How the Bracks’ Government will cut Victorians’ living standards
Gerard Jackson
The economic and scientific illiterates that make up Premier Bracks’ Victorian Labor Government are throwing away hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money on grossly inefficient windmills to generate electricity. Energy Industries and Resources Minister Theo Theophanous inadvertently admitted the inefficiency of windmills when he recently warned Victorians that the use of windmills will raise their electricity bills. Yet this economic cretin and the equally cretinous Bracks honestly believe that this nutty green policy makes for good science and sound economics.
This lot are so convinced that they are better informed scientifically and economically than the market place for energy that they passed an Act that forces electricity suppliers to help fund this windmill scam. To justify their economic stupidity the Bracks’ Government brags that its alternative energy policies will generate hundreds of jobs while creating $2 billion of new energy investments. This is lunacy
To begin with creating jobs is never a problem. That’s why ancient Egypt never had an unemployment problem. The problem is creating high-wage productive jobs. This is not going to happen under Bracks. His much vaunted $2 billion of energy investments is pure economic waste driven by quack science. If it were otherwise this idiot would not have one of his toadies inform the public that energy prices will rise.
That Bracks thinks the rise could be significant was suggested by his apparent threat to use the Essential Services Act to cap electricity prices — a policy guaranteed to give us brownouts and blackouts if pushed to the limit. Either way, higher energy prices are coming, thanks to Bracks’ idiocy.
Regardless of what Bracks thinks fundamental physical laws do exist — and that’s why windpower is hideously inefficient. What Victorians have not been told is that the maximum power one can get from a windmill is proportional to the third power of the wind speed. This means that even the best designed windmill with, for example, 2.5 metre diameter blades and a wind velocity of 16 kilometres will produce about 110 watts.
Theoretically 59.3 per cent, known as a Betz, is the maximum amount of energy that can be extracted from the blade area, meaning that given a wind velocity of 16 kilometres our theoretical windmill can produce a maximum of 110 watts of energy. Engineers to date have only managed to produce 70 per cent of a Betz. (The formula is P= kr2v3).
In English so plain that even Bracks and his greenie ministers can understand it — wind power is dilute — as well as arbitrary — and that is where its diseconomies of scale come from. And diseconomies of scale mean rising costs, not falling costs, a fact that Theo Theophanous unwittingly revealed when he admitted that Bracks’ appalling energy policy would cut real wages. He neglected to mention what it would do to industry.
(Theophanous’s argument reminds me of Julian Cribb [Director, CSIRO National Awareness and former science writer for Rupert Murdoch’s Australian] who complained several years ago about my exposé of what I call the great solar con. I told him that if anyone at the CSIRO had found a means to extract a quart from a pint pot I would be glad to hear from them. I’m still waiting).
The shocking inefficiency of windpower has been amply documented. Some years ago Westinghouse Power Systems released a study showing that to supply the US with 20 per cent of its electricity the country 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 UK’s electricity needs. For America, it would have something like 250,000 windmills with 300 foot blades. Of course, Bracks and his supporters may be dumb enough to argue that technology has come a long way in 28 years. It sure has — but not for windmills because we are dealing natural laws that cannot be repealed.
Danmark is frequently held up as an example of a country that has successfully harnessed windpower to produce electricity to the extent that generating capacity is now several times greater than peak demand. Bulldust. Despite the enormous expense of these wind-powered generators they produce only about 2 per cent of the country’s overall energy supply and less than 20 per cent of its electricity.
This is why Danes suffer the burden of having to pay more for their electricity than just about anyone else. No wonder the NVE (Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Administration) concluded after making a careful study that windpower was “dearly bought” because it required massive funding that produced insufficient energy. The NVE also referred to serious environmental effects.
(One should note the fact that France went nuclear while the Danes were conned by greenies into building hideously inefficient windmills).
Despite these facts Bracks and his clowns insist on foisting this monstrous and costly green fraud on Victorians. I am not accusing Bracks of dishonesty — that would be crediting him with too much intelligence. But he is guilty of wilful ignorance. Even the most stupid among us know to ask questions. Not that self-righteous and contemptible little jerk.
And talking of jerks, where is the Victorian Liberal Party on this green scam? Because of Bracks’ stupidity Victorians are going to have their incomes cut by being forced into paying higher electricity prices. So why isn’t the Liberal Party jumping up and down about this destructive policy?
Two reasons: Firstly, the party is largely led by dunces. These are people who haven’t got the sense to check out the arguments against so-called alternative energy sources. Secondly, these dunces — one of whom is millionaire Michael Kroger — are in the process of wrecking the Liberal Party for personal gain.
So while Kroger’s machinations are in the process of reducing the Liberal Party to a political rump the citizens of Victoria are being conned into accepting a cut in living standards and job opportunities by the same party that has taxed thousands of Victorians out of the housing market and into high-rent flats.
The cretinous Bracks and the moronic John Thwaites are also going to impose a 10 cent charge on plastic shopping bags in order to save the planet. That this is just another tax on the poor and the low paid doesn’t bother this pair or their greenie mates. In the Victorian Liberal Party implodes while Bracks’ Government attacks consumers I explain the fallacies behind the banning of plastic bags.
For more information on windmills see The real truth about windmills by Dr. Howard C. Hayden Professor Emeritus Physics from the University of Connecticut and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Colorado.
A final note: It’s because these alternative energy sources are destructively expensive that the green leadership advocate them. It was, after all, Amory Lovins who said that “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 stated that “Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 24 July 2006