Books and banter by W.H.Manke

Today I want to touch on the topic of wind farms.  It’s a subject quite different from my posts of the past.  Harvesting wind power has intrigued me for a long time.  As long as the wind blew, I believed, wind turbines would give us cheap power.

Like with most things I like to draw on what history tells me for confirmation.  After all, isn’t past experience the best predictor of future success or failure?  Looking at the use of wind power of a couple centuries ago I note the success of the Clipper Ship.  Before steam engines replaced them the Clipper dominated the seas with its marvelous speed.

The windmills of the past used the wind to turn a huge grindstone  that ground grain into flour.  The invention of the windmill saved many hours of manual labor and was seen as a benefit to people.  These and other inventions speak favorably of seeing in wind farms a cheap way to light our homes.  It appeared safe to me to draw the conclusion that using what nature gives us freely can only benefit us all.

For that reason I applauded the construction of a wind farm on the northern tip of the island.  After all we get windy days almost all of the year. The power a portion of the turbines produce , it seems, is now hooked into the hydro network.  We should soon see a benefit to our hydro bills, shouldn’t we?

The experience in countries that have gone to wind farms to solve their power issues suggests otherwise.  Stories from England and Scotland now tell us that all is not as it should be.  The turbines don’t produce as imagined.  There are days when the wind does not blow or blows to hard, and backup power generators are needed.  The cost of constructing these giant towers with their huge turbines may never be repaid by the power they generate we learn.  We also hear of birds being killed in no small numbers.  Germany saw in wind farms the way to eventually dismantle their nuclear power plants.  The most recent news from that country suggests that it was a pipe dream, one that could set that country’s booming economy back a century or two.