Prominent physicist warns that wind power “fails on every count”
By Paul Homewood
I thoroughly recommend reading this report. It is only three pages long and is succinct:
London, 23 March – A prominent physicist has warned that the UK is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply and calls for a reset of national energy policy.
Professor Wade Allison, of the University of Oxford, says that the government is ignoring overwhelming evidence of the inadequacy of wind power and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis.
Professor Allison says:
“Whichever way you look at it, wind power is inadequate. It is intermittent and unreliable; it is exposed and vulnerable; it is weak with a short life-span.”
Professor Allison’s warning is set out in a short paper entitled The Inadequacy of Wind Power (pdf), published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
I am highlighting two of his graphs.
The first shows how variable wind power is across Europe as a whole, contrary to the renewable lobby’s spin that it is always windy somewhere:
The second focuses on UK offshore wind, which as I have often pointed out is not as reliable as we are led to believe:
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I have been in regular contact with Prof Allison about Battery Energy Storage Schemes (BESS) and nuclear. He is definitely very knowledgeable and a great source of information. But the establishment knows much more than scientists and engineers about how to run a cheap, secure and reliable electricity system!
If you talk to the actual people who manage the grid, the dispatchers, they can tell you how unworkable unreliable generation is – no credentials required.
Weather dependent renewables can not power a sophisticated 24/7 society of 66 million. But we all know this. Why don’t our Highly intelligent betters also know it?
Probably because they are nowhere near as clever as they think they are and they fervently believe in the green religion, so any small amount of common sense they may have left is obliterated by ideology.
I wish I could agree with you. The truth I think is sadder.
I know many very smart and educated – in the social sciences – people who are adamant about the Green narrative. They refuse to question what they are told by what they see are well-meaning authorities – authorities they believe are advised by other well-meaning but scientifically-based experts. They don’t see themselves as capable of thinking better. They see personal critical thinking as rhetorical processes to confuse rather than enlighten. They are very suspicious that questioning the Narrative is based on conspiracy theories and the corruption by money or power of competing ideological groups.
You can’t get into a discussion with them. The simple question if whether “it” makes common sense switches off their minds. Some say it’s cognitive dissonance at work, but I think it’s worse. They think the “majority” have already dealt with all the questions you might bring up, whatever they are, so to try to “reinvent the wheel” for themselves makes no sense, common or otherwise.
They won’t believe the building codes are inadequate until all their houses fall down. Not just this one, even their own, but until they all fall down. All your charts and photos of cracked foundations not withstanding, the houses they see are still standing; the system is working. Your complaints are perhaps valid in the details, but not in the general.
People can’t handle the idea of the individual being responsible for what is around him, or that he can (and should) determine what is and what is not true and factual in his own life. The challenge is too much. People want desperately to look to the collective for guidance. We see that especially when it comes to politics, where no challenge to their favored politician can be considered, and to their disfavored politician, denied.
An excellent description of the problems with grid control caused by intermittent “Unreliables” on Judith Curry’s superb blog:
https://judithcurry.com/2023/03/14/australian-renewable-energy-transition-part-3/
Excellent exposition on the finer points of reactive power!
To Tonyb,
Indeed, they ARE intelligent and under the cover of “saving the planet” they fill their pockets with plenty of cash and take advantage of “illegal benefits”.
This is not an elite but a MAFIA.
Looking forward to the giant solar farms coming to Devon and the wider area. Lots of cheap reliable solar power available at all hours of the day and night. At least that’s what the politicians seem to believe.
As a leading member of the establishment – the lying oaf Johnson remarkably telling the truth for once – admitted yesterday that he is ignorant and clueless. No great surprise.
When I was a junior manager in industry and my boss wanted to go down a route which was going to end in disaster, I would object, point out the reasons why, so I got passed over for promotion. New tactics were needed, say nothing but plan for the disaster and devise a recovery plan, when it happened I went to my bosses boss with the plan. I got a company car.
The net zero is just not going to work, we on this site know that. The turning point will almost certainly be when the power cuts start, the sooner that happens the sooner net zero will be abandoned. So should we change tactics and accelerate the move to wind and solar, close down all the coal stations, abandon the few nuclear we have, never ever allow fracking, no more new oil fields in the north sea etc etc. In fact encourage extinction rebellion to achieve all they want?
This is a successful strategy to counter bad ideas: embrace them fully and quickly. The sooner they are shown to be bad, the sooner and faster they will be abandoned.
In private practice I suffered the loss of promotion without the future car. The companies went bankrupt but I DID get laid off later than others and big severance cheques. The problem I could not solve or help was that they were public stock market firms, dependent not on good profitable results today but posited on tremendous profitable results next year, with debt financing based on future expectations. Course corrections would mean their whole present, not just future, worth was less than current debt, so they had to try to bill their way through to a magical end (price for product increase). Just like SVB today.
Never ceases to amaze me that people on here decry people making statements outside their expertise then go on to do exactly that. You have zero idea how share prices are set.
Self sacrifice for the greater good? Can I have a bit of time to build a bigger stockpile?
But I’m not sure the population of UK would react particularly quickly. Poll Tax riots, Miners Strikes and CND marches have been replaced by banging saucepans as entertainment during lockdowns
And the poll tax was despised because people had to pay their own way. And as we see in France currently, the young are largely stupid – rioting so that they can pay higher taxes for 40 years to support those not working and hoping against all reality that when they get to retire there’s still some money left.
I’ve been telling people about the Cubic Law of Fluid Flow for years, and how it impacts the Wind Power Agenda. In fact, I have even posted it here.
It seems the Mathematics, which is just Primary School Arithmetic, is too difficult when it means Not Saving the Planet.
But it is only my view, and now Professor Allison’s. while Saving the Planet is For Real.
Don’t even mention Mathematics, that racist tool of suppression.
I know he was writing for a lay audience, but he overstated the output of a wind turbine, which cannot exceed the Betz limit of 16/27ths of the incoming wind energy, since the wind cannot be brought to a dead halt once it has gone through the turbine – it must depart at a slower velocity, and the Betz limit is defined from the theoretical optimum departure velocity that maximises the captured energy. Too fast, and more energy could have been extracted. Too slow, and too much energy is consumed in diverting the air.
Nicely put. Well done.
Why would a mere Physicist outweigh far-seeing Climatologists?
x
There is no need to be a prominent physicist to see through the renewable scam, Joe Bloggs down the pub knows its bleedin’ obvious yet we have a government, nay successive governments taken in by this pie in the sky nonsense. One should wonder why seemingly intelligent people swallow this, destroying the UK industry at the same time, unless?
“I am highlighting two of his graphs.
The first shows how variable wind power is across Europe as a whole, contrary to the renewable lobby’s spin that it is always windy somewhere”
An excellent interactive source for wind power across Europe is Grafana.
https://intermittent.energy/d/axEcp3gVz/wind?orgId=1&from=now-24h&to=now
The previous 12 months – showing lulls affect multiple countries simultaneously. So when our turbines generate little, most other countries are unlikely to have sufficient surplus to sell to us.
I have been watching the balancing for load of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) for six or seven years. The power generated on BPA’s grid is sold to public utilities, private utilities, and industry on the grid. The excess is sold to other grids in Canada, California and other regions.
It is a long way to California but the trick of exporting electrons is explained by a direct-current intertie [Pacific DC Intertie]. A somewhat shorter distance is via Path 66 – three roughly parallel 500 kV alternating current power lines.
The balancing chart for the BPA is a 5-minute update by week. See it here:
https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
The chart has a green line for Total VER. It has had two days this week when it was not bouncing off the bottom.
What is your observation/conclusion based on your multi-year watch?
Much of the time wind power is close to nothing. Then a Low will sweep through and hydro facilities dial back. A day later the dams have to compensate again. Nuclear and thermal provide a backdrop. Enviros would like to remove the dams.
Their use of the term “VER” as in “Variable Energy Resource” is rather confusing in some ways. “VAR” as in Volt Ampere Reactive is also a major issue (especially with renewable resources) and I was completely banjaxed at first as to what the hell they were referring to!
Living intermittently – the Simpsons way…
As long as the Greens and SoS’s responsible for energy keep talking about windfarms in terms of their nameplate power output then all planning is bound to fail. But if they talked about PF output – and how intermittent it is – people (well some, like us) would laugh at them. We are truly being led by donkeys under the control of WEF etc.
I’ve been raging against the use of “nameplate power output” and it’s variants such as “capacity” for years. But the 21/26% reality of output ….. I’ve never found the argument persuasive to the Green adherent. I think it fails because the Narrative is built on an ideology of Virtue and proposals are “Well Intentioned”.
As far as I can see, the Progressive mind – which is much stronger in the female half of the population based on recent political polling data in the US and Canada – is focused more on the quality of intentions rather than the quality of outcomes. The logic, I think, is this: nothing Good happens if you first don’t intend to do Good. And Good is not neutral, it is not whatever was before that was working. Yesterday might even not have been Bad, but could only have been Okay. It certainly wasn’t Good, because it could have been Better.
The Progressive mind will never stop complaining and pushing because Perfect cannot be obtained, while always being the goal of the progressive ideology. The Conservative (Engineer?) says X deaths per year are acceptable, the Progressive (like Cuomo during the pandemic, and a doctor friend of mine) says NO death is acceptable.
The Utopians – especially those who aspire to being in charge – are at the top of the social order in the West right now. In the 19th century it was the builder, the expansionist, the Maker of Things, that were at the top of the social order: the railway czar, car manufacturer, colonialist entrepreneur. Today it’s Greta Thunberg.
There’s the rub.
Greenies trying to philosophise that ‘yesterday may not have been bad….’ ignore the fact that it is all down to relevance: ‘Yesterday’ may well have been bad, but compared to the crap you experienced ‘today’ you might say it was better.
And that’s how they work. In order to say the future will be better they need to paint the present as crap. These are people who never enjoyed the technology that got them from b&w TV to online HD colour TV and really ache to get their b&w sets back. To them, everything in the future is likely to be bad; the past was perfect.
You’re describing them as Luddites yearning for simpler times. I see them as Futurists demanding we have the Star Trek life now: no racial or sexual issues, universal peace and financial health and wealth security …. at least within the Federation. But ignoring the hierarchical and power structure that runs that Federation and keeps life safe for its citizens.
These Greenies don’t want B&W technology back, they want neurotechnology of 2100 today, but with zero personal, social, economic and environmental costs. They want food replicators to give them faux hamburgers so they can say they don’t support killing animals while enjoying the pleasures of their cooked flesh.
Mentally ill high school dropouts? Yep.
You can’t fix stupid and we’re only one more murder away from utopia…..
That’s simply untrue. The social order in the 19th century was headed by the aristocracy and large landowner. “Trade” was looked down on. Try reading Trollope. We had various Lords, Vicounts, Earls and Dukes as prime ministers and until the Reform Act of 1832 industrial towns such as Manchester and Birmingham didn’t even have an MP.
I’ve often wondered about off shore. High pressure can park itself over the sea as easily as over land. Wind over hills and mountains is generally faster than at ground level for two reasons. Wind speed increases with altitude, and be use of the fact the wind gets compressed between the mountain a and the troposphere. On top of mountains on land would appear to be the best choice to me.
I’ve been on top of many mountains. When there is a wind pushing up a mountainside, the wind at the top is ferocious. 50′ back from the top on the other side, little to none. And many, many times, there has been no wind at the top.
Wind is where you find it. It’s weird but true. The wind turbine people stick individual turbines in many places, even in “windy” cortidors, to find the places that work. Trial and error.
How many if these windfarms are just badly sited? Nobody asks that. The owners have limits on their choices of operations. It would be like opening a liquor store in a predominantly Mormon neighborhood. Cheap rent, good access, lots of people driving around. A number of times during the year, like at Christmas, the nonMormons flock to your store. The rest of the year, not much. If you said you had 26% of expected business, would your friends say your neighbors are cheapskates, not your fault, or you should have opened your store in a different neighborhood?
I’ve never seen a breakdown of wind turbine efficiency based on individual farms. Maybe the 26% includes many with 15% or less.
This is a wonderful resource for renewable electricity generation data
https://www.ref.org.uk/generators/index.php
This is perhaps relevant.
“Dr. Naveed Akhtar from Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon has found that wind speeds at the downstream windfarm are significantly slowed down.
As the researchers now write in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, this braking effect results in astonishingly large-scale low wind pattern noticeable in mean wind speeds.
On average, they extend 35 to 40 kilometers — in certain weather conditions even up to 100 kilometers. The output of a neighboring wind farm can thus be reduced by 20 to 25 percent, which ultimately leads to economic consequences. If wind farms are planned close together, this wake effects need to be considered in the future.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210603171247.htm#:~:text=Naveed%20Akhtar%20from%20Helmholtz%20Zentrum,noticeable%20in%20mean%20wind%20speeds
Yup. Relevant.
Just out of possible interest ….
On my various road trips from southern Alberta to the Mexican border over the last few years, I’ve driven by many wind farms. I always try to determine how many turbines aren’t turning. It’s a consistent 2 to 5%. 1 in 50 to 1 in 20.
I wonder if that number reflects the average lifespan of turbines, I.e. after 20 to 50 years every single turbine has failed (at least) once, needing serious repairs before its operational again.
If I think about vehicle maintenance: my previous vehicles cost about $25,000. Each year maintenance costs averaged about $1500. (More if the GD Dealership was involved). That’s replacement in 17 years, it’s worth about $3500 then. 19 years, seems about right for its life.
Maybe operational life appears longer than economic life really because you replace it bit by bit.
Can’t quite figure this thought through.
@Douglasproctor I use the data from http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
to assess what sort of weather to expect when I get up.
High output from wind turbines = wind and rain = no rush to get up!!
Regarding wind turbines turning, just because a wind turbine is rotating is NOT necessarily an indicator that it is generating. It can be very damaging for a wind turbine to be stationary for even a short period – it causes excess wear from bearing brinelling and rotor warping. Large ships in dock will slowly turn their propellers for the same reasons. Even in dead calm you can see wind turbines rotating and they are actually nett consumers of electricity and not generators.
That explains why some were turning very slowly relative to the rest!
Things you see you just don’t understand …..
You are forgetting that wind turbines do not like turbulant air which is very likely on a mountain. Turbulnt air places asymmetric loads on the blades, bearings and pitch change mechanism and low and behold they wear out quicker.
That is ultimately the limit on rotor size. There can be huge differences between the wind speed at the top of the blade travel and the bottom which creates huge stresses that rotate in the bearing, creating wear and risk of fracture. It already is limiting for tidal stream turbines, which get wrecked in short order unless rotor diameters are kept small. The 800 times denser fluid and turbulent flow caused by wave action do not help the gradient of current speed with depth. It is why tidal stream is unlikely ever to offer a competitive cost.
The trouble is that nothing from GWPF ever makes it into MSM. So it matters little how right or wrong their submissions may be. Someone else is controlling the spread of information and we are all going into hell in a handcart because of it. Solutions, and no doubt deep pockets, are needed to actually get the truth out there. Could legal actions be taken? All we do here and on other sites like this is run around in circles talking to ourselves.
I agree totally with REM. But why?
I’ve argued elsewhere today that it is not just a refusal to be convinced by contradictory evidence or persuasive common sense arguments that stops the ordinary people from challenging the Narrative. And it’s not so much cognitive dissonance driving them away from facing personally disturbing conclusions. It’s a refusal to believe that the individual has the capacity, not just the duty, to figure things out in a general sense.
They might agree that these “details” of the skeptics’ position are possibly, if not possibly reasonable, but they would argue that the “collective” has considered all the possible arguments – without doubt including these ones – and with their superior collective expertise dismissed them. If the people were to engage in your arguments, first they would be engaging in your rhetorical sophistry that is mostly about raising questions and uncertainty (like Don Lemon argued against Tucker Carlson) rather than providing answers. Secondly, they would be engaged in “reinventing the wheel”: waste of time, energy and – most importantly – comfort.
I’ve never successfully argued with a believer in the Green Narrative, Fauci or the coming New World Order (that doesn’t exist). They see points of contradiction or signs of an agenda as conspiracy talking points, cherry-picked moments that do not reflect the overall “truth” or validity to the questioned positions.
It’s very frustrating. I can see in their eyes as they look up and to the left that they are searching for a reason to dispute what I say, but then the look becomes a laugh and a shrug and a confession they don’t know what to say, except that “overall” the Narrative is true and valid. And …… here’s the killshot ….. the Narrative is Well-Intentioned. Now, if you push more, you just lose the relationship. You wish a bad situation to continue or get worse, and are as AOC complained, concerned more about “facts” than “truth”.
This is the problem: we are challenging the solidity of the floor on which they stand. Since they haven’t fallen through to the basement so far, they can argue that the floor is just fine, even if you have noted a crack here and there. And all floors, in their mind, have cracks here and there (which is true).
To bring a smile to your faces, youtuber Geof Buys Cars has reported that second prices for battery and hybrid cars are bombing, as well as taking twice as long to sell by any method as normal vehicles. Cars are going around the auction cycle up to 4 times at which point a dealer might offer £1000 as a punt knowing that this it the 4th time up and desperation setting in. A 2015 or 2016 BMW hydrid fetched just £1500. And the resale for a year old Model 3 Tesla has dropped 25%.
Blackout-news.de has some interesting posts. One says that Norway has refused an interconnector to Scotland in order to keep its own electricity. It also notes how Germany is slowly making its way to becoming the DDR once again with a centrally planned – and failing – economy.
Yet the Dutch are about to gamble :-
“The Netherlands Chooses Site for World’s Largest Offshore Wind-to-Hydrogen Project | Offshore Wind” https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/03/20/the-netherlands-chooses-site-for-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-to-hydrogen-project/
The project, which is said to mark the first application of offshore hydrogen production on a large scale, is planned to be operational around 2031.
8 years is a long time conceptually, financially as well as politically. Solyndra went from startup to end in 6 years (2005 -11). We’ve been hearing about small scale fission reactors for years. Political commitments disappear within the 10 years many economic forecasts used to justify them.
8 years is lots of time for this idea to fall apart. All we can be certain is that for 8 years the business promoters will be bonusing themselves.
And yet Calder Hall, the World’s first grid scale nuclear power station commenced construction in 1953, was completed in 1956 and was commissioned on 17 October of that year, using 1950s construction and engineering technology and was closed on 31 March 2003, the first reactor having been in use for nearly 47 years.
That’s progress, I suppose…
Yes, thank you for pointing that out. I am surprised at how these countries continue to pursue expensive, mass off shore wind farms. Denmark and Portugal are apparently announcing feasibility studies too.
It is like a disease. An unhealthy, dishonest way to gain lots of money but little electric. Governments will know by now how it is going to play out.
Never trust a UN climate study even if it appears at the top of the list is moral to be learnt here.
There already is a pilot project:
https://poshydon.com/en/home-en/
It seems to have gone a bit quiet since last summer though.
“wind power is inadequate”, along with the politicians who push this old fashioned power supply.
UK legal professionals refusing to prosecute eco criminals.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11896725/Fury-woke-barristers-refusing-prosecute-eco-warriors.html
Disgraceful. Any barrister who signs that “declaration of conscience” should be disbarred immediately.
Completely agree. If they are not disbarred it makes a complete mockery of the system……so I guess nothing new then!
A generation or two lost wholly in self-regard and self-indulgence.
Talking over the garden hedge bank the other day to a neighbour, he put it in a nutshell: “wind farms driven by insanity”
.
Most people would rather feel the warm glow of saying the right thing now than the warm glow of a reliable heating system in 5 years time. Those who want to radically change the world understand this very well and use it to manipulate us. Where do phrases like “climate justice” come from? From those who have a clear view of what they want to achieve.
A bit off topic , but has anyone else had problems with the GWPF , [ and net zero watch ] sites not allowing access unless you agree to being bombarded with COOKIES .
Myself , and most people I know , will not use sites that demand you take all of their cookies . So have they started their own destruction .
Very disturbing. Perhaps they have been hacked by the control freaks / alarmists.
Perhaps time to swamp their e-mail address with complaints.
Ideally the technical regulators (NOT politicians and governments) really ought to outlaw the use of cookies on all websites or at least disable them as default)
Paul,
On the subject of the accursed windmills have you seen this drivel from BBC Wales? It’s hard to know where to begin..!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65026300
Are the BBC claiming that Lord Deben is an expert?
John MacEnroe applies
Prof. Allison uses a common example, namely 8 days of wind drought. However, if we in the UK think back to the summer of 1976 then there was a wind drought accompanying the rain/water drought that lasted some 65 days. We should round this up with an engineering safety factor of at least 50% to cover our ignorance thereby planning for a wind drought of at least 100 days.
Thus I fear that, for security of supply, we would need a battery bank not “1000 times the capacity of the world’s largest grid storage battery (1.6GWh at Moss Landings, California)” but one at least 10 times larger again i.e. 10,000 times larger than the world’s current largest. How large would that be in cubic metres? And how many tonnes of tech minerals would it require? And how much would it cost? And how would it be protected electrically and against malefactors? My eyes are watering just at the thought of the answers.
Regards,
John.
How much would the insurance premium be, on such a monstrosity?
LCP Enact reported a quite extraordinary curtailment payment at 3:15 a.m. today 24th March:
24 Mar 2023, 3:15 am Low bid accepted
Hornsea One accepted at £-150.19/MWh
Of course, it’s not quite as much as their strike price, which is £175.25, but the day ahead price was £38.25/MWh according to LCP Enact (though other sources suggest around £11/MWh), so they could have trousered a premium to strike price for not producing. Perhaps they will apply to the LCCC for the difference with their strike price as well.
You couldn’t make it up the electricity which is supposed to be low cost is actually paid a fortune to switch off. This sort of info just isn’t followed up by majority of the press and media.
Never mind the contents of the report, have you seen the picture on the front cover?
It conjured up unwanted images of the legendary MP Captain Underpants.
Gave me quite a start.