Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Judge the science by its fruit


Wind turbines could be used as an indirect indication of the entire global warming belief movement, as unlike the complex climate with diverse methods of measurement, huge gaps in direct information and vast variations in figures for the same areas and periods depending which ones they used and how far they were 'adjusted', their entire performance, from setup costs to annual output, plus maintenance, electrical inputs and peripheral issues including permanent backup.

Power generation follows a few very simple rules, based on constant supply and reaction to demand. The supply can also exceed demand if not regulated, thus generating power which is wasted as not used immediately to run any electrical equipment. Staff and automatic machinery are employed round the clock to ensure this does not happen, and the power is wound down to match lower periods of demand. as a consequence, unless the fuel itself runs out or there is a technical failure, our lights (and life support machines) will stay on. It is as simple as that.

Now look at wind turbines. They generate power randomly, the wind is random. They only generate in a band of around 10-30mph, below is not sufficient to do so, and above will burn them out so they have to be stopped altogether. They generate when the wind chooses to blow, regardless of the demand, so when they produce power outside peak times it is wasted as no one is around to take it. The amounts they produce would never be capable of supplying anywhere on their own, and when they do work are limited to the conversion factor from movement to electricity. That means it is possible to calculate the total possible output, should the conversion factor be perfect at 1 (it is well below that and unlikely to rise much further), and as the wattage generated at full power is still far below the equivalent we use now, their ultimate potential even if running at maximum efficiency are limited by design.

So we have weak generators (as compared with current ones) which work as and when the wind provides the right band of speed. Which by sad coincidence is lower when it is the coldest and most required (much like solar powers don't work at night when most required). The power is often wasted and the power stations required as permanent backup also waste their power as unlike wind turbines they don't go on and off when stimulated, but take weeks to start up and must stay on permanently to be able to draw power when required. So while the wind turbines produce the power stations' power is wasted, and vice versa. You are using and paying for both now instead of simply using the one reliable one.

Then we learn wind turbines consume electricity, the blades need to face the wind so use electric motors, brakes when the wind is too fast, and powerful heaters when they freeze as they are damaged by ice. And if one goes wrong, the maintenance cost offshore for a man to go out on a helicopter and fix it eats up a huge amount of any power its ever produced in its lifetime. Not to mention the costs of wiring the new grid offshore and onshore, which is wasted the 20 or so years later when the turbines come to the end of their lifetimes (actually many wear out far sooner than that, there are miles of rusting examples in early adopter's locations such as California).

Therefore wind turbines:

Produce small random amounts of power
This power is often wasted
Power stations are required as backup and waste much of their power
They require electricity to run
They are limited by their construction to total potential generation per unit
Maintenance costs are phenomenal
Build and infrastructure costs are phenomenal and load the equation from day one before a profit can be considered to cover it in the future.
They are limited to random weak generation by their nature
They can never be used on their own
They actually produce far less per year than previously claimed by their brochures

So the fact it is possible to generate power from a windmill, but only when the wind blows within a certain range, does not mean it is sensible or practical. It is also possible to generate constant power from an orange or an onion, albeit only enough to power a small bulb, but if someone cared to run the figures it may produce as much that way than the equivalent amount spent on a wind turbine. But no one I am aware of has considered vegetable powered stations, (although they do now burn food for fuel, another atrocity made possible through the myth of global warming) so can only assume as the figures are so clear and exactly measurable, anything which can lead to the very existence of wind turbines has to be wrong.

Imagine an identical world, except for one thing, CO2 had not risen. Forget the temperature and ice melts etc, as without the rise in CO2 at most they would have made a passing observation we'd had a 30 year rise in temperature but nothing outstanding, and even if it was there was absolutely nothing we could do about it as climate is driven by nature. You get a few nuts in places like China and Russia (not by any coincidence totalitarian states) who carry out cloud seeding (it's unproven) and geoengineering (toxic and not proven), which are now being tested elsewhere, but again, minus the rise in CO2 few if any scientists would have worried about a fraction of a degree C so unlikely to have been an issue. As a result CO2 generation from fossil fuel would never have been considered as a problem as whatever the amount produced (it's only a few % of the total anyhow) it would clearly have been passing through as fast as it was going in. But one more thing would be known, if CO2 generation had not been raised as a problem, then nothing would ever have been suggested as a 'solution', ie wind turbines would not exist. They would not be 'in development', as there is no more development. Unlike even the almost equally pointless solar panels, they would not have the potential for slightly more powerful compounds and designs to get more out than before, as they use direct physical, rather than chemical, linkage. You turn the blades directly with whatever wind is blowing, and they convert it to power in the same way as any other electrical motor. Their limits have been known for decades, and you can't get more out than in less the other restrictions.

Therefore, had CO2 not risen dramatically (despite no corresponding direct rise in temperature, the UN look at times around 2100, although that was in the 90s before the temperature stopped rising) there would have been no reason to consider non CO2 generating alternatives, and wind turbines would have remained in history as means to grind seeds for flour before electricity existed. Scientists do know exactly how much power they can generate (ie very little indeed), and trials for many years have shown the average range of useful wind generation is around 10% of their full capacity, wherever they are situated.

If you judge a tree by its fruit, the most low hanging fruit of all from global warming is the wind farms. Having described how they work (or technically 'don't work'), and the fact it is physically impossible to alter a single aspect of their construction and generation (for example you can't make the wind blow more often or at the correct range, or get more out than goes in), and much of the time they do produce power it isn't used, all scientists with the figures would mark it as a fail. Yet the world is covered by them, and it is physically impossible for them to make a profit, as the more you add the more it costs and can never be recovered.

Therefore, by looking at a single product (among many like it) of the global warming movement, the total lack of discretion the non-scientific advocates possess, to actually imagine the easily measurable outputs of wind farms is physically capable of producing usable power besides the rare times they run and are required, proves beyond all doubt they know nothing about any science, and are almost certainly as deluded about what they see as climate change as they are about the known and exact science of wind generation. A scientific theory which produces a known failure can only itself be a failure.

2 comments:

andyscrase said...

One analogy I like is that of a factory. You have say 15 full time staff, and then 10 part-timers that come in to pick up the peak loads of work.

Then, one day, the government provides some workers that are subsidised, and you are required by law to use these workers when they become available for work.

The problem is that they turn up at random times and do random amounts of work.

In order to accommodate this, you need to decrease your permanent staff and increase your contract labour, to cope with the variability. However, contract labour costs a lot more, and it is not always available.
Eventually, your factory goes out of business, as it cannot meet demand with such a fickle and expensive workforce, and your product gets outsourced to China

David said...

It's the same as a Ponzi scheme. If you keep moving the same people or power around without creating anything and just paying them from either willing or enforced citizens, once the citizens have run out of money the scheme has to fall. It depends how determined they are to keep this going compared to losing votes whether they reach that point, but it's probably the plan as there's a lot of space to fill after bailing out the banks and they'd never get away with income tax increases so have to do it this way instead.