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Green economic illiteracy, money-grubbing CEOs and windmills
Gerard Jackson
Victoria’s Labor Government is wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars on windmill farms. These economic and scientific illiterates — should that be morons? — have been conned into this insanity by a bunch of fanatical greens and money-grubbing CEOs.
Dr Aaron Oakley — a real scientist — once pointed out that trying to rely on renewable energy sources would be like returning to the Dark Ages. This commonsensical observation elicited the absurd response that “[e]entering the 21st century would be a more appropriate description of moving to alternative energy. The economy of Denmark didn't ‘collapse’ when they switched to 20% wind energy”.
Of course Denmark’s economy didn’t collapse when it built electricity-generating windmills. This is because these monstrosities only supply a tiny portion of the country’s electrical energy needs. See what would happen if they tried to run the entire economy on these wasteful monstrosities. The main reason is the third power.
Like economics, nature too has its laws – a fact that socialists don’t seem able to grasp. Theoretically 59.3 per cent is the maximum amount of energy that can be extracted from the blade area. This is known as the Betz limit,
Moreover, the maximum power one can get from a windmill is proportional to the third power of the wind speed. This means that changes in wind velocity will have huge disproportionate changes in output even with the best designed windmills.
Any youngster with a calculator can work this out from the following rule-of-thumb formula P = r2v3. So if the radius of the blades is 3 metres and wind power is 30 mph, output will be 243,000 watts. Should wind velocity drop to 15 mph output will plummet to 30,375 watts. An 87.5 per cent drop in output.
One does not have to be a mathematician or an engineer to understand the effect of the third power on output. To compound this insurmountable problem engineers have only managed to produce 70 per cent of a Betz.
In English so plain that even any pompous self-righteous green and his political toadies can understand it — wind power is dilute and that’s where its diseconomies of scale come from. And diseconomies of scale mean rising costs and not falling costs.
These facts have been confirmed by a number of studies. One by Westinghouse Power Systems found that to supply 20 per cent of America’s electricity the nation would have to build rows of windmills from Canada to Mexico and from coast to coast, with each row being 30 miles apart, each windmill being spaced at 500 feet and requiring 500 foot blades.
Moreover the wind would have to blow at a constant 24 mph for every windmill. A 1978 British study calculated that it would take 20 million windmills with 100 foot diameter blades to meet the country's electricity needs. For America, it would have something like 250,000 windmills with 300 foot blades. How many windmills would it take today?
It’s because these alternative energy sources are destructively expensive that the green leadership advocate them. It was, after all, Amory Lovins who said: “It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we might do with it”.
And Lovins is far from being alone. The notorious Professor Paul Ehrlich who stated: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
No wonder Drs Arden and Marjorie Meinel, pioneers in solar energy, said of Lovins and his ecotopian ilk: “Should this siren philosophy be heard and believed we can perceive the onset of a New Dark age”. Yet idiots like Premier Bracks insist on pouring millions of dollars into this economic lunacy. (Well, I did say the man is an idiot).
Are the companies who build and promote wind generators aware of the above facts. Damn right they are. They know they are defrauding the public. Unfortunately our politicians are far too thick to understand this fact.
If wind farms were profitable under free-market conditions companies would willingly invest in them without any political encouragement or government subsidies.
That they don’t is a clear sign that the necessary resources for these malinvestments are more valued elsewhere. In simple terms, these so-called investments will never cover their costs and so forcing them into existence will have a detrimental effect on the state’s economy.
Try telling that to our politicians and their cretinous media mates.
The real truth about windmills
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 28 February 2005