Wholesale Environmental & Economic Disaster: Why Wind Power Fails on Every Count

On any reckoning, wind power is an abject failure. Dilute and diffuse, chaotically intermittent, insanely costly (when backup costs are included) and a wholesale environmental disaster, wiping out millions of birds, bats and beneficial bugs, and wrecking the livability the rural communities, nothing stacks up apart from the massive and endless subsidies upon which the whole fiasco depends.

A report from an Oxford scientist, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison dumps a bucket on the wind industry and its wild claims about powering the world and saving the planet, as Naveen Athrappully reports below.

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math
Epoch Times
Naveen Athrappully
27 March 2023

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut down on fossil fuels was made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison, who is also a researcher at CERN, said in a 2023 paper (pdf).

Allison noted that because solar power is “extremely weak,” it was inadequate to “sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living” before the Industrial Revolution.

“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures. Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective; even unnecessary,” Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“In particular, the generation of electricity by wind tells a disappointing story. The political enthusiasm and the investor hype are not supported by the evidence, even for offshore wind, which can be deployed out of sight of the infamous My Back Yard,” he wrote. “What does such evidence actually say?”

The Evidence
Allison explained that wind energy is measured based on the amount of moving air and the speed of the air as it reaches the area swept by the turbine blades.

The scientist calculated that, at 100 percent efficiency, if the wind blows at 10 meters per second (about 22 mph), the power is 600 watts per square meter. Hence, to deliver 3,200 million watts, the same output as Hinkley Point C—a planned zero-carbon nuclear power station in England—there would need to be 5.5 million square meters of turbine swept area.

“That should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists,” Allison wrote.

The actual performance of the technology is much worse than the calculations made based on 100 percent efficiency, he said.

“Because the power carried by the wind depends on the third power of the wind speed, if the wind drops to half speed, the power available drops by a factor of 8,” he said. “Almost worse, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up 8 times, and as a result the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.”

Allison noted that fluctuations are considerable as he pointed to a WindEurope Report that showed the installed nominal generating capacity across the European Union and United Kingdom on a daily basis was 236 gigawatts (GW). However, the highest output in 2021 registered at 103 GW on March 26 of that year.

The unreliability extends to offshore windfarms as well. Batteries used to store power are also severely restricted by current technology. In spite of such evidence, the government keeps ignoring the numbers, said Allison.

“With general energy shortages, the war in Europe, high prices and the likelihood of failures in electricity supply, many popular scientific presumptions underlying energy policy should be questioned. Wind power fails on every count,” he concluded.

Failing Turbines, Carbon Dioxide Demonization
Wind turbines across the United States have been failing more frequently in recent times, triggering concerns about additional costs resulting from such failures as well as their impact on power projects. Offshore windfarms, deployed in the name of environmentalism, are now seen as disastrous for ocean life.

Malfunctions in wind turbines range from small issues, like some key components becoming faulty, to full-blown collapses.

According to a 2022 paper published by Wallace Manheimer in the Journal of Sustainable Development, even as modern society depends on reliable sources of energy, the “climate industrial complex”—a powerful lobby of politicians, scientists, and media—pushes climate-related falsehoods into the popular perspective.

“It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis,” said Manheimer, a retired U.S. Naval Research Laboratory scientist.

“Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today,” he wrote. “During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.”
Epoch Times