“Oxendon, Kelmarsh, Maidwell …. Square Norman towers with arrow slits, thatched pubs, tiny Victorian railway stations, nesting in a bosky countryside of high hedges and dense copses. It was enough to make you want to break into a chorus of ‘There’ll always be an England …’ ”
Robert Harris, ENIGMA, (Arrow Books 1996), p. 273
Through the industry’s mouthpiece, the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) we are often told that public opinion is on the side of onshore wind farm development. For example the FAQ section of the BWEA’s website states:
“Opinion surveys regularly show that just over eight out of ten people are in favour of wind energy, and less than one in ten (around 5%) are against it.”
How you interpret this ‘fact’ depends on the detail of how the questions were framed, how informed the respondents are about the issue, and the way the ‘population’ of people was sampled.
First, it is very easy to ask questions that solicit the answer you want and then misrepresent the results. It might well be that when asked a straight question if wind energy is a good thing, nine in ten will tick the ‘yes’ box. It’s ‘motherhood and apple pie’ isn’t it, who could possibly object? What there is abundant evidence to show is that when a reasonably informed public are asked a more direct question such as “Do you want commercial wind ‘farms’ in the countryside?” the large majority always answer with a resounding NO.
Second, asking somebody who has no experience of living close to a wind farm is really asking what for them is a ‘hypothetical question’ about something of which they have no knowledge. One way to ensure that respondents are aware of the nuisance that winds farms create is to look at the results of the all-too-frequent attempts by developers to extend already ‘up and running’ wind farms or where there are proposals for new winds farms close to existing sites. In such cases local residents and their councilors have a good idea of what to expect. The evidence here is that people who know about them are overwhelmingly against them. Ages ago in 1999 a survey of polls by Angela Kelly of the Countryside Guardian summarized a number of such expressions of opinion, for example:
These reactions were over a decade ago, so perhaps as the alleged threat from global warming has become greater, opinion might have swung the other way? Again, the evidence is pretty conclusive, the more people know about them the more they are opposed:
Quite how this can be translated into ‘eight out of ten in favour’ escapes us!
Third, any professional in surveys of public opinion will tell you that what also makes the results hard to interpret is ensuring that the sample of respondents is in some sense ‘representative’. This cuts both ways. For example, if a newspaper or website asks people to vote on some proposition or other, chances are that only people who are engaged with the issue will do so, with a resulting bias in the percentages either for or against. We are well aware, for example, of carefully orchestrated campaigns elsewhere in the county to bias opinion polls in favour on local wind farms by the ‘green’ lobby without considering any of the local circumstances or arguments.
At Harrington, Nuon have tried to play the same game and have persistently misrepresented local opinion. In their Statement of Community Involvement they have used extremely lax social survey methods to justify ludicrous and entirely incorrect claims about the community response to their proposal. For the record, a survey conducted by Maidwell and Draughton Parish Council in 2008 distributed to every household in the two villages most affected received responses that were 84% against the proposal. A further poll after a public debate in the same parish held on 30th March 2009 at which both sides of the argument were presented and gave a similar proportion against. A similar public meeting in Harrington on 6th April 2009 was even less equivocal, with all (100%) present being opposed to the scheme.
Perhaps the BWEA’s statement should be amended to read:
“Reasonably well-sampled and carefully worded opinion surveys regularly show that eight to nine out of ten people are against wind farms being built in their locality, and less than one or two in ten are for it.”
DU.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8206615.stm
BBC News Tuesday, 18 August 2009
Profits fall at protest-hit firm
Vestas says many customers are unable to fund turbine projects
Protest-hit Danish wind turbine firm Vestas has seen profits fall on the back of job cuts and falling orders.
Workers had staged a sit-in protest at its site in the Isle of Wight this summer, as Vestas closed its factory
there with the loss of 425 jobs.
The firm, which also axed 1,142 jobs in Denmark, said net income dropped 34% to 43m euros ($60.8m; £37m) in the second quarter from the same period last year.
Vestas also said that it shipped 618 turbines, 12% fewer than last year.
But the firm did see its revenue increase by 11% to 1.2bn euros.
“Since the autumn of 2008, the credit crisis has impacted the wind power industry, causing limited order intake during the past nine months,” Vestas said.
“Many customers have been unable to finance scheduled projects either due to increasing funding costs or an actual lack of funding.”
The company maintained that it expected revenue to rise this year by 20% to 7.2bn euros.
And it said it was expanding heavily in China and the US because those markets were among the fastest growing.
Senior vice president Peter Wenzel-Kruse told the BBC that the protest at the Isle of Wight was a “very sad episode.”
“When we see a strong, stable onshore market in the UK we will definitely reconsider going back,” he said.
But he blamed the attitude of the general public for the company’s lack of progress in the UK.
“The ‘nimbys’ need to be more open [minded] and acknowledge that wind turbines would be good for the UK.
The government is doing a lot but the final decision makers are the local councils and boroughs.”
———————————————————————-
BBC Radio 4 18th August 2009
“Today” Programme 6am – 9am
Listen again on:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm
and at 8.45am you can hear that Vestas shares have plummeted by one third in recent months.
The Swedish director of Vestas blamed it on “nimbyism” and said that the opposition to wind turbines was stronger in the UK than anywhere in Europe and beyond. He did not blame the government - just we NIMBYs ! I felt really proud to know that we still have enough fighting spirit in this country to protect our land from those who would wreck it from sheer greed. Unfortunately, we still have to contend with “the enemy within” - i.e. many of our own elected representatives, as well as the unelected ones in Europe !
Our political masters, by forcing the consumer to subsidise the wind folly, are just adding to the millions already threatened with energy poverty due to the credit crunch.
The director of Vestas said that they could not set up a manufacturing base in the UK unless a strong market for onshore wind turbines could be established.
Of course, there was not a mention of offshore wind turbines. The developers know it is far too difficult and risky to build them and that dependable conditions for access for service and repair are about as predictable as the wind itself! The insurance costs are astronomical.
Denmark has reached saturation of onshore wind and the Danes are making it very clear that they’ve had enough. They only tolerate them because they know their huge export market is the main plank in their economy and provides employment for thousands. To this end their country has been sacrificed to about 6.000 wind turbines as a huge shop window to sell their wares.
As Howard Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut, wrote in 2001 :-
“In recent years, the little country Denmark has gained a certain amount of fame with its wind turbines.
No, they don’t get much electricity from them. They sell them to suckers.”
So, NIMBYs unite and keep up the fight!
Join the NIABYs - Not In Anyone’s Back Yard !
And Google :- “VESTAS Swedish director Hansen Isle of Wight” :-
To read a very different story just one year ago !
Angela Kelly
Countryside Guardian
The wind farm industry always claims that the main reason why they have to cover the country with turbines is for security of supply. They argue that if the wind stops blowing in one place, chances are that it will be blowing in another and that anyhow such low wind conditions don’t correlate with high levels of demand. Both arguments are dangerous myths that proper data analysis can disprove. When the wind stops it often stops over the entire country and this occurs frequently during the winter peak in energy demand. This note by John Webley provides the details.
Onshore wind turbines the myth the reality and the bottom line
By Edmund Conway - Daily Telegraph
Published: 12:15AM BST 10 Aug 2009
The Government’s plans to increase the proportion of Britain’s energy generated by “green” sources is set to cost between 11 and 17 times what the change brings in economic benefits. The figures are buried deep in the Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy paper produced last month.
According to the document, while the expected cost will total around £4bn a year over the next 20 years, amounting to £57bn to £70bn, the eventual benefit in terms of the reduced carbon dioxide emissions will be only £4bn to £5bn over that entire period. The figures make up part of the Government’s impact assessment of the policies, which include plans to raise the proportion of British electricity produced by renewable sources from 5.5pc today to 30pc.
It is the Government’s assessment that the non-monetary benefits of the policies will compensate for the possible £65bn shortfall, but economists are sceptical as to how much of this sum such factors can make up. The White Paper has also calculated that household gas and electricity bills will have to rise by up to £249 a year, although Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband has insisted that new measures to improve consumers’ energy efficiency would reduce the extra cost to an average of £92 a year per home.
August 9, 2009 • Letters, New York
Editor, Watertown Daily Times, Watertown, NY:I grew up in rural Wisconsin.and spent my adolescent summers at my aunt’s place on the St. Lawrence. I know and love the people and lifestyle. Not terribly cosmopolitan, sometimes, but peaceful, close to the earth, and very, very human.
I returned home recently for a visit and discovered that huge swaths of rustic Wisconsin countryside had been vandalized by armies of monstrosities the size of the Statue of Liberty, with a Boeing 747 pinned to her nose. Now Wolfe Island has been desecrated the same way, and plans are afoot for Amherst Island and Cape Vincent. Ye Gods, has everyone completely lost their minds?
Their whooshing and low-frequency thub-thub-thub, audible at disturbing volumes for up to five miles in the mountains or over water, prevents people from sleeping, upsets livestock to the point that productivity decreases sharply while miscarriages rise, and drives away all wildlife (who do not have to worry about mortgages or property values) within a three-mile radius. No deer, bear, or even squirrels. Offshore turbines in Great Yarmouth, England, are causing baby seals to be born dead or to be abandoned by their overstressed mothers. The FAA-required strobe lights disfigure the clear night sky. Our beautiful Wolfe Island now most resembles a poster for a low-budget science fiction movie.
But, of course, low-budget they aren’t; the towers cost upwards of $2 million each to erect, and about $1 million each to take down and decommission. (When the various investors and fly-by-night energy companies have taken turns depreciating the things, will they take them down? Or will our grandchildren live in a landscape of rusting 300-foot hulks topped by broken fans, leaking chemicals into our land? Looking now like the B-movie aliens after they lose the war…)
Industrial-grade heavy-duty access roads have to be hacked through the fields or woods. The smallest available industrial turbine is 1.5 MW, the equivalent of a two thousand horsepower electric motor, weighing on the order of 60 tons. The truck carrying it has to be able to get through. The nacelle containing the turbine is the size of a large bus; the armature must be turned regularly - even if there’s no wind - to keep it from sagging under its own weight, like the drivetrain on a battleship. Just to counter the CO2 from producing the tons upon tons of cement needed to anchor the towers, these things would have to operate near full capacity for over six years. They are not the cute little windmills behind the barn, or the picturesque features of the Dutch countryside. In operation, the tips of the fan blades are moving at around 200 mph; I hope the terns (and the eagles, and the falcons) stay alert in the middle of the night.
Not to mention, of course, that each turbine contains well over 60 gallons of chemically-sophisticated motor oil to lubricate its complex gearbox and bearings. When - not if - it starts to leak into your streams, rivers, and pastures as these notoriously unreliable machines age, what effect will that have on your drinking water - and your fishing, since all the game for hunting has cleared out? What effect on your peace of mind will it have when a lightning strike disintegrates a blade - throwing ten tons of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and aluminum, white-hot, in huge fragments, for distances up to half a mile, while igniting the lubricating oil 300 feet above the woods? (This sort of event has occurred several times in Germany, with turbines substantially smaller than those planned for Cape Vincent.) In the Wisconsin winter, the turbine blades regularly throw huge chunks of ice, weighing several hundred pounds, up to a thousand feet from the tower. Would upstate New York be so different?
But perhaps this is all worthwhile if we’re saving the planet? Nope. Wind power is so variable that backup fossil plants have to be kept fired up constantly anyway. No carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced. Denmark, the most turbine-ridden country in the world for more than a decade, has not been able to shut down a single power plant and, because its small electrical grid can’t absorb the fluctuations, has had to dump most of its hugely expensive wind wattage to the much larger grids of Sweden and Norway at (as we say) fire-sale prices. Denmark, Germany, and Spain - the leading European wind enthusiasts - have all put moratoria on any further wind installations, because of both public outcry and the budget drain of government subsidies. England, Scotland, and Wales are all in an uproar over the destruction of their countryside and coasts.
Moreover, after twenty years and $50 million of tax-supported research, the small coterie of UN scientist-bureaucrats trumpeting global warming have been totally unable to come up with any solid evidence that carbon dioxide is the cause of the warming (which has now apparently stopped, or at least paused for 30 years), much less that any additional warming will cause catastrophes.
All the evidence, from increasingly sophisticated satellites and deep-diving ocean buoys, is that climate fluctuates in response to natural cyclic changes in ocean currents and solar activity, and that the worldwide sea level has been rising at about eight inches a century for the last five thousand years or so, and is still doing so. So there is no reason to worry about CO2, a plant fertilizer, a necessary part of all life on this planet, in the first place. All this devastation of the landscape is for nothing. Less than nothing. Wind power is a fraud based on a fraud.
But the story is always the same. The wind promoter comes into a quiet rural area, stages several community presentations, pure Madison Avenue professionalism, promises jobs and a great boost to the local economy, chats up the local leadership, and paints rosy pictures of a prosperous environmentally-correct future in the industry of tomorrow. Landowners are wooed with talk of huge commission checks for the generated power.
If there’s any local resistance, the promoter buys the cooperation of said local leadership to paint it as NIMBY - he, of course, would not live within 50 miles of one of the things - and environmentally irresponsible (hah!). If this doesn’t work, he’ll buy a few county, state, or provincial politicians to simply deprive the local jurisdiction of any authority over turbine siting, as they did for example in Wisconsin. In Oregon, wilderness noise regulations prevented development of a wind installation, so of course in 2004 the wind promoters had their friends in Salem change them. In New York, Attorney General Cuomo’s investigations of wind developers’ bribery is continuing, and you now have an “Ethics Code”. Doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?
So the phalanx of giant towers goes up anyway. It’s always the same story - in Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wales, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Sweden, Missouri, Scotland, New York, Germany, Kansas, Hungary, Italy - the modus operandi never varies. The Internet is full of sad little websites put up by local community groups who opposed this vandalism of their countryside and their quality of life; they’ve posted their letters of opposition, their legal pleadings, and finally the horror-inspiring pictures of what happened to their woods and fields - and to their children, who often fall asleep at school because the turbine noise keeps them from sleeping at night. It is excruciating to see this over and over and over.
Jobs? The construction crews and engineers are brought in from outside - the leading turbine manufacturers are all European - and the long-term local jobs amount finally to one or two. The local economy? Politicians love to trumpet hundreds of millions in investment in the area. Now, If these hundreds of millions were to build a steel plant, or a giant amusement park, or a conventional nuclear power plant, it would indeed provide hundreds of long-term, high-paying jobs. Yes, these monsters will generate countless millions in tax breaks, taxpayer subsidies, and “carbon credits”. But not for the local people; they’ll be lucky to get two jobs and maybe a fancy maintenance truck. The money will all flow to the financiers (like Al Gore’s business partners in Goldman-Sachs) in New York City. The turbines produce essentially no useful power and no local jobs, but very efficiently blow our money into fat cats’ coffers.
The huge turbine towers will earn their installation cost back in tax breaks and subsidies (subsidies and tax breaks at _your_ expense) in less than three years. Then, of course, shell fly-by-night company A sells the turbines to shell fly-by-night company B, which then gets its years of boodle at taxpayer expense. And so on.
Until finally the turbines stop working. Again, they cost over a million per tower to decommission, and the wind magnates can afford much pricier law firms than landowners - as the landowners already know, having discussed the amazingly small size of their commission checks with the company. Does anyone seriously think these ugly monstrosities will be taken down and the land restored in twenty years?
Is this the legacy you wish to leave your grandchildren? The people of New York must fight against this nightmare takeover by the eco-industrial complex. You must fight to save your environment from, for God’s sake, the environmentalists. So future generations will not look around and say, “This must have once been so beautiful. I wish I could have seen it then. I wonder why they did it.”
Sincerely,
Craig Goodrich
Indianapolis
