When announcing that thousands of new wind turbines could be built across the UK in the coming decade as part of a £100 billion plan to boost renewable energy, Gordon Brown said the UK should be a leader in renewable energy.
He then announced a major push in to “wind power” – at a time when many other countries are scaling it back because of its failures – and called for a national debate.
Will such debate happen? Most of what we have had so far are “sound bites”, allowing only the snappy “Green slogans” to be heard, while stifling proper revelation of the very serious negative aspects.
The negatives get dismissed with “wind is free – so must be green”, and there is a refusal to listen to, or review, the evidence. Evidence that has taken hundreds of hours of researching cannot be presented in a two-minute sound bite.
Will any politician – regardless of party affiliation – ever give serious consideration to real engineering and scientific issues?
Here are wind power negatives:
It doesn’t deliver realistic power the National Grid can accommodate; it is intermittent; and can be the cause of instability in the distribution system;
It doesn’t achieve realistic emission saving and spinning standby still needed from traditional power stations – at way below optimum, causing further emissions/pollution – like vehicles idling in a traffic jam;
It is driven by hidden subsidy, not real need;
It is the wrong solution – for a poorly defined problem;
It diverts resource from more realistic engineering solutions;
It has noise issues triggering health problems.
Added to this, in the Darmstadt Manifesto, more than 100 eminent scientists urged governments not to adopt it as a mainstream generating facility. And more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying that man is responsible for global warming. They claim that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are actually beneficial for the environment.
If the hype is disregarded, the only benefits I can recognise are:
Showing a commitment to do as the EU has demanded;
Diverting huge sums of money from hard-pressed households (via their electricity bills) to the developers of wind farms.
If any competent technical authority can provide me with technical calculations to disprove what I have said above, I dearly wish to see them. I cannot find it.
Keith Kilbane, chairman, Stop Swinford Wind Farm Action Group, Swinford.
9 July 2008
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/07/09/blowing-the-gaff-on-wind-power/