Neither Clean nor Green!

Wind power is under attack in Colorado where concerned groups are taking the Government to court over the issue. It is a pity more of this scrutiny  does not happen before we create more wind power graveyards for the future! When I started out in engineering I worked as a system planner for the local Electricity Authority and was involved in planning power station siting for 15 to 20 years in the future with each possible plan subjected to rigorous costing and load flow analysis of a sort that no wind or solar project would pass. I never see any analysis for wind other than the lie that the new wind installation will power 30,000 homes or some such , when in reality it will not power even one because wind power is not dispatchable!




Wind power is green, right?

It helps keep the air clean, doesn’t it?

Not according to the people suing the state of Colorado over wind power. The American Tradition Institute’s (ATI) Environmental Law Center sued the State of Colorado in federal court last week.

“We’re putting wind on trial because people don’t understand the facts behind wind,” says Director Dr. David Schnare. “We believe that if people knew how variable wind was, and how dirty it was, if they knew the wind was neither free nor clean, then they may not have government demand its use.”

“The mandate for the use of renewables has essentially caused the air to become worse and the cost to go up,” says Schnare, a former employee of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The problem, Schnare says, is wind is variable and therefore not reliable. A backup source is needed and that is invariably coal or gas-fired plants. Since the supply of power has to equal the consumption of power, the coal plant is going down and up to keep pace with the wind power going up and down.

That causes the coal plant to act like a car in busy urban traffic, which emits more pollutants than a car sailing along on a smooth highway at a constant speed. It is this reality which Schnare says causes the hoped-for positive effect of wind to be negated, at a huge financial cost to consumers.

John Laforet, president of Wind Concerns Ontario, says his group broadly supports legal action against the wind industry and governments “that provide billions of dollars to perpetuate the wind industry’s fraud.

“We’ve seen in Ontario that industrial wind energy isn’t affordable, reliable, green or safe for local host communities,” Laforet says.

“It is shocking that big wind and its supporters continue to campaign in favour of billions of dollars worth of green pork for this failed industry, that Ontarians can’t afford, without any commitment to the truth.”