Remember that time an alien spacecraft destroyed a Lincolnshire wind-turbine back in 2009? No? Well, that’s because it didn’t really happen, despite highly misleading tabloid media front pages of the day like this:
The ruined Eco-Tricity turbine in question suffered a severe failure overnight, losing one blade and with another left damaged during a time-period when one Lincolnshire local claimed to have witnessed “a round, white light that seemed to be hovering” nearby. Disappointingly, the “massive balls of light with tentacles going right down to the ground” reported by other observers would appear to have actually been a misinterpretation of mundane birthday fireworks being set off nearby, not a sensational assault from any hovering fossil fuel-powered alien spacecraft.
So what did destroy the turbine? A “range of possibilities, from flying cows to monsters with tentacles" might have been responsible, said none other than Eco-Tricity founder Dale Vince, a man well known to readers of this website, in an early media appearance on the BBC. Dr Peter Schubel, an expert in wind-power manufacture from the University of Nottingham, suggested a more alarming possibility than aliens: Vince’s gadgets might just have been defective, with faulty ones accumulating ice on their blades during low night-time temperatures, before hurling the stuff off violently when spinning, causing serious damage to other, nearby devices.
The leader of the local council, Robert Palmer, took time out from singing along with his fellow members of The Power Station to speculate that: "
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By getting us addicted to their harmful imports in this fashion, China was essentially doing to us with energy what we had once done to them with drugs during the 19th-century Opium Wars, the governing pipe-dream in this particular instance being that of Net Zero.
The Chinese are laughing all the way to their banks at our stupidity and dependence, and who can blame them?
Is it time to investigate whether the Mad Miliband is an agent of the Chinese? It’s certainly time to repeal the legislation that drives this insane Net Zero agenda.
When Russia launches missiles at Ukraine it often aims for (or hits) its power infrastructure.
Rather than engage in risky underwater adventures cutting energy cables why would an enemy not just whack a few windmills? I reckon a relatively cheap shoulder launched missile could take out the business end of a wind turbine in nothing flat – let alone anything a bit more sophisticated. Hell, just dangling some chains from a drone would probably do the job. The bloody things are vulnerable – and they’re off-shore. Take out 10% of them and we’re hurt. Take out 50% and we’re on our knees.
Many years ago I visited a turbine in Cambridgeshire on a publicity stunt. There was no security as the access gate was unlocked and we were able to go right up to the tower. I suppose we could have done damage but that was not our game at all.
We were approached by owners of a carpet warehouse nearby. They told us a lump of ice the size of a wheelbarrow had fallen from the turbine blades and crashed through the roof of his shop narrowly missing a customer. This was never reported as far as I know.
Wind —–The Dumbest Energy imaginable. It is no surprise that dimwits like that donkey faced Miliband love it. ——Hee haw hee haw hee haw
During the thick of war:
“Sorry pm, we can’t make anymore munitions, the winds dropped!”
The principal functional risk of windmills has been known since time immemorial – when the wind don’t blow, you’re stuffed until Zephyr decides to wake up again.
Ditto waterwheels and, in more recent times, solar panels, when the stream slows to a trickle and the sun don’t shine. Pretty simple facts of energy-provenance life that have stood the test of time.
Starting three centuries ago, enter King Coal and practical men of ingenuity like James Watt, to solve the intermittency problem with a high-density, high gradient, 24/7/365 primordial source of energy. Burn baby, burn.
Throw in geniuses like Faraday and Tesla, oil and gas exploration, energy from controlled atomic fission, and here we in the developed world all are in the 21st century this OAP retired scientist knows, values and cherishes, yet which green extremists, hangers-on and profiteering vested interest, seek to chuck in the bin.
For decades, fallacy, folly, wishful thinking and the madness of the climate crowd have carried the Western and globalist day.
Energy reality and the BRICS countries know otherwise. Sooner or later nemesis generally catches up with hubris. Across the Atlantic, the about-face is already beginning.
Just a matter of time in Europe. Take a… Read more »
And there is still a lot of natural long term energy storage underground. Fashions come and go, but I can remember what happened in the early 1970s, in as much as they printed and issued ration tokens for fuel purchase (they were not actually used, though), after the Suez débacle, before North Sea oil extraction became available.
Just to remind microbands father was a fully paid up member of the politburo…
Politically speaking anyway.