Why Wind Won't Work
Aug 19, 2008 (EIRNS)This release was issued yesterday by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC). Below is the final segment from the concluding article in the new LPAC/LaRouche Youth Movement pamphlet, Covered in Gore. By Larry Hecht, the title of the full article is "You Can't Get to Heaven on Solar Skates." The segment is on wind power.
The fundamental problem with wind energy is the same as that of solar. It is intermittent and the energy flux is too low. In a study of the problem in Texas, where T. Boone Pickens is receiving huge government boondoggles for his wind energy scheme, 21st Century Science & Technology writer Gregory Murphy compared the energy flux density of the Comanche Peak nuclear plant, south of Dallas, to a wind installation. The Comanche Peak nuclear plant, has 2 units with a combined generating capacity of 2,500 megawatts (MW). Comanche Peak is sitting on 4,000 acres, which includes a man-made cooling lake that also serves as a recreation spot.
How many 1.5-MW General Electric wind turbines (the kind Pickens has chosen for his wind farms) would it take to produce the same amount of energy that the Comanche Peak reactors produce? As Murphy elaborates:
Murphy's study also points out that there is a common fraud in the statement of the availability factor for wind turbines, which is the percentage of time that the wind turbine or any other power source is available. Writes Murphy, "Wind energy advocates purposely confuse the availability factor and the capacity factor in their promotional materials, to try to demonstrate that a certain number of wind turbines can produce the same energy as a nuclear power plant. In truth, although the availability factor of the wind turbine is 100% because it is available to produce power at any time, wind turbines actually produce power less than 25% of the time, and that is only when the wind blows. Compare this to the nuclear power plant, in which the availability factor and the capacity factor are the sameabout 95%. The only time the nuclear reactor is not producing power is during maintenance periods."
Solar and wind power share another problem. As they are intermittent sources, they require backup power systems and a complex relationship with the power grid, whereby the power flow can be switched on and off at various times. As they are placed, by necessity, in remote locations, wind generators incur an added expense of many miles of additional transmission lines. In the case of the Texas wind boondoggle, the cost of hundreds of miles of high-voltage transmission lines for the unneeded wind installations is going to be incurred by the consumers, who will have already subsidized the wind farms through huge tax givebacks to the wind energy speculators.
Neither wind nor solar are serious solutions to the world's energy needs. They are, rather, prescriptions for the destruction of progress and the genocidal reduction of the human population. What is really under attack in the proposal by Gore, the front man for the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy's wish to return to a new Dark Age, is science itself. Having largely destroyed the nuclear capability of the United States, the intent is to channel what remains of the next generation's scientific impulse into the pursuit of better solar cells, climate frauds, and cataloging extinct species of which the fastest accelerating is mankind.
We can secure a better future. For the first time in history, we have the means to lift all mankind out of the misery of backbreaking toil, disease, and ignorance. But first, we must overcome the irrational fear of nuclear power, and indeed, of science in general, which the controllers of Al Gore have attempted to impose upon us, from motives which are hideously evil.