Now is the time at SDA when we deja vu!
Telegraph, January 2010 – The cold weather has been accompanied by high pressure and a lack of wind, which meant that only 0.2pc of a possible 5pc of the UK’s energy was generated by wind turbines over the last few days.
Telegraph, January 2011 – Despite high demand for electricity as people shivered at home over Christmas, most of the 3,000 wind turbines around Britain stood still due to a lack of wind.
We’ve tried to warn them that “the wind don’t blow when it’s cold.” But what would Canadian prairie hicks know about wind power?
h/t Maz2
Meanwhile the big masts of Liberal Party white elephant wind turbines continue to trundle down Highway #3 to Port Dover.
I strongly think somebody needs to go to jail for all this. Probably several somebodies.
Just read in the Star Phoenix that one of the things in the ndp platform in the coming election in November is by the year 2025, 50 percent of all power generated in Saskatchewan will be from renewable energy.Including wind. Never ever vote these people in again in Saskabush. The ndp chased me out of here 30 yrs. ago. If they get back into power again.I’ll leave for the last time.
“An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin’,
Baith seill an’ keen!
Course, Bobbie was considered a bit of a pinko anyways! And remember it went right up yer kilt mon!
Sorry, make that “snell”; my Scots Gaelic fails me.
Even worse . . . all those windmills have to be kept warm when they sit idle, so when they are not producing electricity, they are actually drawing current from the grid to keep their mechanicals from freezing.
Now that is irony 🙂
Happy new year. Bundle up.
When it comes down to a choice between having a job, warm house, health care, decent education etc. VS. supporting ineffective “green” technology at the expense of everything else I believe common sense will eventually win out. This cold winter will be the tipping point where common sense wins out against the perpetual blow of MSM-fed hot air.
China will be happy to get the contracts to supply clean coal fired power plants by the dozen when Britian’s energy need imperils its citizens.
Now, if Britian can start to lower North Sea royalties they might actually get some gas field development going again.
Dang that mother nature, She’s always messing stuff up. (-:
The thing I notice about Green energy is that I hear ‘can’ and ‘will’ a lot but rarely hear ‘does.
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big tonguebath (2 separate articles about same guy) in the local paper about a retired boomer who put in a windmill.
nice picture of him monitoring his pc that he says tracks power usage… he says he saves 10% on his electricity bill…
but absolutely no numbers supplied.
no amount for cost of buying & installing giant fan. no number of hours this thing turns or sits idle. no actual
number for kilowatts generated. no figure for length of amortisation required to break even.
in short… another tree-huggin’ snowjob… ‘cos that’s how today’s professional journalists roll.
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& should Speedy. You should… We should…
If the media had any interest in doing their chosen work, this wouldn’t nearly be the (green) problem it’s become.
There is a direct, inverse, relationship between the price of oil & the efficiency of alternative Energy………
When the price of oil is increasing we should be “decreasing” investment in the 1990’s technology (Wind/Solar) of a failed California wet dream. That worthless technology is not sustainable under any conditions…buying crap actually makes the Energy dynamics worse…
The success of alterative energy will be determined when the Technology is investment driven and Oil prices “will” then drop to ~ $30.00
I don’t know why they don’t build these windmills in fast flowing rivers. That way electricity would be generated at both ends.:-)
Phantom; on one wind farm here in Alberta, 49 big bird blenders, revenue 3 years ago over 400,000, 2 years ago,40,000. cost of project, over 120 million, fleecing of the taxpayer priceless. gonna take a few years to ever get that investment back. Electricity surges here in Alberta have blown every electronic washer dryer stove honeywell controls and even my new cuisinart coffee maker. What is Al Gores address so I can send the bill for this juvenile leftard decent into stupidity exercise.
wallyj at 12:43 PM, around these here parts, they’d break up and sink to the bottom once the ice starts to flow. Not too many fast flowing rivers with deep beds in Saskatchewan, either, except in the spring.
Now if the environuts would just let us build a few more dams on our northern rivers, we’d be in better shape. But like everything else that produces power, mighty rivers are off limits with that crowd, too.
But what would Canadian prairie hicks know about wind power?
Sorry gang but I would say nothing or at least such is apparent when you drive through SW Sask. It has been my experience to drive by one of our proud wind farms on a -20C December day to see that not a single blade was turning. Kind of a shame since that would seem to be when the enery these things produce would be usefull.
Spike had it right on April 21, 2008 @ 10:46. The farm we live on had two wind power mills between sometime in the 1930s and 1950s until power lines came through. One was by the house and the other by the barn. The one by the barn was part and parcel of the Eaton’s Samson water pumping wind mill. The power generating part of the one by the barn is gone except for some of the old material insulated wire still remains.
The owner of the farm at the time the hydro electric power lines came through was pretty sharp financially and the uneconomical heavy maintenance wind power generating apparatus was dismantled.
I am fortunate enough to be sitting in Maui and looking outside this morning, beautiful sunny day and not a breath of wind. About 3 years ago the county decided to place 14 or 15 turbines strategically near the Pali pass. They had to build a road up the side of the mountain, install infrastructure to integrate the power produced into the grid and cart these monstrosities into position. Everybody was pretty darned proud of themselves once it was completed. However, once it was operational, they discovered that the wind was often too strong or nonexistent so the projections used to justify the project had to be adjusted meaning that the economics of this green initiative were significantly flawed to say the least. In the mean time, three of the four diesel fired generators sit idle because they cannot or will not get parts to repair them. Energy costs are multiples higher than the mainland and renewable initiatives like the turbines have created a visual blight on the one of the island’s beautiful areas and succeeded in making energy costs even higher but those behind this madness can pat themselves on the back and say to each other what a difference they are making.
Push them over.
Oh yeah REA (rural electrification associations) were created for a reason. In the 1940’s the old windchargers were replaced with coal produced AC power to run the farm and household. Many old windmills still pumped water but because you couldn’t effectively store electricity the vagaries of the wind played a crucial role in the windcharger’s demise. What’s that old saying about those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it.
the Arabs will be pleased as you are that more oil was burnt. Saudi Arabia is the country that is the biggest denier of climate change.
Your tax $s at work:
Bombardier Recreational Products and Government of Canada funding C$11.3M project to develop plug-in hybrid Can-Am Spyder roadster with target of 50% reduction in fuel consumption
The Centre de technologies avancées BRP at the Université de Sherbrooke (CTA) is receiving C$11.3 million (US$11.3 million) in financial support to develop a plug-in hybrid version of BRP’s (Bombardier Recreational Products) Can-Am Spyder roadster. The government’s Automotive Partnership Canada program is contributing $6.2 million and BRP is contributing $5.1 million over a four-year period.
Launched in 2007, the Can-Am Spyder roadster features a distinctive Y-architecture and is he only mass-production, on-road vehicle that is entirely designed and manufactured in Canada.
http://corp.brp.com/en-CA/Media.Center/Press.Releases/1/12.20.2010.htm
If you were to fell a Wind Turbine, what warning would you yell?
“timber” just doesn’t seem appropriate.
If the windmill was surrounded by admiring greenies,yelling anything would be counter-productive.
Louise @ 12:53, point duly noted and filed. My friend,Ruben Goldberg,and I will get to that in due course. Right now we’re busy making cool signs and applying for grants.
Perhaps if Saskatchewan was renamed Europe we would have the required riveres?
Many years ago, they started setting up test windmills in nearby Livingston, Montana, because the place is famous for high winds. Unlike Britain, though, cold temperatures don’t necessarily lead to a lack of wind here. One by one the mills failed. I remember hearing that days where it was around 0 F. with a wind speed near 100 mph were more than the machines could take. I imagine a lot of the wind farms now are using tons of power from the grid to keep these puppies warm.
“Since 2002, Germany has doubled its capacity to generate wind power and has 21,000 turbines producing 7.5% of the nation’s electricity. […]
Since October 2008, the abundance of wind power has led to periods where German customers were paid […]
One solution: Tying power markets together, allowing temporary surpluses in one area to flow toward electricity-poor zones. That’s now done between the Netherlands, France, and Belgium; Germany plans to join them on Sept. 7.
Storing electricity may be another fix. In Scandinavia, Danish wind power pumps water into Norwegian and Swedish reservoirs; the water is later released to drive hydroelectric plants. Until there’s more integration like that and better transmission grids, expect more Germans to sleep with the lights on.
& [when you pioneer new technologies] —
ERLANGEN, GERMANY ( Commodity Online ): Siemens AG (, the global powerhouse in electrical and electronics engineering has announced that it has received the largest onshore wind order to data from US utility MidAmerican Energy headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa. Recently Siemens got a first order for wind turbines from Brazil, paving the way for a plant in Latin American coutnry, while in India Siemens expects its first winder turbine order in the coming weeks.
Siemens also expects the creation of a joint venture (JV) with its Russian partners Rostechnology and RusGidro OAO in spring 2011. […]+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Happy New Year, SDA’ers and especially our hostess – the inimitable Kate.
Here in Nanaimo, our local School Board is especially loopy. First, they lost $83 million in funding for school replacement and upgrades because they refused to close any of the ancient schools that have falling student counts.
More recently, they put solar panels onto three schools at a cost of $66,000. The kicker is that the amortization period is 71 years.
On calling the Superintendent I found the rationale was twofold. First, the solar panels will teach the kids the ‘benefits’ of renewable energy – IOW, green propagada.
Secondly, the $66K was received as a ‘grant’ so it’s like, free money! Never mind that the grant comes out of everybody’s pocket – either as taxes or in this case through higher natural gas prices. Why natural gas, you say?
Because Terasen Gas, our monopoly distributor, is contributing money charged to it’s own customers, to give in grants to quasi-NGO organizations promoting ‘green energy’.
As a business person, it’s strikes me as particularly crazy that a ‘private’ company would help to fund it’s own competitor. But that’s what happens when you get big companies in bed with big government and big education: big expenses and big trouble.
Meanwhile PEI just signed a longterm power delivery contract with a PA NG supplier for between 6 and 7 cents / KWH fob PEI. this is less than what it will cost on a per KWH basis to do major re and re on the wind turbines in about five years.
In a generation or so these windmills will come to be seen as quaint relics of an old bygone era when (some) people thought that we were going to run out of cheap fossil fuels.
Perhaps PEI can sell as a tourist attraction like the Dutch do with their old mills.
(is their any other source of power generation that has as dramatic a visual impact as these giant windmills? When scarce they are an attraction – when numerous they are visual pollution (much like steam trains)
Dalton McGuinty, current wrecking ball Premiere of Ontario, needs to hope the wind turbine “farms” he’s polluted the province with will blow the stink of his mess away before the next provincial election.
Like some wag said elsewhere: “Putting the left in charge is like giving a 15 year old kid a bottle of whiskey and the car keys.”
Mkelley: that was none other than pj orourke
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P._J._O'Rourke
He’s got a million of them. Heres a recent one I like that catches the tone of the left wing elite perfectly and is hilarious to boot:
“There are two organizations pushing for change in November — al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: ‘We’re going to fix you, America.’ On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They’re going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.”
You don’t need to be a climate scientist to know which way the wind blows.
Martha! Throw another liberal onto the fire. It’s getting cold in here!
I just learned that the Chairman of the UK Met Office has been awarded Commander of the British Empire. What a truly pathetic joke and a reminder how completely useless these “awards” are. Much like Messiah Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2011/01/chairman-of-uk-met-office-awarded-cbe/
I’m sure the next part of their “green” energy plan will be to setup huge arrays of solar cells around the windmills which will be used to power a massive array of fans which will provide wind for the windmills to turn. Look at all the “green jobs” that will be created sweeping snow off the solar cells or shining flashlights on the solar cells during cold nights when power is needed.
OTOH we could always build nuclear power plants. Uranium is renewable energy as every few billion years a nearby supernova produces massive quantities of the stuff.
I just learned that the Chairman of the UK Met Office has been awarded Commander of the British Empire. What a truly pathetic joke and a reminder how completely useless these “awards” are. Much like Messiah Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2011/01/chairman-of-uk-met-office-awarded-cbe/
Posted by: Robert W. (Vancouver) at January 1, 2011 8:29 PM ”
darn right robert. kinda like conservatist brian mulruin snatching an order of canada.
beagle, the order of “canada” only seems to be awarded to statist scum and Mulroney fits right in there. The west rendered it’s opinion of what he stood for by overwhelmingly voting for the Reform party and reducing the Mulroney “conservatives” to 2 seats in parliament. You’ve just proved Robert W. (Vancouver)’s point that these awards are only awarded to statist morons.
loki, I second that motion.
doggie,you think we -like- Mulroney here? He’s a socialist.
We don’t like socialists.