October 22, 2008
General

Counteracting the building of wind farms

Halkema, J.A.

To counteract the building of wind farms it is not enough to complain about their adverse impact on the beauty of the landscape or of the very unpleasant wooshing noise they make. All of this unpleasantness is of course true but there are far more important disadvantages of wind energy.

It is important to know that just because of one single law of physics it is impossible that wind turbines will ever produce electricity in reasonable quantity and with the necessary security of supply. How could a machine meant to make some product, whatever product, in reasonable amount and with some security of production function efficiently when the driving source of energy is not only minimal but only completely unpredictable available? Compare this with a big truck meant for transporting freight over long distances that has an engine that receives its fuel only in irregular minute bursts and that only when the wind blows accidentally with the right velocity.

A wind turbine built for producing electricity is exactly such a foolish machine.

May I urge the reader to read from start to finish the website “Windenergy- the whole truth” as can be found under this title at Google. Having read this one knows all the facts that are worth knowing about the properties and the resulting technical disadvantages of wind turbines. It is important to understand why it is convenient to convert big numbers of energy consumption or production into kilowattyears (kWy’s) or megawattyears (MWy’s). By skipping the suffix ‘years’ one can immediately see with which average power a certain consumption of electrical energy was produced in that year. Read therefore Annex 1 of this website.

Now we come to another approach how to counter the planning of a wind farm in your neighbourhood. For this the mentioning of all the emotional perceptions as the horrible impact on the scenery and the very unpleasant noise remain of course an important factor. But on top of that: wind turbines have all the very important disadvantages and inherent risks as explained in that website “Windenergy- the whole truth”.

During the discussions with the people who promote the building of a wind farm in your neighbourhood it is important to pin them down to telling how much this wind farm will contribute to the total consumption or production of electricity in your country. That means that you have to know what that total electricity consumption of your country is. Expressed in MWyears, Knowing that number you can start to ask some penetrating questions on which you should insist to receive an answer. Because during so called “information meetings for the community” the whole truth is never told. Often the people who give this so-called information do not even know themselves all the ins and outs of wind turbines.

Some questions:

A. “Could you tell us in a concise way your opinion about all the advantages and disadvantages of the planned wind farm?”

B. “We know that the now planned turbines will not produce electricity with their uninterrupted full capacity but only with a small part of full capacity. That small part is known as “production factor” or “capacity factor”. Can you tell us what this factor will be for the now planned wind farm? And can you give us a written guarantee for this factor? We think that it is normal use when somebody is asked to contribute to the cost of a production machine that he has to know what that machine can achieve and with what security.”

C. “So you tell us that the total electricity production of this wind farm will be about XX Megawattyears. With my calculator I see that this is only a very tiny part of the national electricity consumption. Only a few hundredthousandth parts. Do you really think that this tiny fraction that you can not even guarantee makes it worth to destroy the beauty of our scenery? Or that this could really save our world from the terrible disasters we can expect according to the alarmists? And what will all this cost?”

D. “You must understand that we all are anxious to know how this now planned wind farm will produce its electricity. So we must insist that you install in our community centre or town hall two monitoring recorders that will give us a registration on a sheet of paper of: 1) the aggregate produced power of all the wind turbines of the wind farm in kilowatts or Megawatts, from minute to minute; and 2) the aggregate produced electricity in kWh’s or MWh’s starting from the date of commissioning of the wind farm or from the first of January.

These two recorders can show the public, as a sort of black box, from day to day what and how the wind farm is producing electricity. The cost for these two recorders will only amount to a tiny bit of the cost of the wind farm.”

And in this way and with the knowledge from my website it will be possible to put a lot more penetrating questions. I hope these suggestions can result in receiving more and honest information from the promoters of building wind farms.

I hope that this content will be passed on to everybody who could be the victim of the building of a wind farm.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/documents/counteracting-the-building-of-wind-farms/