Blowin In The Wind – Wind Energy Comes With A Cost

American Council on Science and Health ^ | 06/09/2021 | Chuck Dinerstein

[Kid Shelleen]

Off-shore wind lasts longer and is stronger than on-shore, making off-shore wind farms (OWF) a source of renewable energy – except, of course, when it blocks your view, and those NIMBY (not in my backyard) types object. To be a valuable, efficient energy source, you need to cluster those turbines ---SNIP---

Off-shore wind farms impact the local ecology, beneath the waves from the built environment and above by their effect on the wind. We should diversify our energy sources; the wind is a promising alternative. But to believe wind farms come at no or little ecologic cost is the same hubris that tells us to continue to burn, baby, burn those fossil fuels.

[Kid Shelleen]

30 years from now when the civilized world is dotted with Chinese solar panels and wind turbines we may see genuine man made "climate change".

[PIF]

30 years from now when the civilized world is dotted with Chinese solar panels and wind turbines made coal fired power plants, we may see genuine man made "climate change".

[qaz123]

Is it me or does this article make a pretty strong case for not having these things, even when the author might be trying to push for the things?

[Tell It Right]

The #1 problem I have with wind or solar is it's almost always framed as someone forcing someone else to make it happen in a way I don't see it or know about it except for the imagined good about it so I feel better.

I'm all for solar and/or wind if you use your own money to implement your own solution for yours and your family's energy needs. I've never felt more libertarian in reality than when I started to produce most of the power my family consumes. But that was my choice to use my money to make it my way on my property looking the way I wanted it to look. If the government finds an excuse to jack up power costs on everybody else to save us from too much CO2 in a world where they're trying to have more CO2 consuming plants anyway to keep the north pole from melting in 10 years like we've been worried about for 30 years so that global warming quits causing so many blizzards or whatever blah blah blah they come up with ... it won't hardly affect me because I don't buy much from the grid anyway. But I'll be against them forcing you to pay to avoid their fantasy dystopia.

[cgbg]

One bizarre element of the leftist’s fantasy is they insist that seas are rising and will flood coastal properties.

Then they buy coastal properties and complain that wind farms shouldn’t be built to block their view!

[Tell It Right]

"One bizarre element of the leftist’s fantasy is they insist that seas are rising and will flood coastal properties. Then they buy coastal properties and complain that wind farms shouldn’t be built to block their view!"

Agree 100%! And my take on global warming anyway is: we should be grateful for it. We've been coming out of the Little Ice Age for about 2 centuries and it's been a mostly good thing just like the Medieval Warm Period was a mostly good thing coming out of the Dark Ages, and the Roman Warm Period was a mostly good thing...

Until a few decades ago, the few people interested in climate science talked about the Current Warm Trend as though it's a good time to be alive. If you recall the brief fad in the 1970's of believing in a coming cooling period -- a lot of it was fearing that life today would go back to being like life in the Little Ice Age (around 1300 to 1800) when crop yields were down, rain patterns were less predictable, and plagues greatly increased. If you think about all the atrocities in history the libs usually fuss about (before the fascism and communism they want us to emulate), a lot of it was motivated in large part with the fallout of the Little Ice Age. The European expansion into the Americas -- crop land was at a premium when what crop land you already had in Europe yielded little. The same for indigenous tribes fighting each other and sometimes wiping each other out, particularly tribes from the north trying to migrate south. The same for black nations in Africa having to switch from exporting crops to exporting slaves. Basically everybody had too many people to feed or get sick and not enough crop land to support them. I'm not saying the cooling period was 100% responsible for all of that. I'm saying it was a major factor that we often overlook because we're supposed to be conditioned that global warming is a bad thing that only the Dims can save us from.

[cymbeline]

“trying to have more CO2 consuming plants anyway to keep the north pole from melting”

As the earth warms (regardless of why) plant growth is enhanced and so more CO2 is consumed by plants and they exhale more oxygen. Warming will cause areas that previously supported little or no plant life to have more plant life. Nature has a self-correcting balance between CO2 and oxygen in our atmosphere.

Fossil fuels come from plant material. The plants produce solid compounds that contain carbon captured from the atmosphere (from CO2) and from their roots. When the plant material (fossil fuel) is burned, each carbon atom is happily re-paired with oxygen atoms, releasing heat and gasses including CO2. Plants merely give off the CO2 that they originally took in.

[bennowens]

Wind turbines actually slow up the rotation of the earth. Remember Newton: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. So the energy that turns the blades has to be taken from something else…the rotation of the earth. If you want to say winds, you can trace that back to the same place.

[GOPJ]

If you think about all the atrocities in history the libs usually fuss about (before the fascism and communism they want us to emulate), a lot of it was motivated in large part with the fallout of the Little Ice Age. The European expansion into the Americas -- crop land was at a premium when what crop land you already had in Europe yielded little. The same for indigenous tribes fighting each other and sometimes wiping each other out, particularly tribes from the north trying to migrate south. The same for black nations in Africa having to switch from exporting crops to exporting slaves. Basically everybody had too many people to feed or get sick and not enough crop land to support them. I'm not saying the cooling period was 100% responsible for all of that. I'm saying it was a major factor that we often overlook because we're supposed to be conditioned that global warming is a bad thing that only the Dims can save us from.

True - but you have to remember - 'climate change' is a religion with liberal 'elites' because most of them are the average to stupid children of intelligent parents (like Kamala, the Cuomo brothers, Kennedy offspring, etc etc etc... DC private school dummies...working waaaaaay above their abilities...) So they don't want facts they want 'talking points' to make them look smart.

[Organic Panic]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-found-to-affect-local-climate/

Along with killing birds.

Amazing how well oiled the “green” energy lobby propaganda machine is.

[hecticskeptic]

One of the headings in the article is “What about the free lunch?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This one always makes me laugh. The idea is that since the ‘wind is free’, then after a few years of operation, it’s ‘free energy’, right? The fact that those years are beyond the lifespan of the equipment is almost beside the point. The big issue with wind turbines (and solar for that matter) is that they only produce energy when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. This means that the ‘backup power’ has to locked and loaded and ready to go at the drop of a hat. What does that scenario do for overall system efficiency? Well, virtually all equipment works best when it is running flat out… at anything less, efficiency drops. Let’s say the wind is blowing and the sun is shining at optimal, this means that all the coal and gas boilers are operating at a fraction of their max capacity and that point, efficiency is terrible… the coal and gas boilers will be operating like a car with both the gas and brake pedals pressed right to the floor. And if your grid has a nuke on line, what do they do? Well…. taking a nuke off line isn’t practical since most of them take about 3 days to bring them back on. So, what does the grid do? Well, they either shut the excess wind and solar down or they try to sell…. urrrr… make that give away the power.

Want to see a case study as to how bad it can get when utilities go ‘damn the torpedoes’ straight ahead and go bigtime into wind and solar? Take a deep dive into how bad Ontario is. There are two fellows in Ontario who analyze data and write blogs about how bad it is…. Parker Gallant and Scott Luft.
https://parkergallantenergyperspectivesblog.wordpress.com/
https://coldair.luftonline.net/2020/02/an-outlook-against-lower-electricity.html

[Renkluaf]

You can't turn silica into silicon, make steel or concrete without . . . COKING COAL!