Wind power
Or Hydro?
Posted on 05/03/2012 5:31:58 AM PDT by No One Special
ONE of the great popular misconceptions about climate-change sceptics such as Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, Cardinal George Pell and me is that we're all Big-Oil-funded, Gaia-ravaging, nature-hating emissaries of Satan. We can't look at a lovely pristine beach, apparently, without praying for a nice, juicy oil slick to turn up and wipe out all the pelicans and turtles and sea otters.
But this isn't actually true. I love our beautiful planet at least as much as your $180,000-a-year (for a three-day week) climate commissioner Tim Flannery does. One of my great heroes is Patrick Moore, the Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace with whose sensible, rational approach to environmental issues I agree 100 per cent. Another of my heroes, after an article headlined "Where eagles dare not fly" in The Weekend Australian on April 21, is this newspaper's environment editor Graham Lloyd.
It took great courage for Lloyd to write up his expose of the tremendous damage being caused by a wind farm to a small community in Waterloo, north of Adelaide. Most newspaper environment editors -- from Australia to Britain and the US -- tend, unfortunately, to be so ideologically wedded to the supposed virtues of renewable energy they find it all but impossible to criticise it.
Lloyd interviewed a number of victims whose lives had been ruined by the vast, swooshing wind towers looking over their homes. They found sleep almost impossible; they couldn't concentrate; they had night sweats, headaches, palpitations, heart trouble. Their chickens were laying eggs without yolks; their ewes were giving birth to deformed lambs; their once-active dogs spent their days staring blankly at the wall. The damage, it seems, is caused not so much by the noise you can hear but by what you can't hear: the infrasonic waves that attack the balance mechanism in the ear and against which not even home insulation can defend you. Its effects can be felt more than 10km away.
Inspired by Lloyd's article, I went to investigate and was heartbroken by what I found. Until you've seen what it can do to people, it's easy to dismiss wind turbine syndrome as a hypochondriac's charter or an urban myth. But it's real all right. Waterloo felt like a ghost town: shuttered houses and a dust-blown aura of sinister unease, as in a horror movie when something dreadful has happened to a previously ordinary, happy settlement and at first you're not sure what. Then you look up on to the horizon and see them, turning slowly in the breeze . . .
Even more shocking than this, though, were my discoveries about the finance arrangements and behaviour of the wind farm companies. What we have here, I believe, is the biggest and most outrageous public affairs scandal of the 21st century -- one in which the Gillard government is implicated and that far exceeds in seriousness and scope of the Slipper or Thomson sideshows.
At the heart of this scandal are the union superannuation funds that are using the wind farm scam as a kind of government-endorsed Ponzi scheme to fill their coffers at public expense. One of the biggest wind farm developers -- Pacific Hydro -- is owned by the union superfund Members Equity Bank. To meet its carbon reduction quotas, we're told, Australia needs to build about 10,000 new wind turbines like the ones that have destroyed Waterloo (and dozens of communities like it from NSW to South Australia).
The figures are mind-boggling. Each of those turbines will cost about $3 million, which means $30 billion even before you've started building the power lines. And where's this money coming from? The consumer, of course -- mostly via tariffs whacked on to the price of conventional, fossil-fuel energy prices, in the form of payouts called Renewable Energy Certificates.
Note that wind turbines produce very little power. Because wind is intermittent, they operate at between one-fifth and one-third of their capacity, meaning they are erratic, unreliable and have to be fully backed up by conventional "black" (mostly coal-fuelled) power. Where the money is to be made is through the REC subsidy. A 3MW wind turbine that generates (at most) $150,000 worth of electricity a year is eligible for guaranteed subsidies of $500,000 a year. A ridgeline hosting 20 or 30 turbines generates very little power -- but an awful lot of free cash for those lucky enough to get their snouts in the trough.
If the unions were merely exploiting government environmental legislation to milk the taxpayer it would be bad enough: but what makes the wind farm scam so scandalous are the public health issues. Why aren't we more aware of these? Because there have been cover-ups on an epic scale. The owners on whose land the turbines are built are subject to rigorous gagging orders (from law firms such as Julia Gillard's ex-company, Slater & Gordon); tame experts are paid huge sums to testify that there are no health implications; inquiries are rigged; victims are rehoused and silenced with million-dollar payoffs. The global wind farm industry -- a cash cow for everyone from Labor's unions to the mafia -- is so massive it can afford it.
Meanwhile the rest of us lose. Communities are divided, landscapes blighted, birds and bats sliced and diced, property values destroyed, lives ruined to deal with a "problem" -- anthropogenic CO2 causing "global warming" -- which most current evidence tells us doesn't even exist.
As a NSW sheep farmer fighting tooth and nail to stop a wind farm development near his beloved home told me the other day in trenchant style: "The wind-farm business is bloody well near a pedophile ring. They're f . . king our families and knowingly doing so."
I've been to Bloomington many times and you feel none of the symptoms this guy suggests are present everywhere. Now, if he'd like to finance the trip, I'll go to Australia and see if I can detect a difference ~ then if there is a difference maybe they can fix it.
Maybe Australians think these things are supposed to hum.
IMHO, wind farms are all scams. They never operate profitably without huge amounts of public cash as subsidies.
And, then there’s the birds. A friend of mine is the licensed electrician for a local wind warm. One of his duties is to pickup and dispose of the dead birds carcases every morning.
The management does not want the public to see all the dead birds.
The damage, it seems, is caused not so much by the noise you can hear but by what you can’t hear: the infrasonic waves that attack the balance mechanism in the ear and against which not even home insulation can defend you. Its effects can be felt more than 10km away.
Elephants communicate over long distances by infrasonic sounds. Even elephants miles apart through dense forest can communicate like this.
Last time I observed a Boy Scout gathering at a skeet shoot and not a one of them behaved any differently than any other Boy Scout I've ever encountered. They hit the clay pigeons. The guns fired properly. The boxes of shells didn't fall off the tables and blow themselves up. The windmills continued to turn overhead, silently, majestically, and expensively!
I think the lack of efficiency is where these devices get knocked out of the ballpark ~ the rest of this stuff might be real to someone but ............ I've heard the same stories about SECOND HAND SMOKE!
Anyone remember the power line scam here about 25 years ago? People near high voltage power lines claimed the same problems due to the induced magnetism.
A local company then built a large number of homes right under the power lines from a local power plant. The houses sold well and no one has complained for the last 25 years.
The power of suggestion is still very strong. Tell someone they “look sick” and soon they will begin to feel sick even though they are well.
BINGO...We have a winner.
That explains the curious and irritationg whistling sound that Obama makes when speaking.
Communicating to the drones.
(I kid you not,it happened...google "Cape Wind")
Which one requires more eminent domain to buy out and displace people who don’t want to sell so that a wind farm or lake large enough to be used for hydro can be made?
Considering the fact that there are literally thousands of hydro adequate reservoirs in the country, no imminent domain needs to be used unless its to put in a small generator building.
I always think of that event whenever someone proposes living under or very near a high tension line. DOES NOT COMPUTE ""BSZ+TLBLKZZ COM' $@$% pute!?BZ T"
The environmental movement is, of course, governed by liberalism which in order to survive must continually go one up on whatever was done yesterday. So,if someone puts up a windmill, the next guy has to put up ten. Then, to prove the windmills are the future then next guy has to tear out a hydro-electric dam that works silently with renewable energy, but doesn’t fit the new paradigm.
Governments are inherently easier to scam because they can be scammed in the guise of the “public good” where you only have to convince one beaurocrat to buy your “snake oil” for the “public good” or the good of their career and you are set for life.
When you scam individual citizens you have to convince a much larger number of people to get in on your scam and with each person you add to your scam the greater chance you will be exposed as a charlatan. Also the greater chance that a bunch of unhappy customers will show up at your door with torches and pitchforks or even worse lawyers....
Unless you've lived in proximity to one of these wind farms your experience is completely irrelevant.
In the NW where hydro is the only power generated for a very long time they want to replace all the dams with windmills. Save the fish kill the birds!! That is how logical the environmentalists are.
They’re removing dams here too but that doesn’t mean I’m going to say “OK we’ll go with what doesn’t work”.
Yes, it's more money...yes you have to have high wires going out..but it just seems to me...it could have been done with centralizing planning...way back when.
Granted...they aren't always producing a lot...and there are issues around the world with damns on rivers....But I'm thinking...if you place a damn...you may as well get some energy production from it.
OO - I agree w/ just about all you said, except for the centralized planning part. You’d have to be an idiot to put in a new dam now without having the potential for hydro power.
cc, I was thinking more of the new lakes that will be built, whether for power generation, flood control, water supply, or whatever. Those tend to displace a lot of people who don’t want to go, as opposed to wind farms which are usually placed on leased land where the owner is amenable. But your point is well taken, tho’ I’m guessing it would be quite the chore to retrofit an existing dam with power generating turbines.
Never really looked into it tho’. I think you’ve given me a suggested topic for my soon-to-be 6th grade son the next time he has to do a “save the earth” project for school. Which I’m sure will be this fall...
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