Green Failure

 

In Australia on Tuesday February 13^th, 2024, over 500,000 Victorians were left without power, the authorities are blaming it solely on the collapse of several transmission towers. This claim comes from a government whose plan is to build more and bigger towers to carry green energy around the country. The reliance on green energy is part of the problem, storms and dark clouds reduce the production of electricity from solar panels and inhibit the production of power from wind turbines.

 

It is a strange fact that, even though this might sound like a contradiction, too much wind causes wind turbines to stop. Anything in excess of 25 m/s (90 km/hr) is dangerous for the wind turbine so it opts to shut down. When the anemometer registers wind speeds higher than 80 Kph (cut-out speed varies by turbine), it triggers the wind turbine to automatically shut off. The direct drive controller allows the machine to start at wind speeds of about 11 - 18 kilometres per hour and shuts off the machine when wind speeds exceed 80 Kph. The controller turns off the turbine at higher wind speeds to avoid damage to different parts of the turbine. With the storms came wind gusting to 117 km/h, guess what happened? Yes, the turbines shut down.

It is difficult to find locations with a constant wind speed of between 11 and 80 Kilometres per hour, places with continuous wind are more likely to experience stronger winds more often, damaging turbines, and places where wind conditions are safer also experience greater periods of calm. Even out at sea where there are no mountains or hills to interfere with wind flow experienced yachtsmen will confirm that there are many days when one curses the lack of a breeze to keep a yacht moving. Wind turbines will also fail to start in these calm conditions.

 

 

Green energy as we are building it at present is a failure and a scam, a view I have covered in several blogs. I am not against wind or solar but believe there are cleaner and better methods to produce clean energy. We are using the worst possible design for our turbines and have a pathological fear of even discussing the concept of switching our closed coal fired power stations to nuclear. A logical step considering that all the distribution hardware is already in place, and one kilogram of uranium generates as much power as three thousand tonnes of coal.

The current wind turbines which we import from China are not green, economical or reliable, we would be far better to manufacture our own vertical axis turbines, made locally from local products. I would suggest turbines similar to the designs that have operated in the Middle East for over a thousand years, could be built locally at lower cost, and would be far more environmentally friendly.

The current model uses a steel tower, the construction of which uses enormous amounts of steel and the coal in the smelting and manufacturing process. The tower is then mounted on a concrete base, the manufacture of cement is another heavily polluting industry. Making the designs even less viable are the turbine blades which are made of fibreglass (plastic) over a balsa wood frame. The balsa wood is harvested from the Amazon rainforest which is now showing signs of stress due to deforestation. The fiberglass skin of the blade sheds microplastics into the environment, these in turn find their way into the food chain. When the blades lose their integrity in a relatively short time the only solution at present is to put them into landfill or simply bury them. The image below shows discarded wind turbines being buried; the small yellow object is a bulldozer completing the burial. This image gives an idea of the waste that is involved in our so-called green energy.

                        

Importing these massive structures on large container ships is also damaging to the environment as five large container ships can consume as much fuel as all the cars on Earth. The CO₂ footprint of a recent “climate conference” was calculated to be equal to driving 375,000 cars for a week, is it any wonder that others and I see the “climate crisis” as simply a political ploy.

Further blackouts are expected (planned) for Thursday 22/02/2024.

 

 

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