It could be argued that the basic arithmetic showing wind power is an economic and societal disaster in the making should be clear to a bright primary school child. Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. The U.K. is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply, he concludes.
“Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”. […]
In his paper, Allison concentrates on working out the numbers that lie behind the natural fluctuations in the wind. The full workings out are not complicated and can be assessed from the link above. He shows that at a wind speed of 20mph, the power produced by a wind turbine is 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. To deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area.
https://apple.news/AnsRlmvNmTl2ui0uVv9fskQ
Paywalled. Archived link is here… https://archive.ph/VxFZ5
The gang greens will argue wind power doesn’t fail to provide enough power, you will just need to use less electricity.
As we all plug in our EV’s & turn on our electric stoves…
hah, joke’s on you – you won’t have an EV or a stove.
You’ll be hungry, cold, and have to walk to your own funeral.
That is subtler than Pol Pot’s approach but it is the same goal. Red Faction or Watermelon, the goal is the same.
F77, frankly, I don’t want an EV. They can shove ’em all where the sun don’t shine. As far as stoves go, if I don’t have electricity, natural gas or propane, I can always burn wood or Prog bodies.
Make government use ZERO heat or electricity.
GREAT IDEA!!!
And cut pay to 10% of what it is.
https://giphy.com/gifs/miramax-clapping-shakespeare-in-love-l0IylyD2fD515YRS8
There is a fortune to be made if all the hot air emitted by the world’s politicians could be harnessed to produce electricity!
Amen and let’s make turd be the bag that holds it.
From the article: “To deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area.”
If the wind isn’t blowing, how many meters of turbine swept area would it take to deliver 3,200 million watts? Let’s do the math.
3,200 million watts divided by the average output of a turbine when the wind isn’t blowing (zero watts) equals (or in symbolic form):
3,200 million/0 = Whoa! You can’t do dat. Dividing by zero is a no-no.
Hmmm… I think it will all work out if the IIC (Idiots In Charge) get off their butts and pass a law making it illegal for the wind to stop blowing. Yeah… that’ll fix the problem.
As in the movie Soylent Green , I will be like Heston , riding a bike to charge up a battery for light use, remembering the good Ole days while the proles fight for scraps of yellow soylent bugs.
The green soylent will be for the upper crust .
Oy vey !
Except you aren’t dividing by zero, because wind turbines consume power when they aren’t producing, including for their control systems, motors, heating and cooling, brakes, etc…
Of course they don’t tell you what each turbine consumes either during its operation, so there is no easy way to find out.
One study i could find showed that a UMinn turbine was producing -50kW until wind speed got above 3.5 m/s which was it’s “cut in speed”.
Nice thought, JD, but the turbine consumption when the wind doesn’t blow is included in the 3,200 million watts of current (Ha!) power usage figure.
If you did manage to replace current power sources with wind turbines, then when the wind doesn’t blow the equation for turbines needed becomes:
0/0 = undefined
which is also a real big no-no mathematically and also practically when it comes to trying to toast a bagel. There is no way to calculate how many wind turbines you’d need to toast a bagel if the wind doesn’t blow.
The intermittency of wind means it can never solely be baseload power. At a minimum, wind turbines will need some backup – fuel powered generators or batteries or solar or lunar (wink, wink) panels – just to keep the blades turning when the wind doesn’t blow, as you pointed out.
(See more at this link about 0/0)
https://www.themathdoctors.org/zero-divided-by-zero-undefined-and-indeterminate/
To Infinity and Beyond.
Yes to the study, but if the intention of the global elites is to return you to serfdom, where you live and die in the same geographical where you are born, its too expensive to travel or limited by inferior EV tech, are forced to eat bugs due to the expenses of eating meat, than they are right on track.
Carry on
We should eat our vegetables instead of electing them.
We should elect vegans and then go on a vegan diet.
(I gave three or four clicks on the phantom ‘Like’ button for your comment, ive.)
ive, that is beautiful.
I, too, am getting tired of people who cannot do basic math. Not politicians, people (voters, citizens)
H
Heads of Saskatchewanians. They cheat how they measure sound pollution from the wind-turbines to determine a safe set-back for residences. Setback in Ontario can be a mere 500 meters. They fudge the numbers so they can fit wind turbines on Ontario size farm lots (440 x 1100 yds) where neighbours have not signed contracts with the windfarm developers. A realistic setback is more like 2.5 kms but that would increase construction costs. So now how much area would a 3200 MegaWatt wind farm take up using safe setback distances?
Having watched the performance of 4 levels of government wrt. the the approval process for wind-farms, its evident that this country is as corrupt as any 3rd world narco-dictatorship.
Dalton McGuinty comes to mind when it comes to a population that loves narco dictators and wind bs.
ooops typo; that’s a “Heads-up”
JS, what you are describing is truly unpleasant. But there’s a worse complication still. The setback can overshadow onto a neighbor’s land. That means he can no longer develop that land within the setback. That reduces the value of his land and thus reduces his creditworthiness in securing bank financing for seed and fertilizer. In short, a neighbor’s wind turbine can also steal property value from you and thus increase your borrowing and credit costs.
The good news is that by 2035, all new vehicles in the UK must be electric. This will greatly decrease the load on the power grid.
Oh wait, no, it’s the other way around.
600 W per square metre at full efficiency at 20 mph wind speeds. As far as back of the envelope calculations go, this sounds terrible.
The average wind speed where I am seems to be around 10-15 kph, or 1/3 to 1/2 of 20 mph. This translates to an estimated 1/27th to 1/8th of 600 W (23 W to 75 W). Which in turn means you’re only getting enough energy to power a couple of high efficiency light bulbs per square metre of wind turbine.
Good enough for that nice, new, shiny outhouse you just built. As long as you don’t stay there too long…
Quite right, OP. What’s an even worse complication is that energy produced varies with the cube of the speed. So small changes in wind velocity produce disproportionately larger variations in power production. Increased or decreased, that’s highly undesirable. And depending on weather conditions at the time, it can vary on a minute-to-minute basis.
I suspect that governments will try to habituate the public to frequent blackouts, just as they are doing in California.
Except Quebec, and thise with generators.
No one will have generators because they’ll be stolen by the roving starving mobs .
Just like they are doing with Covid boosters. I expect the deluge of television advertisements to begin in two to three years.
“governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster”
Hahahaha.
If the wind doesn’t blow hard enough its because of the carbon your daily existence produces.
Stop burning oil and gas because it disturbs the natural wind patterns or something you racists.
Our elites aren’t stupid – Like Covid it’s a worldwide orchestration. They know exactly what they’re doing and are quite cognizant of wind and solar’s dismal energy producing performance. It’s only dismal because there’s too many people around needing the same thing. Once their depopulation project reaches a sustainable level, which is the ultimate goal of course, ( a real doozie of a global killer virus is my guess) they’ll ration the energy out to those unfortunate enough to be still around… like food stamps only in digital form. If history is any guide, dopey political bootlickers pushing green agendas are their useful idiots and will be dealt with later by their masters. So you can take some comfort from that.
Y’know, there’s a reason the Georgia guide stones were blown up and why police didn’t bother to investigate.
The elites didn’t like it much having their 10′ high, stone playbook out in the open for God and country to see.
Paranoia? SAAFO. I’ve learned a lot in the last three years and I’m not one who needs a 2×4 to the face to make me realize that when they tell you what they have in mind for you…believe them, because they’ve got the muscle to make it happen.
Everyone thinks locally, start thinking globally because they are.
burton, I constantly mention the evils of the WEF,UN,WHO, etc, and most on SDA I hope, are in agreement on this.
However, the reality is we are singing this tune to a small group, and we don’t have the platform that some do, to wake up enough of our fellow humans to push back on these evil vermin elitists!
This article is not news. Wind has a very poor life-cycle return on energy and a capacity factor averaging 26%+_. When fossil fuels have been eliminated wind cannot self replicate (due to low ROE). They are grid parasites. They are bird and bat killers. They are ugly and noisy. They are not “green”.
Wind power is a transition energy to impoverishment, period.
It’s a combination of the average person being completely unable to do grade school math, and being unable to fathom that their government might actually be maliciously lying to them. It’s not that the government is lying, no, your math must be wrong. Or you’re not taking some nebulous, unstated thing into account. Or wind power will get 1000% better any minute now because Magical R&D Fairies or some bollocks.
It’s a religion. Worse, it’s a religion based on blind unreasoning faith. These people will go to their graves swearing by the catechism of Green Energy.