NIMBY Comes for Europe’s Wind Industry
Writing at Bloomberg, Javier Blas has an excellent piece out today detailing a sudden downturn for orders of new offshore and onshore wind turbines in Europe.
Among the data points Blas notes is that the number of European orders for new, giant offshore wind turbines for Q3, 2022 was:
“zero. Nada. Rien. Nichts.”
Oh.
And it isn’t just the offshore turbines that have been thrown into a sudden depression – Blas further notes that “Fresh orders came for the less powerful onshore turbines, but those still dropped nearly 50 percent from a year earlier.
So, what’s happening here? Hey, maybe it could be that leaders in Europe are figuring out that the real utility of wind capacity inevitably turns out to be a fraction of the numbers displayed on the nameplate. Blas tweeted this information out on Monday:
“Over the last 40 hours, the UK wind power industry has swung from producing 16.4 GW to generating 0.4 GW.
The drop in electricity production is equal to, give or take, switching off 14 nuclear power stations.
That’s the reason why UK power markets are tight today.”
As one astute responder to Blas’s tweet replied, that means that, if England had 14 additional nuclear power stations, it could generate all the power it needs with zero of the intermittency inherent with wind power and exactly the same amount of carbon emissions.
Oh, again.
So, are Europe’s leaders finally awakening to the folly of spending trillions on wind subsidies to provide power for just a few hours a day, instead of investing in nuclear at a lower cost and achieving the exact same emissions goals?
Well, no. Are you kidding?
As Blas points out in his editorial, what is happening in Europe is what is happening in the United States: NIMBY, which as I’m sure you know, means Not In My Back Yard.
The same climate alarmist groups who are pushing the energy transition also help to mount protests against any form of human progress and development, and the left-wing politicians whose campaigns they help fund respond by putting up regulatory roadblocks to new energy projects of all kinds.
And it isn’t just the liberal politicians doing this: Blas points out that new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is rapidly proving to be a bigger mistake than his predecessor, Liz Truss, has chosen to perpetuate the “conservative” government’s ban on new onshore windfarm projects as he seeks to court the NIMBY vote out in the British countryside.
Thus, Europe finds itself moving into a form of wind development paralysis induced by NIMBY forces, even as its politicians continue to virtue signal about the desperate need to save the planet from burning up by achieving their “net-zero by whatever distant year is convenient” goals.
This is happening at a time when Germany is so desperate for reliable power generation that it has taken to reopening lignite mines and restarting mothballed coal plants.
And NIMBY politics isn’t the only disincentive to new investment. Last week, I wrote about Germany’s genius plan to place a whopping new “windfall tax” on wind generators. Other European countries are considering making similar moves, as is the EU.
Energy projects have to have permits from the government to move ahead, and they also need a regulatory environment that reduces rather than enhances the risk attached to the massive capital investments that are required to make them happen.
This simple, basic principle of the business world is as true for wind and solar as it is for oil and gas and coal and nuclear.
Europe’s governments seem to have decided they can ignore this simple fact of life and still somehow move ahead to achieving their high-minded climate goals.
They’re wrong, and that’s a big reason why their continent is rushing headlong into the most disastrous energy crisis in modern times.
That is all.
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Koen Vogel
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A robust energy plan is vital for a country’s economic and social well-being and succes. Entrusting the planning to clueless ideologues instead of the people with technical know-how leads to the type of full-blown panic that the Germans (!) are witnessing. The politicians will soon learn – the hard way – that a robust energy plan is also vital to a politician’s well-being and succes.
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Mark Tapley
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Vogel do really think the politicians are clueless. Do you not realize that they have at their disposal all of the county’s resources and technical expertise. These puppet actors who front for the Zionist elite and who all jumped on the fake virus medical control wagon immediately when enacted are following orders. The sooner cucks like you realize this overwhelming fact, the sooner they can be thrown out (regardless of what fake party they are in) and real limited government, individual freedom activists can be placed in as servants of the people, rather than the WEF, CFR, Trilateralist Zionist syndicate.
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Mark Tapley
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The “Green Energy” scam is the direct result of the Zionist elite’s plans formulated at the Rockefeller estate in Italy in 1969 coined as The club of Rome. First it was “The New Ice Age:” then “Global Warming.” After the earth began a normal and moderate cooling phase ap. 20 years ago, the terminology was changed to “climate change.”
The Globalists (Zionists) know that in order to move the herd into the long planned Agenda 2030-21, they have to create endemic shortages and rationing of all necessities. Efficient, high energy and reliable petroleum is an abundant resource that has enabled modern society more than anything else. There are now more known reserves of oil and gas than ever before. That is why the fraud of solar and wind power is being pushed under the fake science of CO2 emissions.
I have a question for PSI readers concerning nuclear energy. We know that nuclear weapons are fake. No country has used them in almost 80 years other than in simulated (fake) tests. Read Akio Nakatoni’s “Death Object, Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax.” Also for an exhaustive analysis of the same subject, download Michael Palmer M.D. “Hiroshima Revisited.” Since nuclear weapons are fake how do we know that the nuclear power plants are really producing any electricity. It seems to me that everywhere they have “nuclear” power plants there are also other traditional power plants such as in Japan when the earth quake hit. Here is article on suspicious “nuclear” energy:
http://mileswmathis.com/silk.pdf
This link on the fake tests:
http://mileswmathis.com/bikini.pdf
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Kevin Doyle
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Mr. David Blackmon,
Thank you for writing the article.
In your research did you find relevant facts, such as General Electric sells expensive wind turbines which produce 6 Mega-watts of ‘rated’ power to dumb politicians? The term ‘rated power’ means the windmill produces 6 Mega-watt of power ONLY when the wind blows 25 miles per hour, or greater.
In the real world, wind speeds on a typical day might be 5-15 MPH.
According to the Laws of Physics, a windmill can produce only 1/8 the power if the wind speed is halved.
In other words, you politicians and citizens have been screwed by slick grifters selling windmills.
I’m not sure if Don Quixote was delusional enough to fall for this grift …
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