Here’s Part 4 of the Weyburn Wind saga, focusing on acreages, wildlife and referendum
You might be wondering why I’ve gone so deep into this open house. Here’s the thing – this has been the first opportunity I’ve had to really get into the development of one of these projects, and see and hear the arguments from both sides. Alberta just put its 50th online. Saskatchewan has nine. This would be the 10th. So it’s a chance to really get into the weeds.
The numerous stories I’ve written about wind power to date have almost been exclusively about their reliability or lack thereof, and their impact on a macro scale on grids, power pricing and the like. This development side is a totally different aspect.
Tax dollars to blight the skyline and kill birds for intermittent power that skews grid reliability.
Just because a bunch of ignorant assholes want something doesn’t mean they should get it.
But I appreciate the article, Brian.
The sad story about wind turbines is that they don’t produce power when people need it. When you are standing in the middle of a 200 MW wind farm in January and the temperature is -35C and can’t see even one turbine blade turning, reality kicks in. You then think of all the chicken farms, hog farms, dairy farms whose buildings need 100% reliable power. Wind farms don’t give reliable power and there are no batteries that can store it for when it is inevitably needed. Kill the raptors and the vermin thrive.
It’s all very well to consider all these things while the taxpayers are still ripe for picking, but even though it will take time, subsidies are already starting to dry up.
After subsidies we have enormous poles sticking up out of the landscape that the profiteers have walked away from, what then?
Tee Pee type greenhouses? Or warehouses? Or houses? Interconnect them for adventurous zipline fun?
Ionized wire mesh between the closer ones in dry areas to extract moisture from the air?
“Green” energy is a scam. Period. It solves no problem, including the supposed bogeyman of the anti-scientific lie of climate change – lowering CO2.
Adding complexity to the equation changes nothing. Forcing power companies to pay for potential, rather than delivered, energy only rips off customers and penalizes producers of useful energy. Receiving hundreds of billions in subsidies only rips off taxpayers and penalizes producers of useful energy.
If the government subsidized “energy” companies to blanket the prairies with acres of shag carpets and bring in TFWs to shuffle over them to create static energy, it wouldn’t be more stupid than this.
Wind and solar on the grid are the first stage of de-industrialization.
As a landowner and farmer from Alberta who has a wind development on my property here are questions I would ask.
What standards are used for the groundwork? Here it is not the same as the ones that govern the oil and gas industry, they are lower standards.
How are lease/rental payments structured? How does wind company price power produced? Here many times the power is sold for 0 (zero) that’s correct 0 dollars a MWh.
Most wind contracts are onerous and binding, with non disclosure clauses, restrictions on future use etc.
And the big one end of life, is money set aside for cleanup? When project is sold to someone else will they honor the cleanup terms, even if they go insolvent.
There are more issues but these are the ones we are dealing with.