Blown Away By Cursed, Dirty Wind Power

UK Wind Farms Paid Millions Per Day NOT to Run Turbines


Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London

Last week, millions of pounds in “constraint payments” were paid to wind energy farms to not run their turbines.

Over £12 million was handed out to wind farms in the United Kingdom last week, following a major outage in a powerline that transported energy from Scottish wind farms to England. The handouts will be tacked onto consumers’ energy bills throughout the country. 

The firms were paid between 25 and 80 per cent more than they would have earned were the turbines actually running, reports The Telegraph.

A study conducted in December by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) found that the UK handed out a record high £136 million to 86 wind farm owners last year in “constraint payments” when the grid was incapable of handling the energy flow.

Dr John Constable, the director of the REF, condemned the spate of wind farm development in Scotland saying: 

“The Scottish Government has permitted excessive and environmentally damaging growth in wind power north of the border which has put the electricity system under great strain and burdened English and Welsh consumers not only with constraint payments but also with the additional expense of a £1 billion interconnector that is itself proving unreliable. The environment and the consumer have been betrayed over and over again.”

There is None So Blind . . .

Turning Screws Inside Wind Turbines

We have made the point before--but because it would seem there are heaps of slow learners--we need to make it again.  Wind power is a crock.  As many have observed, wind power is a very expensive and inefficient way to generate electricity.  Regardless of this basic reality, wind power has achieved rock star status as a clean energy.  

The reality is that wind power is inefficient, costly, and erratic.  Any wind power business case relies upon huge subsidies to make it "profitable".  In other words, it can only continue if Peter is thoroughly robbed in order to pay Paul.

The brutal realities have finally been faced up to by a small wind power company in New Zealand.  It may well be the canary in the coal mine.

The new chairman of NZ Windfarms says the company has reached a turning point where it must evaluate its future because of the unpredictability of wind power.

Stuart Bauld spoke of the options as he also announced a $14m loss due to Vector selling its 22 per cent shareholding meaning Windfarms lost millions of dollars in tax benefits under continuity of shareholding accounting rules. [Stuff.  Emphasis, ours.]

In order to make a profit Windpower needs (as is universally the case, it seems) artificial subsidies of one sort or another.  In this case it was tax credits.

Boys Crying Wolf

Another Greenist Calamity Disappears Quietly Into the Night

Just a few short years ago--around 2010--scary (in the sense of "scaremongering") environmentalists were pronouncing that we were confronted with what they had been doomy about for so long: the world was running out of oil.

Now, of course, the greenists were secretly very pleased that the world's oil supply was going to shrivel to a trickle, because oil was a nasty environmental pollutant and the chief cause of alleged global warming.  But they needed a doom-scenario back in 2010 to get people's attention and to overcome political lethargy.  They wanted a green planet.  Hilariously, they forgot to mention (if they ever opened their mind to the thought) that carbon dioxide is the greenest gas known to man.  A green planet requires a CO₂ rich planet; burning lots of oil would help a great deal towards a global green paradise.

In any event, we now need sleepless nights no longer.  There's plenty of oil to go around and no end to it in sight.  This means plenty of  CO₂  released into the atmosphere in the years ahead, which implies a very green planet indeed.

Here is a headline from one of our local papers:

South Australia's Backward-to-the-Future Move

Energy Insecurity

South Australia had a bit of a storm a few days ago.  It resulted in a state-wide power black out.  How did that happen?  Green energy.

South Australia has become seriously committed to wind power.  It plans to help stop the world warming up, and this is a great way to do it.  Now over fifty percent of South Australia's electricity comes from wind power.  There is just a wee problem.  The storm winds a few days ago were so powerful, the state's wind turbines were automatically shut down.  Ergo: brown outs and no electricity.

Australia's Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull lost no time pointing out the obvious:

. . . Mr Turnbull told reporters [South Australia Premier] Mr Weatherill still had a case to answer to “keep the lights on” in his state.  “What we need to do across all levels of government is this - we have to deliver energy security. Rule one - keep the lights on,” he said.  “Second, we have to ensure that energy is affordable. SA has the highest wholesale energy costs in Australia.  So that is a problem for SA and the government, Mr Weatherill has to answer for that.”  [Newscom.au]

The first official report into the disaster concluded that the state's wind power over-capacity was the first cause of the problem.  Everything else cascaded down from that.  This was not a politically correct conclusion, but facts can be stubborn things, it seems.

Clinging to Old, Failed Mantras

No Exceptions

Command and control economies are notoriously wasteful, inefficient, and destructive of wealth.  This has always been the case.  No more so than in modern China.  Because the country is so vast and the population so huge the inefficiencies and waste increase geometrically.  

Let's take the matter of wind farms for power generation as an example.  We are familiar with the hard economic reality that wind farms only work if they are heavily subsidised by the state.  This is not a problem in China because the state fundamentally owns all capital and all labour.  But what it does do is turbo-charge the wastefulness and capital  destruction intrinsic to wind farms.

The centralist planners in Western countries (that is, those who believe that the state sector knows best when it comes to wealth creation, production, distribution, and economic growth) can only look at China with green envy.

Greenist Folly

Not Cheap

Not good news at all.  This headline in the Daily Telegraph ought to make every self-respecting greenie shudder in paroxysms of guilt:

Wind turbine fires 'ten times more common than thought', experts warn

Study backed by Imperial College finds wind turbines prone to "catastrophic" fires but the true scale of the problem is unknown

Then came a spectacular image--that is, if you enjoy pyrotechnic displays:

A £2 million, 100 metre tall wind turbine catches fire in hurricane-force winds at Ardrossan, North Ayrshire, Scotland, in 2011. Photo: STUART MCMAHON

Wind turbines catch fire.  In fact they are prone to do so, according to a study backed by the Imperial College London.

Dumb and Dumber

The Wondrous Works of Windmill Tilters

Electricity power  prices in New Zealand are rocketing northward.  The official Left-wing political party, Labour is thinking that it can make political capital out of the pain of rising power bills.  The gaffe-prone leader, David Cunliffe tweeted the following:

Hat Tip: Keeping Stock

He was immediately confronted with a howl of raucous Twitter ridicule.

Drowning in Oil

Peak Oil, Where Art Thou?

The catastrophists have been warning for the past ten years of mankind approaching "peak oil"--that is, the time when oil consumption exceeds supply, leading to a drastic global shortage of energy.  Peak oil was supposed to have occurred around now.  Except . . . .

North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly

By Joe Carroll and Bradley Olson  
Dec 17, 2013 6:54 AM
Bloomberg News


The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.

Letter From the UK (About Wind Farming)

True cost of Britain's wind farm industry revealed

Every job in Britain’s wind farm industry is effectively subsidised to the extent of £100,000 per year

By Robert Mendick, and Edward Malnick

5 Jun 2013

The Telegraph

 

A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for the wind industry, which claims it is an economically dynamic sector that creates jobs. It was described by critics as proof the sector was not economically viable, with one calling it evidence of “soft jobs” that depended on the taxpayer.

The subsidy was disclosed in a new analysis of official figures, which showed that:

Messianic Pretensions Blowing Up

Wild and Restless Spirits

When governments get the-grand-idea and seek to bring it to pass for the good of mankind the results are always disastrous.  God is a jealous God; He does not brook pretenders to the throne of  Heaven. 

Climate change has seen a flowering of false messianism.  Governments have set out to save the world and have ended up looking like stupid chooks.  Germany and windpower imbroglios are the latest--which is particularly ironic since Germany has been hailed by greenists everywhere as the poster nation for where the rest of the world needs to go.

The Telegraph compares how the UK is still cheerleading for wind power, attempting to imitate Germany, while in the latter country people are starting to rue the day they ever went down that ephemeral and unpredictable track.

Tarnished Family Silver

Powering Up

In New Zealand we are to be offered an opportunity to buy up to 49 percent in state owned power generating companies.  The first to go on the block will be Mighty River Power.

Now we have all sorts reservations when it comes to public floats.  Normally the goods-on-offer are so dressed up with twinkling trinkets that that it's hard to see the shape of the unclothed beast beneath.  Most public floats are overpriced and over-hyped.  There are now rumours about that the Government will attempt to entice investors by offering some of the companies at a discount.  Maybe.  Caveat emptor.