It's all over but for the sweating?

[redneck]

This is a good article.

Archived-Articles: Wind Energy's Ghosts

California's wind farms -- then comprising about 80% of the world's wind generation capacity -- ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned.

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[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

...Renewable energy is the only way we will survive into the next century with anything close to the current standard of living.

It will become more efficient, longer lasting and have more to contribute. At the moment it is primitive, unreliable and very expensive which is why government after government is moving away from it.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

For those who dismiss anthropogenic climate change as nothing more than a conspiracy by scientists looking for job security, here's another conspiracy debunked with similar logic:

Nobody doubts AGW that I know of, at least nobody credible. I doubt the C part of CAGW. I also think we don't understand enough about AGW - it is far more complex that we understand - it needs more research. How is that anti-science ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

You have spent too long reading that daft paper by that Australian / American moron who thinks that people who don't believe in CAGW are conspiracy nuts. Honestly there are other places that the pathetic DeSmogBlog...

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

It is simply not possible to fake climate change data. Except if you have a time machine - yeah that's how they did it!

There have been adjustments, not all are fully explained. Anything before recorded temps are reconstructions based on theories. Go and find out what "hide the decline" is all about - clue, it is not about no warming...

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

You seemingly know very little about the UK, I seem to recall you were here for a while ? (I may have the wrong person).

You're saying that the typical Briton couldn't easily cut 15% from their energy use this year - and do the same next year and the year after?

And obviously you know very little about how energy grids work - a clue, stability is the key.

On the contrary, if you could find source code for the WSCC (now WECC) powerflow & stability programs from the late 80s to early 90s, you would find my initials on a lot of comments.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

You're saying that the typical Briton couldn't easily cut 15% from their energy use this year - and do the same next year and the year after?

How do you propose they do this exactly ?

Originally Posted by jamesqf

On the contrary, if you could find source code for the WSCC (now WECC) powerflow & stability programs from the late 80s to early 90s, you would find my initials on a lot of comments.

I assume Germany doesn't use this code ? They've had loads of problems with stability - actually their renewables have also made the grids in neighbouring countries unstable too so they are considering blocking flow from Germany.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

Hey - did you know - there is this major thing called google - have you tried it ?

'Green' debacle: Tens of thousands of abandoned wind turbines now litter American landscape

Jeebus sliced

Hey, YOU'RE the one making the claims. It's not up to me to do the work of providing supporting evidence.

I'd also question the claims of abandonment - unless, of course, they're counting all the old Aermotor-type wind pumps from the early 1900s. Used to drive through Altamont Pass regularly, and those turbines aren't abandoned.

PS: We might also consider the basic reliability of your cited source for this. Note a few of the links to other articles in the "Most Popular" sidebar:

"Vaccine court' awards millions to two autistic children
damaged by vaccines"

"Black cumin: The secret miracle heal-all remedy"

"Learn how to detoxify electromagnetic radiation and more with bentonite clay"

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by freebeard

...Arragonis -- Is that you in the profile pic, or Isambard Kingdom Brunel ?

Yes it is me, well no it is Brunel.

On another forum we were discussing the effects of immigration - the idea being that it is always bad. The example of Brunel tends to be a clincher here - his father, Marc, did a load of good things for Britain and was a foreigner settled here (a refugee from revolutionary France), and technically his son was from an immigrant family but didn't do too badly either

The picture is one of a series made by Robert Howlett an early photographer - I have another one of him leaning a little more on the chains over my desk as a reminder of what can be done

I also have a large picture of Mallard over my fireplace from a challenge by Mrs A when we had our house decorated - in fact this one:



I like the idea of the "chep" in the foreground admiring the engineering and perhaps having a small "crisis" with it all.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Hey, YOU'RE the one making the claims. It's not up to me to do the work of providing supporting evidence.

Hey, YOU are claiming it is possible to go 15% year on year - that was the original claim. I say this is bollocks for most people. Prove it isn't.

Originally Posted by jamesqf

I'd also question the claims of abandonment - unless, of course, they're counting all the old Aermotor-type wind pumps from the early 1900s. Used to drive through Altamont Pass regularly, and those turbines aren't abandoned.

Oh - ok, I read the link above too.

Altamont's turbines have since 2008 been tethered four months of every year in an effort to protect migrating birds after environmentalists filed suit. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, 75 to 110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333 American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually. A July, 2008 study by the Alameda County Community Development Agency points to 10,000 annual bird deaths from Altamont Pass wind turbines. Audubon calls Altamont, "probably the worst site ever chosen for a wind energy project." In 2004 the group unsuccessfully challenged renewal applications for 18 of 20 Altamont wind farms.

So we have a site that only works 2/3 of the time, and given that renewables only do 40-60% of capacity we can cut that by a half, and the grid HAS to accept anything it makes because of FITs and deal with it however it arrives and maintain a working grid.

Hawaii’s Future? Abandoned Solar Farms Clutter California Desert > Hawaii Free Press > Articles Main

Weed-Covered, Neglected Solar Park: 20 Acres, $11 Million, Only One And Half Years Old!

[Arragonis]

I'll just re-park this.

Originally Posted by Arragonis

In a perfect world imagined from the 1930s via Popular Mechanics then maybe, just maybe - along with personal helicopters and jet-packs. These guys (below) have a standpoint (Nuclear) but the points they make are valuable in bringing this back to the real world...

The myth of renewable energy | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists



One this article fails to mention is that the infrastructure requires maintenance - windmills only last 5-15 years at the outside - so this commitment to them is ongoing if you want to keep using the power they make.

EDIT - And maybe I'll check in at the weekend.

[Arragonis]

Also forgot to include this.

Wind farms vs wildlife » The Spectator

Wind turbines only last for ‘half as long as previously thought’, according to a new study. But even in their short lifespans, those turbines can do a lot of damage. Wind farms are devastating populations of rare birds and bats across the world, driving some to the point of extinction. Most environmentalists just don’t want to know. Because they’re so desperate to believe in renewable energy, they’re in a state of denial. But the evidence suggests that, this century at least, renewables pose a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change.

I’m a lecturer in biological and human sciences at Oxford university. I trained as a zoologist, I’ve worked as an environmental consultant — conducting impact assessments on projects like the Folkestone-to-London rail link — and I now teach ecology and conservation. Though I started out neutral on renewable energy, I’ve since seen the havoc wreaked on wildlife by wind power, hydro power, biofuels and tidal barrages. The environmentalists who support such projects do so for ideological reasons. What few of them have in their heads, though, is the consolation of science.

My speciality is species extinction. When I was a child, my father used to tell me about all the animals he’d seen growing up in Kent — the grass snakes, the lime hawk moths — and what shocked me when we went looking for them was how few there were left. Species extinction is a serious issue: around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day. Yet environmentalists are urging us to adopt technologies that are hastening this process. Among the most destructive of these is wind power.

Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’

Because wind farms tend to be built on uplands, where there are good thermals, they kill a disproportionate number of raptors. In Australia, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is threatened with global extinction by wind farms. In north America, wind farms are killing tens of thousands of raptors including golden eagles and America’s national bird, the bald eagle. In Spain, the Egyptian vulture is threatened, as too is the Griffon vulture — 400 of which were killed in one year at Navarra alone. Norwegian wind farms kill over ten white-tailed eagles per year and the population of Smøla has been severely impacted by turbines built against the opposition of ornithologists.

Nor are many other avian species safe. In North America, for example, proposed wind farms on the Great Lakes would kill large numbers of migratory songbirds. In the Atlantic, seabirds such as the Manx Shearwater are threatened. Offshore wind farms are just as bad as onshore ones, posing a growing threat to seabirds and migratory birds, and reducing habitat availability for marine birds (such as common scoter and eider ducks).
‘Uh-oh.’

‘Uh-oh.’

I’ve heard it suggested that birds will soon adapt to avoid turbine blades. But your ability to learn something when you’ve been whacked on the head by an object travelling at 200 mph is limited. And besides, this comes from a complete misconception of how long it takes species to evolve. Birds have been flying, unimpeded, through the skies for millions of years. They’re hardly going to alter their habits in a few months. You hear similar nonsense from environmentalists about so-called habitat ‘mitigation’. There has been talk, for example, during proposals to build a Severn barrage, that all the waders displaced by the destruction of the mud flats can have their inter-tidal habitat replaced elsewhere. It may be what developers and governments want to hear, but recreating such habitats would take centuries not years — even if space were available. The birds wouldn’t move on somewhere else. They’d just starve to death.

Loss of habitat is the single biggest cause of species extinction. Wind farms not only reduce habitat size but create ‘population sinks’ — zones which attract animals and then kill them. My colleague Mark Duchamp suggests birds are lured in because they see the turbines as perching sites and also because wind towers (because of the grass variations underneath) seem to attract more prey. The turbines also attract bats, whose wholesale destruction poses an ever more serious conservation concern.

Bats are what is known as K-selected species: they reproduce very slowly, live a long time and are easy to wipe out. Having evolved with few predators — flying at night helps — bats did very well with this strategy until the modern world. This is why they are so heavily protected by so many conventions and regulations: the biggest threats to their survival are made by us.

And the worst threat of all right now is wind turbines. A recent study in Germany by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research showed that bats killed by German turbines may have come from places 1,000 or more miles away. This would suggest that German turbines — which an earlier study claims kill more than 200,000 bats a year — may be depressing populations across the entire northeastern portion of Europe. Some studies in the US have put the death toll as high as 70 bats per installed megawatt per year: with 40,000 MW of turbines currently installed in the US and Canada. This would give an annual death toll of up to three -million.

Why is the public not more aware of this carnage? First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up — to the extent of burying the corpses of victims. Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy. What they clearly don’t appreciate — for they know next to nothing about biology — is that most of the species they claim are threatened by ‘climate change’ have already survived 10 to 20 ice ages, and sea-level rises far more dramatic than any we have experienced in recent millennia or expect in the next few centuries. Climate change won’t drive those species to extinction; well-meaning environmentalists might.

The second edition of Clive Hambler’s Conservation (Cambridge University Press) is out now.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

Hey, YOU are claiming it is possible to go 15% year on year - that was the original claim. I say this is bollocks for most people. Prove it isn't.

OK. Per the US EIA, average residential electric use was 11,496 kWh per year. My actual use for the last year was 3380 kWh. So the average user could do 7 years of 15% annual reduction before reaching my current (still comfortable) usage level. And I could still add solar or wind generation, solar water heat (mine's electric), LED lighting, &c to reduce my use still further.