There is a letter in the Herald replying to a previous correspondent’s “several criticisms of wind power”. (Herald letter)
I’ll start with the interesting bit which is a debate about whether Hydro or Pump Storage should be a priority. On the one side are the wind maniacs who say that we should do everything to promote wind (mainly because that is how most of them make money) and they are worried that sooner or later as they force the decommissioning of base load coal and gas, the lights will start turning out on cold still days and that may make a few people angry. So, they want us to build a lot of pump storage (presumably the hydrogen powered economy having proven a complete pie-in-sky wetdream).
But, annoyingly for wind, this opens up an old sore because hydro power never needed subsidy and worse, it actually produces “green” electricity. Even worse, British companies produce hydro-power turbines so it has that unknown attractiveness for renewables: British manufacturing jobs! So the logic, if you were to build a lot of dams to further destroy the Scots tourist industry, is that you may as well build hydro dams which don’t need subsidies rather than prop up foreign wind which is not only far more expensive than hydro in the first place, but also needs us to build pump-storage further increasing the cost of wind (likely paid for by us through electricity bills and not the wind-scamsters profits).
This is the absurd madness of wind. It costs more in the first place than Hydro, it is totally unreliable tending to provide no output on the coldest days, and if we further increase the amount of wind we have no effective way to store the required electricity for the colder days other than to start building, what is in effect just very very expensive hydro. Whilst pump storage technology is very similar to hydro in the power generation phase, the same infrastructure also has the hugely challenging (and costly) job of pumping water uphill from one water reservoir to another reservoir to store the water on the many days when there is too little wind. This more than doubles the cost compared to hydro for the same output.
As for the bulk of the letter: It’s the same stuff.
- We may be small but Scotland could be an inspiration to the other lemmings by jumping off the cliff first.
- There is overwhelming evidence, of extemes (ignoring the studies that show this to be tripe).
- Phytoplankton, which is crucial to the marine food chain, has declined by 40%.
- Melting permafrost is releasing methane
- Ocean acidification – aka if you can’t win on the temperature, find something to scare them.
- Antartic ice sheet loosing mass (not area! which anyone could measure – only mass which has to be calculated by the climate priests using secret formulas only divulged to the believers) “faster than the climate models predict.”
- Drought conditions are becoming persistent where they never previously existed. (Much like the Queensland floods – which we’ve never seen so bad – at least since the last bad Queensland flood!)
They forgot plagues of frogs and death of the first born!
