Free Republic

Former climate change alarmist Dr James Lovelock, famous for popularising the "Gaia" metaphor, continues his journey back to rationality. Lovelock is objecting to a "medium sized" (240ft high) erection planned for his neighbourhood in North Devon by infamous windfarm operator Ecotricity. The UK currently has 3,000 onshore turbines and 6,000 are planned: this is the main reason why electricity bills are soaring out of control in order to pay for the inefficient, highly expensive windmills. Lovelock calls the runaway windmill building "industrial vandalism". In an objection to the planning application made to Tiverton council, Lovelock points out that one nuclear...

Proposal 3 on the Nov. 6 ballot, dubbed the “25 by 25' renewable energy standard, refers to a mandate that would force the state’s utilities to produce 25 percent of their electricity sold from “renewable” resources by 2025. These resources, as stated on the ballot, include wind power, solar power, biomass and hydropower. A casual glance at this list suggests serious challenges. Water power is under-endowed in Michigan. Biomass evokes the primitivism of bygone England where dwellings required thatched roofs because the woodlands were being ravaged into fuel. Wind power founders because most of the time those giant windmills stand...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is out with another ad targeting Angus King and his wind energy business. The spot, titled “Smooth Operator,” asks, “Angus King got a sweetheart deal for his windmills. What did Mainers get?” The spot then features five unidentified residents from the area of the 22-turbine Record Hill wind project in which King and business partner Rob Gardiner held a 10 percent stake until January 2011. They accuse King of profiting from a wind turbine installation that’s changed the area where they live. “‘We all need to get used to seeing turbines where we used to...

President Barack Obama assailed rival Mitt Romney's opposition to tax supports for wind power, delivering an Iowa-specific critique Tuesday on the Republican challenger in that crucial Midwestern state. Obama's deputy criticized GOP budget plans to overhaul Medicare, cut trillions of dollars from social programs and lower taxes on high-income taxpayers. Iowa is a center of wind energy production in the United States and the Obama administration credits tax breaks for helping build that industry. Obama has called on Congress to extend the breaks. Romney opposes it. Obama, on the second of a three-day Iowa bus tour, noted that Romney once...

People who move to the country don't have a right to a quiet environment, according to the head of one of Michigan's major renewable energy advocacy groups. John Sarver, executive director of the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association, made the statement in an email to colleagues in February 2011. It was one of numerous emails obtained through a Freedom Of Information Act request pertaining to wind turbine noise level issues in Michigan. The Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association supports the Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs proposal, also called the 25/25 proposal. If passed, the proposal would require 25 percent of Michigan's...

The brain trust at the California Department of Fish and Game, having solved all other problems, moved in and confiscated a stuffed wolverine and red-tailed hawk from a bar, some fifty years after they’d been put on display. Zero tolerance is a wonderful replacement for common sense, and in that bastion of liberalism that is California, it is clear that you can have any kind of sense you want – as long as it isn’t common.

Taxpayers have put out billions in subsidies over the last three years for Barack Obama's green-energy stimulus program, which has produced such success stories as Solyndra, Beacon Power, and Ener1. But what happens when taxpayers subsidize efforts that actually produce electricity? As people in the Pacific Northwest have discovered, they end up subsidizing green-power generation -- and non-generation: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Wind farms in the Pacific Northwest — built with government subsidies and maintained with tax credits for every megawatt produced — are now getting paid to shut down as the federal agency charged with managing the...

Today we have yet another example of what was unintended, but probably could have been seen coming had our government know-it-alls not been blinded by their ideological mission. We call these Global Warming Oops Moments. There’s no shortage of them. “While President Barack Obama is touting clean energy such as wind farms, a group of American scientists are raising alarm bells that wind turbines increase the effects of global warming, as well as killing birds that fall prey to the deadly spinning blades,” says an item from Dallasblog.com.

As Jimi Hendrix may have put it: “And the wind cries bankrupt…” Minnesotans for Global Warming report that in the last 30 years, the United States has had 14,000 wind turbines abandoned. Apparently, once the subsidies and the wind run out, these 20-story high Cuisinarts are de-bladed and retired. This means more bats and migratory birds will live. From Minnesotans for Global Warming: “The symbol of Green renewable energy, our savior from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the...

When the Netherlands built its first sea-based wind turbines in 2006, they were seen as symbols of a greener future. ... But five years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour -- some 4.5 billion euros last year. The government now plans to transfer the financial burden to households and industrial consumers

This one's really off the radar. Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: "blank spots" that distort radar readings. Now government agencies that depend on radar -- such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service -- are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities. A four-star Air Force general recently spelled out the problem to Dave Beloite, the director of the Department of Defense’s Energy Siting Clearinghouse. "Look there’s a radar...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on 30 May that Germany, the world's fourth-largest economy and Europe's biggest, would shutter all of its 17 nuclear power plants between 2015 and 2022, an extraordinary commitment, given that they currently produce about 28 percent of the country's electricity. Underlining the government’s seriousness in changing the country’s energy matrix, Germany's Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (German Development Bank) is to underwrite renewable energy and energy efficiency investments in Germany with $137.3 billion over the next five years, Germany Trade and Invest reported. Overall, the German government's 6th Energy Research Program has made an extraordinary $274.6 billion...

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,...

"Renewable energy isn't something pie in the sky," Obama said during a speech at Cardinal. "It's not part of a far-off future. It's happening all across America right now. " ... It can create millions of new jobs and entire new industries if we act right now." Jeff Grabner, vice president and head of the company's wind business, told the Plain Dealer earlier in the week that Cardinal had been losing business to European suppliers who had underbid Cardinal, forcing the company to trim its workforce by 15 employees a year ago.

Reality has overtaken green hope. Facts are pesky things. And they're particularly pesky when it comes to the myths about the wind energy business. For years, it's been an article of faith among advocates of renewables that increased use of wind energy can provide a cost-effective method of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The reality: wind energy's carbon dioxide-cutting benefits are vastly overstated. Furthermore, if wind energy does help reduce carbon emissions, those reductions are too expensive to be used on any kind of scale. Those are the findings of an exhaustive new study, released today, by Bentek Energy, a Colorado-based...

The futility of squandering money on wind farms has been laid bare by the United Kingdom's new budget for windmill construction. Christopher Booker of the U.K. Telegraph in his column yesterday highlighted the folly that is ongoing in the United Kingdom and Europe; he writes: In the week when it was reported that 20 per cent of the EU's fast-soaring, trillion-euro [US$ 1.4 Trillion] budget may soon be spent on "fighting climate change", it was timely that Britain's energy companies should have met with the Department of Energy and Climate Change to raise one of the best-hidden secrets of our...

NEW YORK – Recalling Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code," computer experts have discovered strange anomalies in the Obama birth record released by the White House. They include a different birth registration number that shows up in "hidden text," remnants of the short-form certificate apparently bleeding through the long-form and a "smiley face" in the registrar's stamp that does not show up on other recently issued Hawaii birth records. Curiously, in a simple process run by Optical Character Recognition software that reveals hidden text, the registration number 10611 turns up, instead of 10641, the number displayed on the...

WIND farms are much less efficient than the industry claims, according to new research. A report produced for the conservation charity the John Muir Trust (JMT) says turbines are producing below 10 per cent of capacity for more than a third of the time. It claims that for extended periods, all the wind turbines in Scotland linked to the National Grid produce less than 20MW of energy - just enough power for 6,667 households to boil their kettles. Helen McDade, JMT's head of policy, said: "This report is a real eye-opener for anyone who's been wondering how much power Scotland...

Wind turbines wring energy out of a free-flowing fuel ­supply that may be losing some of its punch. Surface winds appear to be weakening across the Northern Hemisphere, including in the United States, Western Europe, and China—the world's top three markets for wind power. And climate change threatens to weaken them further during this century as faster warming over northern ­latitudes trims the temperature gradients that energize airflows.

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens' TV commercials blasted the airwaves in 2008 with his big idea to get America off foreign oil imports: natural gas and wind energy. Two years later, let’s just make that natural gas. Since the billionaire’s plans for the world’s largest wind farm fell apart in the Texas Panhandle, Pickens has edited his much-hyped “Pickens Plan” to focus primarily on his other big business interest: natural gas. Touting 1.7 million Pickens Plan supporters, he’s now pushing Congress to pass legislation that would offer incentives to convert 18-wheelers and fleet vehicles to run on compressed natural gas,...