Wind Power – The Saltbush Club

A Pilot Plant for Net Zero

By Viv Forbes

Both solar and wind energy have fatal flaws – solar stops when the sun goes down or if a cloud blocks the sun; wind fails if the wind is too strong or too weak. But every day we hear of some fantastic and expensive plan to keep the lights on when these unreliable energy twins stop work.

The latest thought bubble from Mr Bowen (the Australian Minister for Generating Blackouts) is for him to be able to drain the energy from electric car batteries to back up a failing grid. He suggests that batteries could also power the house or sell energy into the grid. (They are already scheming on how to use smart technology to prevent homeowners from charging their own batteries when flicker power is fading.)

The Titanic scale of floating wind turbines quantified

By David Wojick

Source: https://www.cfact.org/2024/07/17/the-titanic-scale-of-floating-wind-turbines-quantified/

My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.

Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.

Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.

Battery Baloney, Hydrogen Hype and Green Fairy Tales

By Viv Forbes

How low Australia has fallen – our once-great BHP now has a “Vice President for Climate”, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: “No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear” while Our ABC, Our CSIRO and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy plus a bit of standby gas, plus heaps of batteries and new power lines can power our homes, industries AND the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards?

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions – the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

Grand Land Grab: Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Needs 70% of Australia’s Prime Farmland

Australia’s prime agricultural land is being carpeted with endless seas of solar panels and thousands of these things are being speared everywhere the panels can’t go.

Dilute and diffuse, wind and solar require a staggering amount of space, and way more than their occasional, weather (and/or sunshine) dependent power generation can ever hope to justify.

Taking up vast tracts of farmland with solar panels means that that land produces nothing else. While the solar panels are lucky to produce power for 5-6 hours every day (ie 20-25% of the time).

Spearing hundreds of 300 tonne, 280m high turbines into productive farmland brings its own range of special ‘challenges’ for primary producers.

Continue reading: https://stopthesethings.com/2024/03/16/grand-land-grab-wind-solar-transition-needs-70-of-australias-prime-farmland/

Former Greens candidate now warns wind turbines are lunacy and a scam

Steve Nowakowski was a Greens candidate in Cairns in 2006. He was a co-founder of Rainforest Reserves Australia, and was hired as a photographer, but he didn’t like what he saw. Two years ago he was concerned at the environmental damage of the Emerald Wind farm, now he’s filming the destruction in the hope of stopping wind farms being built in Queensland. He’s calling it lunacy, and arguing we need nuclear power.

In a big leap, he even realizes the green groups are “colluding” with the government and the money making environmental vandals in the greatest land grab of the age. Mark my words, eventually this issue will split the Greens.

First Bob Brown former Greens leader, and now foot soldiers like Nowakowski and a few other conservationists are campaigning against wind turbines — word is spreading…

The Great Wind and Solar Land Grab

By Steve Goreham

US Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Domain

Which is more environmentally friendly — an energy source that uses one unit of land to produce one unit of electricity, or a source that uses 100 units of land to produce one unit of electricity?

The answer should be obvious.

Nevertheless, “green” energy advocates call for a huge expansion of wind, solar and other renewables that use vast amounts of land to replace traditional power plants that use comparatively small amounts of land.

Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Canada, extensively analyzed the power density of alternative sources used to generate electricity. He defined power density as the average flow of electricity generated per square meter of horizontal surface (land or sea area).

Continue reading: https://www.westernjournal.com/op-ed-one-simple-energy-question-devastates-net-zero-pipe-dreams/

Gas Power Saves Texas From Blackouts, As Wind Power Collapses Again!

By Paul Homewood

From: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/gas-power-saves-texas-from-blackouts-as-wind-power-collapses-again/

Over the weekend the US declared a Grid Emergency in Texas, as temperatures plummeted.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-declares-texas-grid-emergency-180011531.html

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/texas-power-prices-spike-more-165419011.html

The emergency order from the US Energy Department allowed the state’s grid operator to exceed certain air pollution limits to boost generation amid record power demand in the state. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, whose service area includes 90% of electric customers in Texas, requested the emergency order Friday, warning it may need to resort to blackouts. TRANSLATION – fire up more coal and gas plants! Continue reading “Gas Power Saves Texas From Blackouts, As Wind Power Collapses Again!”

The Biggest Public Policy Disaster in a Lifetime

By Ian Plimer

The 27th COP event is preceded by breathtakingly shrill predictions of forthcoming disasters from speculated catastrophic climate change. Here are a few cold hard facts:

No one has ever proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. For more than two decades I have been asking scientists for this proof. If proven, it would also have to be shown that natural carbon dioxide emissions, 97% of the annual total, don’t drive global warming. This also has never been done. Furthermore, if had been proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming, there would be endless citation of the dozen or so seminal scientific papers demonstrating this proof. Instead, there is obfuscation and deafening silence.
Continue reading at Quadrant: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/11/the-biggest-public-policy-disaster-in-a-lifetime/

Poisoning people to save the planet

By Ian Plimer. First published at The Spectator Australia: https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/australian-notes-322/

The blades from environmentally friendly subsidised bird- and bat-chomping inefficient wind turbines have a short life and cannot be recycled. They weigh 10-20 tonnes, are 40-60 metres long, need to be replaced every 15 years or less and are composed of plastic, fibreglass, balsa wood and resins. Balsa wood is produced by chopping down Brazilian rainforests, in an environmentally friendly way of course. Fibreglass is impregnated with epoxy resins to increase blade strength and are made from petroleum. Previously blades were disposed of in Third World countries for a pittance until these countries ungraciously decided not to be the dumping ground for First World toxic rubbish. The wind industry was miffed and took to dumping used blades illegally until communities objected. Continue reading “Poisoning people to save the planet”

An Overview of the Capital Costs of Firming Wind Farms with Pumped Hydro

By Michael Bowden; IEng(Electronics-UK);CPL;CQP and Craig Brooking; MBA; BE(Civil); FAIC, Dip; formerly FIEAust; CPEng.

The Conclusions:

Over the next 15 years, NSW will decommission four of its five coal fired power stations which will dramatically reduce the availability of reliable and dispatchable electrical power.

According to the NSW Government, the reduced capacity will be replaced by wind and solar farms firmed with batteries, gas and pumped hydro. This paper has demonstrated that renewables firmed by pumped hydro is massively expensive and high-risk commercially and technically. The most cost-effective and technically feasible solution is to replace the four decommissioned coal fired power stations with modern HELE USC coal plants which would deliver significant advantages over the firmed renewables strategy.

Read the whole paper: https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/costs-of-firming-wind-with-hydro.pdf [PDF, 270 kB]