For examples of the opposition we encounter from many “greens” please see these excellent articles:

Saving the Environment from Environmentalism, by By Paul Lorenzini

Response to Robert Llewellyn – Fully Charged

Six New Papers Reveal A Hushed-Up ‘Green’ Reality: Wind Turbines Destroy Habitats

As mentioned near the end of Chapter seven – and repeated here for emphasis – when we include the positive medical data that was accumulated over thirty years from Pripyat and the region around Chernobyl, the worldwide death print for wind is 115 times worse than the death print or nuclear power, 340 times worse for solar, 3,000 times worse for natural gas and 27,000 times worse for oil.

Nuclear power is even safer than ‘benign” hydropower, which has a huge carbon footprint because of the energy needed to manufacture the cement in its concrete, and because reservoirs create large amounts of methane. (See Hydro’s Dirty Secret Revealed by Duncan Graham-Rowe.)

Hydroelectric power’s dirty secret revealed by Duncan Graham-Rowe

Furthermore, people who are forced to live close to windmills have complained of severe sleep deprivation, chronic stress, dizziness and vertigo caused by low frequency noise and inaudible noise below 20 Hz, known as infrasound.

Health effects of wind turbine noise and road traffic noise on people living near wind turbines

Effects of low-frequency noise from wind turbines on heart rate variability in healthy individuals

Adverse health effects of industrial wind turbines

French couple who said windfarm affected health win legal fight

Despite these problems, those who profit from selling, repairing and building short-lived, inefficient, wind and solar farms have no interest in replacing coal-burning power plants with highly efficient, environment- friendly, ultra-safe, Generation III+ reactors or Molten Salt Reactors that cannot melt down, cannot generate the hydrogen that exploded at Chernobyl and Fukushima – and can even consume much of our stored nuclear “waste” as fuel.

With these facts in mind, how can “environmentalists” support wind farms that require carbon-burning backup generators, have only a 20-year lifespan, are difficult to recycle and have larger death prints than nuclear power, which operates 24/7, has a much smaller carbon footprint, a 60-year lifespan, is 90% efficient, requires very little land, and kills no birds or bats?

Coming up next week, Episode 26 – Tilted Economics – Public Fund Pillaging

Links and References

#UnintendedConsequences #GeorgeErickson #FissionEnergy #NuclearEnergy #TheThoriumNetwork #Fission4All #RadiationIsGood4U #GetYourRadiation2Day #WindTurbines

23rd Jun 202218th Jun 2022

Episode 24 – Blowing in the Wind. An Eagles Nightmare – Unintended Consequences – Chapter 9 Part 1

Blowin’ Wind

I was thrilled when the first windmills appeared on the Laurentian Divide near my hometown of Virginia, Minnesota, but a few years later, having noticed a significant amount of “down time,” I checked on wind power’s record with the help of my new associates in the Thorium Energy Alliance and discovered that the windmill industry had been selling more sizzle than steak.

During the “green” search for energy alternatives, which was guided by an “anything but nuclear” bias, the Sierra Club and others to which I once belonged took pains to define what was “renewable” and what was not. In so doing, they deliberately (and ironically), excluded CO₂-free nuclear power, even though we have enough uranium and thorium to last 100,000 years.

Sierra Club – NOT founded on Nuclear

Because those who profit from wind and solar said nothing about their carbon footprints, environmental damage, resource use, inefficiency, bird, bat and human deaths (death prints) and the need for huge subsidies, we drank their Kool-Aid, and now wonder why it’s making us sick. Well, here’s why, from many points of view.

Number 1 – Safety

Windmills kill 1 million birds and 1 million bats per year, even as insect borne diseases like Zika, dengue fever and malaria are increasing. (Bats can be killed by just getting too close to the low pressure area that accompanies each blade, which ruptures their lungs) How “green” is that?

Energy company to pay up to $35 million after turbines killed eagles by Lindsey Bever, 9 April 2022

150 Eagles Killed. The Money Won’t Bring Them Back

Shouldn’t environmentalists care that, according to Save the Eagles International, “windmills kill 30 million birds and 50 million bats per year.”
George Erickson

Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines are killing 6-18 million birds and bats yearly – actual carcass count
Spanish Ornithological Society

Shouldn’t they care that Pacific Corp., which owns 13 windfarms, has sued the U. S. Interior Department to keep it from revealing how many birds and bats their windmills have killed?

Dead Eagle Data: Buffet/Berkshire/PacifiCorp Don’t Want You to Know

Don’t these “environmentalists” care that, according to Science magazine, a “single colony of 150 brown bats has been estimated to eat nearly 1.3 million disease-carrying insects each year”? Shouldn’t they know that, according to the US Geological Survey, bats consume harmful pests that feed on crops, providing about USD 23 billion in benefits to America’s agricultural industry every year?

53 Billion Reasons Why Bats are Important
United States Geological Survey

Bats Remove Millions of Tonnes of Crop Pests Each Year

“North America lost 3 billion birds between 1970 and 2019” [ WSJ] but no one mentions windmills for contributing to this disaster!

Birds Are Vanishing From North America

The number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century, scientists find.
Carl Zimmer 19 September 2019

Part 1 of Chapter 9 continues next week… Vanishing Humans…

Coming up next week, Episode 25 – Hazards to Humans. The Blades of Death.

Links and References

#UnintendedConsequences #GeorgeErickson #Fission4All #RadiationIsGood4U #GetYourRadiation2Day #InvisibleFire #Eagles #Bats #Birds #SierraClub #WindTurbines

Tag: Wind Turbines

Episode 27 – Fake and Vulgar – The Truth Paid Bare – Unintended Consequences – Chapter 9 Part 4

Number 3 – Misrepresentation and Inefficiency

Links and References

Episode 25 – Hazards to Humans – The Blades of Death – Unintended Consequences – Chapter 9 Part 2

Links and References

Episode 24 – Blowing in the Wind. An Eagles Nightmare – Unintended Consequences – Chapter 9 Part 1

Blowin’ Wind

Number 1 – Safety

Links and References

A Passion for Rare Earth Elements and Thorium? Want to break a Global Monopoly? We Are Doing It.

Drama before Data: The Lies of Chernobyl

Critical Analysis of a Questionable Review on Molten Salt Technology