41 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans”

  1. 20MW as I write this. Enough power to satisfy the needs of Kenora. Kenora’s population (2012) was 15,171 souls.
    A total farce.

  3. It would be interesting to know how many close relatives or “friends”
    of the top Ontario politicians, elites, and envirofraudsters are deeply
    involved in moving forward this obvious swindle. Idiot true believers
    don’t have anything approaching the smarts required to get this off the
    ground and to keep suppressing the truth reaching low information voters.

  4. Make note of this day! What a huge improvement! We’re on the right track now. Usually it’s .5%

  5. This is actually the best mode possible for these monuments to ignorance and greed.
    Windmills providing large amounts of unstable power require “real power plants”
    (like those clean, modern, gas turbine plants that were cancelled by the Lieberals)
    on hot standby to step in and save the day when things get hairy and the system is
    quickly heading for collapse.

  6. Government is asking folks to cut consumption because of flood damage caused blackouts.
    It would be nice to have reliable back-up but the wind ain’t blowin’ and the sun ain’t shinin’!
    Let’s hope the weather renews itself soon.

  7. Obviously these wind farms disrupted normal weather patterns and caused the Toronto flooding.
    Two can play the “blame it on human intervention” game.
    We should all call it the Dulton Flood!
    Just having some fun 🙂

  8. And we all know that Toronto – which couldn’t get enough of The Dildo’s green stupidity – is using nothing else but solar and wind-powered pumps today, right?

  9. Just drove by two large wind farms while driving from Bismark N.D. to Minot N.D. on Monday. Not sure of the number of turbines but there are many with just a very very few turning. However the Coal Creek Generating Station which can be seen from there and is close to the highway was busily chugging out megawatts. As I tried to explain to my son, someone has to pay for the stand-by generation for the days when those fans don’t turn. Like the other wind nuts, he doesn’t get it.

  10. That’s the spirit – until the TTC starts running exclusively on wind-generated electricity, Liberals and liberals pay for Ontario’s wind farm subsidies.

  11. Here in SW Ontario we have been inundated with these behemoths. Nobody but nobody in their right minds want them. opposition to them is getting very fierce to the extent that someday soon one of the detractors is going to go full Weibo Ludwig on one of them.
    And no one will have seen a thing.

  12. With output statistics like this, it is amazing that they don’t post “cooked” numbers in order to avoid embarrassment.

  13. Here’s a little suggestion on how to stop more solar/windmill development.
    With the almost inexhaustible list of flora and fauna that appears on the Schedules of Ontario’s Endangered Species Act, it would be hard to find an acre in this province that didn’t have a threatened or endangered species on it.
    And if that doesn’t work, there’s a pretty good chance that site is either ‘significant wildlife habitat’, or, it falls within the setback area of an adjoining SWH.
    Stop the bastards in their tracks with some of their own ‘green’ ammo.

  14. Have the Liberals push the blades of these monstrosities with their breath when the wind, for some strange reason, doesn’t perform as they wish. They can call it “Breath Power” and have the taxpayer subsidise it. Just think- they’ll black out after a few minutes of this exercise and maybe in enough time to dismantle the damn things.

  15. These giant Tweety Terminators are ,I’m sure causing the earth to rotate faster causing time to fly, this is my new theory, it is just as valid as any environMENTALists BS theorys like Gore and Suzuki. I know a family who had to move out from within 50 of these jokes surrounding their ranch, it drove the father to go from a vibrant good decision making ranching cattleman to a shopping mall shoe salesman, keep these things away from your property if possible, they will devalue your property quicker than a flood.

  16. That’s been tried over and over again. The erection of these does NOT require MOE approval.
    McGuinty gave them special dispensation from day one.
    I have never seen a more corrupt government in the 67 years of my life.

  18. You beat me to the reponse on that one. Although there is a glimmer of hope out Picton way where an endangered turtle seems to be delaying one project. Unfortunately in SWO we don’t have a bunch of rich part time landowners from the GTA to lead the fight like they do in Prince Edward county.

  19. Output is now up to 78 MW at 2:00PM. Put another way total demand in Ont is 19391 MW so Ont fleet of 1300 turbines is generating .4% of demand. See link to handy chart for official Ont figures.
    Nuclear and Hydro 76% wind rounds to 0%
    http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricity.html
    Remember this chart when Liberal enviro-fanatic talks of wind’s contribution to “clean air” Also worthy of note is Ont already is supplying well over 2/3 of its electricity from green, clean sources. Wind is the answer to exactly what problem?

  20. Look to Ontario for an example of Green madness, massive leftist insanity on display in fields and along shorelines. Dalton McGuinty, High Priest of Green, has left the province deep in the red thanks to his green insanity.

  21. “…Dalton McGuinty, High Priest of Green, has left the province deep in the red thanks to his green insanity…”
    The only thing the Dildo can be accused of is taking the population where it wanted to go. Every Liberal voter and every NDP voter had no problem with this foolishness. In three elections they constituted a majority of the voters.
    I’m getting a bumper sticker made: Don’t whine about your Hydro Bill if you voted for it

  22. There is work for the firing squads after investigation into climate change is completed.

  23. Yeah,in three elections a majority of Ontario voters proved they were happy with being lied to, taxed to the max and love paying high utility bills.
    The little green man must have been putting some kind of stupidity elixir in the water, how else can so many people be so stupid?

  24. Consider this- the 1200 + turbines across the province also have power requirements of their own. At these pathetic outputs of power from wind installations from Sault Ste Marie to Wolfe Island near Kingston, it doesn’t even cover the requirements of all the turbines. So somewhere, there’s a gas plant or a coal plant ramped up a little more just to cover those turbine requirements. At open houses hosted by wind companies, I couldn’t get an answer as to who pays for that power or at what rates that power is priced at.
    You just can’t make this stuff up

  25. pkusker is right. They all rely on grid connection to supply the activation current for the generator. Even when they’re not turning, they’re consuming electricity, albeit not very much.
    As to the overall topic, you can look on IESO’s hourly production tables just about any day of the week during high summer and 30-60 MW, 0.5% fleet capacity, is typical generation from Ontario’s wind fleet.

  26. A wind developer confessed that a GE 1.6mw turbine needs on average 40 kw/hr the larger 2.75mw turbine takes 50 kw/hr.That’ll give you a feel for how much turbines require. Since the IESO only reports on projects 20mw and greater, there are still lots of 10mw projects installed, not reported. There’s about 2025mw of installed wind at present. I assume the performance is no better.
    At the Underwood complex, the total nameplate is 182mw. From 5am through to 2pm the best it got was 5mw and was mostly running at 0mw ( for 6 hrs around midday). For that time, it was drawing from the grid rather than contributing. Looking at Wolfe Island, the output is even worse.

  28. ” 20MW as I write this. Enough power to satisfy the needs of Kenora. Kenora’s population (2012) was 15,171 souls.
    A total farce. ”
    The sad thing is, it s not a total farce to the public, because they lack the elementary math skills and logic necessary for analysis.
    The average voter reading that will probably view the 20 MW as a very positive step, since 20 MW > 0 MW.

  29. Please provide us with your explanation as to why the second statement in your post is true.
    Please provide us, also, with your opinion as to how any of what pkuster has raised could bear on your previous and famously/infamously disturbing remark about “hundreds of nuclear ‘maneuvers’ per month”.
    Plus: great contributions, as always, Jamie and small c, but I can report that I heard, in no uncertain terms, to my face, over the weekend, from very unexpected and completely unsolicited sources (quite anecdotally, to be sure, and admittedly on an unrelated matter, but astonishingly, nonetheless) that the Liberals are finished in certain areas, shall we say, of the province that would be critically important to their continuation as even a minority government.
    My high-level interpretation from what I heard, FWIW, is that a very great majority are seriously not interested in voting for Ms. Wynne, and that Ms. Horwath’s continuing support for the current administration has cost her very dearly.

  30. I agree with you that great majority are not interested in voting for Wynne, or her sidekick Horwath in the next election. Problem is, they know this and are working full steam ahead to approve as many wind factory as possible, while they still can. They are assuming a succeeding government would find it too expensive to
    cancel them.
    In this they are abetted by the MOE, which is the main rubber stamp in the approval process. This bureaucracy has a coterie of expensive environmental lawyers who travel to the boondocks in hybrid cars, to listen to rural residents whine about health and safety concerns and home setback distances. True, they have suffered a setback of their own in Prince Edward Co with the native turtle problem, but this is their first defeat. As for human concerns, for them, it is just something for rural people to get over.

  31. The turtle will be relocated. The turbine will be erected.
    I guarantee it.

  32. You might be right, GofAE.
    I’ll tell you one thing: if this group that is trying to stall/stop the windmill has any brains, they’ll be making this one hell of a hot political potato.
    Time for your opinions, Wynne-Tim-Dim.

  33. Thanks to pkusker for supplying the figures. The very simple reason for this is that electricity is needed to generate the electric fields for the generator. There’s a lot of equipment inside the wind turbine that converts mechanical rotation into electric current. Without the initial excitation current, the blades simply spin with nothing happening. So, when a wind turbine is connected to the grid, it always has to have excitation current; if the turbine isn’t producing anything then it’s drawing from the grid, not supplying to it.
    The one problem with the otherwise excellent daily IESO production numbers is that they don’t tell you what the net production is from wind. Now, nuclear power plants also need excitation current which they can’t produce themselves, like wind turbines. However, a nuclear power plant’s electricity production is such that at any level of generation activity it’s producing a large net surplus. An Ontario nuclear reactor typically needs about 50 MW out of its nominal 935 MW (Darlington) to power all of the equipment and systems in the plant. The remainder, about 880 MW, is net to the grid.
    And here’s the variability problem. The key piece of mathematics to remember with wind turbines is that energy varies with the cube of the speed. That means for example that if wind speed increases from 5 kph to 10 kph, the energy output increases by 2 cubed, or eight times. It also works in reverse if the wind drops. So this means that small changes in wind speed produce huge changes in energy output, either up or down.
    Now think about the poor grid controller. You’ve got your transmission lines all nicely loaded to meet the daily peak. Suddenly the wind picks up, and where you had 1000 MW of wind two minutes ago, now suddenly with a small change in wind you’ve got 3000 or 4000 MW more. You can’t add more load, everything’s already on. So you have to get someone to back off production or shut down entirely. Or you dump your surplus generation on a neighbour for whatever they will give you for it.
    This is where the “reactor maneuvres” that David was referring to enter the picture. And it’s not good for the nuclear reactors. They are designed to be turned on, worked up to full nominal power rating and LEFT at that level for many months at a time until it’s time to take them down for weeks for a planned maintenance outage.
    Sudden drops are just as difficult to handle. Suddenly because of a fall in wind speed, you have to find a lot more generation for what the wind was supplying. Your choices are in this order of desirability: 1. Start up your spinning reserve (generating plants that are hot and ready to go; 2. Import on an emergency basis from a neighbour if you have intertie capacity available; or 3. Load-shedding (otherwise known as various forms of blacking out the customers.)
    It should be noted that transient cloud cover affects solar generation just as badly as variable wind speed does wind. With even light overcast, a solar panel loses about 80 per cent of its electricity production (nearly all of it comes from direct sunlight and nearly nothing from reflected or refracted sunlight).
    One further little thing that needs to be added to pkuster’s good numbers above. It’s in all the manufacturers’ specification manuals. The full service life of the turbines is only valid if operated at 75% capacity factor. Service life of turbines decreases drastically as speeds increase between that and the nominal full power rating.
    The long and the short of it is that big power systems with big generating stations fueled by nuclear, gas, coal and hydro are vastly more reliable and provide better power quality than any system with a large proportion of renewables contaminating it.

  35. That’s a great exposition, as always. I apologize for presenting my questions in the form of interrogatories (which I’m sure you’re used to, anyway), but I was trying to avoid being too, er, congratulatory, in advance.
    But, I have to say, my friend, that, over and above all that, you just “triangulated” yourself and the boss lady, by which I mean that you presented corroborating evidence in support of both of your positions, to wit:
    “or 3. Load-shedding (otherwise known as various forms of blacking out the customers.)”
    Compare, if you would, that statement with what HMK (as opposed to, you know, HMQ) posted on July 8, 2013 at 1:09 p.m.:
    ‘If You Have Nothing To Freeze, You Have Nothing To Worry About
    In a seemingly innocuous revision of its Energy Star efficiency requirements announced June 27, the Environmental Protection Agency included an “optional” requirement for a “smart-grid” connection for customers to electronically connect their refrigerators or freezers with a utility provider.
    The feature lets the utility provider regulate the appliances’ power consumption, “including curtailing operations during more expensive peak-demand times.”‘
    I recognize, of course, that “smart-grid” really means “really dumb-grid”…

  36. Intended as a response to cgh’s last comment. Sorry for not ticking “Reply”.

  37. David, no apology is needed. I often use the Socratic method when I’m trying to explain something complex. Questions focus concentration.
    Your comments are well taken. Now, there’s nothing new about demand control. Utilities in Ontario have been offering programs for years that would control your electric water heater at times of high demand. In return for that, you would get a lower electricity rate. It’s no different in principle from the “Interruptible” power rates available to Ontario Hydro customers back in the 1990s when Ontario had a meaningful industrial development strategy. What I don’t know is what incentives the province is offering for the “optional” smart-grid connection.
    Second, the older municipal utility programs always steered clear of refrigeration. They concentrated on things like electric water heaters, where you can interrupt power supply for hours and have no significant effect on the supply of hot water in the house (high latent heat of water plus a big tank). And there’s no health issues involved. But refrigeration is another story entirely. People don’t run their refrigerators at uniform temperature settings. Outages that are fine for one household may result in spoliage at another. This is exaggerated by the fact that people open and close their refrigerators at different rates, particularly with families of small children. In short, there’s going to be complaints about this one from refrigerator shutoffs resulting in spoliage.
    Why are they doing this? Mostly because of two reasons: 1. Most of the electric water heaters vanished in Ontario a long time ago, so there’s nothing more to save there. 2. Managing peak demand is always challenging for any utility, but managing it with a lot of renewables on the system is far worse. The generators you may be counting on for peak supply may be already in use backfilling drop-offs in renewable generation.
    Finally note that this situation is only manageable in Ontario thus far because Ontario remains in a significant industrial recession. Both energy demand and peak loads are off significantly from the high periods in the mid 1990s to mid 2000s. Should Ontario’s industrial economy ever recover significantly, the system is going to be under significant strain.
    And this matters to all Canadians. Despite the huge benefits of western oil and gas, the single largest factor in Canada’s overall economy is still the economic health of Ontario. If Ontario booms, it lifts just about every province and region; if it declines, it drags down everyone.

  38. Dipping into the weather information, I see wind was4km/hr [humidity 94% ] When the wind doesn’t blow, it doesn’t blow.
    Presumably Levant has been keeping an eye on the monitor, waiting for a minimum to tell us all how bad wind energy is.
    I see it is up to 741 — “enough to meet the needs of Brampton & Halton Hills” — as I write.
    It would be nice if there were a running graph, but this would probably show their “built capacity” figure to be less meaningful.
    [Thanks Martin]

  39. dizzy, would you invest all your money into savings bonds, the interest rate of which was tied to instantaneous wind velocity?

  40. Dizzy, that’s just silly. You can read for yourself in IESO’s hour by hour production figures what’s coming from wind and everything else. The dismal performance of wind under summer low pressure conditions is a normal behaviour of the Ontario wind fleet. And in case you haven’t got the message, a supply source which is varying from zero to some value on a minute by minute basis is worse than useless.

  41. That would depend on the average wind speed, eh? Given present interest rates, a breeze produced by butterfly wings would be ennough.
    I see the outpout just now is 882 MW “the same as a large nuclear unit” [ and about 1/3 the output of Niagra Falls]
    Hi cgh.

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