Wind does not meaningfully add power, but imposes huge costs on ratepayers and the environment

You will never see the destruction of animals and the bio-systems going on in faraway places all around the world controlled by China. You will not likely see the hundreds of birds and bats at existing sites in the US and even Bald Eagles killed by the massive turning blades of wind turbines. They are continually removed from view before visitors are invited in. You also will never see the fossil fuel power plants, hidden from view, built to allow the operation of the useless wind turbines.

You do not see the hundreds of tons of cement produced to anchor the base of the turbines standing 300 to 500 feet tall with blades reaching out with a 300 to 350 feet wingspan. You do not see the slave labor used by the Chinese to mine the rare earth metals required for these turbines. The truth is that the US has ample supplies of rare-earth metals, but the EPA will not allow us to mine them. Or do we, just like China making all the money on our wrong-headed and fraudulent wind power industry.

Just the preparation of the land for many wind farms does extensive environmental damage. We often take down thousands of trees and bulldoze hills and valleys.

Also, a lesser-known fact about windmills is the human health impacts created by the throbbing noise for anyone within 1500 feet of these behemoths. Blades flying off turbines have killed more than 100 people around the world in the past decade. In addition, nearly 1,500 wind towers have collapsed for unexplained reasons. As a result, Finland, Bavaria, and Scotland have limited wind turbines closer than 1.2 miles from homes.

Another little-known deficit of wind turbines is that wind turbines are actually net consumers of electricity at wind speeds that yield less than 20% of capacity rating. Meaning they are a net negative to the grid. This happens because once the decision is made to activate the wind turbine, all the oil pumps, hydraulic pumps, control systems, and accessories must be turned on. Typically this drawdown can amount to 12-13% of the capacity rating of the windmill. But this electricity can not even be drawn from the wind turbine because the wind turbine-produced electricity is not reliable enough to safeguard the wind turbine or the health safety requirements. So this critically needed electricity must be drawn from the grid. Fortunately for the operators, this safety requirement also allows them to overstate the actual net electricity produced by the wind turbines.

Most of my readers know that human-caused global warming or climate change is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on society. But, unfortunately, and surely the most successful ones are directors in every Fortune 500 Board room. Every major bank and nearly all politicians have bought into the idea that we should be reducing carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, they unwittingly are willing to undermine our entire economic system to accomplish both the most absurd and impossible change in society.

Trying to recognize how such insanity ever took hold, I made up different scenarios that could explain how such crazy ideas could have been sold so easily. How about stopping all mining because it can reduce the Earth’s pull of gravity and allow much of society to float away. Ridiculous, of course, but if you had spent nearly a half-century studying the variables that determine the Earth’s temperature, you would realize my absurd scenario is no crazier. It goes back to an old saying, “you can fool some of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time.” But, when you control every information outlet, which the left certainly does, you can fool all the people all of the time. Regrettably, we are currently living in that time.

We must remember we have long used the wind to power sailboats, grind grains, and pump water. Producing electricity, however, from such an intermittent and unreliable source of power is another thing few people understand. But wind power has a surprising ally in the electric utility industry which gets to buy and maintain all the wind equipment necessary and build 100% backup fossil fuel plants.

Remember the Ciccone/Lehr electric grid rule of thumb from Part 1of this series: All Solar and Wind Power on an Electric Grid Must Be Backed Up With an Equal or Greater Amount of Fossil Fuel Power Running on Standby 100% of The Time.

Then, they quickly get permission from their Public Utilities Commission to charge every cent of it off to their customers. These utilities know they are wasting your capital on fuel and operating costs thought to contribute to their available energy. But, they know it can not.

In fact, we should recognize the benefits of increasing CO2 emissions. So conventional thinking is upside down. Proof of this is Congress’s Green New Deal which states that the nation will transition to 100% renewable energy without the help of nuclear power by 2030. None of this will happen, and it is the rope that the left will be hanging itself in November 2022 when more reasonable congressional representatives will take charge of every aspect of our national budget from our House of Representatives.

Dr. Jay Lehr
CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.