THE MORNING RANT: More Wind Energy Follies, and Some Good News as Proposed Wind Farm Projects Start Getting Rejected

A common criticism from people like me about wind energy is that it’s not reliable and that it doesn’t produce electricity when the wind isn’t blowing, thus it can’t be relied on for baseline electricity needs.

But another problem with wind energy is that it often doesn’t produce electricity even when the wind is blowing.

“6 of 10 Turbines Out of Commission at Prince Edward Island Wind Farm, Government Says” [CBC – 7/11/2023]

One of P.E.I.'s biggest provincially owned wind farms is operating at less than 40 per cent of its design capacity. The wind farm at Hermanville, near the eastern tip of the Island, came online with 10 turbines at a cost of $60 million in 2014.

On Tuesday, the P.E.I. Energy Corporation said only four of those turbines remain functional — with no reason given as to why.

"It's something that needs to be rectified quickly, because it's standing in the way of our goals," said Steven Myers, P.E.I.'s minister of environment, energy and climate action.

Actually, what’s standing in the way of this Canadian province’s “goals” is that it has embarked on the unattainable eco-communist goal of replacing reliable long-term energy sources with an unreliable short-term energy source.

The graph below shows how the amount of energy produced by this wind farm started dropping significantly when it was only 7 years old. Nine years later, it’s only producing 40% of the electricity it produced when new.

Not only is wind energy not a long-term energy option, it’s clearly not even a short-term energy option.

But Wind energy is environmentally responsible, right?

“SNP Admits to Felling 16 Million Trees to Develop Wind Farm [The Telegraph – 7/19/2023]

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP [Scottish National Party] minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

Have you planted a tree to fight global warming? Do you buy carbon offsets when you fly?

Whatever you’re doing by either planting trees or “saving” trees, the wind industry is offsetting you by clear-cutting forests to slap up their unreliable, short-lived, bird-killing, wind contraptions.

When the wind hustlers cut down a forest for a wind farm, would that constitute a carbon-offset-offset?

Aren’t wind turbines supposed to capture the wind and create electricity from it, rather than being blown over by a stiff breeze? Well, here’s a recent video of a wind turbine in Germany collapsing, while still spinning.

Oh well, that turbine has killed its last bird, which is a good thing, but there’s probably a little danger in having giant spinning blades crashing down to the ground.

There is also recent news of offshore wind turbines failing spectacularly.

In this story (below) at the Independent, there’s another video of the incident. Aside from the burning turbine, it also shows that about half of the turbines in the wind farm aren’t spinning at all.

“Wind Farm Workers Evacuated After Offshore Turbine Catches Fire” [Independent – 8/16/2023]

Again, turbines that aren’t spinning or are otherwise out of service are something that I celebrate, because they have stopped killing birds in the pursuit of fairy tale energy. But still, what a colossal waste of money and unnecessary despoilment of nature.

Meanwhile, dead whales keep piling up on the East Coast of the United States, thanks to the wind industry.

Many of us have long understood that the “green energy” movement is actually a death cult that seeks to reduce the global population by denying reliable energy to people, and by reducing standards of living. But I’m still surprised how they have been able to coopt environmentalists and nature lovers into their cult, and how killing birds and whales is now a celebrated sacrament in the Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse.

Some people, even on the left, are starting to wake up to the folly and futility of wind energy. A couple of recent headlines give me hope…

“Rhode Island Energy Rejects Plan for Nearly 1000MW Offshore Wind Project” [WPRI – 7/19/2023]

The state’s largest utility company has decided not to move forward with a massive offshore wind project in Rhode Island, arguing that rising costs have made the deal too expensive for ratepayers and out of line with state law.

“Sweden Rejects Vattenfall's Planned Stora Middelgrund Wind Farm” [Reuters – 7/27/2023]

"An establishment at Stora Middelgrund would risk damaging sensitive natural values in an unacceptable way," Minister for climate and environment Romina Pourmokhtari said in a statement.

"The risk of negative impact on national interests in shipping has also weighed heavily in the Government's assessment," she said.

Related, not only is Sweden rejecting wind energy, but it is aggressively embracing nuclear power.

“Swedish Government Plans to Build at Least 10 Nuclear Reactors” [TVP World – 8/09/2023]

The Swedish government declared on Wednesday that by 2045, at least ten conventional nuclear reactors or a greater number of smaller, modular equivalents need to be built. The demand for electrical energy is expected to double over the next 20 years.

The only future for the wind energy industry is massive remediation and deconstruction projects as these abominations are dismantled over the next couple of decades. With wind projects starting to be rejected, and nuclear returning to favor, perhaps we are at the beginning of the end of the wind-energy nightmare.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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