Wind Turbine Folly
News & Social Media / Post
Anthony Nailer explains why wind farms are a terrible idea...
Most of the population wish to protect the environment and have no wish to damage the Earth or destroy the natural landscapes and seascapes or endanger living creatures. On shore wind turbines near towns and forests kill large numbers of bats due to the vortex behind the rotating blade collapsing the lungs of the creatures. Birds are also killed in quite large numbers because the blade tip rotating at full speed is sweeping through the air at 180 miles per hour.
On the Isle of Portland in Dorset, during the David Cameron premiership, the St Georges Primary School installed a small high speed turbine to prove their green credentials. It immediately caused a problem because it continually shredded seagulls. Each day staff had to arrive early to clear the playground of dead seagulls. Obviously the turbine was removed.
If you believe that increased CO2 levels are causing global warming, and evidence from the last 25 years contradicts this, you may be surprised to learn that the manufacture, installation and maintenance of even a single wind turbine creates more CO2 than the same amount of electricity generated using any fossil fuel during the lifetime of the turbine.
The cost of manufacture, installation, maintenance, and generous land tariff for every onshore wind turbine makes the cost of every unit of electricity they produce more than double the cost of electricity generated by any other means. Offshore wind turbines are more expensive to install and require much more maintenance than onshore turbines. Electricity produced by offshore wind turbines is more than four times the cost of a unit of electricity generated by any other means.
In 2021 the climate levy added to electricity bills is 20% and rising at least 1% per year. If the climate levy tax is removed from electric bills and switched to gas bills it will have to be increase to 90% of the gas bill to raise the same revenue presently achieved by taxing electricity, because typically electricity is four and a half times the price of gas.
Wind farms are not an alternative energy source as they cannot supply demand when the wind doesn’t blow. So traditional electricity generation stations are still required. This means that so called ‘renewables’ such as wind and solar generators are additional sources.
Because wind and solar are additional to the conventional stations and produce electricity at significantly higher price than conventional power stations, their expense is unnecessary, and is only adding to fuel costs. They are now the major part of the problem and not the solution. These renewables are just an expensive ideological folly.
When a wind farm project is proposed, it is hailed as a useful contribution to electricity generation based on peak generation capability. In fact across the UK the wind farms on average only produce 17% (about one sixth) of the rated capacity. The 7000 wind turbines have a peak capacity of typically 2MW so if all were running optimally this would produce 14GW of electricity.
As we have seen this year when high pressure is over the UK and Europe the turbines are useless. Because successive governments have shut down coal fired stations or modified them to burn wood chip imported from North America and refused to grant licences for fracking for gas we now in danger of the lights going out.
We only produce about a quarter of the gas we need and are now reliant on Norway and Russia, via the EU pipeline for the bulk of our gas needs. When there is a high pressure over the continent and no energy from the wind turbines all countries turn to gas fired generation and gas prices soar.
UKIP doesn’t believe that CO2 is warming the planet, is against carbon taxes and renewable feed-in tariffs, and uneconomic and intermittent renewable projects
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