Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Net Zero Watch has ridiculed the Seventh Carbon Budget, which was published today, saying that ‘it doesn’t rise much above the level of fantasy’. The campaigning organisation says that the spending estimates are unaffordable, and are lowballed, because they are based on figures that bear no resemblance to anything seen in the real world.
Net Zero Watch has ridiculed the Seventh Carbon Budget, which was published today, saying that ‘it doesn’t rise much above the level of fantasy’. The campaigning organisation says that the spending estimates are unaffordable, and are lowballed, because they are based on figures that bear no resemblance to anything seen in the real world.
The Climate Change Committee, which prepares the budget, says that capital expenditure on Net Zero projects will have to rise from around £18 billion today to over £40 billion by 2029, a level of expenditure that will then have to be sustained for a decade. But Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford says this is unaffordable:
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is already running out of spending headroom. For the Climate Change Committee to commit the country by law to a financial excess on this scale shows that the whole Net Zero project is not grounded in reality.
And Mr Montford has discovered that even these figures are gross underestimates, because the Climate Change Committee is assuming dramatic reductions in the cost of renewable energy, despite the fact that the ongoing trend is upwards.
Andrew Montford said:
The Climate Change Committee are telling us that Net Zero is going to save us money, but it’s clear that they have simply invented numbers that will lead to that conclusion. This report is not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Notes for editors
1. Real-world estimates of the cost of offshore wind (levelised costs) have been prepared by Net Zero Watch from audited financial accounts of windfarms.
2. Strike prices may be slightly lower than levelised costs because they are index linked and because windfarms can earn prices above their strike prices in various ways.
3. Ed Miliband is currently consulting on the possibility of extending windfarm subsidies to 20 years (from the current 15 years). This comes after the introduction of extra subsidies for windfarms in the shape of the Clean Industry Bonus scheme. These two factors are further indications that windfarm costs are rising, not falling.
For some reason more than a thousand whales, dolphins and porpoises died around the UK’s coastline every year for the last eight years. This is roughly twice as many as in the 25 years before that. What could it be?
For some reason more than a thousand whales, dolphins and porpoises died around the UK’s coastline every year for the last eight years. This is roughly twice as many as in the 25 years before that. What could it be?
Whatever it is, it isn’t windfarms. Greenpeace says so:
“There is no evidence whatsoever linking offshore wind to whale deaths. The manufactured hysteria is the result of fake news promoted by politicians, big oil, and their cronies to save the oil and gas industry”
…”building offshore wind is way, way better for ocean wildlife than fossil fuels”.
And yet there are a thousand dead cetaceans.
Andrew Montford of NetZeroWatch graphed beached dolphins, whales and porpoises against the rise of a new industrial marine machine:
Cetacean Strandings in the UK graphed against offshore wind capacity. @Dissentient
There’s no evidence, say Greenpeace, sounding just like Philip Morris.
We don’t know for sure what is causing so many whales and dolphins to die, but Greenpeace doesn’t even want to find out. The only thing we do know is that Greenpeace is craven, counterfeit, eco-imposter front for the Globalist Blob. As Matt Ridley saidwhat happened to the Precautionary Principle?
The UK’s 2023 annual report to Ascobans* reveals an appalling level of cetacean deaths in British seas, and comes in the wake of record-breaking increases in whale, dolphin and porpoise mortality in recent years. This shocking statistic should be a wake-up call to those planning to further industrialise our seas …
Researchers have known since at least 2013 that pile drivers were permanently deafening porpoises, leaving them, presumably to die miserable deaths wandering blindly through dark or murky seas. Where were all the professors of marine science, paid by the public to know these things, and where was the BBC?
They were all silent for ten years until someone invented and tested “bubble curtains” to protect porpoises, and then they could say “well isn’t that clever”?
Spread the word: fifty years ago environmentalists would have raised hell about a thousand dead whales and dolphins. Today they are a part of the cover up. They’re not even blaming climate change and 0.001 degree of warming. They don’t want to draw attention to the blubber on the beach in case people start asking hard questions.
Greenpeace, WWF, UNEP, they’re all fake environmentalists.
Posted Mon 10 Jun 2024 at 5:23amMonday 10 Jun 2024 at 5:23am, updated Mon 10 Jun 2024 at 11:22pm
Deep in coal country, a lifelong environmentalist and one-time Greens candidate is feeling the applause.
It’s Thursday night at a Gladstone pub and Steven Nowakowski has won over sceptical locals.
His message is a simple one; he believes a wave of new windfarm developments threatens to smash hilltops and turn koala habitat into “industrial zones”.
The green movement, he says, are in “la-la land” over windfarms, a comment that draws nods and knowing smiles from the audience.
But its only when one local suggests building a new coal-fired power station does the crowd erupt in spontaneous applause.
This is the front line of Australia’s latest climate war.
Nowakowski, a nature lover who says he’s been arrested fighting for forests, shares the stage with ultra-conservative federal MP Colin Boyce, a man who claims burning fossil fuels creates “plant food”.
“We’re an odd couple,” Nowakowski admits. “I shake my head in disbelief. I cannot believe that I’m in this situation.”
…
“We’re going down the wrong path,” he says. “We can’t destroy biodiversity to save the planet.”
I applaud Steven Nowakowski’s courage breaking ranks with his friends, and standing up for what he believes – genuine measures to protect nature.
The colossal wilderness destruction wrought in the name of renewable energy was always going to be an issue.
Nobody who genuinely cares about the environment can see a devastated concrete construction zone which was once a protected wilderness, stretching as far as the eye can see, and say “see, we saved nature”.
Ah, The Guardian, ever the beacon of balanced journalism, has outdone itself yet again. With a flourish of melodramatic despair, they’ve painted a portrait of Donald Trump as an eco-villain, brandishing policies like a black cape in a horror show of environmental doom. Let’s dive into their latest apocalyptic prophecy.
Ah, The Guardian, ever the beacon of balanced journalism, has outdone itself yet again. With a flourish of melodramatic despair, they’ve painted a portrait of Donald Trump as an eco-villain, brandishing policies like a black cape in a horror show of environmental doom. Let’s dive into their latest apocalyptic prophecy.
Donald Trump has vowed to immediately halt offshore wind energy projects “on day one” of a new term as US president, in his most explicit threat yet to the industry and the latest in a series of promises to undo key aspects of the transition to cleaner energy.
The drama unfolds with Trump, the presumed puppet master of planetary destruction, vowing to dismantle the beloved wind projects. Never mind that the industry might warrant a critical inspection of its impacts; The Guardian is more interested in framing this as an opening scene of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Trump repeated false accusations about wind projects as being lethal to whales during a rally on Saturday in Wildwood, a resort city on New Jersey’s coast, promising to stamp out an industry that has been enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden.
Here, Trump is almost comically vilified, conjuring images of dead whales washing up by the dozens, courtesy of those nefarious wind farms. The Guardian, in its infinite wisdom, assures us these claims are “false,” brushing aside any pesky nuances about the environmental cost of these structures.
“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said of the wind turbines. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
One can almost hear the ominous music swell as Trump lists the crimes of these whirling dervishes of doom. Of course, The Guardian couldn’t possibly entertain the thought that he might be exaggerating but not entirely fabricating. Instead, they prefer their villains cartoonish and their plots black and white.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get more theatrical:
McLeod said that there has been a concerted misinformation campaign, funded by oil and gas interests, to mislead voters. “Big oil is benefiting from all of this fear mongering,” she said.
The plot thickens with the introduction of Big Oil, the shadowy antagonist lurking behind the curtain. According to The Guardian’s script, anyone who questions the sanctity of wind power must be a marionette dancing on petroleum-coated strings.
Finally, Trump’s distaste for the Paris Agreement is presented not as a policy position but as a nefarious scheme to single-handedly warm the globe:
“In one of the most vivid illustrations of his stance towards the climate crisis, Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement during his first White House term.”
…
“The Paris climate accord does nothing to actually improve the environment here in the United States or globally,” Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former EPA chief of staff, told the Guardian in February.
In the world according to The Guardian, this statement is less a legitimate argument and more a declaration of war against Mother Earth, conveniently ignoring any substantive issues with the agreement.
In this latest piece The Guardian crafts a narrative so richly woven with bias that one could mistake it for a tapestry of fiction. Trump’s environmental policy positions, whether one agrees with them or not, deserve a platform for discussion rather than dismissal as the raving of a would-be planet plunderer.
So here’s to The Guardian, our tireless sentinel against the apocalypse, ever vigilant, ever fearful, ever entertaining. If journalism ever tires them, there’s always a spot open in Hollywood script writing. Cheers to that!
As wind power grows around the world, so does the threat turbines pose to wildlife. From simple fixes to high-tech solutions, researchers are finding ways to reduce the toll.
Even the greeniacs are starting to understand the damage to wildlife from wind turbines:
As wind power grows around the world, so does the threat turbines pose to wildlife. From simple fixes to high-tech solutions, researchers are finding ways to reduce the toll.
About twice a month, many of Australia’s wind farms receive an important visit from dogs and their handlers. The dogs are professionals and know exactly what they’re there for. Eagerly, they run along transects under the wind turbines, sniffing until they catch a scent, then lying down, sitting or freezing once they’ve located their targets: the carcasses of bats and birds that were killed by turbine collisions.
For nearly two decades, wind and wildlife ecologist Emma Bennett’s company, Elmoby Ecology, has been using canines to count the victims of wind turbines in southern Australia. The numbers are troubling. Each turbine yields four to six bird carcasses per year, part of an overall death toll from wind turbines that likely tops 10,000 annually for the whole of Australia (not including carcasses carried away by scavengers). Such deaths are in the hundreds of thousands in North America. Far worse are the numbers of dead bats: The dogs find between six and 20 of these per turbine annually, with tens of thousands believed to die each year in Australia. In North America, the number is close to a million.
A large ship being built to construct offshore wind farms in a way that complies with a labor union-backed law is behind schedule and over budget, compounding a series of setbacks that have complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to expand domestic wind energy, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A large ship being built to construct offshore wind farms in a way that complies with a labor union-backed law is behind schedule and over budget, compounding a series of setbacks that have complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to expand domestic wind energy, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Charybdis, a massive boat under construction in south Texas, would be the first vessel legally allowed and able to carry wind turbine components from an American port and then install turbines in the open ocean, the WSJ reported. The ship is about a year behind schedule, which has placed a strain on the offshore wind industry and made it less likely that the United States meets the Biden administration’s goal of producing 30 GW of wind energy by 2030.
In addition to being behind schedule, Charybdis is projected to have a final cost of $625 million, around double what a similar ship would cost elsewhere, according to analysts.
No existing American ships have the capability to install the wind turbines many energy firms have planned, and foreign vessels that can build them are not allowed to pick up components directly from American ports.
Rather than large foreign ships directly picking up turbine parts from American ports, smaller American boats will shuttle parts from ports to the farm sites where foreign ships then use their cranes to pick up the parts and begin construction.
Turbine blades can be larger than football fields, and turbine towers can stand as much as 600 feet above water.
Ørsted, a Danish wind energy company, contracted Charybdis to construct two wind farms off the coast of New York but has since had to explore alternative options due to the delays, the WSJ reported.
There is an ongoing shortage of construction ships, contributing to wind energy projects being canceled and delayed, according to the WSJ.
Other wind power companies have paid tens of millions of dollars to get out of contracts to sell energy to utility companies after they were unable to complete projects, citing inflation and supply chain difficulties.
Cancellations of wind energy projects have complicated the Biden administration’s clean energy goals. The United States is only on track to meet about half of its 2030 offshore wind energy goal, according to Reuters.
Delays and cancellations will likely drive up the prices Americans end up paying for wind energy, according to the WSJ.
The Biden administration has financially supported the wind industry through tax credits and manufacturing subsidies.
Despite federal support, some experts think taxpayers could be on the hook to bail out failing wind companies.
“No one should doubt the willingness of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats to try to spend billions more debt-funded dollars to bail out their pet offshore wind industry,” David Blackmon, an energy consultant, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The AFL-CIO did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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A new paper from the Net Zero Watch demonstrates conclusively renewables increase electricity bills — indeed, it is almost impossible that adding a new windfarm to the grid would ever reduce consumer prices.
A new paper from the Net Zero Watch demonstrates conclusively renewables increase electricity bills — indeed, it is almost impossible that adding a new windfarm to the grid would ever reduce consumer prices.
The author of the paper, Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford, outlines a series of effects that a new windfarm will have on bills, showing that in each case households will take a financial hit. As Mr Montford explains:
In order to reduce bills, a new generator generally has to force an old one to leave the electricity market — otherwise there are two sets of costs to cover. But with wind power, you can’t let anything leave the market, because one day there might be no wind.
But as well as adding excess capacity to the grid, renewables also have a series of other effects, each of which will push bills up further. Mr Montford says:
Renewables need subsidies, they cause inefficiency, they require new grid balancing services that need to be paid for; the list of all the different effects is surprisingly long. There is only one way a windfarm will push your power bills, and that’s upwards.
The paper is entitled The Six Ways Renewables Increase Electricity Bills. It is available in plain text below, or can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking on the cover image.
There are many misconceptions about how electricity bills are affected by new generation capacity, and in particular by new windfarm capacity. Here I break down the main effects. To illustrate them, I will first look at a simple example of a ‘dash for gas’ in a fossil-fuel powered grid. Then I move on to look at the more complex case of a ‘dash for wind’ in a grid powered by gas and renewables. In both cases, the grid I describe is much simpler than the real one, so I close by considering whether what I describe is correct in practice.
Costs and markets
The electricity market tends to favour generators with lower fuel* costs: the ones with the lowest fuel costs always run, ones with intermediate costs run some of the time, and ones with high costs only get to run occasionally (this is called the ‘merit order’). However, it is important to understand that, no matter what its fuel cost, a generator still needs to cover all its costs (i.e. including capital and maintenance).
Some can earn enough in the marketplace to do this, but others can’t. How it works is all bound up in the way the market works, and the fact that electricity is a commodity; in other words, everybody in the marketplace is selling the same thing.
A concrete example should make it all clear. Let us look at a grid running wholly on gas- and coal-fired power stations, and assume that gas has lower fuel costs and thus runs preferentially.† When demand is sufficient to require both gas and some coal-fired units to run, the gas-fired units do not sell at a lower price, despite their lower fuel cost. Instead, they sell at the higher price demanded by coal-fired units – they are all selling megawatt hours, after all.
As a result, the wholesale market price for electricity tends to settle at around the fuel cost of the coal-fired units (we say the market price is ‘set’ by coal).
The market price varies though. At times of high demand, older coal-fired units will have to be fired up. Because these are inefficient, and also because they get to run comparatively rarely, they have high fuel costs and high total costs. But when they are called upon, they are indispensable, and they can demand very high payments. Since everyone in the market can see this coming, they all bid at the same prices they expect the old coal-fired station to get, and the market clears at a commensurately higher price. Consumers carry the cost.
Being able to charge those higher prices enables the gas-fired units to earn enough money to pay for their capital and maintenance costs as well as their fuel. However, this is not an option for the coal-fired units (or perhaps just the least efficient ones), which will therefore require a subsidy to keep them in the market.
A dash for gas
Now consider what happens when you add to the generation mix a new, lower-cost source of generation, such as a state-of-the-art gas-fired power station. How will market prices change?
It’s important to note that there is no direct effect, because market prices are set by coal. However, there are many indirect effects.
Firstly, the coal-fired power stations all get to run less often. This will increase their fuel costs somewhat, since they will use coal less efficiently if they are switching on and off more often. So, counterintuitively, one effect of adding new, lower cost generation (in this case a new gas-fired unit) to the generation mix may be to increase market prices,‡ and thus the amount that consumers have to pay to every generator on the grid. In addition, since some of their costs are fixed (in other words they are unaltered by output changes – the obvious example being depreciation), their total costs per megawatt hour, and thus the price they need to achieve in the marketplace, increase even further. One way or another, consumers have to pay this too. We’ll call this the inefficiency effect.
It is possible that the least efficient coal-fired power station will decide that a reduction in operating hours is intolerable, and it will decide to shut up shop. If that happens, market prices going forward may well be set by a somewhat more efficient coal-fired power plant, thus tending to push market prices down again. We’ll call this the displacement effect.
However, grid managers may decide that these units are indispensible for dealing with periods of very high demand. They will therefore offer them a financial bung to make them stay around. We’ll come back to this subsidy, which we’ll refer to as the capacity market effect (after the mechanism currently used to deliver it).
If more and more gas-fired power stations are added, these effects will continue in tandem. However, eventually, there will be some periods of low demand when no coal-fired units are required at all. When that happens, the wholesale market price will no longer be set by coal, but by gas. This will cause a sharp drop in prices, which will then feed through to consumers. As more and more gas-fired units come on stream, average market prices steadily decline.
Thus dashing from coal to gas will eventually make consumers better off.
A dash for wind
When the new generation capacity is wind rather than gas, things are rather different. Imagine a grid that is a mixture of gas-fired power stations and windfarms – much like the one in the UK today – to which a new, state-of-the-art windfarm is added.
As in the previous example, the fuel costs of the new generator are lower (for wind they are zero!); in other words, wind will run in preference to gas. However, because of their very high capital costs and low output, wind’s total costs are – except in exceptional circumstances – so high that there is no possibility of them being earned back through selling electricity.§ As a result, subsidies will be necessary to get the windfarm built. These subsidies – the Renewables Obligation and Contracts for Difference (CfDs) – are levied on electricity suppliers and thus directly exert upward pressure on consumer bills (that is, outside the wholesale market). We’ll call this the levy effect.
Once it is operational, the windfarm produces effects that are similar to those seen in the dash for gas. For example, the inefficiency effect is still in play: each new windfarm will reduce the efficiency of the gas-fired power stations, thus pushing market prices upwards.
Similarly, the displacement effect will still be in operation too, with older, less efficient power stations eventually nudged out of the marketplace, and the market price thus tending to be pushed down again. However, this time there is a crucial difference. Because the wind turbines are intermittent, they are not a direct replacement for gas-fired power stations. If, say, we replace a 1-GW gas-fired unit with three 1-GW windfarms, delivering on average 33% of their nameplate capacity, the annual output is theoretically the same. But 33% is the average; at times, the windfarms will deliver nothing at all.¶ As a result, we still need that 1-GW gas-fired unit; if it has left the marketplace, we may sometimes be left with a catastrophic shortfall in supply. Thus, when renewables are involved, it becomes much more important not to let old, inefficient generators leave the marketplace; the capacity market effect will be seen to a much greater degree, and there will be little or no relief from the displacement effect. Consumers carry the cost of ensuring this back-up generation remains in place.
If we go on adding windfarms to the grid, there will eventually be periods of low demand and/or high wind generation in which the gas-fired power stations are no longer required to run. At these times, the market price will be set by the fuel cost of a wind farm. Since this is zero, the market price will drop to approximately zero too. (Such very low prices are already seen occasionally on the UK grid). In fact, windfarms in the Renewables Obligation can bid negative prices into the market because they will still receive generous subsidies on top of whatever they are paid for power. However, windfarms in the CfD regime have different concerns. CfDs essentially give generators an agreed fixed price, typically above market prices. However, the rules state that this top-up is only paid when the market price is not negative. Thus CfD windfarms will bid into the market just above zero, and this is the likely to be the price at which the market clears. They then receive a large top-up to take them back to where they expected to be. In other words, there is no gain to consumers – the low price inside the wholesale market is completely cancelled out by the high subsidy levied outside it. On the other hand, the Renewables Obligation units will take a (possibly large) reduction in income. This means a gain to consumers, at least in the short term. However, assuming the level of the Renewables Obligation is no higher than required to make these windfarms competitive, they will have to counterbalance periods of below-average prices with periods of above-average prices in order to make the necessary returns. Thus there may be no gain to consumers at all.
There are other effects arising from windfarms’ intermittency too. The Balancing Mechanism is the grid’s process for ensuring that the electricity system remains stable. The costs of fixing any imbalances between supply and demand are passed on to electricity system users. The best known of these costs are constraints payments, which are incurred when windfarms in far-flung locations cannot get their power to market due to limitations in grid capacity. In these circumstances, they are paid to switch off, and another generator (typically a gas-fired power station) located closer to the consumer is paid to switch on to ensure the windfarm’s customer gets their required power.
The grid has also had to introduce a new service in response to the growth of wind power. Gas-fired power stations naturally stabilise the grid (providing so-called ‘inertia’); a fault in one place tends to propagate slowly across the network, giving managers time to respond. However, windfarms have no inertia, and faults can therefore propagate almost instantaneously, threatening major blackouts. In order to mitigate this risk, the grid pays for artificial inertia, typically in the form of flywheels and batteries. In other words, a service once provided for free by gas-fired power stations is now a further burden on consumer bills.
Finally, because windfarms tend to be built far from centres of demand (in the ocean, and in remote highland areas), they bring with them the necessity for major upgrades to the transmission grid. The costs of what we can call the transmission effect are charged to users of the grid, ultimately raising consumer bills still further.
Summary
In summary, adding a windfarm to the grid increases costs to consumers in no fewer than six ways:
The inefficiency effect
The capacity market effect
The levy effect
Constraints payments
Artificial inertia
The transmission effect
Only the displacement effect could theoretically reduce costs to consumers, but in practice this is likely to be zero, because of the urgent need to keep gas-fired power stations on the grid.
In summary, it seems implausible that windfarms will ever reduce costs.
Table 1 gives indicative costs for each effect, suggesting a total of £24.5 billion, or around £850 per household per year. Approximately half of this will be experienced as increases in household bills, and the rest as increases in the general cost of living.
“…so many of our people are lost because they don’t have that connection to country…they don’t have a sense of belonging” – Jirrbal woman Georgina Wieden slamming the Chalumbin Wind Farm project.
Jirrbal woman Georgina Wieden. Source ADH TV, fair use, low resolution image to identify the subject.
“…so many of our people are lost because they don’t have that connection to country…they don’t have a sense of belonging” – Jirrbal woman Georgina Wieden slamming the Chalumbin Wind Farm project.
I visited Ravenshoe a year ago. Ravenshoe sits on top of a tropical highland plateau in Australia’s far North. It is a place of breathtaking beauty, full of unique species and natural wonders.
The thought of ruining such a place with mechanical monstrosities to satisfy the green energy fantasies of distant city based politicians is unthinkable.
Georgina has been fighting the green monstrosities for a while.
Proposed wind farm on Jirrbal Country a concern for some
A proposal for a wind farm in North Queensland has raised concerns for some Jirrbal people who say the project does not respect the land and threatens native species.
The Chalumbin Wind Farm project would see wind farm developer Epuron construct 94 wind turbines and clear 1,132 ha of land near the town of Ravenshoe.
A number of online petitions to the project have been created which list concerns about the impact of a wind farm on vulnerable and endangered species including the northern greater glider, red goshawk and the magnificent brood frog.
Jirrbal woman Georgina Wieden told a community meeting in December the Country needs to be protected.
“My daughter she is a sugar glider, that is her totem, my son is a goanna, how do I explain that their animals don’t have homes anymore because we needed electricity.”
My heart goes out to you Georgina. I hope you win your battle against those who would trample your people’s ancient traditions, I hope you defeat the green energy despoilers of nature.
Update (EW): There is growing awareness of the devastation wind turbine projects inflict on nature.
What a great euphemism – repowering. In reality it means replacing modestly intrusive wind turbines, where the nacelle was 35 meters (114 feet) above the ground, with a smaller number of massively more visible turbines with nacelles 140 metres (460 feet) above the ground – four times higher, in other words – with the tips of the blades being as high as 200 metres (650 feet).
In a comment on Saving the Planet by Trashing it I drew attention to an article in the Guardian, about the plans of Spanish-owned Scottish Power to dismantle Hagshaw Hill wind farm in the previously rural (but soon to be ever more heavily industrialised) South Lanarkshire. The plans don’t extend simply to dismantling the 28 year old wind turbines, but the intention is also to replace them with monster new turbines towering over the landscape.
Of course, in respect of such matters, where the Guardian leads the BBC follows (and vice versa) and the story now enjoys an extensive write-up on the BBC website too.
There is so much about this story to annoy anyone who has even a mildly sceptical outlook. First of all, there’s the fact that when many wind farms obtained planning permission (often against the wishes of local residents) an element of reassurance existed in the fact that the planning permission applicable to them was for a limited life – usually 25 years – with the prospect of the site being (even if only partially) restored when the planning permission expired. In respect of the abomination currently desecrating wild Shetland (Viking Energy’s wind farm), for instance, such assurances were given (even though the decommissioning bond in respect of this, a precondition of planning being granted, is still not in place). Here’s the Shetland News from 2018, reporting on Viking Energy’s expert witness, Tim Kirkwood:
The roads leading to the massive turbines would prove an asset to crofters once the turbines are removed, he said, but there was less certainty on the extent of reinstatement of the site, though he believed the concrete bases would ultimately be reduced and buried.
This is certainly true of Hagshaw Hill. Scottish Power have produced a glossy leaflet in respect of their plans for a new wind farm to replace the old, and in it they candidly admit that:
The planning permission for the Existing Development requires that the site is decommissioned and restored within six months of ceasing to generate electricity.
With the infrastructure now in place, however, it’s just too tempting to continue to blight both the landscape and the lives of local residents (human and animal), for there’s lots more money to be made. And so, with grim inevitability:
...the Proposed Development site partly comprises an operational wind farm nearing the end of its operational life. It is therefore considered to be a suitable site for wind energy development (repowering), making use of existing site infrastructure and recognising the accepted principle of wind energy generation at the site.
What a great euphemism – repowering. In reality it means replacing modestly intrusive wind turbines, where the nacelle was 35 meters (114 feet) above the ground, with a smaller number of massively more visible turbines with nacelles 140 metres (460 feet) above the ground – four times higher, in other words – with the tips of the blades being as high as 200 metres (650 feet).
Welcome to the future. Wherever wind farms already exist, the plan will be to extend their lives, with ever higher turbines, in perpetuity. Decommissioning, in so far as it takes place at all, will be partial (“it is not about demolition but reversing the process of construction” according to Ryan Walker, project manager for crane and transport specialist Forsyth of Denny), and will see massively more visual intrusion in the future. As the BBC puts it:
Re-powering will gather pace across Scotland as other turbines reach the end of an expected working life of 25 years, extending for some of them up to 30 years.
And as Scottish Power’s Charlie Jordan says:
Although Hagshaw is our oldest site, there were a number of windfarms built in the late 1990s which are coming to the end of their operational lives. We have a dozen more to repower over the next three or four years.
What is to happen to the concrete bases? They are to be removed (where to? What will be done with the concrete?), but new, significantly bigger, sets of concrete foundations will be required, along with a lot of other intrusive development:
A number of ancillary development components are also proposed, including a construction compound and concrete batching area; turbine laydown area; hardstandings adjacent to the wind turbines for construction, maintenance and decommissioning cranes; access tracks; underground cables between turbines; an onsite substation and maintenance building with welfare facility; an energy storage facility of around 20 MW; an underground export cable(s) alongside the access track to J11 of the M74; and two new permanent meteorological monitoring masts.
Some of the materials used in the windfarms can be recycled, most obviously the steel, but the old blades continue to be a problem. The Guardian article, naturally, doesn’t discuss this at all, but the BBC article, written by Douglas Fraser, probes – as is his excellent journalistic wont – a little deeper:
There are more than 11,000 wind turbines installed in Britain, with many more planned for offshore. And while most of a turbine can be recycled, including the steel towers and components in the gearing and generator, more than 33,000 blades present a challenge.
Many replaced blades have so far been sent to landfill. In some cases, they can be incinerated.
He does try to put a positive spin (pardon the pun) on this, by mentioning Re-Blade, a new Scottish company formed to recycle old turbine blades. Even here, though, there is yet another irony:
The skills involved in cutting extremely durable composite glass fibre are not available in Scotland, so it has gone to a boat-building firm near Colchester.
There is one final insult to people living near old wind farms earmarked by greedy foreign companies for financially lucrative “re-powering”. Not content with side-stepping the age limits on old planning consents, and with ensuring that the sites in question are blighted in total for more than half a century, they also expect their new planning applications to be fast tracked. Quite why this should be is a mystery to me, since the term of the original consents are well known to the energy companies, and they have plenty of time in which to draw up and submit their plans for new replacement wind farms, long before the old permissions expire. It seems, however, that this level of organisation is too much to ask. Perhaps, as technology continually develops, they want to leave each application until the last moment, in order to utilise the latest and most profitable technology. The price of this is presumably that local objectors will be given less time than ever to marshall their objections, in a planning process which, in Scotland at least, is already heavily stacked against them.
As if that isn’t insulting enough, the Guardian rubs salt in the wounds of distressed local residents:
ScottishPower is calling on the government to streamline the planning process for existing windfarms to take into account the lower risks of developing in an area that is well understood by developers and supported by local communities.
It is possible that some portions of local communities are won over by the “community benefits” (aka bribes) on offer, as part of this process. However, to pretend that all local communities are supportive, and that shortening an already one-sided planning process is therefore justified is – dare I say it – misinformation. The simple fact remains that although “repowering” does involve existing wind farm sites, the new proposals are on an environmentally much more damaging scale than the old ones, and local residents should be given every opportunity to have their say, rather than having the planning rug pulled from under their feet.
Note, the photograph accompanying this article was taken by me earlier this year and shows a damaged turbine (I believe it was struck by lightning some years ago) north of Hesket Newmarket in Cumbria.
The birds of Europe are fighting for their survival right now before our very eyes: the EU states have lost 600 million birds in the last four decades – the equivalent of a loss of 40,000 birds every day.
Spektrum.de is working on a study that finds a dramatic decline in birds in Europe.
“The birds of Europe are fighting for their survival right now before our very eyes: the EU states have lost 600 million birds in the last four decades – the equivalent of a loss of 40,000 birds every day. You can even hear it now. The bird choir every morning has already changed noticeably due to the loss of more and more individual singers and bird species. It becomes quieter and more monotonous.
A completely “silent spring” is not yet a reality, but it is getting closer. This is because the trend is continuing, as systematic recording programs in many countries show. In Germany, experts estimate that 1980 million birds have disappeared compared to the 16s.Particularly hard hit by the worst bird crisis since the beginning of scientific research are bird species that have their habitat in fields, fields or pastures. The number of these so-called agricultural bird species has plummeted by almost 60 percent in the last four decades, significantly more than the average for all common bird species, whose populations have declined by 25 percent. Individual farmland bird species are hit even harder. For example, partridges and lapwings in Germany have had to contend with slumps of over 90 percent in the last 25 years.”
The cause is therefore directly and indirectly agriculture. But there are other factors as well. In any case, this is not good news for the environment. In stark contrast to the popular “What About” comparison of cats, cars and window panes, they are taking action in the Netherlands. Although wind turbine operators try to downplay any danger to birds, as Orsted has done, for example, including the stupid “What About” argument, of course, something is happening in our neighboring country. But it’s probably not quite that simple, because according to n-tv, the Netherlands now wants to switch off plants during bird migration. What now? Either there is no danger or you shut down the systems.
“It is expected that from autumn 2023 onwards, the wind farms will be shut down more frequently after the pilot phase that is now underway, it added. In order to enable the birds to pass through safely, the wind farm owners are to reduce the speed of the wind turbines to a maximum of two revolutions per minute during the predicted nocturnal migration period.
At the end of 2022, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam presented a model that, among other things, uses weather data – it predicts bird migration two days in advance. This is intended to give the grid operator Tennet time to ensure the stability of the high-voltage grid and to initiate the shutdown of the turbines.
Study with hundreds of animals Not all migratory birds fly around offshore installations
Bird protection expert Tim van Oijen said: “Twice a year, in spring and autumn, millions of birds migrate across the North Sea on some nights.” Due to the increasing number of wind farms there, it is extremely important that this expansion has minimal impact on the ecosystem of the North Sea.”
In August 2022, we reported on a very interesting, but also sobering podcast from SWR, which quotes Nabu expert Lachmann. Now, however, bird migration does not work according to a fixed timetable. Each species has its own times and even within a species the migration can drag on for a long time. Does this mean that the plants will be shut down for a very long time? Will not only the wind be decisive for electricity production in the future, but also the birds?
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