Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 09/11/2011 6:52:10 PM PDT by george76
These pointless monstrosities will continue to proliferate until the Government sees sense.
Three separate news items on the same day last week reflected three different aspects of what is fast becoming a full-scale disaster bearing down on Britain. The first item was a picture in The Daily Telegraph showing two little children forlornly holding a banner reading “E.On Hands Off Winwick”.
This concerned a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral, to be built nearby by a giant German-owned electricity firm. The 40 residents, it was reported, have raised £50,0000 from their savings to pay lawyers to argue their case when their village’s fate is decided at an inquiry by a Government inspector.
...
Alas, despite all the practical evidence to show why wind power is one of the greatest follies of our age, those who rule our lives, from our own politicians and officials here in Britain to those above them in Brussels, seem quite impervious to the facts.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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Pure idiocy.
My power company recently announced that they have decided against building the new coal fired plant and are building a wind farm instead (Plus raising my rates an “estimated” 6%)
More workers have already died falling from wind turbine towers than all nuclear power plant accidents combined, except Chernobyl in USSR. While nuclear power goes back 60 years, wind turbines are a recent phenomena.
ping
1. It must be competetive with fossil or nuclear energy derived electricity.
2. The environmental damage to the locals must be fully compensated, those blades make a bucket load of noise and chew up the occasional bird.
3. No government monies can be used to subsidize the wind power.
The above three criteria in effect would stop all wind power generated electricity today. When and if wind power can meet the above criteria I will support it. Today it does not meet even one requirement much less all three.
0 promised higher electric bills.
More blackout like Kalifornia had recently ?
...a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral...Everyone has a steak in this.
I have absolutely no problem with wind power and support it if it can pass the following criteria.
4. It must be totally invisable to the naked eye.
Holy Moly is that Consumer’s Energy? Detroit Edison?
Crap, I have both.
Mmm steak...
Mmm steak...
Porterhouse or T-Bone?
What a nightmare.
Porterhouse or T-Bone?
Hmm, I don't!
Thanks, Civ.
“Everyone has a steak in this.”
That takes some chops.
Windfarms. Ecofascist environmental equivalent to a strip mine.
Consumers.
You are lucky. The kooks in California have MANDATED that 1/3 of our power must come from wind and solar. Look for rates to double and power to be unreliable.
How many people died at Three Mile Island?
One less than died in Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile.
There is one being proposed here in michigan that would cover some 6,000 acres with towers 4 and 5 hundred feet tall. I did some estimating and figured that they would be visible over an area of nearly 200 square miles.
I don’t remember the exact figures but it was enough for me to decide I’d rather live a mile from a coal fired plant.
There is of course one more concern. Wind transfers energy (heat) from one place on Earth to another. If enough windmills are built, they will slow the wind down and extract that energy from the wind. As result, the energy will not be released where it was meant to be. The air will be colder. How will this impact the precious climate that so many "scientists" are agog about?
Note that if the air gets colder then the water vapor in it condenses into water droplets. You will get clouds and rain where no rain was supposed to be, and accordingly other locations will not get that water. I somehow doubt that any of that was included into the environmental study.
It's amazing how common sense (or reality) gets checked at the door...........
I’d like to laugh at the Brits for this but we’re still converting our food into ethanol.
Utter drivel, even Algore has written more intelligent factual crap than this.
But he’s magical.
“There is of course one more concern. Wind transfers energy (heat) from one place on Earth to another. If enough windmills are built, they will slow the wind down and extract that energy from the wind. As result, the energy will not be released where it was meant to be. The air will be colder. How will this impact the precious climate that so many “scientists” are agog about? “
OK wise guy, I live in eastern New Mexico, the most windy place in the nation, and windmill Heaven. We have lots of windmills! Then how come we had triple digit heat most of the summer? We have enough windmills we should have been wearing sweaters all summer. And our heat should have been pushed up to Seattle WA. I know junk science when I see it.
Hat tip to FreeReign.....
equivalent to a strip mine
Worse! Strip mines will be returned to a natural habitat after they are mined out. Windmills may very well be a blight on the environment for decades.
Strip mines actually produce a product for sale at a reasonable price. I’ll take a coal bearing strip mine to a bunch of windmills any day any time.
Strip mines are capable of efficiencies that can be measured above 30 percent. Windmills are limited to 30 percent or less by the very nature of wind.
You are a rare steakholder. You have used FreeRepublic as your medium to prove it. Well done.
OK wise guy, I live in eastern New Mexico, the most windy place in the nation,
You might get some argument from the entire state of WY
Amen. Truly a blight indeed.
We are, unfortunately, beset by these monsters here in TX and in large part thanks to, alas, GWB. One of the last things he did as Governor was “ok” the wind power initiative we have plaguing us today. Nonwithstanding the fact that they are a scam, scamola, fairy tale, a fool’s bet, hogwash, hooey, balderdash, and bilge.
Now, for those landowners who’ve chosen to accept leases for these catastrophes, they are told that there is a giant pile of money being put aside somewhere in Austin (cough, BS) just in case, for whatever reason, in the unlikely event that the mills on their property are shuddered that the cost of removal and reclamation will be paid for. Ya know, some event like the taxpayer subsidies supporting them now running out and the machines becoming instantly uneconomical.
Wyoming
Pfftt!!! What they call wind, we call a gentle breeze!
The hundreds of windmills west of Minneapolis is pathetic. Each week a few less are functional. In five years they will all be abandoned. At least the raptors can nest on them.
The Feds guarantee loans to a well connected green energy firm than no lender would normally make. The execs pretend to build a company as they drain money from the firm in exorbitant salaries & perks. When sufficiently drained, the company declares bankruptcy, & the execs walk away with a bundle of cash, some of which they return to friends in Washington, as a way of saying thanks, keep up the good work, & let's do it again, real soon. Then the cycle repeats.
It is as obvious as the Sun, & has been going on as long as Congress has been allowed to allocate funds & the President spends it. It is also a BIG part with what is wrong with politics in this country, & a primary reason why we should have the absolute smallest gov’t budget possible, at all levels. The fewer dollars a politician controls, the fewer dollars will be stolen from the people.
The killer is its epic unreliability. That’s the reason for all this “smart grid” talk you see in TV ads, you know. They figure that if you could just cover the world with these things you could convert time averages to spatial averages, and let the “smart grid” figure it all out. I don’t think it works even on paper.
The fewer dollars a politician controls, the fewer dollars will be stolen from the people.
One could say that by virtue of the above we would be guaranteed more crooks in the private sector, but then that could be seen as a real benefit. They would be more likely to be prosecuted for their crimes than the average politician.
Each windmill produces, say, 10 kW. Every square yard of Texas generates 1 kW of heat from Sun. You need one windmill per 10 square yards to break even. I doubt that you have *that* many windmills and that much wind :-)
The climate of Texas won't be affected because it receives so much energy from the Sun. However it may well be that windmills placed in colder and more humid areas of the country, and especially at higher elevations, can nudge the temperature of the air below the dew point. In Texas you can't take enough energy out of wind to drop the air temperature from +100F to +65F (for 20% relative humidity.) However if the air is moist (say, 90% RH) then the same +100F air needs to be cooled only by 4 degrees for the dew to form. In other words, the effect will be seen only in areas of high relative humidity.
I don't know if this effect is negligible or not, but perhaps it should be looked into, along with the noise and with the danger to birds.
I personally prefer solar power because it can be produced without moving parts; it is more reliable this way. Windmills can work only in a narrow range of wind speeds, and they are complex mechanisms that are dangerous to install and service. There is a photo of a shorted generator earlier in this thread.
Every environmentalist group on the planet should be forced into paying for the removal of these eyesores once reality sets in that they are a fiasco. It should not be left up to the taxpayers to pay for these mistakes.
That's not really correct. Wind in Texas generally meets your three criteria.
Ugh. We had nearly 300.00 bills last winter.
Use them for location shots for "some years after civilization fell" movies
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