The concomitant stupidity of “wind power” on grid-scale just keeps getting more and more obvious to anyone that’s paying attention. Here Issues & Insights points out some of the more obvious issues:
There are a number of problems with wind farms:
- They eat up far more land than any of the conventional forms of energy production, as well as nuclear. It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres. Bryce pointed out in a paper he wrote for the Center of the American Experiment that it would take the land equal to two entire Californias “to meet America’s current electricity needs with wind energy.”
- Due to rising costs and logistical headaches, “developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s “an industry in crisis.”
Wind turbines, writes energy consultant Ronald Stein, “are now becoming an eyesore, a hazard, and a significant environmental threat” in a policy piece that asks if wind farms generate more waste than they do electricity.- Wind farms have to be built in open spaces where power isn’t needed. Moving the electricity to where it’s eventually used destroys the landscape in between.
- In Scotland, 16 million trees, each one of them with their names surely written on every environmentalists’ hearts, have been felled to open ground on which to build wind farms.
- The late physicist David MacKay, who said “you know I love wind turbines,” believed that building wind farms is “actually a waste of money.”
Even the government is an obstacle. Reason reported not quite a year ago that “construction on what could be a massive offshore wind farm in Massachusetts has been held up for years due to” federal reviews.
Now, author and reformer Michael Shellenberger is documenting how off-shore wind farms are killing whales. Have a look:
Yesterday marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022. This is not normal.
The government says it’s not because of the wind industry’s high decibel pile driving & boat traffic in previously pristine waters. They’re lying. And now we have the proof. pic.twitter.com/7BcVrgz04X
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 13, 2023
Holy crap!
If nothing else turned the public off of these massive wind-turbine farms – aside from the expense (oh, and all the materials that can only be sourced from fossil fuels) and the difficulty in disposing of the turbine blades when their useful lives are up, is the massive footprint these things require to develop power on a scale that’s even remotely adequate for the power grid.
This isn’t just a boondoggle. It is fraud on a massive scale. Look at that first bullet point: “It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres.”
But there’s hope:
(Energy author Robert) Bryce noted last week that over the last 10 days in the U.S., “local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa have rejected or restricted wind and solar projects.” According to his database, that makes 574 rejections or restrictions of solar and wind projects in less than a decade. Most of them, 407, have been wind projects.
Bryce predicted the growth of resistance four years ago when he wrote in The Hill that protests in Hawaii then were “a harbinger of more clashes to come if governments attempt to install the colossal quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to fuel the global economy.”
Let’s hope this trend continues. We live in a time where the nation is trillions in debt, our fiscal rating keeps slipping, Congresscritters of both parties have abandoned even the pretense of fiscal restraint, and yet the Imperial and state governments keep subsidizing and promoting this horseshit.
Enough is enough. Let’s hope the resistance to this keeps on growing. If private businesses or homeowners want to try wind and/or solar on their own property, fine; they are welcome to do so at their own cost, then we’ll see if they can prove efficiency or even capability in the market place. There are in fact a few people wop know here in the Great Land who are off-grid and depend on solar (and Diesel generators) for power. That’s fine – their choice, their responsibility.
But it’s pretty well established now that grid-scale wind power isn’t viable.
