It takes audacity to call yourself an ‘industry’ when you can’t say when you’ll deliver your product and its only ever delivered 30% of the time, at best. But that’s the business model upon which our wonderful wind powered future is predicated.
Australia’s wind ‘industry’ is literally suffering a case of the doldrums, with its output through June and July approaching something just north of pathetic. Wind watchers have dubbed it the big wind drought: Dead Calm: Australia’s Wind ‘Industry’ Suffering From Prolonged Wind ‘Drought’
One character who’s developed a keen eye for wind industry BS is Rafe Champion. Here he is digging into the data to show just how helplessly hopeless Australia’s so-called wind industry is.
We are all windfarmers now!
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
21 July 2020
We are all in it together, to coin a phrase. Since all the powers that be, state and federal, are determined to move as quickly as possible towards dependence on the wind and the sun for electricity we had better pay attention to the amount of sun and wind power that is available, day by day.
Farmers, those hardy sons and daughters of the soil who get up every day to provide our daily bread, watch the weather like hawks and so we had better watch the wind and the sun with the same intensity. You don’t need to be a Rhodes Scholar to know that the sun is not there in the early morning and the evening, but what about the wind?
Will there be enough for a hot breakfast? Coffee on the way to work? Is the electric train running? And what about dinner this evening?
Check out the extent of the green bars in the picture below, state by state. From the AEMO Data Dashboard (changing every five minutes) we find at that SA is importing and they have had very light winds for 24 hours (see the Aneroid site.)
Not looking very promising at this early hour, but let’s see how it develops!
Some particularly revealing pictures can be found via the Fuel Mix tab at the top of the Data Dashboard. For some strange reason it is updated at 4am every morning and it lags so to see what the mix is today you have to wait for a day or two. This picture shows the mix in SA recently that you can access today.
An attractive feature is a slider that is located at the extreme right in that shot, it can be moved to get the numbers hour by hour over the two days. It shows that the wind was contributing 37% of the power generated in the state at the time. You can see the wind is on the way down towards the low point recorded yesterday and even at that time the sum of wind and gas was inadequate and coal power was coming in from Victoria.
Memo to letter writers. Thinking about a follow up for Bar Beach Swimmer’s remarkable conversation with an ALP staffer who was prepared to make a telephone call and then engage with a heap of ideas that violated every assumption that they would have held about RE. I was thinking about providing some more information, but not too much to swamp him/her, just enough to build on the platform built in the first conversation.
Some graphic pictures would surely help, and then the next step, what if the staffer actually looks at the source data and does his or her own windwatching! So I am going to send the windwatchers guide to every pollie in our data base, my son is looking after this, we have all the Coalition members Federal and NSW plus other parties Federal. He is coming to lunch today and we will set up the Windwatchers Anonymous group on Facebook for addicts.
All children and grandchildren should be trained and invited to join the Junior Windwatchers and give the family a report on the wind power supply at dinnertime every night!
From the comments. Tony from Oz.
Here’s two simple exercises to show you (a) the power actually required on a daily basis and (b) the power that wind actually supplies on that daily basis.
Go to the aneroid home page. (at this link)
When the page opens, scroll down a little. Now see that coloured graph there, well, that’s the Load Curve for power generation in Australia, well everything East of the WA border anyway, so 95% of it anyway, and that power generation is exactly the same as for power consumption, because you only generate what is being consumed.
Okay, here’s the (small) task for you all.
Under that graph, you see the boxes for the power generation sources.
First up. TICK the box which says Total. (a black line now appears across the top of the graph).
Now, UNTICK every other box, EXCEPT wind. (you are now left with a green colour rolling along the bottom of the graph)
Okay, the black line is what is being consumed, and the green colour is what wind power is delivering.
See the scale of the problem now.
Oh, incidentally, now hover your mouse along the graph line and find the low point of that black line.
That low point is the LOWEST that actual power consumption gets down to, not just for this day, but every day, and the year round average for that LOW POINT is 18,000MW.
That’s the lowest power consumption gets down to.
Until renewables can supply that ALL DAY EVERY DAY, they’ve got nothing.
Tony.
Liberty Quote. The government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them — Ronald Reagan
Catalaxy FIles
STOP THESE THINGS 
Reblogged this on ajmarciniak and commented:
It takes audacity to call yourself an ‘industry’ when you can’t say when you’ll deliver your product and its only ever delivered 30% of the time, at best. But that’s the business model upon which our wonderful wind powered future is predicated.
Australia’s wind ‘industry’ is literally suffering a case of the doldrums, with its output through June and July approaching something just north of pathetic. Wind watchers have dubbed it the big wind drought: Dead Calm: Australia’s Wind ‘Industry’ Suffering From Prolonged Wind ‘Drought’
One character who’s developed a keen eye for wind industry BS is Rafe Champion. Here he is digging into the data to show just how helplessly hopeless Australia’s so-called wind industry is.
Our former chairman dreamt up a nice little parable to illustrate the vagaries of wind energy – http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/#Comment
Only when those in charge have to suffer will anything get done.
Blown away by wind farm capacity versus actual output
Published July 25, 2019 at Eurasia Review https://www.eurasiareview.com/25072019-blown-away-by-wind-farm-capacity-versus-actual-output-oped/
The world is on track to rachet up intermittent electricity generation from wind and solar, trying to achieve carbon-free electrical generation by 2050. Since electricity alone is unable to support militaries, aviation, and merchant ships, and all the transportation infrastructure that support commerce, the world needs to use the time to diligently develop new technologies to find an energy source or sources that are similar or superior to what deep earth minerals/fuels have been providing civilization, and hopefully those new sources will be abundant, and affordable.
Good News Week and Eve of Destruction…
I’m not a lawyer but have read, more to the point, interpreted legislation since 1968; much in defence and the aviation industry, having to comply with it.
It has never ceased to amaze how industry, unions and government ignore the laws they are supposed to comply with. Such as as asbestos outlawed in the workplace in 1978 (dangers were known since 1928) yet in one instance was being knowingly spread throughout public and private hospitals up to five years later.
Politicians seem to think the ordinary working class are expendable and The Good Ship Lollipop will stop to rescue them in times of crisis. As the pandemic has shown, politicians, celebrities and others don’t believe the rules apply to them, with so many others claiming to be exempt because of individual human rights.
Along with tradition pointing out how many have died in wars to “protect our freedom.”
Who exactly is setting these Malthusian examples?
Having had a quick look at the Caithness updated Safety Report June 2020 and the detailed Full Accidents.pdf analysis, along with other online information concerning various wind turbine deaths, there appears to be overwhelming evidence suggesting a distubingly know dangers in the industry are being ignored. A search for “turbine maintenance workers incinerated” returns quite a number of incidents as does “wind turbine fire deaths”. Where else are workers being incinerated in such numbers?
And comments such as, “Dating from Sept 2013 kills a mere 100 people or so per trillion kWhrs, the majority from falls during maintenance activities.”
This is not progress, it’s a return to the dark ages.
It’s not the sort of job anyone would take on unless they were desperate, and with such high world unemployment figures, many are.
Regardless of the known human health impacts of turbines, not much has been mentioned of the effects on other creatures. An article about a US dog breeder, since turbines were installed nearby, pups have been born with problems including deafness, and other of their animals suffering various problems, even a duck going blind.
For every argument there seems to be a counter argument. Undisputed is that shift workers and sleep depredation, have adverse health effects.
What genetic effects occur in the wild is unknown, and surely not all of these reports can be dismissed. Although it’s known that some people are more susceptible to diseases than others.
As more wind farms come into existence all these problems can only increase, including dangers to the public. That the inclination is to place turbines in government forests or other such areas, will allow them to be closed to the public on grounds of safety risks. Particularly where plantation timber exists, adding another dimension to the dangers already faced by forestry workers.
It is nothing other than insanity based on financial profit helped along by the heads of the cult of celebrity leading the majority by the nose.
People not being a statistic is mockery, with the silence from religious leaders deafening.