Oxford scientist: Wind power 'fails on every count'

FPI / March 28, 2023

Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison said the United Kingdom is looking at a "disaster in the making" via its over-reliance on wind power.

“Wind power fails on every count,”Allison says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis.”

In a new paper for The Global Warming Policy Foundation, Allison concentrates on working out the numbers behind the natural fluctuations in the wind.

Allison shows that at a wind speed of 20mph, the power produced by a wind turbine is 600 watts per square meter at full efficiency. For example, Allison wrote, to deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant in Somerset, England – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square meters of turbine swept area.

When fluctuations in wind speed are taken into account in Allison’s formula, the performance of wind becomes very much worse. If the wind speed drops by half, the power available falls by a factor of eight. Almost worse, he notes, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times and the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.

"It is noted that this should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and other environmentalists," Chris Morrison wrote in a March 25 analysis for DailySceptic.org. "Millions of bats and birds are calculated to be slaughtered by onshore wind turbines every year. Meanwhile, off the coast of Massachusetts, work is about to start on a giant wind farm, complete with permits to harass and likely injure almost a tenth of the population of the rare North Atlantic Right whale."

Allison added that, when it comes to the enormous batteries needed to store renewable power, there are a multitude of problems with safety as well as mineral shortages. The batteries used to keep wind farms and other green initiatives running need cobalt and lithium and must be replaced every 10 years. Batteries will never make the failure of offshore wind farms rebound, even for a week, and Allison points out they can fail for much longer than that.

Last year, Associate Professor Simon Michaux warned the government of Finland that there were not enough minerals in the world to supply all the batteries needed for the goal of "net zero" emissions.

Allison concludes: “Whichever way you look at it, wind power is inadequate. It is intermittent and unreliable; it is exposed and vulnerable; it is weak with a short life-span.”

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