As I said, until yesterday, my thoughts and feelings were of two minds. Yesterday, that changed. Yesterday we came up onto the Lammermoors, and turned off onto a flat area beside a huge rock outcrop. We got out and looked around, standing in silence for a time, listening to the whispering grasses and the southerly wind plucking fitfully at our hair and clothes. What do you think? I asked Alex. He stood there for a time, absorbed, considering his answer (as he does) and then he replied: It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful. As we looked across the vast moor, across the Great Moss Swamp, I told him about the wind farm, about what was proposed. Again there was silence, while he thought about it. I don’t get it, he said. How can they do that to a landscape like this? It’s just awful. We stayed there, attempting to absorb the vastness before us.

Most of the public do not want to have wind turbines in the Turitea reserve because it will destroy the Turitea bush

The Capital Wind Farm project will seriously diminish biodiversity from its initiation and this degradation will not cease. It is totally hypocritical for the scientific community, the so called environmental community, and the renewable energy businesses to promote an inefficient and invasive technology which has decimated bird populations globally. The inefficiency of wind technology must be thoroughly researched and published by our media as a matter of the utmost urgency. For those sanctimonious bureaucrats and scientists who reply that we should be looking at the bigger picture, that global warming is killing off species anyway, this is all the more reason to lobby our governments to develop a clean and efficient technology immediately. There is no room for scientific arrogance or ignorance with regard to the technology (not just the scientific concept) of energy production.

It may be the time to consider how wind farms fit in with the values which the Wilderness Society represents. If the Society is prepared to go through such a prolonged and worthy fight to save the forests, with all the financial and emotional costs involved, it would be consistent to regard wind farm development with the same scepticism with which it regards the wood chip industry. Both are potent adversaries to the values which I hope we share.

Wind turbines are NOT planned for Dunedin’s Octagon or the Otago Peninsula; not that we know of. But the computer-enhanced photograph isn’t altogether a joke. Huge turbines exactly like this their height and size shown in correct context and scale could soon dominate the landscape in inland Otago. Meridian Energy, through its Project Hayes, wants to put 176 such windmills, each 160m high, on the Lammermoor range behind Middlemarch; and TrustPower hopes to erect at least 100, slightly smaller, nearby on the Lammerlaw Range. If both proposals go ahead, the two contiguous sites in inland Otago would contain the world’s largest wind farm.

Editor's Note This opinion piece was submitted to IWA in pdf form and is available in IWA's reference library via the link provided below.

Like most really thoughtful environmentally concerned scientists, I'd rather a tiny amount (in metric tonnes or cubic metres, after decades of use) of stored radioactive waste than the unmitigated disaster of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. And renewables are not realistically and politically going to fill the gap any time soon.

Is the current drought another sign of climate change? Is renewable energy a real solution? The rainfall record has a few clues, and it is also worth considering how land and water management practices have changed over the last 100 years including in the Murray Darling Basin - the food bowl of Australia.

MISSING from the deluge of more than 300 reports tabled in this last week of parliament before the state election were two key documents the Bracks Government has chosen to keep secret. Both would shed important new light on big government election initiatives and allow voters to make a clearer assessment of them, but it appears that for political reasons they will be kept under wraps. The first report concerns the economic impact of the Government’s wind farms policy and calculates the effect on the average power bill.....Premier Steve Bracks and his ministers claim the increase will be just $10 on the average annual power bill, but they refuse to release the research that underpins this claim. The Opposition claims the increase will be more like $80 a year, but without seeing the research both figures are effectively just unsupported claims of politicians.

Yet, the only solid measure of the warming, the NASA satellite data, shows that over the 27 years that data has been available, warming has been at a negligible rate of 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. This level is engulfed by the statistical variation for reliability. Although there is an increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant nor does it pose health risks. Its effects, other things being equal, are to raise temperatures, but by how much is highly contentious.

The current hype surrounding wind energy is just that and is a costly distraction from securing clean energy that is also reliable.

What all this means is that residents who support changes to the reserve management plan don't really know what they are opening the door to. Those who oppose changing the reserve plan don't really know what they are shutting the door on.

But if the nation is going to go nuclear, should we not play a role in developing a better, safer form of this energy?

Where does wind come in? In a sense it doesn't, because NEMMCO does not count it as power generation, because it can't be called up like other forms. Rather, it is classified as a drop in demand. As well, wind does not normally displace coal power, it displaces the more environmentally sound but expensive generators such as hydro-electricity and gas. In addition, because of its unreliability wind has to be backed up to 90 per cent of its claimed capacity by other forms of generators. Also, the output is relatively low per dollar spent. The State Government has a report it won't release that sources have said confirms this.

The truth is that the two main alternative energy sources that the Opposition Leader talks about, wind and solar, are hopelessly uneconomic. The major super funds, whose investments I manage, own interests in a significant number of wind farms. Each and every one of them would be totally unviable without very heavy subsidies. Their average cost of production is over twice that from a base load coal-fired power station.

Far from being an incredibly important part of a low-carbon future, the share of global energy demand satisfied by wind power over the next 50 years will be marginal compared with carbon-based energy. Relying on it would be like hoping a group of greenies peeing into the Murray River could restore its flow.

In the meantime I note that the wind here in Galloway shows no sign of getting up. Anyone care for a candlelit dinner?

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
Broadcast: 17/04/2006
Government vetos wind farm development
Reporter: Mary Gearin

Now that the wind farm threat to wildlife has been eliminated at Bald Hills, this diverse range of people are working together to increase wildlife habitat at the wetlands.

While the Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry recognises that there is a role for renewable energy sources as complementary inputs to Victorian industry, the stark reality is that renewable energy will not provide a commercially viable alternative supply for Victoria over the medium to long term.