There are some errors in this article: "The most glaring dishonesty peddled by the wind industry — and echoed by gullible politicians — is vastly to exaggerate the output of turbines by deliberately talking about them only in terms of their 'capacity', as if this was what they actually produce. Rather, it is the total amount of power they have the capability of producing. . . . The point about wind, of course, is that it is constantly varying in speed, so that the output of turbines averages out at barely a quarter of their capacity . . ."
No one hides the difference between nameplate and actual capacity, with wind turbines, or with nuclear reactors for that matter. Actual is closer to 32% for most land installations. If they installed them in a spot with 25%, they should not have. "When you consider, too, those gas-fired power stations wastefully running 24 hours a day just to provide back-up for the intermittency of the wind, any savings will vanish altogether." A gas-turbine plant is not turned on if it is not generating electricity. If they are used provide back-up power, they are not "wastefully running 24 hours a day." "Then, of course, the construction of the turbines generates enormous CO2 emissions as a result of the mining and smelting of the metals used, the carbon-intensive cement needed for their huge concrete foundation." The energy payback period for wind turbines is about 3 months, which is considerably shorter than for gas fired or nuclear plants. "There is no way we can hope to make up more than a fraction of the resulting energy gap solely with wind turbines, for the simple and obvious reason that wind is such an intermittent and unreliable energy source." Demand is also intermittent and unreliable. That is why the nuclear power plants are not useful above baseline (~30%). You cannot turn them off (unlike gas turbines). "No one would dream of building wind turbines unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy. " No one would dream of building a nuclear or coal-fired plant without subsidies. No one would dream of building a nuclear plant unless the government covered the entire cost of liability, for reasons which are obvious from the Brown's Ferry, Three Mile Island, Connecticut Yankee and Fukushima accidents. No one would build a coal fired plant if they were held liable for the 20,000 killed by the smoke every year in the U.S. The amount they would have to pay to victims families would make this the most expensive source of electricity by far. - Jed
