Saturday, August 05, 2006

Against wind power

Matthew Stevens: The answer isn't blowing in the wind | News | The Australian

This is an interesting article explaining why wind power is not the great benefit that it would seem. For example:

...even in those states with the most ambitious renewables targets, South Australia and Victoria, the net effect of wind power on carbon dioxide emissions will be negligible, if not illusory. According to another recent study, if Victoria reaches its target of 1000 megawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2016 (the state currently boasts about 120MW of wind capacity), its share of national greenhouse gas emissions will fall from 32 per cent to 28 per cent by 2020.

But in raw numbers, Victoria's power plants will be pumping out 24 per cent more carbon dioxide by 2020 than they do in 2006 because, quite simply, Victorians will be using much more power.

I suppose it can still be argued that it is better to have some of that electricity produced by clean wind power than an alternative CO2 producing means, otherwise the total future CO2 output will be even higher than that already bad forecast.

But it would seem that the more important message is that, in reality, windpower is just fiddling around the edges of the problem. What's worse, such fiddling can give an impression of significance that is undeserved.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's right, wind power doesn't contribute much power at all. They're very expensive, pretty things to look at.

Unfortunately, Australia's population won't be large enough to warrant the need for nuclear power plants for quite a while. I like nuclear power. It's very efficient, relatively cheap, and would provide more jobs than wind power provides (eg. a job for me!).

We should just demolish all coal power plants and stop the development of wind farms in favour of nuclear power!