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Post by principled on Feb 7, 2012 21:02:01 GMT 1
Marchesa
I like this quote:
This should be common sense. Unfortunately, our technologically illiterate ruling elite appear- for the most part- to be devoid of common sense. I suspect it's to do with them sitting on their brains most of the day.
BTW, have you ever noticed how often people in the media refer to politicians as being intelligent? If this is true, then intelligence and common sense must surely be mutually exclusive!
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Post by marchesarosa on Feb 10, 2012 11:29:06 GMT 1
Windfarm noise – Renowned acoustician denounces double standards in noise regulations Tricks are used to allow wind farms too close to habitations In an email replying to the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW), world-leading specialist in low-frequency sound Professor Henrik Moller of Aalborg University denounces the improper acoustic measurements carried out by Danish authorities. Dear Mark Duchamp The Danish 20 dB(A) limit for low-frequency noise cannot be compared to normal noise limits because * it is an indoor limit and not an outdoor limit like usual limits for wind turbine noise * the limit applies to the limited frequency range of 10-160 Hz – only frequencies in that range are included – the level of the full frequency range may be higher Without an acoustical background, it may be difficult to understand how much 20 dB(A) 10-160 Hz noise is, but the limit is the same as for industrial noise in Denmark, and it is in the same order of magnitude as the limits in most other countries that have low-frequency limits (the limit may be defined in completely different ways). Most people will easily hear a noise at that level, and some will find it annoying, in particular if it goes on round the clock. At low frequencies, the perceived intensity, the loudness, increases more steeply above threshold than at higher frequencies. This means that when the level is a few decibels above the 20 dB limit, the consequences are more severe, than if a limit for higher frequencies is exceeded by the same amount. Few people would probably accept 25 dB(A) in their home at night and hardly anyone would accept 30 dB(A). Therefore, measurements must be accurate. In the new Danish statutory order for wind turbines, the noise is not measured but calculated. This need not be a problem, if the calculations are correct. But they are not. The main problem is the sound insulation used to obtain indoor levels. The statutory order gives values to be used in the calculation, and these values are based on measurements in 26 Danish houses. Unfortunately, wrong measurements. Sound at low frequencies varies a lot in a room, and according to the Danish rules for industrial noise, the level should – briefly explained – be measured, where the annoyed person finds it loudest. The sound insulation must be measured the same way in order to be applicable for calculations of indoor levels from the outdoor level. But it was not. The indoor measurement positions were simply chosen randomly and not selected for the high level. Thus the obtained values of sound insulation are too high – by several decibels. Furthermore, statistical sound insulation values were chosen (from the wrong data) so that 33% of the houses have poorer sound insulation, meaning that the limit may be exceeded in 33% of the cases. And finally, the calculated values may exceed the limit by a 2 dB uncertainty value. Measured levels from industrial sources are not allowed to exceed the limit. All these errors sum up to probably not far from 10 dB, which means that the limit is suddenly not 20 but rather 30 dB(A). But the rules are claimed to give the same protection as for industrial sources, which is simply not true. I hope this helps your understanding. Sincerely, Henrik Møller – Henrik Møller Professor Section of Acoustics, Department of Electronic Systems Aalborg University Fredrik Bajers Vej 7 B5 DK-9220 Aalborg Ø, Denmark more here wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/09/windfarm-noise-renowned-acoustician-denounces-double-standards-in-noise-regulations/
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Post by marchesarosa on Feb 10, 2012 20:48:35 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Feb 28, 2012 16:19:44 GMT 1
From Prof Kelly's letter to The Times
...I am most worried by the billions of pounds being misinvested and lost as a consequence. Look out to sea at the end of 2015 and see how many windmills are not turning and you will get my point: there are already 14,000 abandoned windmills onshore in the US. Premature technology deployment is thoroughly bad engineering, and my taxes are subsidising it against my will and professional judgment.
Professor Michael Kelly
Prince Philip Professor of Technology, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 1, 2012 13:55:23 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 1, 2012 17:51:56 GMT 1
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Post by StuartG on Mar 1, 2012 20:03:52 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 5, 2012 13:09:22 GMT 1
Matt Ridley: The Beginning Of The End Of Wind
Sunday, 04 March 2012 23:36 The Spectator
The government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam – but why did it take them so long?
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.
If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.
This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.
Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.
In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.
America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)
So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.
Though they may not admit it for a while, most ministers have realised that the sums for wind power just don’t add up and never will. The discovery of shale gas near Blackpool has profound implications for the future of British energy supply, which the government has seemed sheepishly reluctant to explore. It has a massive subsidy programme in place for wind farms, which now seem obsolete both as a means of energy production and decarbonisation. It is almost impossible to see what function they serve, other than making a fortune from those who profit from the subsidy scam.
Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?
One answer is money. There were too many people with snouts in the trough. Not just the manufacturers, operators and landlords of the wind farms, but financiers: wind-farm venture capital trusts were all the rage a few years ago — guaranteed income streams are what capitalists like best; they even get paid to switch the monsters off on very windy days so as not to overload the grid. Even the military took the money. Wind companies are paying for a new £20 million military radar at Brizlee Wood in Northumberland so as to enable the Ministry of Defence to lift its objection to the 48-turbine Fallago Rig wind farm in Berwickshire.
The big conservation organisations have been disgracefully silent on the subject, like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which until last year took generous contributions from the wind industry through a venture called RSPB Energy. Even journalists: at a time when advertising is in short supply, British newspapers have been crammed full of specious but lucrative ‘debates’ and supplements on renewable energy sponsored by advertising from a cohort of interest groups.
And just as the scam dies, I find I am now part of it. A family trust has signed a deal to receive £8,500 a year from a wind company, which is building a turbine on land that once belonged to my grandfather. He was canny enough not to sell the mineral rights, and the foundations of the turbine disturbs those mineral rights, so the trustees are owed compensation. I will not get the money, because I am not a beneficiary of the trust. Nonetheless, the idea of any part of my family receiving ‘wind-gelt’ is so abhorrent that I have decided to act. The real enemy is not wind farms per se, but groupthink and hysteria which allowed such a flawed idea to progress — with a minimum of intellectual opposition. So I shall be writing a cheque for £8,500, which The Spectator will give as a prize to the best article devoted to rational, fact-based environmental journalism.
It will be called the Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy. Barring bankruptcy, I shall donate the money as long as the wind-gelt flows — so the quicker Dave cancels the subsidy altogether, the sooner he will have me and the prizewinners off his back.
Entrants are invited forthwith, and a panel of judges will reward the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.
My donation, though significant for me, is a drop in the ocean compared with the money that pours into the green movement every hour. Jeremy Grantham, a hedge-fund plutocrat, wrote a cheque for £12 million to the London School of Economics to found an institute named after him, which has since become notorious for its aggressive stance and extreme green statements. Between them, Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) spend nearly a billion a year. WWF spends $68 million a year on ‘public education’ alone. All of this is judged uncontroversial: a matter of education, not propaganda.
•••
By contrast, a storm of protest broke recently over the news that one small conservative think-tank called Heartland was proposing to spend just $200,000 in a year on influencing education against climate alarmism. A day later, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, with assets of $7.2 billion, gave a grant of $100 million to something called the ClimateWorks Foundation, a pro-wind power organisation, on top of $481 million it gave to the same recipient in 2008. The deep green Sierra Club recently admitted that it took $26 million from the gas industry to lobby against coal. But money is not the only reason that the entire political establishment came to believe in wind fairies. Psychologists have a term for the wishful thinking by which we accept any means if the end seems virtuous: ‘noble-cause corruption’. The phrase was first used by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir John Woodcock in 1992 to explain miscarriages of justice. ‘It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned,’ said the late Lord Denning, referring to the Birmingham Six.
Politicians are especially susceptible to this condition. In a wish to be seen as modern, they will embrace all manner of fashionable causes. When this sets in — groupthink grips political parties, and the media therefore decide there is no debate — the gravest of errors can take root. The subsidising of useless wind turbines was born of a deep intellectual error, one incubated by failure to challenge conventional wisdom.
It is precisely this consensus-worshipping, heretic-hunting environment where the greatest errors can be made. There are some 3,500 wind turbines in Britain, with hundreds more under construction. It would be a shame for them all to be dismantled. The biggest one should remain, like a crane on an abandoned quay, for future generations to marvel at. They will never be an efficient way to generate power. But there can be no better monument to the folly of mankind.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 5, 2012 13:22:42 GMT 1
How much profit will a turbine turn?
Developers of wind farms offer 'sweeteners' to local communities, but they may be tiny compared to the revenues.
By Christopher Booker 03 Mar 2012
Scarcely a week goes by when I am not asked by a local campaign group to publicise their fight against some scheme to build one of those increasingly hated wind farms. So many developers are now piling in on the subsidy bonanza that, according to a survey by the Western Morning News, in Cornwall and Devon alone no fewer than 600 such schemes are now being discussed or going through the planning process.
A ploy often used by developers to buy off opposition to their proposals is to offer cash to fund local community projects. But few campaign groups are aware just how derisory the sums often are, compared with the gains the developers stand to make.
I was recently approached, for instance, by Felix Williams, mayor of the little Suffolk market town of Eye, over a plan for two huge 3.4 megawatt (MW) turbines that would loom over the town from the site of a former wartime airfield nearby. Although the scheme was almost unanimously opposed by the town council, it was approved by Mid-Suffolk district council, on the grounds that it was necessary to meet the local target set by the Government, itself determined by our commitment to the EU to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020, mainly from tens of thousands of new turbines.
The developers tried to appease opponents of the scheme by offering Eye £7,000 a year. What Mayor Williams wished to know was how this compares with the profits they might make from it.
The developers specify the capacity of their turbines – which will be taller than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral – as 6.8MW. But they admit, because wind is intermittent, that the actual output will only be around 2MW. In fact, even this is optimistic: turbines in England generate on average only 20 per cent of their capacity, so it’s unlikely that the average output of the Eye turbines will be more than 1.4MW. Sticking with the developers’ own figure, though – how much would their 2MW earn them?
As a rule of thumb, the annual income per MW fed to the Grid from wind energy is around £800,000, half from the sale of the electricity, the other half from the subsidy we all pay through our electricity bills under the Government’s Renewables Obligation. (These can only be rough averages because the value of each varies.) So the income from the Eye turbines might be around £1.6 million a year – which hardly makes the £7,000 offered to the locals for the blighting of their skyline the bargain of the century. (As Mayor Williams says, the town already pays £5,500 a year just for its new unisex public lavatory.)
Compare this with what the BBC describes as “the huge windfall” being offered to villagers in Powys by the German-owned energy giant RWE, to win their support for a plan to build 65 3MW turbines, each 450ft high, at Llanbrynmair, on the hills of central Wales. This “sweetener”, as the BBC calls it, will amount to a staggering £18.8 million over 20 years. But from RWE’s own figures we can see that the wind farm’s possible income of £50 million a year will amount to £1 billion (£500 million of it subsidy) over the same 20-year period.
This is how preposterous the finances of the great wind scam have become – to yield, very inefficiently, only a fraction of our electricity. (One medium-sized gas-fired power station can produce 800MW, reliably, all the time, at a fraction of the cost.) Even David Cameron last week criticised onshore wind farms as “over-subsidised and wasteful of public money”. He should know, since his father-in-law makes £1,000 a day from one on his Lincolnshire estate. But of course this was only a hollow gesture to appease those 100 MPs who recently wrote to him in similar vein, carefully referring only to “onshore” turbines – when the subsidies for those offshore are twice as high and twice as indefensible.
The fact is that, thanks to that unrealisable commitment agreed with the EU, the Government will do nothing meaningful to remedy this grotesque waste of public money. The destruction of Britain’s countryside – against the wishes of communities like those in Suffolk, Powys, Devon, Cornwall and so many other places – will therefore continue at an ever greater rate.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 7, 2012 14:36:49 GMT 1
The Global Warming Policy Foundation publishes today a new report on the economics of wind powered electricity generation. Here is just a taste ...meeting the UK Government’s target for renewable generation in 2020 will require total wind capacity of 36 GW backed up by 13 GW of open cycle gas plants plus large complementary investments in transmission capacity – the Wind scenario. The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a capital cost of £13 billion – the Gas scenario. allowing for the shorter life of wind turbines, the comparative investment outlays would be about £120 billion for the Wind scenario and a mere £13 for the Gas scenario. www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/hughes-windpower.pdf |
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 19, 2012 12:25:08 GMT 1
Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain's 'wind rush'?Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html#ixzz1pYqNFsdD ---------- Richard Verney on Bishop Hill says .... if one wishes to see what the future has install for us look no further than the decaying windmills in California and Hawaii. When the subsidies run out and when the full costs (which have been grossly underestimated) of maintenance start rolling in, these useless mincers will be abandoned and left to decay since it will bankrupt the energy companies to dismantle them and dispose of them in a 'green' manner.... ---------- Wind generation will last only as long as the subsidy.
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 21, 2012 12:29:04 GMT 1
 The big fat zero of wind power in the bigger scheme of things. Why green energy isn’t making much inroads. |
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Post by StuartG on Mar 23, 2012 14:15:47 GMT 1
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Post by marchesarosa on Mar 23, 2012 14:52:54 GMT 1
I bet it will go bust before anything like 800 long term jobs are "created". This enterprise will last only as long as the subsidy lasts.
Their decision, coming less than a year after opening their offshore wind technology centre near Glasgow, follows many detailed discussions with the Scottish Government, SDI and Scottish Enterprise and the company's own careful analysis of locations offering the optimum environment to deliver its product.
In other words, anywhere for a toffee apple!
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Post by principled on Mar 23, 2012 22:14:51 GMT 1
Stu The Spanish government is broke, as are all of the autonomous regions and townhalls (average payment for drugs bill by hospitals is 4 years. Some local authorities have unpaid invoices going back 15 years!). Green energy subsidies have been slashed as a result. (see www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-27/spain-suspends-subsidies-for-new-renewable-energy-plants.html ) So naturally, if one owns a "green" energy company one is going to look around at those plonkers that are still offering subsidies. As Marchesa said "anywhere for a toffee apple"! |
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