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They’re not much use without a lot of cabling. | Image by Norbert Pietsch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Thanks to Oldbrew at Tallblokes Talkshop
Who knew high voltage cables running for kilometers in a deep electrolytic moving body of water would be expensive?
The 245kV Wolfe Island Cable | Photo by Z22
Despite offshore windfarms dealing in a kind of mechanical hell of high speed salt water spray, big waves and volatile wind conditions, surprisingly 85% of the insurance claims are because the underwater cables are failing.* If the subsea cables can’t be insured, it’s another unexpected cost threatening the economics of offshore wind.
The underwater cables needed for offshore wind are apparently so costly to repair, and the losses from lack of generation so steep, they are in danger of becoming uninsurable.
Subsea cable failures pose global threat to offshore wind
Energy News Live
The race to harness offshore wind energy has hit a significant roadblock, with the reliability of subsea cables emerging as a critical concern.
Global Underwater Hub (GUH) has raised alarm bells about the escalating issue of subsea cable failures.
October 6th, 2023 | Tags: Basslink, Subsea Cables, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable, Wind Power |  Print This Post | |
Wedge-tailed Eagle | Photo by “Fir0002/Flagstaffotos“
By Jo Nova
Greens destroying nature again
Some experts think there may be only 1,000 of these eagles left, our largest bird of prey, and yet in the last 12 years some 272 of them have been killed or injured in the vicinity of Tasmanian wind towers. That’s at least as far as the maintenance crews have noticed, and not that they were specifically looking…
So the number can only go up, and other types of birds are getting the chop too.
The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed eagle has been known to have a wingspan as large as 2.8m (9ft 3in). They mate for life, and a single nest can be 1 – 3 meters across.
Tasmanian wind rush ‘may push eagles to extinction’, says study
By Matthew Denholm, The Australian
Tasmanian wind farms and transmission lines have killed or injured 321 threatened eagles in 12 years, but the real figure is likely far higher, a new study finds.
The peer reviewed study, published in Australian Field Ornithology, uses data from wind farms, TasNetworks and eagle rescuers to identify the death or injury of 272 endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed […]
By Jo Nova
The Year of Gloom continues for Wind Power
Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.
The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:
‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms
Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs
Jillian Ambrose
None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.
The companies had warned […]
Siemens Gamesa
By Jo Nova
The end of the naive era of hope in Wind Power fairies
Remember how they said wind energy would keep getting cheaper? Only a year ago academics were still writing papers about the “Moore’s Law” miraculous future of wind power. Only we appear to have already hit the point where bigger is not better. Two years ago the former head of Siemens bizarrely warned that “Wind power risks becoming too cheap” and Reuters, bizarrely, published it.
Meanwhile production costs are rising for the offshore variety too, and Siemens is scrambling to delay deliveries, so it can fix problems first…
The Washington Post, a big fan of the “Green transition”, puts in an admirable effort to make excuses for the bad luck of the wind industry — anything but admit that this failure may represent real mechanical limits to the collection of erratic, low density energy in the most hostile settings on Earth.
These machines are so fragile they cannot just sit under their own weight motionless, less they get permanent brinelling damage to the bearings. And tiny micro-oscillations can create False Brinelling.
Wind ‘Turbinegeddon’ Is a Troubling Climate Omen
by Chris […]
The new onshore models have rotors 170 meters long | Siemens Gamesa
By Jo Nova
It’s a bloodbath in the wind industry.
Despite the wind being free, collecting it appears to cost a fortune. Siemens Energy lost a third of its stock price on Friday. Just like that, seven billion dollars in market value disappeared.
Only a month ago they were expecting to break even, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the executives appear to have been blindsided by the rapidly escalating maintenance costs. The problem is so bad, and perhaps fundamental, that shareholders in other turbine manufacturers are selling out. Vestas Wind fell 7% Friday.
Siemens Energy Share Price, Yahoo Finance
The promise was that wind turbines would keep getting cheaper as they got bigger and better. Instead, issues are appearing now even in new installations, and people are starting to wonder if they’ve made the turbines too big too fast. The bearings and blades are wearing out, and the costs to fix them are crippling.
Clean Energy’s Latest Problem Is Creaky Wind Turbines
Carol Ryan, Wall Street Journal
Shares in Siemens Energy plunged by a third after it said turbine […]
By Jo Nova
Just another day of Wind turbine failure — 6GW in 16 hours
There was no cyclone, no storm, no national disaster, but our national infrastructure collapsed just the same. Blame a high pressure cell.
Last week TonyFromOz noticed that the output from all 79 industrial wind plants in Australia disappeared overnight from 6GW to just 0.4GW. Imagine if an entire state of coal plants failed in the space of 16 hours and nobody cared?
Wind plants fail all the time and wreak havoc on the grid. It’s just “business as usual” or rather “subsidies as usual”. The rainbow list of acronyms below the graph shows every single wind plant in five states of Australia was accounted for in this dismal tally.
Wind turbine failure: TonyFromOZ
Billions of dollars rests on whether we can stop high pressure cells forming near Adelaide…
As Tony points out, the more wind towers we build, the worse this mayhem will be. Weather comes and weather goes but when the doldrums hit, it wipes out all 79 industrial plants together. Only wind plants built outside the high pressure cell could smooth out this failure. Offshore wind farms would have failed at […]
By Jo Nova
Let it be known that the skeptics are, and always have been, the environment’s best friend. The Greens, sadly are the wilderness wrecking, naive minions of the Establishment Powers who will sacrifice whales in a quest to impress their industrial banker overlords. They tell themselves they are saving whales 100 years from now with the same windmills that kill the whales today.
Our good friends at Heartland and CFACT are working to stop the insanity in a guerilla campaign.
“SAVE-WHALES-STOP-WINDMILLS.ORG”.
@ClimateDepot
Conservative watchdogs highlight ‘alarming’ surge in whale deaths as wind farms grow off NY, NJ coasts
Josh Christenson, NY Post
“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally okay with this agenda.”
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”
Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the […]
By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
By Jo Nova
Arecleoch Wind Farm | Mary and Angus Hogg.
While British people can’t afford to warm their own homes in winter some Scottish wind turbines are being rotated and de-iced with warmth from diesel generators which also leaked some 4,000L of diesel. Since this was due to a cabling fault, presumably the other shivering wind turbines are maintained with mains power?
If giant turbine blades sit still too long, the bearings can generate permanent Brinelling damage. Alternately micro-oscillations or vibrations can cause False Brinelling. Small metal fragments then grind more of the metal around it, reduce efficiency, and increase the friction, the heat and the fire risk. It’s a couple of the hidden costs of maintaining a vast network of infrastructure to collect low density energy. Coal turbines must be slowly rotated too, to avoid the shaft bending, but coal turbines run for months at a stretch without stopping. One coal turbine can weigh up to 600 tons, but wind turbines nacelles usually weigh 100-300 tons, but can weigh up to 700 tons)*. The largest wind turbine blades can weigh 35 tons each. The power-to-maintenance ratio of wind turbines is absurd.
The wind turbine industry today […]
Floating humpback whale offshore of Delaware. Photo: Marine Education, Research & Rehabilitation Institute.
By Jo Nova
There have been a lot of dead whales on the East Coast of the US lately. David Wojik noticed that NOAA was investigating 178 dead whales in something called an Unusual Mortality Event, or a UME — it’s like an episode of X-Files.
NOAA says this wave of strandings mysteriously started in 2016 which was before the offshore wind factory industry got going — but Wojik points out the timing matches very well. Offshore lease sales for the wind industry ramped up 2015-16. There were nine big sales, he says, off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. And not so coincidentally, apparently 2016 was also the year that NOAA started giving permission slips for whale hunts, sorry whale harrassments for “geotechnical and site characterization surveys“.
In bureaucrat-valium-lingo, the license to cause incidental dead whales is called an IHA — or an Incidental Harassment Authorization. This appears to have fooled Greenpeace.
Although since wind turbines are a sacred totem, NOAA could have called them a 007 License to Kill Humpbacks and they might not have cared either. The whales are dying for […]
By Jo Nova
When does it make sense to build 122 giant industrial turbines that can’t operate for nearly half a year?
The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.
Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.
This is infrastructure that only works about 30% of the time anyhow, and now will be reduced to something like 17%. The theoretical capacity will be 340MW in the first stage, supposedly growing to 900MW if they can somehow build the extra 170km transmission lines and perhaps get the taxpayer to help build another undersea cable across the Bass Strait. (If the company was going to pay, why was the Tasmanian government spending $20m on the “business case”?)
It will be one of the largest wind factories in the Southern Hemisphere (the biggest being West of Melbourne), but as Tom Quirk showed years ago, when […]
By Jo Nova
The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero
The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.
The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)
Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.
How fast those balance sheets change…
Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.
‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]
by Jo Nova
For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.
“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”
Vestas Wind Turbine
There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.
Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.
The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.
Renewable […]
The people making wonder wind turbines are having a tough time. They thought they were picking the hottest new industry, saving the world, and expecting to make great money. Instead supply chains are in crisis, competition is fierce, and profit margins are razor tight. They know that the solar panel industry has largely gone to China, and worry that wind turbine manufacturing will do the same.
What they don’t seem to realize is that the reason the factories went to China is that the country isn’t powered by wind turbines. No country powered by unreliable power is also a growing manufacturing base. And as well as having cheap coal power, China also has the advantage of cheap slave labor, few environmental rules, no ethics and hardly any red tape. It’s a red-light flasher. About now, a wise investor might be wondering about the the odd disconnect in the idea of building devices to save the world while imprisoning people and polluting lakes. What if the environmental movement is a hollow geostrategic trojan fantasy serving Russians, Chicomms, socialists and investment banker cartels?
For Ben Hunt, the light-bulb moment isn’t there yet. These are the guys trying to make ends meet […]
In Germany, praise be to Gaia, it’s Green to knock down a forest that has sat undisturbed for a thousand years to put wind farms in, and then plant saplings in a fake forest somewhere else as a carbon sink.
When will the environmentalists realize they have been taken for a ride by investment bankers and the renewables industry? Let’s help them speed up that “transition”. There’s a Red-pill moment here. File the story of the Reinhardswald, “fairy-tale forest” away for those moments when a teenager turns up to tell you how important it is to save old growth forest. Exactly, you can say… would you like too help stop the latest rapacious attack on rare heritage forest?
Being “Green” is nothing more than a badge people wear to their weekend dinner party.
NoTricksZone has reported on this environmental crime in February 2022 when the access roads started to go in. In the latest news Swiss NZZ Daily has described it as the absurdity of the German energy transition:
In the fall, the Documenta management planted oaks in the fairytale Reinhardswald near Kassel to save the climate. Now the forest is to give way to wind turbines, which […]
Dead birds save the world kids!
Welcome to Your Green Dystopia. The wind turbines at ESI Energy killed 150 eagles in the last ten years and last week the company was fined $8 million dollars “or $53,300 per carcass”. Which sounds someone cares about these birds. But don’t think the The Fisheries and Wildlife Service (FWS) are outraged at the deaths of eagles. The real problem was not the slaughter, but that ESI didn’t fill out the paperwork first. If they had only got their permits to kill, it would have been fine.
The new FWS permitted “take” limits of bald eagles has just been increased to 15,800 a year.
Do Eagles Lives Matter? It depends on who kills them.
Fact pic.twitter.com/EA2XmLhsPi
— Paul Thacker (@paulthacker11) April 12, 2022
As Gregory Whitestone says: The government is funding this knowing the birds are dying in the name of Clean Energy
The DOJ press release further stated: “ESI and its affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits for generating electricity from wind power at facilities that it operated, knowing that multiple eagles would be killed and wounded without legal authorization.”
The […]
Australia now has nearly 10GW of wind power installed on the National Electricity Grid, but look at the monthly minimums — the guaranteed power we can rely on. The good news is that it’s increased by 10% over this time last year. The bad news is that it was only 216MW.
From the 10,000MW of windpower we paid to install, at one point in the last month only 2% was working, and that’s not unusual.
The true dismal story of wind power is that we need a near total second network of generators just sitting around waiting as back up. Since the back up is reliable, we could use them instead. As a bonus, backup power won’t kill birds, bats and hypnotize crabs and it won’t destroy sleep for farmers and spotted quolls, and it doesn’t create a national security risk either. Handy, eh?
Original graph: WattClarity | Click to enlarge.
The monthly average generation is about 30% of capacity. But the world doesn’t run on average electricity.
9.8 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
In the Victorian Supreme Court a judge has just ordered that the Bald Hills Wind farm must turn off at night time. After seven years of pain and suffering, two households living nearby will finally get night time relief and some payments of $92,000 and $168,000.
“The wind farm noise has been a common law nuisance at both properties.”
Bald hills, Wind Farm, Victoria, Australia. Image: John Englart Flikr CC BY-SA 2.0
This could change everything. These industrial plants close to homes just became even less profitable because they can’t operate at night. They also need to pay damages to people affected by the noise, and do more maintenance to reduce noise — like repairing gear boxes more often, and they may have to pay to make changes at homes nearby to ameliorate the nuisance, or pay compensation. Many properties near the towers have abandoned plans to build new houses there.
What stands out in this ruling is how entirely inadequate were any of the attempts by the government that approved the wind plants, or the companies that profited from them, to measure and assess the noise, and to respond to complaints. Despite tens of thousands […]
The great offshore revolution that never happened
Dogger Bank Wind Farm
Dogger Bank will become the World’s Largest Wind Farm and maybe the World’s largest white elephant too.
Despite years of research and hyperbole we can conclusively say that offshore wind is still a charity project, losing money from start to end. The GWPF highlights a new Norwegian report that shows that the Net Present Value of Dogger Bank is “minus £970 million.”
Britain’s biggest, newest offshore wind farm still isn’t profitable. It may be killing eagles and hypnotising crabs, but it isn’t cost effective at making energy, and it isn’t cost effective at changing the global weather either.
NetZeroWatch saw it all coming:
The report confirms as series of findings published by the GWPF and others [1–5], which show that offshore wind costs are very high, at best are only falling slowly, and are far above the auction strike prices being agreed.
Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch said:
“We have been warning since 2017 that there has been no revolution in offshore wind costs. Every time we get new financial data from offshore wind farms, the cost estimates […]
Welcome to your prison comrade
A new Taiwanese study investigated wind farm noise on people in homes made of sandstone, concrete, iron or bricks. And they measured the low frequency noise inside and out, and with windows open and closed. Given the health risks involved, they advised that governments ought to set limits on how close towers can be, and recommend airtight windows that nobody opens much.
pixelrockerz
Perhaps someone should have done more studies like this before the world installed 750GW of wind power?
The same people that panic about the effect of a hot weekend on your grandchildren a hundred years from now, don’t seem so worried about whether the wind towers destroy your sleep or put you at risk of heart attacks today.
Thanks to MasterResource.
From the introduction of a new paper in Taiwan on the effects of wind turbine noise on people:
LFN [Low Frequency Noise] exposure has been found to cause a variety of health conditions. Exposure to LFN from wind turbines results in headaches, difficulty concentrating, irritability, fatigue, dizziness, tinnitus, aural pain sleep disturbances, and annoyance. Clinically, exposure to LFN from wind turbines may cause increased risk of epilepsy, […]
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