In the cold, bleak winter, won't someone remember the windmills?

Remember those windmills that will protect us from the peak oil theory and help remove all those nasty CO2 emitting power stations that are killing our cheeeldren?

Well, what do you notice about winter weather when it's particularly cold?  Yes, that's right: there's no wind and a still breeze an unproductive windmill makes.

From A Problem With Wind, this particularly damning observation often overlooked by those blinded by simplistic green rhetoric is the final twist of the knife into the folly that is wind technology when managing a country's energy demand:

Denmark (population 5.3 million) has over 6,000 turbines that produced electricity equal to 19% of what the country used in 2002.

Yet no conventional power plant has been shut down.

Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. Most cannot simply be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises, and the quick ramping up and down of those that can be would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary "greenhouse" gas).

So when the wind is blowing just right for the turbines, the power they generate is usually a surplus and sold to other countries at an extremely discounted price, or the turbines are simply shut off.

So, whenever any eco-nazi starts going on about how windmills will save the cheeeldren, remind them of the above.

If you have time, read the information at the link - there are summaries but for the more technically minded, there are some good pieces about energy management and the distruptions caused by windmill trials, especially in Germany for instance.

The windmills of your mind

Apart from the cost of maintenance to keep these "bird slicers" (a minor amount of carnage, of course, but I love the term) running, what they fail to tell you is that this variable power source requires a conventional power source as a backup: a fossil fuel burning one.

Now what they also give the impression is that when the wind stops blowing just as EastEnders starts, they press a button and the standby power station does the business.

Let me tell you, having worked on a power station and refinery in a former life, one does not simply press a big start button and voila: instant power. It can take several days to "black start" a power station.

In order to get the power to the grid quickly, the power station must be in "standby" mode i.e. its furnaces lit, the steam generated and pressured and possibly the turbines rotating.

So while these windmills are busy spinning away keeping the thicky green eco-nazis happy in blissful ignorance and couscous salads, a nasty old backup power station is quietly burning fossil fuels in the background.

Tax, tax and more tax and subsidies to large corporations.

These idiots simply wont be happy until horses are towing our Volvos.