You see, I always thought that wind vanes were supposed to generate power. Silly me:
Scotland’s green-obsessed left-separatist government has been left with egg on its face by revelations that dozens of gigantic onshore wind turbines are having to be hooked up to diesel generators, leaking thousands of litres of hydraulic oil into the countryside.
All this because — and I know this will come as a shock to many — Scotland is fucking cold during winter, and the turbines can’t function despite the fact that Scotland is also fucking windy (all the time), as attested to by Combat Controller and Doc Russia during a fall hunt in the Cairngorms.
I think that to be fair, it should have been mandated that fall-back protections for the turbines had to be powered not by diesel engines but by solar energy (something that Scotland does not have a lot of, at any time of year).
The only way we’re ever going to eliminate all this Green bullshit is if we constantly rub the Greens’ noses in the shit every single time their policies fail, and make them live with the consequences.
Rub their noses in the shit? Oh, no, no, no.
Let. Them. Freeze. Let’em sit in the dark. Stupid ought to hurt.
Something else: the turbines have to be shut down when it gets too windy! Guess what? Here in Scotland it often gets a bit breezy in winter! Whodathunkit?
And guess what? Energy firms have also been paid £500M to switch their turbines off because they generate too much power to export to England because the interconnects can’t cope.
Sort of like paying American farmers to not grow certain crops.
Wind Turbines are designed with variable pitch blades. They are set to work within a specific range of wind speeds depending on the expected average wind speeds for their specific location. That is why when you drive by a large “Wind Farm” with 5 or more units you only see a few of them working. Those are the ones that are set to work in the current wind speeds. The others are set to work in higher or lower wind speeds and so are shut down to avoid damage. The other problem in places like Scotland is icing on the blades leading to a rotational imbalance. Those Blades are huge and Ice is heavy. Even though they appear to be rotating slowly, the tips are actually moving quite rapidly.
The third big problem is that they are large users of oil. They leak.
Consequences is the key word. The fucking Leftists Morons need them, hard and immediate (so there’s a strong association) with financial, comfort and legal consequences, and for politicians, humiliation and retribution in the glaring public eye.
I have two neighbors, who for a year or more now, have had those aggravating Climate Action Now signs right up on their property boundaries by the road, preaching and signalling their righteousness to all who pass by.
If they were serious and actually virtuous, they wouldn’t mind if I shot down their power line from the pole, but I can imagine their screeching (OMG, I can’t listen to NPR!) for Big Guv to do something because GUNS.
My wife’s nieces (from Wales) are all physicians in the UK. When it came time for their residency placement, the oldest said “anywhere but Wales.” That’s a signal to the NHS to send you to Scotland. After the first one spent one year in Aberdeen, she begged to be sent anywhere else. That’s a signal to the NHS to send you to Wales, so they sent her to Cardiff. The other two wised up and said anywhere not London and both got London.
The weather sucks in London, but it REALLY sucks in Scotland.
Huh? The weather here in Aberdeen is pretty good. We’re coastal so it doesn’t get that cold. The only things are that it’s not warm here and we’re a long way away.
The problem is that the vast majority of these watermelon environmentalists are utterly incapable of learning or critical thinking. To paraphrase FA Hayek, If green environmentalists could learn or were capable of critical thinking, they wouldn’t be environmentalists.
Sure we should be mindful of where we put our waste, recycle and reuse items as much as possible but today’s watermelon environmentalists go way too far.
JQ
Wind turbine technology was obsolete over a century ago. However, ripping off the taxpayer will never go out of fashion. What is the moderation policy regarding four-letter Anglo-Saxon words on this blog?
My observation has been that in the minds of the ‘environmentalists’ wind and solar power are magical sources of energy without any technical downsides. They’ve been that way about them since I started paying attention to politics in the mid-1970’s. They keep insisting than any problems with either that are brought up are propaganda from the oil companies, or some similar drivel. Politicians go along with them because the average politician has the ethics of a Port Said pimp.
How long it is going to take for the ‘greens’ to accept that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch is anybody’s guess.
are these environmentalist watermelons capable of learning? Many are not.
JQ