THE great wind-scam keeps soaking up taxpayer and consumer dollars and blowing smoke. All much more reliably than the electricity flowing from those lazily turning windmills.

A company called Epuron yesterday announced a proposal to build Australia's largest wind farm, near Broken Hill deep in western NSW.

"We are proceeding with this project on the assumption that the state and federal governments will legislate in the interests of developing Australia's renewable energy industries, executive director of Epuron Martin Poole said yesterday.

Translated: wind power only 'works' if governments mandate power companies have to buy it and its price is made 'competitive' by artificially forcing up the price of good old coal power.

"This project alone could contribute 4.5 per cent of the total energy demands of NSW, supplying up to 400,000 homes with electricity," Poole went on.

That's, supplying those 400,000 homes with electricity around 30 per cent of the time over a year.

The other 70 per cent of the time, the power will have to come from conventional power stations.

Or they can turn off their lights, or have them 'turned off' for them.

All those turbines would also be 'supplying' all those homes with zero electricity from time to time.

And guess what, those times could come at any time, and 'at the wind's choosing' not the power company or the consumer.

So if taxpayers and consumers spend $2 billion to build Epuron's wind farm, they'd better be prepared to spend another $2 billion to build a real power station as 'stand-by'.

It'd make more 'sense' to build a gas-fired one; so it could be turned on only when the wind don't blow -- and sit idle for the rest of the time.

Because if you built a 'stand-by' coal station, it would have to be on all the time. You can't just fire up the boilers the moment the wind stops blowing.

Now Poole's colleague Andrew Durran made a series of ridiculous claims about wind in a three-page letter to the Owen Inquiry into electricity in NSW back in June.

First that wind-power could supply 5000 to 10,000MW (megawatts) of renewable energy in NSW by 2020.

As the wind would be blowing 'somewhere' in NSW at any point in time, an extensive network would mean wind would provide reliable and dependable power. And so be considered "base-load power", Durran claimed.

Well, Germany has the biggest wind-power network in the world, with turbines all over the country.

As I detailed last month, the E.ON Netz grid taps wind farms with 7600MW of theoretical generating capacity -- smack in the middle of Durran's 2020 target.

As E.ON Netz disclosed in its latest report, from that entire network at a point in time it got as little as 8MW. Effectively zero. Some base-load.

Germany's neighbour Denmark has the largest wind power generation as a share of total electricity in the world. At times it gets up to 50 per cent of its power from wind.

At other times, it gets zero. A cursory glance at the data shows one four-hour period where the entire wind output was running at less than 10MW. Another example 36 hours straight with wind operating at less than 100MW.

Their wind-meisters make similar glowing claims about the strength and reliability of Danish wind.

But when it don't blow the power don't flow. Denmark then turns to Norway, Sweden and Germany to keep its power flowing.

As I say, wind-meisters are much more reliable at blowing smoke. Thanks to climate hysteria, there's a very big quid in doing that.

mccrannt@heraldsun.com.au