Delingpole: Donald Trump Is So Right to Wage War on Wind Farms…
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By Paul Homewood
h/t Harry Passfield
There’s a good piece from Dellers at Breitbart:
But there’s a very powerful lobby which would like us to see wind turbines as being clean, eco-friendly and vital for the planet’s future. So if President Trump is to crush this bloated, parasitical industry as it deserves he’ll need some serious fire support.
This piece by Matt Ridley is a big help. It convincingly demonstrates that wind turbines are even more of a monstrous stupidity than any of us had hitherto imagined.
It starts with a quiz, whose answer may surprise you:
To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.
Yep. All those views blighted; all that wildlife sliced and diced; all those billions of dollars of subsidies wasted – in order to produce a form of power so inefficient and triflingly irrelevant that it still supplies not much more than 0 per cent of the world’s energy consumption.
This isn’t something you ever hear from renewables industry lobbyists who would like us to believe that wind is the future:
Nationwide, wind provided 5.6 percent of all electricity produced in 2016, an amount of electricity generation that has more than doubled since 2010. Much of the demand for new wind energy generation in recent years has come from Fortune 500 companies including Home Depot, GM, Walmart and Microsoft that are buying wind energy in large part for its low, stable cost.
But then, so many and varied are the half-truths, distractions and outright lies put out the wind industry that in any other sector half of these reptilian scumbags would be behind bars by now for selling a false prospectus.
One dirty trick – see that paragraph on US wind coverage above – is to talk about “electricity” rather than “energy.” Ridley points out the difference here:
From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
Another well-used cheat is to quote the fact that 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable – leading the unwary public to assume, incorrectly, that the majority of this must be the two renewables they must commonly hear about, wind and solar.
In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.
Perhaps the biggest lie of all is that wind is now the cheapest form of energy.
As Paul Homewood explains in detail here, this is only plausible if you use Enron accounting techniques. If it were really true, though, then the wind industry would be able to survive without subsidies – which it won’t, can’t, and never will be able to unless, somehow, the laws of physics are radically altered. Wind, being intermittent, unpredictable, unreliable and limited in its intensity, was fine in the 17th century powering Dutch windmills to drain wetlands, but is next to useless meeting our rather more sophisticated energy needs in the 21st century.
And despite what its advocates claim, wind isn’t even “clean.”
Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.
Industry experts sometimes privately admit that in the life of a wind turbine it will never manage to offset its own carbon footprint.
Read the rest here.
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May 13, 2017 at 09:54AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 