Benny Peiser alerts us to this excellent feature story brought to you by the UK Spectator on the wildlife devastation being wrought by “climate-friendly wind turbines”. Hats off to the Spectator for this one.
The story just goes to show you how little the environmentalist thought these things out:
1. Wind turbines don’t produce that much electricity.
2. They run on average only at about 20% of their rated capacity.
3. Their lifetimes are turning out to be only half of what was promised.
4. They are turning the landscape into a panoramic eyesore.
5. Now, we see they are killing birds and bats by the millions.
Recall how environmentalists like to think they are intellectually superior to everyone else, and that they rarely make mistakes. At worst, they only have to “adjust” their ideas at times. This assumed intellectual superiority is what drives them.
Well, it now looks like they got some major adjusting to do with their thinking. But I suppose this windmill carnage will be too much for them to cope with, and so they’ll go on denying it and act like they’re rescuing the climate.
How can we expect them to understand the complexities of climate when they can’t even think more than one step ahead?
We saw the same pattern of behaviour with the communists and their economics. Did they change course? Except for China, they all obstinately stayed in acute denial until everything around them collapsed. Expect the same from the kook-green, drugged-up-on-climate-protectionism European governments and media.
Clive Hambler writes (emphasis added):
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.”
One has to wonder which species is more intelligent: birds or environmentalist kooks?
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.”
I seriously doubt that green-kooks are any more capable of learning.
Example green kook in denial, Bill McKibben. Hopelessly clinging to the climate obsession. Good thing he first washed the bird-blood off his hands before speaking to his gullible audience at RIT. Photo source: Hotshot977, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
“The Czech Republic and Poland intend to build switches on their borders to keep German energy off their nets. Hopes of achieving a pan-European electricity market are undermined by Germany’s embrace of unreliable green energy production.”
http://www.thegwpf.org/czechs-poles-german-green-energy/
Thank God for the Chzeks and Poles, the are leading the world in green energy by keeping it out.
@mwhite,
The power flow controlling devices are not ‘switches’. They are ‘phase shifting transformers’.
That just means that they allow for a gradual throttling. In the extreme case they can block energy completely; that’s why they are being installed.
There will soon be another un-planned cost for wind-farms. Wind-farms interfere with air traffic control radars. The spinning blades cause Doppler interference and aircraft returns get lost in that interference. Aveillant is developing infill radars to provide the missing position and altitude data. Wind-farm developers will pay Aveillant a fee based on wind-farm size for the replacement radar data.
Source: Aviation Week and Space Technology, Dec 31 issue, page 142.
Would this be considered a green job, affixing the problems created by wind energy, the least green energy source on the planet?
Correct, this is a green job. Actually everything is a green job, just selling Asprin to someone who donates money to WWF is considered a green job.
@Ed
Very interesting!
In addition, the situation in Germany is such that closure of any more conventional power plants is not feasible. This is despite investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in so-called renewable technologies, particularly wind generation.
Oh well, I guess the Germans will simply print more money. Bazing, problem solved. No worries.
I tried this 6 hours ago with full linK
The only factual things about turbines and animals in the USA is that the current government looks the other way when birds are killed by a blade while fining coal and oil companies for their transgressions. Other than that it seems quite hard to find out anything. The #5 statement says “birds and bats by the millions”, but who documents such numbers? I live in between two wind power ridges (about 15 miles both east and west of me) and there is nary a peep from anyone about bird and bat deaths. One person suggested that if those looking under the turbines don’t show up until mid-morning the coyotes will have cleaned the area of carcasses.
If wild animals were going to adapt to avoid blades we might also expect they would have long ago adapted to moving autos. Modern highways and speeds have existed since the 1950s, so after more than half a century the theory of adaptation seems falsified. Here are some numbers:
http://www.deercrash.org/states/data.htm
The quote about not learning when whacked on the head by a turbine blade moving at 200 mph gets one’s attention but misses the point.
The coyotes very quickly learn where food sources are located.
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One way to force environmental activists to face these isues is to hoist them on thier own pointard of the Precautionary Principle. Require they prove that thier pet projects will cause no harm.
Please note the guy isn’t a professor: http://www.hertford.ox.ac.uk/about/people/mr-clive-hambler
The way Europe treated the Poles in WWII, paybacks a bitch aint it?
When you look at the methodology of “wind farm” installation, it’s a lot like gas fracking. I don’t think the people who actually install them are ecology-minded. How could they be, with such blatant effects on the countryside? It’s a travesty what’s happening to northeastern Oregon, for example.
There are some pseudo-environmentalist techie types who’d like to see the whole planet look like a Star Trek project, and those are the ones who really worry me, with their eager engineering skills, set in a bad direction. They oddly dismiss natural landscapes in the big scheme of all things “green.”