Windfarm Wankers

The source of wind-turbine illness has been tracked down.   The source is anti-wind farm campaigners who make people think those windmills are going to make them sick.  Let's call them "windfarm wankers."

It was obvious that there's nothing inherently sickening about wind farms by the number of communities elsewhere, particularly in Europe, where local populations live with them and report no problems.

Now an Australian study has linked windfarm illness to the presence, not of windmills, but of the anti-wind power campaigners.

Complaints of illness were far more prevalent in communities targeted by anti-windfarm groups, said the report's author, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. His report concludes that illnesses being blamed on windfarms are more than likely caused by the psychological effect of suggestions that the turbines make people ill, rather than by the turbines themselves.

"If windfarms were intrinsically unhealthy or dangerous in some way, we would expect to see complaints applying to all of them, but in fact there is a large number where there have been no complaints at all," Chapman said.

It's easy to see how this plays out.   There's a lot of NIMBYism generated by windfarms.   People complain it spoils their pastoral view or lowers their property values.  That it seems leaves them pre-disposed to developing "windfarm sickness" on cue when that's suggested by windfarm wankers coming about to stir them up.

In September, 2010, I was involved in a running squabble with Wind Concerns Ontario that led to this post, "Calling Bullshit on Wind Power Witch Hunters."  It got to the point where WCO mouthpiece and windfarm wanker, John LaForest, blocked comments from me on their web site.   Nice work, John, you did yourself proud.

Google Sinks Billions Into Wind Power Scam

Google has joined forces with a New York financial firm to invest five billion dollars into a 350-mile electricity transmission backbone for future offshore wind generation.

Google, which obviously hasn't figured out that wind power is a money-wasting hoax, is partnering with investment firm, Good Energies, and a Japanese trading house to fund the 350-mile seabed transmission spine that would run from New York, past New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C. and then reach a southern hub in Virginia.

Imagine, five billion dollars for a seabed transmission line for a technology that's a scam.  Amazing isn't it?   But, then again, it's the very same scam that the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Italians, the Chinese and others have been enjoying for years already.

Why Do Wind Turbines Not Make Italians Sick?

The anti-wind power group will tell anyone who'll listen (that's usually themselves) about just how malevolent wind turbines are.   To hear them talk the damned things can be half a mile away and the noise is so oppressive that it will drive you off your land.   They'll even make you sick, give you a case of what the anti-windies call "wind turbine syndrome."   
They'll make you sick that is unless you're an Italian or an entire Italian village or even 800 Italian villages.
 Today's New York Times has a piece looking at the ancient Italian village of Tocco da Casauria (pictured above) where the locals actually have wind turbines right in their back yards and are loving it:
More than 800 Italian communities now make more energy than they use because of
the recent addition of renewable energy plants, according to a survey this year
by the Italian environmental group Legambiente.

Renewable energy has been such a boon for Tocco that it makes money from
electricity production and has no local taxes or fees for services like garbage
removal.


A quintessential Italian town of 2,700 people in Italy’s poor mountainous
center, with its well-maintained church and ruined castle, Tocco is in most ways
stuck in yesteryear. Old men talking politics fill gritty bars, and old women
wander through the market. The olive harvest is the most important event on the
calendar.


Yet, from an energy perspective, Tocco is very much tomorrow. In addition to
the town’s wind turbines, solar panels generate electricity at its ancient
cemetery and sports complex, as well as at a growing number of private
residences.
I don't know, you tell me.   Is it the Italians that are different than us or is it maybe their wind?  Or, perhaps, could it be that the anti-wind power brigades are just full of NIMBY shit.

Calling "Bullshit" on the Wind Power Witch Hunters

There's a supposedly "progressive" blog called Wind Concerns Ontario that has caught my attention in recent months.   It exists for one purpose and one only, to decry the Ontario government's development of wind turbine power.

I've found WCO kind of weird.  If you believe what is posted there, Ontario's wind power programme is the greatest hoax ever.  Wind turbine energy is, we are told, horrible - inefficient, unworkable, costly, utterly destructive of the environment.  It attracts a flock of the faithful who, typically, turn out to be rural folks who don't want windmills in their backyards.

Garry Wise of Wise Law Blog initiated a discussion on wind turbine power that generated the expected outpouring of horror stories.   One commenter lamented that a wind turbine had supposedly caused a young child to get a bloody nose.   Another said it did nothing to reduce carbon emissions because it was so unreliable all the coal-fired electricity plants had to be kept running full bore anyway.   On and on and on.

If you read my post yesterday on "epistemic closure" this is a perfect example.  WCO presents every possible bit of information it can glean on wind turbine power so long as it's negative.

Now let me begin by saying that I don't have a dog in this fight.  I have nothing whatsoever to do with wind energy nor am I threatened by the prospect of some mega-turbine landing in my backyard.  I also have nothing to do with the fossil fuel industry that's potentially threatened by alternative energy options.

But I do have experience.  About four or five years ago I had to travel to Ontario for a reunion in Muskoka.   While there I stopped off for a few days to visit a relative in Leamington.  On Day 2, I went to the emergency ward thinking that I'd developed pneumonia.   I didn't want to go to the reunion if I was seriously ill.   I was treated and given a couple of tests.   Eventually the physician came in to announce I didn't have pneumonia but I had developed a bad case of asthma.

I asked the doctor how a non-smoker, 56 years old could suddenly, out of the blue, develop asthma.  He said "welcome to Ontario."   Apparently the air quality was so foul that I contracted asthma and had to be put on a steroid puffer and pills.

I can recall driving to Toronto and gazing at distant stands of trees that should have been green but were, instead, grey.   I saw the CN Tower, or at least the silhouette of it, through the smog.   It took me about six months after I got back to the island before the asthma disappeared.

When I got home I mentioned the asthma thing to my neighbour.   She told me her nephew, an incredibly fit Coast Guard lieutenant and daily runner, had exactly the same experience when he was sent on a 2-week training course to Toronto.   He had to be hospitalized with asthma, he was put on steroids, he too took about six months after getting back to recover fully.
 
Now, when I engaged with all these wind power opponents at Wise Law Blog, it quickly became apparent they wanted to stick with fossil fuel-generated electricity.   One advocated "clean" natural gas which is somewhat better than coal but only so long as you don't have to think about shale fracked gas and the groundwater nightmare that causes.   Not one of these critics had a viable alternative.   When pressed they just set up straw men and knocked them down.

That kid with the nosebleed that somebody told somebody about?   Kids get nosebleeds.   Without any proof that wind energy had anything to do with this kid (if he even existed) and his nosebleed they latched on to it as conclusive proof of the evils of wind turbines.  Say what?   And exactly what do they think is happening to this little bugger's lungs from successive summers of inhaling toxic air contaminated by carbon emissions?  Oh, we won't worry about that.   Epistemic closure says to ignore any facts that don't suit the narrative.

As I have explored these anti-wind power sites (there are several) I've found a feature common to the climate change denialist community.   They simply take whatever they can get and throw it all into the mix.   The climate change denialists offer up a melange of lunacy.   Some say global warming exists; others say it's a hoax.   No matter.   Some say it's natural, others say it's sunspots.   On and on and on.  As long as you speak against it, you're okay.   It matters not in the slightest that one's theory is inconsistent with or even contradictory of the others.   The more the merrier.   As I mentioned to my friend, Scruffy Dan, when you have 16-people in a room, each espousing a different reality, what you actually have is an asylum.

The wind power witch hunters indulge in the same sophistry.    They go from kids with nosebleeds, to no reduction in carbon emissions, to utterly punitive and industry destroying costs.   Curiously enough, a lot of the sources they cite lead back to the fossil fuel industry.   But what they scrupulously avoid is the slightest mention of the other side.

At the head of the "other side" I'll put German Chancellor Angela Merkel.   She's a PhD physicist and I'm guessing she won't be knocked off stride by woeful tales of some kid with a nosebleed.   I receive periodic reports from Chancellor Merkel's climate change advisory panel, the WBGU.  It turns out that Germany is a leading nation in the development of wind turbine energy.   Now the wind power witch hunters maintain that the German experience has been a total disaster.  They're lying.

They're lying at least if you believe that hotbed of leftie radicalism, Bloomberg Businessweek.  Here is part of a story BB ran back in April about Germany's wind turbine experiment:

"Since 2002, Germany has doubled its capacity to generate wind power and has 21,000 turbines producing 7.5% of the nation's electricity. That compares with only about 1% in the U.S. The use of wind has lowered wholesale electricity prices in Germany by as much as 5 billion euros some years, says a study by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based consultant. Spanish prices fell at an annualized rate of 26% in the first quarter due to surging wind and hydroelectric production.

Since October 2008, the abundance of wind power has led to periods where German customers were paid rates that sometimes reached 500.02 euros ($665) a megawatt-hour, or about as much power as used by a small factory or 1,000 homes in 60 minutes.


One solution: Tying power markets together, allowing temporary surpluses in one area to flow toward electricity-poor zones. That's now done between the Netherlands, France, and Belgium; Germany plans to join them on Sept. 7.


Storing electricity may be another fix. In Scandinavia, Danish wind power pumps water into Norwegian and Swedish reservoirs; the water is later released to drive hydroelectric plants. Until there's more integration like that and better transmission grids, expect more Germans to sleep with the lights on.


The bottom line: As wind power generation grows, it can create regional surpluses of electricity. That makes power prices fall, hurting wind profits."

Yes, European wind profits have dropped but so what? That didn't stop IKEA from just making a huge investment in a wind farm. And, as for the cost of electricity dropping, do you think fossil fuel is going to be getting any cheaper?

And then there's China, the People's Republic of.  They're going massively into wind turbine power.  Why?  Because they're easily duped?  You pull a supposed hoax of this magnitude on the Chinese you wind up with a bullet in the back of your neck.
 
There's more, a lot more.   Unfortunately the Wind Power Witch Hunters are so swept up in the erotic throes of NIMBYism and so entrenched in epistemic closure that none of this is going to matter to them.   But if you're not one of those WPWH types, at least approach wind turbine power with an open mind.   Don't buy into their nonsense because there is another side to this story, one they're not going to mention.