Windfarms? We might as well use hamsters on treadmills

Mail Online ^ | 9/7/2009 | Peter Hitchens

[Saije]

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt.

But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace.

There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us to rely for our power on windmills, million upon million of them, as if we had never discovered more efficient and reliable ways of generating electricity.

And they are succeeding. Few areas in Britain are now unthreatened by deranged projects to install intrusive, gigantic wind-farms on prominent sites.

This must be one of the first instances of a civilisation voluntarily and consciously going backwards. We might as well rely for our economic and industrial future on tens of millions of hamsters pattering frantically round treadmills. Hamsters only do this by night. Windmills only make electricity when it is windy. See the problem?

For most of us, the truth has yet to sink in. Our old lightbulbs still function, or we have stockpiled a few. And the nuclear and coal-fired power stations which keep our country going have some years yet to run before they wear out or a Brussels decree shuts them down for ever.

But the time is not far away when we will find the irrational opinions of these maniacs being forced upon us unpleasantly in our daily lives. The lights will be too dim to read by.

[rwfromkansas]

I thought I had read it did store, but if not, wow.

That is a SERIOUS problem with wind energy!

[Flag_This]

Fifty to one hundred years from today people will look back on this period and laugh their a$$es off at us.

I understand the people pushing this have an agenda that goes far beyond "saving the planet," I just can't believe anyone listens to their stupidity.

[slowhandluke]

Even then, it stores what was made.

A windmill stores nothing. Battery or capacity technology to do that at the scale needed and at a convenient price point doesn't exist yet.

It does take some wind, and it is truly calm enough. Maybe parts of Kansas are never calm, but in MN/IA there are calm hot sweaty summer days which are also the peak electricity demand days.

And then, wind can be too strong forcing the windmills to stop.

Living our lives by the rhythms of nature, being hot and sweaty in the summer and dark in the windy winter is going backwards.

[dforest]

He looks like he is saying “what, me work”!

[slowhandluke]

You do realize they don’t actually take the wind itself....it still blows. All that is done is the movement is converted to electricity through the turbine’s motion.

They do take energy out of the wind, which slows the wind, so yes they do take the wind itself.

You have implied this in your own argument. If you convert movement to something else, that movement doesn't exist anymore, i.e. the wind slows.

I don't know the efficiency of energy extraction or how much the wind slows, but it's probably enough (>0) to cause some fanatic to get upset about it sometime in the future.

[chimera]

Capacity factor is the Achilles' Heel of any energy system whose primary source is by nature chaotic and unpredictable. Remember when CA was having their killer heat waves a few years ago? The capacity factor for wind generators in CA during that time, just when they were need most, was about 5%. Now, any other energy source used by a utility whose CEO proposed it, that got a 5% capacity factor during time of high demand, would result in that CEO being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

Nationwide, capacity factor for wind generation is in the range of 25-30%. Who in their right mind would invest in an income-generating asset that effectively sits idle about 3/4s of the time? It is a nightmare for grid stability as well. Having a source online that becomes variably and unpredictable depending on the whims of Mother Nature is precisely what you don't want when your job is to serve the load and keep the frequency as constant as possible.

[rwfromkansas]

Not storing the energy is a fatal flaw, needless to say. I thought they did.

Even in KS, there can be some calm scorching hot summer days with virtually no wind.

[PIF]

The lights will be too dim to read by.

—

There is always whale oil...