Alberta has now built 29 wind farms connected to its grid, and on Saturday, they were collectively putting out 8 megawatts out of a total of 2,734 megawatts capacity.
One of the arguments for wind has been if it’s not blowing here, it’s got to be blowing somewhere. We just need to spread it out of a large enough area.
Well, the area of southern Alberta populated by wind farms is larger than the area of the BENELUX countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) combined. Alternatively, it’s about the size of all of Austria.
So apparently, Alberta is not spread out enough.
The saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
What happens when you get fooled 29 times?
Because that’s what’s happening in Alberta. The denominator in the wind power equation has grown as well, as another wind farm was added onto the grid. The new total is now 29, an increase of one from the previous week. (You have to be sharp about this, because new facilities are continually being added.)
That was Saturday. And today, on Monday, for the third day in a row, and four days out of the last six, Alberta’s wind turbines crapped out again. At noon, their total output dropped to just 6 megawatts. Only one wind farm was contributing to the grid, out of hundreds of wind turbines.
Went to Waterton on Sunday morning and passed the 21 Turbine, “feel good-do nothing” wind farms put up by Suncor and Enbridge as worthless, “green” advertising just outside Magrath. Not a single one turning. Not one. (Unusual for our little corner of heaven)
At least one can take consolation that they weren’t killing any birds at that moment
I drive by these weekly in the summer doing the Waterton-Lethbridge shuffle. Very common to see no movement on these. If I recall correctly, Suncor has sold these duds to someone else.
Consider at that pathetic level of output, those bird blenders are actually having to draw power from the grid to maintain the entire fleets internal systems. They aren’t even covering their own power requirements.
Redmonton should go fully wind and solar. And Redmonton rate payers can pay for it.
And put it in their precious river valley.
It’s almost comical at this point. Such a spectacular farce. What a colossal waste of money, materials and manpower to build and operate these useless machines.
Wind turbines are COVID injections in long form. It would be hilarious if it didn’t bring so much nothing or worse.
Wind chimes are more useful than wind turbines on a cost to benefit calculation, imo. Politicians are dumber than a bag of rocks when it comes to practical investments. Reservoirs, garbage incinerators, irrigation…pretty much anything the average down-to-earth person can think of would be better use of taxpayer cash than wind power.
NDP Virtue signaling BULLSHIT, as it’s been from the beginning.
I was in Old Palm Springs Dec 2001, Doing Welding Automation Seminars. First day there took a drive around the area…I saw what looked to me near 1000 blenders surrounding the area as far as the Eye could see doing absolutely nada…whilst the surrounding hills were utterly & visually destroyed with rusting JUNK. 21 YRS…ago
Magrath/ Pincher Cr resembling that to a TEE.
Looks good on Canadians, and all the other enviro-tards.
You wanna be part of a grid of millions? Well then, suck it up like a good little collectivist.
Nobody picked up on the first and most damning hint: Energy companies that encourage you to use less energy, so they can sell more of it in bulk, with less maintenance overhead; they are not there to service you, they exist to make money only, and they don’t need us to do that anymore. When Ontario “de-regulated”, all the small municipal outfits went under, because they weren’t as profitable as Big Energy. First hit’s for free, and all that. Well, now you’re an addict, and will dance to whatever tune your supplier plays.
People with both the brains and the resources are using wind and solar on a micro-scale, and doing fine, by living off-grid, of course, they don’t have heated pools or Christmas lights that can be seen from orbit, the swine!
Around Shelburne, Ontario a few weeks back and the blenders are from horizon to horizon. Any person with the slightest common sense would realize it takes at least a million to build one, then to install it, to service it and to remove one. How can you possibly make energy from this source.
David, I regularly fly over the Shelburne area in my plane and yes, it is huge and from the air it looks even bigger than from the ground. I have also flown gliders near that area and I avoid the entire wind farm since I need to keep within a safe gliding distance from somewhere landable.
For sheer scale however, check out the Lake Huron shoreline. There are wind farms from Sarnia to Port Elgin with only small gaps near the airports at Goderich and Kincardine. I hate seeing those things from the air as I am always mindful of having somewhere safe to land should my engine quit (decades of glider flying trains you to think that way)
The other issue with those giant blenders is that, unlike cell towers, they don’t have lights. Sure, some of the towers may have a light on, but the blades don’t and they can easily be a couple hundred feet higher that the tower. The aviation charts show them as unlighted.
David,
I knew a guy who oversaw the installation and serviced wind turbines in Western Ontario and he told me it cost almost $2M to build and install each turbine. Plus the person(s) who own the land got $25K for each turbine. And, as you mention, the cost to service and remove them.
Mr. K
Most wind turbine contracts only require removal of top hamper to plow depth assuming that the turbine subsidy harvester hasn’t gone under. In any event the massive concrete foundation will remain in place. Some of the top hamper can be recycled such as the steel, copper and magnet elements and metals. The blades are carbon reinforced resin and cannot be recycled only cut up and buried.
Experience has shown that many wind farms are left intact to rust away once the subsidies have stopped.
Try $3M per. 20 year maximum useful life, straight line depreciation is $150,000, throw in the cost of capital and don’t even worry about maintenance. They won’t generate enough revenue to even get back to 0, let alone make sense or money. That is unless ratepayers are forced to pay $0.40-$0.60 kwhr, FIT rate in Nova Scotia. Boondoggle is such an understatement.
At this moment wind is producing 0.6% of capacity.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/CA-AB
and Alberta is probably both the windiest and sunniest province.
…and to think that there still exist idiots who are naive enough to think that this is about energy, as opposed to pure, unadulterated power, and its exercise. Blenders not tuning? Well then , you get FA, peon.
Defacto Ministry of Energy, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Peace, etc.
It don’t matter what their called, they exist, and the more dependent on them people are, the more power they have.
What makes it even worse is how many millions of dollars we waste subsidizing these useless, unproductive and unsightly bird blenders.
Every major environmental disaster is a result of government policy.
Some are recovering from this delusion about wind/solar. Ontario is extending the life of Pickering for at least one year to provide time for a full engineering analysis of a complete refurbishing of four of its reactors. Announced last Thursday, this represents the final rejection of the Maurice Strong/Bob Rae electricity policy foisted off on Ontario in the early 1990s. It also puts a boot in the face of Gerald Butts, author of Ontario’s Green Energy Plan in 2009.
St. Albert was going hard after a city owned solar farm, right up to the moment they found out they wouldn’t qualify for any of that sweet, sweet grant money from higher levels of gov’t, after which they couldn’t drop that thing any faster.
Amateurs.
I guess they didn’t hit up the right people.
They coulda got some money from the WEF, Tides foundation, etc if they know how to ask.
Thank God we’re lead by experts!
NGOs don’t provide money for such projects. The last thing they want is more power production that might result in progress. What they will do is fund ways of delaying and hampering energy production
Wind and solar qualify on both counts.
Is that 8 mW net or gross, since most of them have motors to keep the blades turning slowly so that they aren’t resting on a set of bearings causing flat spots that reduces the life of the turbines
Where in the world did you hear that?
I drive by farms all the time wherein the blades are dead still.
Actually they are moving albeit at a snails pace.
At least when the wind isn’t blowing there’s less chance they can fall over and kill you.
No it’s not’s gotta be blowing “somewhere else”. There are places on the earth where geography, and predominant weather patterns produce consistent high winds … and many places where the opposite is true. In fact … as we finish installing these contraptions on the windiest locations … each succeeding location will be less and less windy.
The same thinking that reasons there is some ideal “set” temperature for the planet … is the same thinking that wind is equally distributed in duration and intensity across the planet. Rubbish thinking.
Oh it gets even worse. This BS is also still expanding.
https://majorprojects.alberta.ca/details/Strathmore-Solar-Farm/4175
Wind turbines are surprisingly lethal because they kill bugs.
Willis Eschenbach
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/21/explaining-wind-turbine-lethality/
Monuments to stupidity, cupidity, and ideology.
Like Satan, socialists cannot create.
They can only pervert, vandalize, steal, kill, or destroy.
In spite of southern Alberta’s reputation of being always windy, it’s pretty common to see little to no power production from these things, especially on really hot and really cold days, when power demand is at a peak.
Once you pull the kinetic energy (energy due to motion) out of the air (wind) to make electricity, there is no energy left in the still air.
in some ways it could get worse. About a dozen or so years ago in Ontario, the green movement boasted that for the first time all of Ontario’s night time electricity came from a renewable (i.e. wind energy). It turned out that the government (Ontario Power Authority I believe) was contractually obliged to buy the power whether needed or not. At the same time, the OPA was receiving electricity from on going nuclear and hydro (e.g. run-of-the-river type including Niagara Falls). The excess power had to be dumped at a bargain price to New York and Michigan at something like 2 to 3 cents per KwHr.
Yep
https://financialpost.com/opinion/boondoggle-how-ontarios-pursuit-of-renewable-energy-broke-the-provinces-electricity-system
Someone should do a study and see how many of these were built under and with the support of Alberta “Conservatives” and the Energy Minister responsible should be named and shamed.