Wind Power is all hot air.

Leaving UK's energy provision in the laps of the gods

In August 1740, a small convoy consisting of five men-of-war, a scouting sloop and two small cargo ships on a secret mission to engage a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, made its way down the English Channel. Who’s to say people don’t get creative when taken off screens. The convoy had already been delayed for a year, and now, fighting for wind and space with other ships, spirits were high, until the wind dropped, as fickle as the gods. Three times they attempted to leave England, and it took until September 18th for a favourable wind. How those sailors would have awed at our modern diesel ships, sliding through the waves, rain or shine, even through the windless doldrums in which ships might have once beleaguered for weeks on end. And how gobsmacked they would be to find governments rejecting dependable technology of oil and gas and nuclear for the vagaries of the weather.

The only predictable characteristic of the weather is its unpredictability. If we struggle to complete cricket summer test series without delays and faces peering out from the pavilion at weather-enforced draws, then what hope is there for a reliable national grid based upon its whims? If there is one thing that our society requires, it’s reliable energy provision.

It’s easy to see why wind power is appealing. In the UK the South westerly wind seems unremitting (it does drop), and as political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. says “It is quite intuitive for people to understand that there is a lot of power in solar energy. We feel the wind. The idea that you can get something for nothing, people find enormously appealing.”

There’s something of ‘if life throws you lemons, make lemonade’ about wind power. We spend so much time swearing beneath our breath at its effortless vendetta in rendering most items of clothing useless, that using your opponents’ strength to your advantage feels inspired. From the 8th century wind ground grain and pumped water, and of course filled the great sails of the world’s largest navies. However, its unreliability exposed it as a weaker technology once steam arrived to drive the industrial revolution. It’s not armies that win wars, but the technology they used. No military commander would have surrendered the Maxim gun, capable of 450 rounds per minute, for spears and lances, because it was a superior technology. Yet, Net Zero threatens to plunge us back into the world that our ancestors, at great sacrifice, sought to extradite themselves. 

The wind might be free, but politicians and activists are people apparently unfamiliar with the concept of there being no such thing as a free lunch. How attractive is the requirement to find 150 square miles of land every day until 2050 to accommodate the demonic 2 mega-watt wind turbines that no one wants near their house, but definitely someone else’s? Everyone loves free stuff until its processing centre is built on your front lawn.   

The next UK government is so likely to be Labour that they might as well swap sides in the House of Commons now, and save millions spent on TV debates where they pretend to disagree with one another whilst pursuing the same destructive political games of an overfunded, underperforming NHS, unbridled mass immigration of young men, the pursuit of digital currency and universal basic income (already being trailed), handing over sovereign powers to globalist organisations and probably the most destructive of all, the dogmatic pursuit of a pointless Net Zero.

Due to the influence of global organisations such as COP, UN, WEF, Trilateral commission, we have politicians blindly unaware that there might even be an alternative narrative to manmade Co2 increasing global temperatures. Like players buzzing from a half-time motivation talk they’re all pumped with collective ideas to made-up global problems. They are the children of an education system that discourages questioning, while of course embracing the idea that there’s no stupid question. These are the sort of people whose knowledge of the Russian revolution is based upon knowing the lyrics to Boney M’s Rasputin. 

Their intention to decarbonise the national electrical grid and rely upon wind and solar is based upon a science that is looking as unreliable as these methods of energy production. For turbines to work efficiently the wind can be too weak or too strong. As with the destruction of the Spanish Armada by the storm in 1588 (kind of), when a turbine exceeds its designed rotation speeds it spills 25 gallons of grease, oil, and coolant onto the fields, along with a $1.5 million replacement bill. Not only is wind power the solution to a non-existent problem but basing an economy upon the fickleness of the weather is like powering an intensive care unit on the fluctuating moods of a toddler. 

Currently wind farms have been constructed in the North Sea, where the blades last about 3 years before the salt and sand blown in the wind destroys the edges of the blades. There’s money in replacing these, those green jobs the politicians have promised; it’s a shame they’re in China. And as it takes about 6 1/2 years to pay off the initial costs of manufacture and installation of a turbine then it appears that wind turbines are better at spinning money than they are electricity.

In addition, these wind farms energy companies have built in remote northern locations (on taxpayer subsidies) have insufficient grid connections to carry their power south, causing infrastructure to be overloaded at times of high wind. Thankfully they have an answer this: build wind farms on farmland closer to residential areas. Genius, it means we can die of hunger, yet warm and watching Netflix. Let’s hope they choose somewhere in areas of outstanding beauty in the West to keep the Devon Climate Declaration signees happy. 

According to the Department of Energy, wind power is a clean and renewable energy source. Well, not to the 100,000s of birds that the turbines kill it isn’t. The production of steel and other components, as well as vessel transport and heavy transportation, also involve burning fossil fuels, so maybe it’s not as clean as the DOE claims. And this is the problem. They lie. A two-megawatt turbine requires 260 tonnes of steel, 300 tonnes of iron ore and 170 tonnes of coking coal to build it, but this contradiction of their Net Zero mantra occurs behind closed doors, which as with calories eaten in cinemas presumably don’t count. 

The politicians’ blind faith - that the UK can be run on wind - is so dogmatic that it ignores a blatant flaw. It’s not always windy. For all this magical thinking that wind is a reliable energy source, our climate needs to be one in which Atlantic gales permanently rip newspapers from your hand, where wheelie bins require handbrakes and functional umbrellas exist only in the memories of the elders. We already know politicians don’t live in the real world, but now their cloud cuckoo land is one without stationary clouds and where birds are incapable of flying in a straight line. 

Anyone supporting wind power needs to be asked where the electricity will be coming from on a calm breezeless day. In actual reality a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated capacity for days, even weeks, at a time. It’s a question that the Climate Change Committee (CCC) ignored when claiming the UK could rely on wind and solar after it based claims on the extent to which the UK could rely on solar and wind farms to meet Net Zero. This was misleading a public who might once have been excused for trusting such governmental bodies. The CCC is the UK's independent adviser on tackling climate change yet are happy to promote evasive national action based upon cherry-picked data. The CCC even privately admitted it had made a mistake when it only ‘looked at a single year’ of data showing the number of windy days in a year 

And let us not forget that the UK’s use of fossil fuels produces just 1% of global CO2 emissions, so sacrificing our landscape will make negligible difference globally, even if the level of atmospheric CO2 were controlled by man-made emissions, which considerable evidence shows it does not (Ole Humlum, 2015). 

Yet, they plough on, the population battered relentlessly by weather given girls’ names, so helpful in developing the essential eco-anxiety assisted by the media. it. The BBC even reports that climate change threatens to ‘call time’ on the great British pint, while ignoring that global governance masquerading as national democracy threatens to call time on personal choices in favour of collectivism. We’re all familiar with Lemmings following their mad instinct to run off cliffs, yet history shows that such dangers of collectivism and herd behaviour are similarly found in mankind.