Victorian govt accidentally admits wind and solar could use 70% of all agricultural land in the state

By Jo Nova

Victoria is just not big enough to fit all the solar and wind industrial plants

It’s no wonder the Victorian government is desperate to begin building offshore wind turbines. Their own targets for the forced transition are so crazy-brave, they would “need” to use as much as two thirds of the state’s agricultural land instead. It sounds delusional but they told us this straight up in their own policy document released in March 2022.

Thanks to Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies, who not only reads these boring tomes, but also noticed that they quietly disappeared the Victorian Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper. He explained in The Australian that he believes they hid it because they’ve realized how embarrassing it looks.

Apparently 227,000 square kilometers is not enough land to power 7 million people in a NetZero world.

Victorian planners had farmland in their sights (as if it was their own). They mapped it out and described it as “available for onshore renewables”.

If farmers were not aware of the totalitarian disregard the NetZero bureaucrats have for farmers, they know now.

Think about the captive mindset it takes to publish a ludicrous document […]

Former Greens candidate now warns wind turbines are lunacy and a scam

A wind farm near Emerald, Queensland (ABC)

By Jo Nova

After all these years, finally, signs that more Greens are waking up to the awful truth

Steve Nowakowski was a Greens candidate in Cairns in 2006. He was a co-founder of Rainforest Reserves Australia, and was hired as a photographer, but he didn’t like what he saw. Two years ago he was concerned at the environmental damage of the Emerald Wind farm, now he’s filming the destruction in the hope of stopping wind farms being built in Queensland. He’s calling it lunacy, and arguing we need nuclear power.

In a big leap, he even realizes the green groups are “colluding” with the government and the money making environmental vandals in the greatest land grab of the age. Mark my words, eventually this issue will split the Greens.

First Bob Brown former Greens leader, and now footsoldiers like Nowakowski and a few other conservationists are campaigning against wind turbines — word is spreading…

John McCarthy InQueensland writes:

Former Greens eco-warrior says we should all fear wind turbines

“I have never seen such collusion in my environmental career as I do now between big business, NGO’s and state […]

Building offshore wind farms can permanently deafen porpoises, but it’s OK now with Bubble Walls

BBC

By Jo Nova

Now they tell us

Wind farms save the world, and absolutely do not hurt dolphins or whales but did you know the industry has developed bubble curtains to protect porpoises hearing from the things that never harm them (isn’t that nice of them)? Bubble curtains are being “widely” used in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The BBC is happy to report it now there are good results from a study, but apparently they weren’t too enthused in 2013 about telling us how pile -driving during construction can permanently destroy hearing in marine mammals. Indeed, ocean noise is such a problem the pile-driving teams use acoustic deterrents — loud noises designed to scare marine life away before they get started on the industrial noise. But even the “safety warning” may itself be dangerous.

So that’s alright then, windfarm construction used to kill porpoises, and the BBC kept that a secret, but now that we’ve solved it, it’s news we can use, right?

“Like a giant jacuzzi.”

How bubble curtains protect porpoises from wind farm noise As huge offshore wind farms spread across Europe’s North and Baltic seas, efforts grow to buffer the impact on wildlife. […]

Former Greens Leader Bob Brown says wind industry and renewables are profiteering off climate

Bob Brown’s Foundation protests at the Robbins Island Wind Farm

By Jo Nova

Every day the Greens sound more like Skeptics

Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.

Make no mistake, Bob Brown was the face of the Greens in Australia for decades. He was in politics for 30 years, and Leader of the Australian Greens. He was Mr Green himself on the Australian scene.

Four years ago he surprised a few people when he spoke out against the idea of putting the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere on remote Robbins Island off NorthWest Tasmania because it would spoil the view and kill birds — something climate skeptics have been saying for years and about nearly every industrial wind park.

Now he’s going further and saying the “free for all” with wind farms must stop. He’s even using the ugly term “profiteers” to describe the Tasmanian government setting up a […]

Good for our enemies: Wind turbines scramble the Air Force radars, and provide cover for jets

By Jo Nova

Imagine you built hundreds of wind turbines off your coast and then found out they reflect the signals used by your air defense radar?

It turns out that large rotating blades reflect radar pulses rather like planes do, and with future offshore wind turbines as tall as the Eiffel Tower and 1,000 feet wide, things are only getting worse.

RAF pilots already use the turbines to help them hide in training exercises.

The UK government has quietly spent £18m to try to figure out how to stop this and the best they have come up with is coating the blades in the type of paint used on stealth fighter jets. But the paint on F-22 jets peels off a bit too often, so they are considering something like the new ceramic paint from the F-35 program. But since that’s a top military secret, presumably it won’t be too similar. What could possibly go wrong? Since you asked, last year, after just six months on aircraft carriers, the F-35s were already looking kind of rusty.

Just drive a truckload of money to your local wind subsidy farm. Other plans include adding cameras, microphones, and radio aerials […]

Wind-power Investors abandon Siemens Energy — another shocking 37% fall, and it’s not alone

Marketing fantasies from the Boom Times of Wind. Who were they kidding? | Siemens Gamesa

By Jo Nova

It’s dire. After suffering a 36% fall in June due to unexpectedly bad maintenance bills, Siemens Energy has lost another 37% on Thursday as it revealed orders and revenue would be even lower than the current subdued expectations. The share that sold for 24 euro in May is now selling for 7.

Frankfurt Borse

Things are so bad Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany has even said Siemens Energy is “very important”. Apparently talks are “intensive”, which presumably means the company is on death’s door and the German government is being asked to help save it.

And so we arrive at a point where a company selling products that depend on government subsidies is now asking to be subsidized itself. And the whole green industry depended on government pumped “science” and artificially low interest rates to exist in the first place. Like a pyramid scheme skiing on a two ponzi scams, sooner or later it has to collapse.

Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge

Siemens Energy Shares Crash 37% As Renewable Bust Sparks ‘Green Panic’

Siemens Energy […]

China plans wind tower as big as the Eiffel Tower, blades 1000ft across (Better at killing birds and bats?)

MingYang

By Jo Nova

In the race for “free” but random energy, or perhaps for bigger status symbols, China set a new record in July with a 16MW wind tower with a rotor diameter of an awesome 853 feet (260m). It’s a bird mincer one quarter of a kilometer across. But already plans are being drawn up for an even bigger one.

What could possibly go wrong? It’s typhoon proof…

Gargantuan 22-MW wind turbine will be among history’s largest machines

By Loz Blain, New Atlas

Imagine something as tall as New York’s Chrysler building, but spinning. China’s Mingyang Smart Energy has announced plans for a colossal 22-megawatt offshore wind turbine, and standing in its presence will be an unprecedented human experience.

The new turbine proposed for 2025 by MingYang, according to Bloomberg, will have a peak output of 22 MW, and a rotor diameter over 310 m (1,017 ft), corresponding to a swept area of at least 75,477 sq m (812,425 sq ft, 14.1 NFL football fields, 60 olympic swimming pools), minus hub.

The Eiffel Tower is 324m tall.

A few months ago Siemens got bad news on turbine maintenance that was […]

Investors are starting to abandon clean green energy as they realize it’s never going to be cheap

Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Kathryn Porter in The Telegraph, has compiled quite the list of failures as offshore wind projects get frozen around the world. Decisions are being delayed, contracts abandoned, auctions left without bidders and almost no new projects started. The awful truth of inflation, the maintenance cost shocks and cable failures is all too much. Then there was the problem of needing a 100 years of copper, nickel and lithium production before Christmas.

It’s all been kept quiet. Who knew there were no offshore wind investments in the EU last year, apart from a few floating projects?

After years of subsidies, wind power was meant to get cheap enough to be profitable and competitive all by itself, instead, 25 years later, it just needs bigger subsidies. When the great oil and coal price crunch came, wind power was supposed to rise through the ashes, instead we discovered that wind turbine and battery factories needed cheap coal and oil like the rest of the economy.

Right now Australia has no offshore wind turbines and is about to jump onto a burning ship:

The myth of affordable green energy is over

October 13th, 2023 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Failing underwater cables “pose global threat to offshore wind”

They’re not much use without a lot of cabling. | Image by Norbert Pietsch from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Thanks to Oldbrew at Tallblokes Talkshop

Who knew high voltage cables running for kilometers in a deep electrolytic moving body of water would be expensive?

The 245kV Wolfe Island Cable | Photo by Z22

Despite offshore windfarms dealing in a kind of mechanical hell of high speed salt water spray, big waves and volatile wind conditions, surprisingly 85% of the insurance claims are because the underwater cables are failing.* If the subsea cables can’t be insured, it’s another unexpected cost threatening the economics of offshore wind.

The underwater cables needed for offshore wind are apparently so costly to repair, and the losses from lack of generation so steep, they are in danger of becoming uninsurable.

Subsea cable failures pose global threat to offshore wind

Energy News Live

The race to harness offshore wind energy has hit a significant roadblock, with the reliability of subsea cables emerging as a critical concern.

Global Underwater Hub (GUH) has raised alarm bells about the escalating issue of subsea cable failures.

October 6th, 2023 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable, Wind Power | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Climate Change won’t get the chance to kill off the Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle — the wind industry will do it first

Wedge-tailed Eagle | Photo by “Fir0002/Flagstaffotos“

By Jo Nova

Greens destroying nature again

Some experts think there may be only 1,000 of these eagles left, our largest bird of prey, and yet in the last 12 years some 272 of them have been killed or injured in the vicinity of Tasmanian wind towers. That’s at least as far as the maintenance crews have noticed, and not that they were specifically looking…

So the number can only go up, and other types of birds are getting the chop too.

The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed eagle has been known to have a wingspan as large as 2.8m (9ft 3in). They mate for life, and a single nest can be 1 – 3 meters across.

Tasmanian wind rush ‘may push eagles to extinction’, says study

By Matthew Denholm, The Australian

Tasmanian wind farms and transmission lines have killed or injured 321 threatened eagles in 12 years, but the real figure is likely far higher, a new study finds.

The peer reviewed study, published in Australian Field Ornithology, uses data from wind farms, TasNetworks and eagle rescuers to identify the death or injury of 272 endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed […]

‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’ — UK government sells rights to the wind and no one wants them

By Jo Nova

The Year of Gloom continues for Wind Power

Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.

The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:

‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms

Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs

Jillian Ambrose

None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.

The companies had warned […]

“Turbinegeddon” — Siemens loses €4.5 billion because collecting free energy is not cheap

Siemens Gamesa

By Jo Nova

The end of the naive era of hope in Wind Power fairies

Remember how they said wind energy would keep getting cheaper? Only a year ago academics were still writing papers about the “Moore’s Law” miraculous future of wind power. Only we appear to have already hit the point where bigger is not better. Two years ago the former head of Siemens bizarrely warned that “Wind power risks becoming too cheap” and Reuters, bizarrely, published it.

Meanwhile production costs are rising for the offshore variety too, and Siemens is scrambling to delay deliveries, so it can fix problems first…

The Washington Post, a big fan of the “Green transition”, puts in an admirable effort to make excuses for the bad luck of the wind industry — anything but admit that this failure may represent real mechanical limits to the collection of erratic, low density energy in the most hostile settings on Earth.

These machines are so fragile they cannot just sit under their own weight motionless, less they get permanent brinelling damage to the bearings. And tiny micro-oscillations can create False Brinelling.

Wind ‘Turbinegeddon’ Is a Troubling Climate Omen

by Chris […]

Siemens Energy stocks fall 36% — turbines are degrading faster than expected

The new onshore models have rotors 170 meters long | Siemens Gamesa

By Jo Nova

It’s a bloodbath in the wind industry.

Despite the wind being free, collecting it appears to cost a fortune. Siemens Energy lost a third of its stock price on Friday. Just like that, seven billion dollars in market value disappeared.

Only a month ago they were expecting to break even, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the executives appear to have been blindsided by the rapidly escalating maintenance costs. The problem is so bad, and perhaps fundamental, that shareholders in other turbine manufacturers are selling out. Vestas Wind fell 7% Friday.

Siemens Energy Share Price, Yahoo Finance

The promise was that wind turbines would keep getting cheaper as they got bigger and better. Instead, issues are appearing now even in new installations, and people are starting to wonder if they’ve made the turbines too big too fast. The bearings and blades are wearing out, and the costs to fix them are crippling.

Clean Energy’s Latest Problem Is Creaky Wind Turbines

Carol Ryan, Wall Street Journal

Shares in Siemens Energy plunged by a third after it said turbine […]

Six gigawatts of total wind generation collapsed in 16 hours last week, and nobody cared

By Jo Nova

Just another day of Wind turbine failure — 6GW in 16 hours

There was no cyclone, no storm, no national disaster, but our national infrastructure collapsed just the same. Blame a high pressure cell.

Last week TonyFromOz noticed that the output from all 79 industrial wind plants in Australia disappeared overnight from 6GW to just 0.4GW. Imagine if an entire state of coal plants failed in the space of 16 hours and nobody cared?

Wind plants fail all the time and wreak havoc on the grid. It’s just “business as usual” or rather “subsidies as usual”. The rainbow list of acronyms below the graph shows every single wind plant in five states of Australia was accounted for in this dismal tally.

Wind turbine failure: TonyFromOZ

Billions of dollars rests on whether we can stop high pressure cells forming near Adelaide…

As Tony points out, the more wind towers we build, the worse this mayhem will be. Weather comes and weather goes but when the doldrums hit, it wipes out all 79 industrial plants together. Only wind plants built outside the high pressure cell could smooth out this failure. Offshore wind farms would have failed at […]

Skeptics are saving whales while Greens lobby for Industrial Plants in the wilderness

By Jo Nova

Let it be known that the skeptics are, and always have been, the environment’s best friend. The Greens, sadly are the wilderness wrecking, naive minions of the Establishment Powers who will sacrifice whales in a quest to impress their industrial banker overlords. They tell themselves they are saving whales 100 years from now with the same windmills that kill the whales today.

Our good friends at Heartland and CFACT are working to stop the insanity in a guerilla campaign.

“SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG”.

@ClimateDepot

Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts

Josh Christenson, NY Post

“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally okay with this agenda.”

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”

Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the […]

Wind fantasy land: to cover 8 days of half-speed wind, UK needs 1,000 times the “biggest battery” on Earth

By Jo Nova

Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?

Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.

The exponential death of affordable electricity

It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.

Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]

Who knew Scottish wind turbines are kept warm with diesel power…

By Jo Nova

Arecleoch Wind Farm | Mary and Angus Hogg.

While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?

If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.

The wind turbine industry today […]

The strange coincidence of the Offshore Wind Industry and 178 dead whales

Floating humpback whale offshore of Delaware. Photo: Marine Education, Research & Rehabilitation Institute.

By Jo Nova

There have been a lot of dead whales on the East Coast of the US lately. David Wojik noticed that NOAA was investigating 178 dead whales in something called an Unusual Mortality Event, or a UME — it’s like an episode of X-Files.

NOAA says this wave of strandings mysteriously started in 2016 which was before the offshore wind factory industry got going — but Wojik points out the timing matches very well. Offshore lease sales for the wind industry ramped up 2015-16. There were nine big sales, he says, off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. And not so coincidentally, apparently 2016 was also the year that NOAA started giving permission slips for whale hunts, sorry whale harrassments for “geotechnical and site characterization surveys“.

In bureaucrat-valium-lingo, the license to cause incidental dead whales is called an IHA — or an Incidental Harassment Authorization. This appears to have fooled Greenpeace.

Although since wind turbines are a sacred totem, NOAA could have called them a 007 License to Kill Humpbacks and they might not have cared either. The whales are dying for […]

Mega Wind farm approved that can’t operate half the year

By Jo Nova

When does it make sense to build 122 giant industrial turbines that can’t operate for nearly half a year?

The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.

Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.

This is infrastructure that only works about 30% of the time anyhow, and now will be reduced to something like 17%. The theoretical capacity will be 340MW in the first stage, supposedly growing to 900MW if they can somehow build the extra 170km transmission lines and perhaps get the taxpayer to help build another undersea cable across the Bass Strait. (If the company was going to pay, why was the Tasmanian government spending $20m on the “business case”?)

It will be one of the largest wind factories in the Southern Hemisphere (the biggest being West of Melbourne), but as Tom Quirk showed years ago, when […]

NetZero impossibility point? Europe’s renewable wonderland now can’t make solar, wind, batteries or EV’s

By Jo Nova

The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero

The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.

The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)

Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.

How fast those balance sheets change…

Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.

‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]