Posted on 03/26/2023 2:39:55 PM PDT by george76
It could be argued that the basic arithmetic showing wind power is an economic and societal disaster in the making should be clear to a bright primary school child. Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. The U.K. is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply, he concludes. “Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”.
Professor Allison’s dire warnings are contained in a short paper recently published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He notes that the energy provided by the Sun is “extremely weak”, which is why it was unable to provide the energy to sustain even a small global population before the Industrial Revolution with an acceptable standard of living. A similar point was made recently in more dramatic fashion by the nuclear physicist Dr. Wallace Manheimer. He argued that the infrastructure around wind and solar will not only fail, “but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment and be entirely unnecessary”.
In his paper, Allison concentrates on working out the numbers that lie behind the natural fluctuations in the wind. The full workings out are not complicated and can be assessed from the link above. He shows that at a wind speed of 20mph, the power produced by a wind turbine is 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. To deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area.
It is noted that this should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and other environmentalists. Of course, this concern does not seem to have materialised to date. Millions of bats and birds are calculated to be slaughtered by onshore wind turbines every year. Meanwhile, off the coast of Massachusetts, work is about to start on a giant wind farm, complete with permits to harass and likely injure almost a tenth of the population of the rare North Atlantic Right whale.
When fluctuations in wind speed are taken into account in Allison’s formula, the performance of wind becomes very much worse. If the wind speed drops by half, the power available falls by a factor of eight. Almost worse, he notes, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times, and the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.
...
When it comes to the enormous batteries needed to store renewable power, Allison notes the problems with safety, as well as mineral shortages. Batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week, and he points out they can fail for much longer than that.
Others have recently looked in more detail at the costs of battery storage. The American lawyer and mathematician Francis Menton, who runs the Manhattan Contrarian site, reviewed recent official cost reports and found that “even on the most optimistic assumptions” the cost could be as high as a country’s GDP. On less optimistic assumptions, the capital cost alone could be 15 times annual GDP. Last year, Associate Professor Simon Michaux warned the Finnish Government that there were not enough minerals in the world to supply all the batteries needed for Net Zero. Michaux observed that the Net Zero project may not go fully “as planned”. Meanwhile, Menton concluded, with an opinion that some might consider unduly charitable: “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the people planning the Net Zero transition have no idea what they are doing.”
Professor Allison has done his sums based on basic physics and freely available information. “Whichever way you look at it, wind power is inadequate. It is intermittent and unreliable; it is exposed and vulnerable; it is weak with a short life-span,” he concludes.
Hey geniuses. Don’t forget solar panels quit working when covered with ice and snow.
Maybe my idea of Cow Farticus Connectus Ignitus might still have a chance.
Yes, total failure. No growth at all in production.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Wind_energy_generation_by_region%2C_OWID.svg
The wind....blows.
Sometimes.
Keep in mind a hair dryer can use 1,500 watts of energy.
Here’s Dr Michaux’ presentation
Simon Michaux - The quantity of metals required to manufacture just one generation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc
🤣
Nonsense. Wind power funnels massive subsidies into politically connected hands while providing camoflauge for anti-growth greenies. You just have to understand the left’s measures of success.
Normally I’d believe an emeritus professor. But Greta Thunberg was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in theology. I might be wrong, but I think that outranks an emeritus professor.
So I’m gonna wait to see what Dr. Thunberg has to say. 🤨
A Simple Reason Why Net Zero Is Impossible
https://heartland.org/opinion/a-simple-reason-why-net-zero-is-impossible/
Subsidy harvest, nothing more.
But the Feds want to kill off the Maine lobster industry because of an unfounded belief that the lobster trap gear will kill Right whales. (Actually, it will kill off the individual lobstermen who will be replaced by large companies that can afford the cost of the necessary equipment - at added cost to the consumer of course.)
Breeze Power
This is true . . . up to a point. I would add that you just have to understand that the grifting isn't limited to "the left." Not by any means.
Dirty?
Yes. As anyone who was cleaned glass windows knows, windows collect a kind of slime from the air.
I seriously doubt that the cost of providing “squeegee” guys AND the Windex they need to keep solar panels CLEAN is included in any of the so-called “peer-approved” models.
Net-zero is about as wacky a concept as shooting polluting aerosols into the sky to block the sun, or harnessing the power of tornadoes with mega-turbines.
Too much fiction, not enough science.
Hey geniuses.
Solar and wind both satisfy one single count. Virtue Signaling. Right up there with wearing a cloth mask anywhere that there isn’t Tuberculosis.
This country is living in a fantasy land. Our enemies are living in reality. Unless we wake up, we’re toast.
Broken blades are also piling up. Cant be recycled. Epoxy and polyester resins used to make them are also oil products.
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