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Hot Weather and No Wind Underscore a Basic Flaw in Wind Energy

July 19, 2013 by Paul Crowe

High temperatures nationwide and no wind

High temperatures and very little wind, happens every year, wind advocates are always surprised
Image by Intellicast

For the last couple of weeks, a large portion of the US has been experiencing temperatures in the 80s and 90s. If you have air conditioning, you’re using it all day, every day. If you walk outside into the heat, you’ll notice something else, there’s no wind. This common occurrence every summer, high temps and no wind, is always overlooked by advocates of wind energy. The old saying about money applies to wind, “When you have it, you don’t need it and when you need it, you don’t have it.” But even as wind energy output falls, all of the nuclear, gas and coal fired power plants are humming along taking care of the demand for electricity, running our air conditioners and keeping us cool and doing a fine job of it. Yet wind advocates call for more wind turbines and the EPA is shutting down coal plants.

Power plants keep working as wind stumbles

Just across the lake in Ontario, Canada, they’re experiencing the same thing, high heat and no wind, and just like here, stationary power plants, especially nuclear, are keeping everyone cool.

Ontario’s nuclear plants were generating more than half of the province’s electricity: 11,148 megawatts. Gas, hydro and coal accounted for another 8,608 MW. Wind power, at 97 MW, barely moved the dial. Those mighty turbines (for which we will be paying dearly for many years to come) contributed less than half of 1 per cent of the total power output.

Ontario has been very aggressively building wind turbines, but no matter how fervently the true believers of wind keep expressing their faith, the facts keep getting in the way, when hot weather makes demand goes up, wind output goes down. Wind energy is a very expensive and unreliable addition to an energy grid that doesn’t need it or want it.

Romantic or reliable? You choose

The newest nuclear plants are extremely clean, safe and efficient while cheap and clean natural gas is lowering the cost of electricity nationwide and coal is still providing a huge portion of our base load requirements. All of these sources provide the reliable electrical power a modern economy needs. For all of the romantic talk of “green energy,” wind energy literally comes and goes with the wind, it’s not there when you need it and it simply doesn’t provide the “always on” electricity necessary to run the country.

Replacing things that work with things that sound good, rarely ends well.

Filed Under: Wind Energy Tagged With: intermittent, unreliable

What can you do?

  • Be informed! Read as many articles on this website as you have time for, so you can understand the issue. Do your own research. Check us out.
  • Tell your neighbors about the wind turbines, point them to this website so they can learn more.

Comments

  1. Tammy C Truitt says

    July 20, 2013 at 8:53 pm

    Ask USFWS about the bird survey. These industrial machines kill thousands of birds and bats every year. Here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the 65 turbine project Pioneer Green is proposing is going to kill 65 eagles per year. A term USFWS refers to as “takes”.

Unfortunately

The less you know about wind energy,
the more you'll like it.

Why wind developers never understand …

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

~ Upton Sinclair

Don’t know – Don’t care

Is willful ignorance necessary
to promote wind energy?

No, but it helps.

Climate Change

Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. … Also, if the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental results can be made to look like the expected consequences.

~ Richard Feynman, 1964

It’s not on-demand, it’s no-demand

Wind energy is "no-demand" electricity. If the wind isn't blowing and you demand electricity, the answer is no.

Wind – expensive, inefficient, unreliable



December 1923 Popular Science cover dreaming about generating electricity from windmills, and though the dream never dies, the dream doesn't work, didn't then, doesn't now and without huge government giveaways of your money, no wind farms would get built anywhere. The government forces utilities to buy wind power so payments to landowners are simply wind welfare.


Wind energy runs on tax credits

"I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate, for example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
~ Warren Buffett - from interview with Fortune magazine

Wind investments and high cost green energy

“I’m in the wind business … I’ve lost my ass in the business. ... Hey, we can get on everything green. We can get on everything renewable. Then the cost of power will go up ten times."
~ T. Boone Pickens - on Morning Joe on MSNBC

Wind Turbine Map

Information you'll only see here.

The complete map of all of the wind turbines proposed by Pioneer Green Energy in Erie County, PA and filed with the FAA. Plans not yet filed are not shown.

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