The Truth About Wind Power

[threegee]

Well, you know the official line: wind power now contributes a significant amount to or energy budget, and so represents a major improvement to all our "carbon footprints".  After all countless billions spent and all those wind turbines littered everywhere around and over our island how could it be otherwise?

In the USA these claims are part of the Obama legacy that he's now trying to sell to the history books.  But, he grudging admits that it's “less than 14 percent”.  If only these sort of figures were true!

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/11/14/obamas-much-ado-about-nothing/

From today's Telegraph:

Quote

...I cited that figure only after a quick internet trawl. where it is quoted on various websites, including Wikipedia. Only when I subsequently referred to a more reliable source did I find that the figure was in fact absurdly exaggerated. All the US was actually getting last year for all the billions of dollars it has spent on wind and solar farms was just 5.4 percent of its electricity. Most of the rest of course came from those CO2-emitting, “planet-destroying” fossil fuels that Obama was so keen to see disappear.

So how does this compare with the position here in England, where we are continually told that wind and solar are now providing ever more of our own power? The official headline figures do not separate England, where most of us live, from the rest of the UK. But thanks to some very clever detective work by Paul Homewood on his Not A Lot Of People Know That blog, we can see that the English figures are in fact strikingly similar to those for the US. The contribution of English onshore wind and solar farms to electricity used in England amounted last year to just 5.3 percent.

That intermittently generated by all the thousands of wind turbines spread across the English countryside was just 2.4 percent: rather less than that fed into the grid by a single medium-size gas-fired power station like that recently opened at Carrington outside Manchester – which, thanks to the “carbon tax” and the Climate Change Act, could be the last we ever see built. There’s another very uncomfortable fact you will never see quoted on Wikipedia.

No one is mentioning Ed Windmilliband's role in the fiasco, but it's another of the virtue signalling left's hair-brained ideas that have visibly changed our country for the worst, and piled on huge levels of debt in the process.  That debt must be repaid at some point (a situation that will be made much worse as interest levels increase, as now looks likely).  How much extra energy will need to be expended to achieve the levels of industrialisation that will be needed for future generations to even service that debt?  This is the question to ask those "greens" who believe in infinite free lunch and techno-miracles.

[mercuryg]

Not often I agree with you outright 3G, but this one I do! I believe wind farms to be an expensive waste of time. Out of interest, what would your suggestion be in  terms of replacing fossil fuels?

[threegee]

21 minutes ago, mercuryg said:

Not often I agree with you outright 3G, but this one I do! I believe wind farms to be an expensive waste of time. Out of interest, what would your suggestion be in  terms of replacing fossil fuels?

Small modular reactors are nuclear energy’s future

Something the EU should have been promoting instead of all the vanity projects it has been sinking countless billions in to, and duplicating other work.  Something we can lead in if the government gets off its butt.

[mercuryg]

Yes, I have a friend who is working on this very thing right now, in this country....unfortunately, he is not at liberty to give too much away!