In response to Clark Cross: It’s an ill wind, Owen_Morgan wrote:
If wind power is the answer, I have to ask, ‘What is the question?’
Clark Cross talks about ‘the downside of wind turbines’, but he is doing them a favour by implying there is any upside. There isn’t. There is no conceivable circumstance in which wind power can supply our energy needs. Even in the optimistic propaganda claims the numbers, intended to sound impressive, are pitiful. 80,000 homes? That’s a fraction of the homes in a place like Liverpool, or Glamorgan – never mind London. The claims, in any case, are dishonest.
As Clark Cross points out, there is a difference between supplying the power needed consistently for 80,000 homes (or any other random number) and merely occasionally (and almost wholly unpredictably) augmenting the power supply of that many homes. There is always the farce that we need backup power plants for those homes since wind is such an obviously unreliable source of power generation. Why not skip the wind power and just use the backup sources?
Clark Cross is a little kind in addressing the polluting aspects of wind turbines. Every aspect of the manufacture, installation, operation and de-commissioning of a wind farm is massively polluting. The greens would have us believe that they care about pollution, but they promote wind farms, destructive in many ways, while opposing minimally harmful fracking.
The nature of wind is not going to change. At best, it will only rarely pass the Goldilocks Test (only Baby Bear’s porridge was just right, if you recall). The rest of the time it is a useless, destructive extravagance, indulged in at our expense by spineless politicians.
