Posted: 6/27/2019
Recently, I have blogged here about the The Outrageous Electrical Cars Scam. Let’s have a look at the global scam of wind power generation.
For our purposes here, we will focus on one of the largest onshore wind power farms in the world and the largest wind power farm in the U.S.:
Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC) in California:
- Total capacity: 1,550MWh (this is roughly the continuous output (not capacity) of 1.5 typical U.S. nuclear power reactors; translates into 13,392,000 MWh per year)
- Construction started in 2010 and it was completed in 2013 (S1)
- “Spread across 3,200 acres in the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains in Kern County” (S1)
- Average electricity generation per year is 3,179,263 MWh (over the period 2014-17; S2)
The scam/boondoggle consists of:
- Average production of electricity is only about 24% of total capacity. Or in other words, four times as much capacity of a wind power generation has to be built to compensate for the uncertainty of wind
- To generate the total annual electricity consumed in California you would need to build over 48,500 wind turbines (of the AWEC type). This translates into at least 1 wind turbine for every 800 inhabitants of California. For the entire U.S. it would be at least 1 turbine for every 470 inhabitants (It appears that California is more energy efficient than the rest of the U.S. or California does not have as much significant electricity consuming industries)
- Ridiculous government subsidies for this form of energy generation
In Germany, even the world famous tree huggers and the zealots of environmentalism have allowed huge areas of natural landscape to be spoiled and ruined by gigantic onshore and offshore wind power farms. Thousands of birds and bats die every year! The sound emissions from wind power farms are probably not entirely harmless. The production and maintenance of these wind mills is by far not environmentally friendly. Beautiful hill tops inside protected forests were sacrificed to the religion of renewable energy. And so on ...
Are there any studies on the influence of large wind power farms on local weather? I would posit that large wind power farms interfere with the flow of air if not more.
Initially, I presumed it was the extraordinary land/area use of wind power farms that would expose the scam, but it turned out it is the per head of population count of wind turbines.
P.S. I meant to add a tableau of figures that were underlying my calculations here, but for lack of time … Hope, my calculations are not completely off.
Sources (S):
No comments:
Post a Comment