Wind Turbine Syndrome - green energy's dirty little secret

[Rat]

Rat, When is the next book coming out. I have real money to buy.

Thanks for asking. Which one(s) have you read? I don't keep track. The third Cliff Knowles mystery, Fatal Dose, came out two months ago. It's available on amazon.com in Kindle and print format. I'm working on a non-fiction account of my FBI career right now but I have no idea whether or when that will ever see print.

 

[TomT]

I have read all three and enjoyed them all very much!

The third Cliff Knowles mystery, came out two months ago.

 

[TomT]

In the first case of its kind, a large energy company has pleaded guilty to killing birds at its large wind turbine farms in Wyoming and has agreed to pay $1 million as punishment.

Duke Energy Renewables -- a subsidiary of the Fortune 250 Duke Energy Corp. -- admitted to violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act in connection with the deaths of more than 160 birds, including 14 golden eagles, according to court documents.
The deaths took place between 2009 and 2013 at two Duke sites in Wyoming that have 176 wind turbines, according to court documents.


http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-wind-energy-eagle-death-20131123,0,2938734.story" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

 

[LTLFTcomposite]

http://m.theweek.com/article.php?id=254155" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Yet despite literally paying people to take their electricity, wind power represents just 3.5 percent of all electricity generation in the United States. The big problem is not so much cost as reliability. Wind power is intermittent; it has a nasty habit of stopping, sometimes on a moment's notice. And since there is no commercially viable means of storing electricity, use of wind power requires the existence of back-up power plants (typically natural gas) that can be ramped up or down depending on which way the wind blows. This sort of redundancy is not only inefficient, but emissions levels are higher during the process of ramping a gas plant up and down, cancelling at least part of the environmental benefits of using wind. No amount of subsidies for generators will solve these problems, and, in fact, subsidies could serve to aggravate it by undercutting the profitability of back-up sources of power.

Here I thought all the people saying the power goes off when the wind stops blowing were just a bunch of douche naysayers, but it must be a real problem if people in Denmark say so.

 

[camasleaf]

http://www.treehugger.com/wind-technology/vortex-vertical-bladeless-wind-turbine.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I want a few of these, but no more than 4m tall. I am wondering how do they make electricity out of that movement.

 

[NeilBlanchard]

So called wind turbine syndrome is utter bunk. The book was based on about 29 phone interviews with people self-reporting - and it is simply fear mongering.

And bird are killed in far greater numbers - by buildings. And by feral cats, and about 4 or 5 other things in greater numbers than wind turbines.

Pollution from smokestacks kills orders of magnitude more animals of all sorts, including birds.

 

[kikngas]

Seems like it should be easier to walk the land under a windfarm and count bird corpses than to count live cats. Funny how you never seem to hear of anyone using that method of estimation.

 

[AndyH]

Seems like it should be easier to walk the land under a windfarm and count bird corpses than to count live cats. Funny how you never seem to hear of anyone using that method of estimation.

Counting corpses is already part of the process in many of the linked studies. And in this from Canada:

http://www.ace-eco.org/vol8/iss2/art10/ACE-ECO-2013-609.pdf

ABSTRACT. We estimated impacts on birds from the development and operation of wind turbines in Canada considering both
mortality due to collisions and loss of nesting habitat. We estimated collision mortality using data from carcass searches for 43
wind farms, incorporating correction factors for scavenger removal, searcher efficiency, and carcasses that fell beyond the area
searched.

 

[NeilBlanchard]

The "wind turbine syndrome" is a hoax. The book that started it was based on ~29 personal interviews only - some even were done over the phone. There is zero medical evidence of any effects from wind turbines - that is not psychosomatic.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...ng_a_disease_that_may_be_a_nocebo_effect.html